Super Bowl Fun Facts: Marlboro Man & More

Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara (California), home of the San Francisco 49ers, dresses in its best clothes to host Super Bowl LX this Sunday (0:30 Spanish time / Cuatro and DAZN). With an estimated audience of more than 150 million viewers around the world, an average price of $8,000 per ticket and a cost of ten million for a 30-second ad, the event with the greatest impact in American sports will this time bring the New England Patriots face to face, resurrected by Drake Maye and Mike Vrabel, and the Seattle Seahawks, who have been revived in turn by another Mike, MacDonald, and by Sam Darnold. Tom Brady’s crown prince and the grandson of a Marlboro man will collide in a final that is full of curiosities.

Sam Darnold was two years old when his grandfather Dick Hammer died in Long Beach. Lung cancer cut short the life of someone who had become a popular figure by playing the cowboy that Leo Burnett conceived to multiply the sales of filtered cigarettes and extend the use of a product among the male population that until then was consumed mainly by women.

Hammer, who had been part of the University of Southern California basketball team that reached the NCAA Final Four in 1954 and represented the United States in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics as part of the volleyball team, later had a career in film and television, appearing in the series ‘Emergency!’ and became captain of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, but his image was immortalized mainly when he took over, in the seventies, from Robert Norris, the first Marlboro man.

Norris, who spent his life without smoking a single cigarette despite encouraging millions of people to do so, escaped the curse that followed at least five of his successors, all of whom died as a result of lung diseases. Among them was Dick Hammer, who passed on his passion for sports to his descendants but could not imagine the epic that one of his grandchildren would complete heading to the Super Bowl this Sunday.

Although he seemed predestined to surf the waves that caught many of his friends, he played basketball, baseball and taekwondo, Sam Darnold ended up choosing American football while listening to the stories that his mother, Chris, told him about his grandfather Dick. “My mom always tells me how much I remember him,” he said when he arrived in the NFL.

A graduate of the University of Southern California, Darnold was chosen by the New York Jets third overall in the 2018 draft, but his time in the Big Apple was unfortunate. There he began a journey that took him through the Carolina Panthers, the San Francisco 49ers and the Minnesota Vikings, where he arrived in 2024. An injury to JJ McCarthy opened the doors to a starting position with the Vikings, with whom he completed a great season before moving to Seattle. With him at the helm, the Seahawks went from being left out of the postseason to meeting in the Super Bowl with the Patriots who are flying again on the back of another chosen six years after Tom Brady left Foxborough, thereby leading the New England team to a long journey through the desert.

another chosen one

The rebuilding of the Patriots after the departure of The GOAT in 2020 was so chaotic that it even took down Bill Belichick, the architect of the NFL’s greatest dynasty. Cam Newton, Brian Hoyer, Jarrett Stidham, Mac Jones, Bailey Zappe and Jacoby Brissett. All of them aspired to collect Brady’s legacy. They all failed miserably. Brissett was the starter when the Patriots chose Drake Maye with the number 3 pick in the 2024 draft, a young man from the University of North Carolina, the same one from which Michael Jordan rose to the top of basketball.

Son of a former quarterback who, like him, played for the North Carolina Tar Heels and who was part of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers squad in 1988 before injuries put an end to his NFL career, Drake Maye has established himself in his second year as a professional and has done so alongside an old buddy of Brady, the myth he aspires to succeed.

Mike Vrabel won three of the six Vince Lombardi trophies that make the Patriots the franchise with the most Super Bowls in their cabinets, the same as the Pittsburgh Steelers. In 2025, after five years as head coach of the Tennessee Titans and one as a consultant for the Cleveland Browns, he received the call from Robert Kraft, owner of the Patriots, to take charge of the bench.

One season has been enough for the former linebacker to be one step away from becoming the first man to win the Vince Lombardi Trophy as both a player and head coach for the same franchise. From winning just four games last season, the Patriots have gone on to add fourteen wins in the regular season this year, become AFC champions and reach their twelfth Super Bowl, the first without Brady and Belichick.

At 23 years and 162 days old, Drake Maye will become this Sunday the second youngest quarterback to start in a Super Bowl, a record only surpassed by the 23 years and 127 days with which the legendary Dan Marino defended the candidacy of the Miami Dolphins in 1984, and he may be the earliest to lift the trophy if the Patriots beat the Seahawks, since Marino fell to Joe Montana’s 49ers. Until now the record belongs to Ben Roethlisberger, who was champion at the age of 23 years and eleven months with the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2006. Brady won the first of his six rings with the Patriots (he later won another with the Buccaneers) at the age of 24 years and six months.

Maye, who unlike his rival Darnold does not have among his favorite pastimes using an application to identify the song of northern mockingbirds, is confident that this Sunday in Santa Clara he will have the mettle that characterized Brady to return the Patriots to the top in a Super Bowl that will confront two franchises whose joint valuation reaches 15.25 billion dollars, according to Forbes.