My most vivid Super Bowl memory? It was Super Bowl 24, 1990. January 28th, 1990 San Francisco 49ers played the Denver Broncos at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans. John Elway was the quarterback for the Broncos. The 49ers won 55-10. Jerry Rice caught three touchdowns, John Taylor caught one, and Brent Jones reeled in another. Tom Rathman rushed for two short scores. Joe Montana threw a record breaking 5 touchdown passes, taking home MVP honors, and his 4th Super Bowl victory. Matt Millen, Ronnie Lott, Bill Romanowski, Kevin Fagan, Chet Brooks, Michael Walter and Don Griffin led San Francisco's defensive charge. I was pulling for the 49ers because hometown boy, Dough Cunningham, had once played for them.

Honestly, I had to Google all this information because I’m just not that into football. The reason I remembered that particular Super Bowl vividly was because my wife and I had left our three children for the very first time to go out of town and celebrate our fifteenth anniversary. We drove down to Nashville for the weekend and checked into a motel across from the Opryland Hotel. We couldn’t afford to stay at the Opry Hotel so we stayed as close as we could afford. We took a tour bus of Nashville to see where a lot of the country music singers lived that Saturday. Captain-Ds was next to the Motel, so that’s where we had dinner. Our plans were to spend the evening together and drive back to Paducah the next day to relieve our babysitter.

Mother Nature had other plans. Sunday morning we awoke to a half inch of ice coating everything. Everything included cars, parking lots, roads… you name it. We couldn’t even walk next door to Captain-Ds to eat. We breakfasted and lunched from the vending machines. We weren’t going anywhere. No one was. Nashville was shut down. By that evening we were starving and thankful our babysitter hadn’t abandoned our daughters.

By the time the Super Bowl was coming on the Silver Bullet Bar in the motel had opened and was accessible to everyone trapped there. Neither of us are the “Bar” type, but we had had all we could stand of that motel room and walked down to see what was going on at the Silver Bullet. We joined the few people that had not fled the city prior the ice storm and dined on free pretzels and peanuts, chased down with expensive soft drinks.

We vowed to do better after that anniversary, and thus far we have managed to step it up every fifth succeeding year. But where else did we have to go but up? That was a Super Bowl we’ll never forget.

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Rick Algood
February 7, 2016