This week, the Marist Center for Sports Communication sent five other students and me to cover Super Bowl Media Week in San Francisco, CA, in anticipation of Sunday’s Super Bowl LX matchup between the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots. This is the fifth of multiple entries documenting our journey in Northern California, covering the lead-up to America’s biggest sporting event.
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — Our days in sunny California got better and better as the week unfolded; Friday was no exception, providing a picture-perfect ending to one of the most exciting weeks of our lives.
It was a truly thrilling time in the Bay Area, away from the bitter Poughkeepsie cold – something I’m not prepared to return to.
But when I finally flop on my bed upon returning home, I know I’m never going to want to get up. I’m exhausted, and that’s not a complaint. William Rosen wears a WHOOP, a bracelet that monitors heart rate and other body signals to track sleep through analytical data; I am very glad I don’t have one of those, at least not this week (but whenever my sister, Sophie, who works at the company, can grab me one, I’ll be happy to hop on board).
To be fair, I was getting some of the best sleep of my life. The second my head hit the pillow, I was out, and what felt like a half a second later, my alarm rang. The lack of sleep hasn’t caught up to me yet, but as a notoriously bad plane-sleeper, I’m going to be a mess after the red-eye home.
As was par for the course, I got to the Moscone Center before the sun was up, just in time to see the morning sports shows such as NFL Network’s Good Morning Football and NBC’s Football Morning in America wrapping up their week of coverage.
West Coast Super Bowls stage an awkward predicament for these shows, which usually air at 6 a.m. EST – meaning they started at 3 a.m. local time. It goes without saying that it is hard to get guests to appear at that hour. Anyway, by 9 a.m., most of those morning show sets had already been completely packed up.
While Radio Row still brought the energy, it did begin to tail off around then – some tables sat vacant, as their usual occupants had left the Bay Area. Still, even with a dwindling number of people, we managed to grab some big names. William got to speak to Chris Berman on camera, and Nick Chiarito got his white whale, Stephen A. Smith. Later in the day, William reeled in his biggest fish yet, one of his broadcasting heroes, Kevin Harlan.
I popped over to the Sport Beach Clubhouse across the street for a minute until I got a call from William. I figured it was something important because he hadn’t called me once the whole trip; he only texted. Boy, I was right.
“Eli Manning is here.”
I hung up the phone almost instantly and ran back to Moscone. This was my everything.
I adored Eli Manning growing up. He was my hero. The New York Giants drafted him four days before I was born, and I spent my entire childhood watching him play, live or on any highlight tape I could find. I had his jersey in about any style it was sold in and even pasted his life-sized Fathead on my bedroom wall (it’s still there to this day).
If you look hard enough at that photo, you can make out Manning and me in that picture frame. When I was six years old, I met him at a signing show.
I was a shy, quiet kid who was deathly afraid of meeting new people. My family waited outside in brutal Westchester, N.Y., cold for what felt like hours that night, before we finally inched far enough in the line to where we got inside the venue, and I could see Manning.
He looked uncomfortable, visibly overwhelmed. When I got to the front of the line and my Dad asked if I could take a picture behind the table with him, the workers said that he didn’t like it when anyone came behind the table. Instead, I had to sit on top of it right in front of him.
That hero who always looked unfazed on the gridiron suddenly looked human. And not just human, he looked like me. It meant a lot to me, even as a six-year-old. He too, got shy and quiet around new people. That was truly eye-opening; these people I saw on my TV screen might be more like me than I thought.
As I grew up and had chances to meet and interact with other athletes I looked up to, I never felt starstruck, because I had learned from meeting Manning that they were humans with their own flaws too.
Since retiring, Manning has come completely out of his shell. He is seemingly everywhere on television now, including his own alternative Monday Night Football broadcast with his brother, Peyton. He’s still awkward at times, but it’s a charming awkward. A funny awkward. As he grew into this media personality, I grew up as a person. Watching him evolve, I became more confident in myself around new people. If Eli could grow, so could I.
And there he was. Right in front of me. All the sudden, I was that six-year-old kid all over again, jaw agape, staring at him. We followed him to where he did an interview with Front Office Sports, where I spoke to the person assigned to direct fans and media members away from Manning.
I pulled out the physical picture from my back pocket and tried to reason with her. Thankfully, and I mean thankfully, she obliged. As he walked to his next on-air hit, she allowed me to talk to him for a quick 30 seconds. It felt like 30 minutes.
I told him how much he meant to me as a kid, right now and every moment in between.
It was a perfect ending to the week. I slid that photo into my backpack before leaving Marist on the off chance I might run into him while out on the West Coast. It sounds give an athlete that much credit to raise me, but at the end of the day, it’s the truth. I didn’t even want him to sign the photo. I just wanted to show him, and tell him how much he meant to me as a person – beyond football.
And I did it. I did it all.
I have so many thanks in order; it is not lost upon me how valuable of an experience this has been, and the honor I have felt when telling people I am in San Francisco covering Super Bowl Media Week as a student for Marist University.
So, thank you, Marist, and thank you to Andy Elrick and the entire sports communication program. I’ll be eternally grateful for this, and I know I am severely in debt when it comes to Andy Points – I cashed in more than I had saved up.
And how about our crew?
Though at times filicidal about his work, none of the video content you have seen this week could have reached your screen without Eugene Barbieri. William, Nick and Katie Beichert all did great in front of the camera – William and Nick helped out a lot with editing, but Eugene spent most of his time battling putrid WiFi on Radio Row to get everything out as fast as possible. He rarely took time off; the longest he was away from Moscone was when he went and picked up some brisket for lunch.
And then there’s me. I came into this trip with one mission: write. Write, write, write. I knew my role; Eugene would handle editing, Katie would be on camera, William and Nick dabbled in both on-camera and video production and all of the fantastic photos you’ve seen are from Jaylen Rizzo’s camera.
Jason Myers’ making the Super Bowl gave me a Marist-relevant feature to put together, but besides that, I was in San Francisco to document our trip in written words. I had never written any true first-person stories before, but I felt this was the scenario to do it, to be personal. A listed recap of my day, with quotes from the people we interacted with each day, in my opinion, would have been boring and lacked the justice this week deserved.
I gave it my best shot; I tried to experience everything I could, and document it all on my little yellow legal pad. Again, this whole week was hard to put into words. Here’s a video tour of what the Moscone Center looked like on Radio Row.
That’s it. I’m all out of thank yous, except for all of you, who followed along this week – whether that be reading every single word of these, or just glancing at any of the social media content.
I’m beyond grateful for every moment of this experience, and if the rest of my career in sports journalism looks anything like this, it will be a dream come true.
Photo by Jaylen Rizzo
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