• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

But Swann would have been on the field at Tampa Stadium for Super Bowl XXV even if he had not been selected to the silver-anniversary team. He was also chosen to fill a key position on another celebrated roster: ABC’s Super Bowl broadcast team.

During his playing career, Swann participated in ABC’s Wide World of Sports and The Superstars challenges, and delivered sideline commentary during one of the network’s Pro Bowl broadcasts. Upon retirement, the thirty-year-old joined ABC full-time in January 1983.

Throughout the decade, he served as an on-site reporter for the Olympics, United States Football League games, Triple Crown horse races, as well as the network’s weekly college football games. And as the sideline and halftime commentator for Monday Night Football, Swann appeared on prime-time television each week of the NFL season.

Not long before hustling over to midfield to be introduced as part of the silver-anniversary team, Swann delivered a live report for the Brent Musburger–hosted pregame show.

But ABC’s broadcast on Sunday would feature the voices of more than just one of the sport’s legends. Two more NFL greats—along with an iconic broadcaster—occupied the broadcast booth.

A twelve-year playing career with the Giants—highlighted by five appearances in the NFL title game and the league MVP during New York’s 1956 world championship season—earned halfback Frank Gifford a place in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Gifford retired from football after the 1964 season, three years before the advent of the Super Bowl. Still, when the Packers and Chiefs met for the inaugural AFL-NFL title game (aka, Super Bowl I), Gifford was there as a play-by-play voice for CBS’ telecast. In 1971, he switched to ABC and became one-third of the famous Monday Night Football gang that featured Howard Cosell and Don Meredith.

Fifteen years after Gifford joined Monday Night Football, ABC revamped a lineup that had undergone several changes in recent seasons. Joe Namath and O. J. Simpson were replaced, and Gifford was paired with forty-two-year-old Al Michaels. Best known for coining the phrase “Do you believe in miracles?” to punctuate the U.S. Ice Hockey team’s victory over Russia in the 1980 Winter Olympics, Michaels was a versatile broadcaster who eventually became the only man to deliver play-by-play for the World Series, Super Bowl, NBA finals, and Stanley Cup finals. Beginning with the 1986 NFL season, he brought his customary enthusiasm to Monday Night Football.

A year later, ABC returned to the familiar three-man format. Dan Dierdorf, the perennial Pro Bowl lineman for the St. Louis Cardinals (and a Hall of Fame selection in 1996) joined Gifford and Michaels in the booth.

The three very different personalities eventually gelled, boosting television ratings.

“I think it took a little while for the three-announcer booth to come together,” the show’s producer, Ken Wolfe, said prior to Super Bowl XXV. “The three guys really enjoy each other now, and it comes across on the air. We’ve all grown.”

The trio passed their first Super Bowl test in January 1988: they kept viewers awake during the unwatchable second half of Washington’s 42-10 rout of Denver. Three years later, they eagerly awaited the next Super Bowl broadcast and hoped the game would be more competitive.

But when they arrived in Tampa to prepare for the Giants-Bills matchup, ABC’s star-studded broadcast team—just like everyone else that week—faced an extraordinary landscape.

“I’m having a hard time going to sleep every night,” Gifford said. “You’re holding your breath. I think that’s the feeling here. It is the Super Bowl. It is important. It’s important to play it and go on with our lives. But there will be a cloud hanging over the game. I feel a little peculiar, more than any game I’ve ever done.”

Almost immediately, once Super Bowl week began, whispers spread that—because of the Gulf War—perhaps the game should not be played.

On Monday, the annual commissioner’s party, two days before the