With another Super Bowl upon us, I’ve been thinking about the first one I covered, in 2004. At a staff dinner early in the week leading up to the game, Dave Anderson, my fellow Sports of the Times columnist, pulled me aside for a talk.
I had covered other big sporting events, but never a Super Bowl. Anderson, a dean of American sports journalists and especially venerated in professional football circles, had advice for the rookie on what promised to be a harrowing game night.
To cope with the stress of writing a pregame column for the earliest edition of the newspaper — which meant updating the text as the game progressed and filing a new draft the minute it ended — and mitigating the workload for the final online edition, Anderson recommended: “Keep it simple, don’t overthink it.