Paul Harvey’s Triumph at Super Bowl

God Made a Farmer Ram Super Bowl Commercial… by bourbonblog

In the Super Bowl XLVII, the ceaseless spectacle that lasted for four and a half hours, there was only two minutes when the crowd came to a standstill and listened truly. The credit went to the late radio broadcaster Paul Harvey, whose one of the speeches made that magic.

The idea came from Chrysler who thought to add 2 minutes of Harvey’s speech at a convention called ‘Future Farmers of America’ in 1978 into the soundtrack of an ad. He advertising was for Ram truck and it displayed American farm life’s still photos on the screen while Harvey’s speech combined with soundtrack was playing on the background.

It was a surprise that CBS did not refuse telecast it on the grounds of its inappropriateness to the occasion. The ad was simply quiet, simple, and thoughtful. It was persuasive. It was the whole thing that our celebrity-soaked modern culture, which controlled Super Bowl on Sunday almost as far as football did, is not. Not all the incredible glitz and sometimes uproarious vulgarity that classified the proceedings around the Super Bowl including the halftime shows and the trailers could be the framework for a desperate deficiency of expression.

Paul Harvey’s speech was a little treasure of literary artistry. It proved that words have the supremacy to move us, even within a persistently visual age obsessed from diversion to diversion. Harvey chose the tale of creation. It continued to describe uniqueness of the devoted farmer, interposing each riff flawlessly.

According to its swiftness and descriptions, the speech was a type of prose poem. Harvey delivered this with great rhetorical force. Listening to him can move someone who by no means wants to handle cows, especially before sunrise. For a moment, it was a remarkably convincing performance. Someday an edifying historian will engrave the classic story of the Super Bowl halftime.

Image Courtesy: abcnews.go.com