Silicon Valley's last Super Bowl had collegiate feel to it

PALO ALTO, Calif. – Fans who walked into Stanford Stadium for Super Bowl XIX found a gift waiting for them: a seat cushion to soften the hours they were about to spend sitting on benches. On one side of the cushion was a logo of a local tech company. It was multicolored and shaped like an apple with a bite taken out of it.

It was 1985, and this was long before Apple became a part of everyday life in America. It was before Silicon Valley became a mainstream term and a seat of the Internet revolution. And yet just as technology was about to transform the way we live, this Super Bowl brought a harbinger of change in the nation's biggest sporting event.

Super Bowl XIX, between the San Francisco 49ers and the Miami Dolphins, was the last NFL championship played on a college campus. There were no metal detectors, no luxury suites, no celebrity halftime performers. Many tickets were in the $60 range, with prices closer to $100 that got people talking about exorbitance.

Matt Doyle, who now works as director of football operations in the Stanford athletics office, attended the game as a child and remembers his mother parking at Nordstrom's. Mark Soltau, who covered the game and also works for Stanford now, was recruited to play Joe Montana in a scrimmage that week to give ABC production crew a trial run for its first Super Bowl. For a mammoth, worldwide event, it was almost homey.

"It was a really neat atmosphere," Doyle says, "to have a worldwide event coming to the Bay Area."

It was as close to a backyard feel as the Super Bowl will ever get, but it ushered in something more bright-lights about the sport. Joe Montana against Dan Marino hinted at an era of high-powered offenses and celebrity quarterback matchups. The 49ers, who would be remembered as one of the greatest teams ever, racked up a record 537 yards on offense. The Dolphins would run the ball only nine times all game. Montana and Marino, all these years later, are still considered standard-bearers for what a great modern passer should be.

But there was even more of a foreshadowing about the event. The halftime show was a man in a jetpack, flying around the stadium and making a cacophonous racket. "It was pretty high-tech at the time," Doyle says.

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The theme was technology, and although no one could possibly imagine the advances that were coming to the world, the seeds of the change were there. Lights were brought into the stadium, as was a video board. A hotel was built for the occasion. Stanford Stadium gave the league a chance to pack 84,000 people in for the game, but the need for add-ons showed how watching the Super Bowl would never be like watching a college game again. There would be much more Super and less Bowl.

As the fans left after the game, carrying their Apple seat cushions as a memento, they couldn't have known how the Super Bowl, and the way they would experience it, was about to change for good.