So today was Super Bowl Sunday here in the us, and our local team the Seattle Seahawks won.
Woo-hoo...!
But this is not a post about today's event, but watching it made me think back to the very first time I was exposed to the spectacle that is the Super Bowl here in the USA.
When I arrived in Austin Texas in January 1981 — to start University — the University of Texas offered freshly arrived foreign students the opportunity to be connected with a local "host family" to help us settle into local culture and mores.
Since I knew absolutely nobody in Austin — and only one person in Houston, 3 hours away — I decided to take the offer of being paired up with a host family.
I'd actually been in Austin for less than 3 weeks when my host family "mom" called and invited me to come over and join them for their annual Super Bowl party.
To be honest, at that point I barely knew what American football even was, having grown up in Europe where "football" to me meant soccer. But I was assured that there would be lots of food and lots of local people for me to meet and connect with and so I said yes, absolutely I would like to come.
Like many foreign students I was without a car and fully reliant on using my bicycle or the University bus system to get around so my host family "dad" on coming and picking me up at my apartment.
To this day, I remember it made quite an impression on me that this dapper gentleman in his 60s came to my door dressed in a neat dark blue, three-piece pinstripe suit... and bright green trainers!
I didn't really learn a whole lot about the rules of football during that particular party, but I did learn about the whole nature of the Super Bowl basically being an excuse to yell at the tv, while consuming vast amounts of pizza and beer.
At that same party I also met the first Mrs. Denmarkguy for the first time, but in (somewhat sad) retrospect I have to confess that the only thing we effectively had in common was that we were the only people present at the party under the age of 50, along with the fact (perhaps?) that I was from Europe and she had been to Europe... if that's "having something in common."
I don't think I actually watched another Super Bowl for about 5-6 years or until at least I had graduated from University. I was really more interested in college football to the degree that I was ever interested in football, at all. Eventually I got indoctrinated into the Dallas Cowboys... seeing as how I was living in Texas and a couple of my coworkers were rabid Cowboys fans.
It's now 45 years later, and I'm still not a big follower of football. I have a very generalized idea of what's going on, and which teams are playing where and how they're doing... at least enough to carry on a reasonably intelligent conversation with the average American football fan.
What is funny though, is that it is still that very first Super Bowl I went to that I have perhaps the most memories from, all these years later. The human mind works in strange and mysterious ways, doesn't it?
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Created at 2026.02.08 23:42 PST
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