One year, he used the traditional presidential Super Bowl interview to say that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was “very bad for our country.” The next year, he used the same forum to say that she was “a very confused, very nervous woman” and to make fun of former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s height. This Sunday, Fox will air Donald Trump’s Super Bowl interview, conducted in advance with Bret Baier. The hits during the game could be less brutal than the president’s remarks.
Over the years, presidents have, to be sure, mixed politics — taxes, the federal budget, foreign policy — with pigskin commentary to an audience more interested in running backs than running deficits.
Most presidents have sensed that. George W. Bush, for example, spoke about his allegiance to the Houston Texans. Game-time food is a popular topic: Barack Obama highlighted the chicken wings that Michelle Obama was preparing (“I’ve been cooking all day”) before issuing a swipe at what he called “the little vegetable tray that nobody touches.” Obama also expressed concern about the sport’s concussions — a rare point of agreement with Trump, who said that he would be hesitant to allow his son Barron to play the sport.
The Super Bowl is one of the very last shared American experiences, with an Ipsos poll conducted two years ago showing that 44% of Democrats were football fans, as were 45% of Republicans. Just a few months ago, a poll YouGov undertook for the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University found that a majority of Americans considered members of the opposite party “downright evil.”
There was a time when Ronald Reagan, the last president to play college football, was regarded as a divisive figure. But time has the effect of sanding away the rough edges of American presidents, and though Democrats are in no rush to celebrate the 40th president — and the new Trump-oriented Republicans would find him a RINO, or Republican in Name Only — there may be some value in returning, if just for one column on the run-up to this year’s Super Bowl contest, to his 1986 pregame interview with NBC’s Tom Brokaw.
This will go down easy, like a classic old-fashioned to go with a president who was regarded as old-fashioned and, as someone who had just turned 75 years old — younger than Trump’s 78! — was considered just plain old:
“I think it’s typically American that we can have — or be diverted by things like this from the serious problems, and I think it’s part of the American personality … It’s so much a part of American life that I think it’s a part of our personality.”
Reagan began his romance with football long before there was a Super Bowl. For more than half his life, college football captured Americans’ attention. The year he graduated from college, the Michigan Wolverines won the national championship symbolized by the Knute Rockne Memorial Trophy.
Young “Dutch” Reagan would have had no reason to see the significance in that, for he couldn’t have foreseen that eight years later he’d play his signature role, in the “Knute Rockne, All-American” film, cast as George Gipp. There he was given the line that would follow him forever, when the Notre Dame coach (played by Pat O’Brien), spoke of his last meeting with his former player: “Rock, sometime, when the team is up against it, and the breaks are beating the boys, tell ‘em to go out there with all they got and win just one for the Gipper.”
Brokaw lingered on football, and Reagan indulged in reflection: “It all comes back, and you find yourself kind of remembering what the cleats felt like under your shoes.”
Brokaw had called the president’s college football coach, Ralph McKinzie, at Eureka College, who at 91 remembered him as “eager, aggressive, better on defense, but overall an average football player, but an outstanding talker.”
Like John Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Reagan was a lineman, which prompted him to discuss teamwork. “The line certainly feels that those fellows behind them wouldn’t be able to do anything if we didn’t pave the way for them … I was a guard; and three years of varsity ball at Eureka, I averaged all but two minutes of every game.”
Then he turned the tables on the broadcaster. He asked a question:
“Do I have a second so that I could tell you a little incident in my memories of football?”
Brokaw: “Sure, absolutely.”
The president: “Well, it was our ball back on our own 35-yard line. We were 1 point behind. There were 20 seconds to play, but we thought the ref had said two minutes. And Bud, our quarterback, called an off-tackle run with himself carrying the ball. As a running guard, I came out and led the interference. And the key to the play was me getting that first man on the secondary; I missed him. But Bud cut back to the sideline, went 65 yards for the touchdown, and we won the game …
“I never could figure out: How did he do it with me missing that block? And the very next season, when I was auditioned to become a sports announcer, and they told me to stand in front of the microphone and imagine a football game and describe it on radio. So I did, and I chose that game because I knew enough of the players’ names that I could get by and so forth. And I thought, ‘I won’t start with the kickoff or anything. I’ll start in the fourth quarter.’
“I had the chill wind coming in through the end of the stadium. We didn’t have stadiums; we had bleachers … I called that play. And this time I nailed that man in the secondary. I claim this is the first instant replay. Only it wasn’t instant; it was a year later. But, no, it was a beautiful, earth-shaking block.”
Brokaw: “The great thing about being a president or a sports announcer, you can go back and correct all those mistakes, all those missed blocks.”
Two questions for Super Bowl 2025: At the beginning of his fourth week, is there a chance Trump might want to go back and correct whatever mistakes he might have made? Is that what the pause on the Mexico and Canada tariffs was?
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
