Super Bowl Xxxviii: It's a Texan Thing

Today Houston prepares to host Super Bowl XXXVIII. It is the first time in 30 years that any city in Texas has held the big game, the last being Super Bowl VIII also in Houston. Overjoyed, the largest city in the Lone Star state has spent all week throwing the wildest party around. Celebrations kicked off last Sunday with a concert, Houston's sporting heroes have been on parade and in-town celebrities were treated to a succession of 'Point After' parties featuring strippers, go-go girls and cheerleaders to help them relax. Most bars and restaurants have laid on extra staff and have abandoned their traditionally huge rib-eye steaks to offer visiting New Englanders the chance to feel at home with a bowl of clam chowder.

But the real homecoming belongs to football. To most of America Super Bowl Sunday is the most important date on the sporting calendar; to Texans it is something more. Lose your job? That's OK, think about it tomorrow, crack open a beer and talk about football with your friends.

This is a state where football is not simply a way of life, but life itself. I first learnt about the Texan obsession with football in 1997 when I began working for the Houston Chronicle. On my first day a colleague took me out for a drink and tried to explain what football meant to this humid city of skyscrapers, stadiums and malls. 'I nevah really cared for baseball,' he said. 'It's fine and all but football, that's the real thing. It's a proper sport, not like your football. People come at our boys and they don't go down.'

It is an attitude that could fairly sum up that of Texas, a state that prides itself on its patriotism, which still commits more men than most to the army's cause, which believes in man's unalienable right to bear arms, eat red meat and drive everywhere.

Yet, for all his fervour,my new colleague, like most Houstonians in 1997, was having a bad year. The NFL team, the Houston Oilers, heavily supported despite a pedigree that was best described as wayward and more often as mediocre, had abruptly left town in December, following a long-running dispute over stadium costs.

Houston missed the Oilers. At the Chronicles' offices chief NFL correspondent John McClain moped around, only occasionally perking up to write another column condemning the departure. Yes, there would be the Dallas Cowboys to cover and that would be fine and grand and, whisper it quietly, more entertaining but somehow it wasn't quite right, they weren't his team, not the way the Oilers had been.

The townspeople felt much the same. At Rice University, home to college football team the Owls, and the University of Houston, home to the Cougars, banners implored Houston to forget the synthetic glory of the NFL and support their own.

What football means to Houston, and to Texas, was everywhere that year, from the crowds that filled the Texas Memorial Stadium shouting for Ricky Williams, the star of the Longhorns, to the 50,000 plus who regularly turned up to watch Friday night high school games. My friend Danny, a third generation Mexican-American, affected to find it ridiculous before quietly admitting that he loved going to the high school games as a child with his grandfather. 'He thought it was the American thing to do,' he said.

Yet more than an American thing it was a Texan one. In his book Friday Night Lights, which covers a year in the life of a high school team in Odessa, Texas, the journalist HS Bissinger talks of how the game touches the community, of how when the side do well the businesses boom, there is renewed hope in this dusty, dry part of the world. And when they lose, the small community is plunged into depression. They know that few, if any, of the boys will ever make the NFL but for one brief season they are gods to the town.

The same was true, on a grander scale, of the Oilers and, maybe, in time, of Houston's new franchise the Texans, formed in 2002. Which is perhaps why, for many Houstonians, hosting the Super Bowl is not simply an honour but a point of pride and a symbol of their city's rebirth. Seven years ago they felt football had turned its back on them, today it has come home.