You know how I came up with the name 'Road to the Super Bowl?' It's an homage to the old Bob Hope - Bing Crosby buddy movies - you know, like 'Road to Zanzibar' or 'Road to Morocco.' Can you tell? All I've done my whole life is go to movies.

Look at a football field. It looks like a big movie screen. This is theatre. Football combines the strategy of chess. It's part ballet. It's part battleground, part playground. We clarify, amplify and glorify the game with our footage, the narration and that music, and in the end create an inspirational piece of footage.

I never thought of what I was doing as a way to sell the NFL. I was making movies about a sport that I loved, about players and coaches that I respected. I wanted to convey my love of the game through film. And most artists convey their love through art. And my art and my love was expressed through film.

But I can tell you this: Nothing will happen up there that can duplicate my life down here. That life cannot be better than the one I've lived down here, the football life. It's been perfect.

There have been nine Super Bowls in New Orleans, and not all of them have brought the best of luck to NFL Films. We got robbed twice there, got food poisoning, and my hotel room was broken into on the day the Bears played the Patriots in January 1986.

Life is good. Football is better.

I always was fascinated by neat nicknames.