GOSPEL CELEBRATION

The NFL-sanctioned event will bring music and football together for Super Bowl weekend

By Hy Cotten

Thursday, September 9, 2010 - 1:20pm

There was the year that Richard Seymour, then a defensive tackle for the New England Patriots, attended the Super Bowl Gospel Celebration three days after his father had died.

Seymour’s dad had preached to him as a boy the importance of church and gospel music. And after his father passed, Seymour said he considered it more important than ever to participate in that year’s Super Bowl Gospel Celebration.

His story and others were passed along to the North Texas media and those present Wednesday afternoon for the 2011 Super Bowl Gospel Celebration Informational and Media Session.

The gospel celebration, one of only 10 events actually sanctioned by the NFL, will be staged at the Music Hall at Dallas’ Fair Park on the Friday night prior to Super Bowl XLV.

This will be the 12th Super Bowl Gospel Celebration, which was created by and has been carried on by Melanie Few-Harrison of Atlanta, Ga.

“This started as an event for the players and their families to have a faith-based component to our Super Bowls,” Few-Harrison said. “It was done the first two years as a gospel brunch. We had no way of knowing that it would grow to what it has grown to be like it is. The first year, the NFL Players Association thought, ‘Well, maybe we’ll have 300 people.’ And we had 4,000 people. That was in Miami in 1999. It has grown, grown, grown, grown.”

For North Texas’ Super Bowl, Few-Harrison plans to mix in more headline singers from several music genres outside of gospel but who grew up singing gospel. They will join well-known gospel acts and NFL players on stage that night at the Music Hall.

“We’ve had Patti LaBelle, Gladys Knight, Anita Baker, those who started out as little girls singing in the church choir,” Few-Harrison said.

As for NFL players, she said, “We’ve had everybody from Donovan McNabb to Deion Sanders to Curt Warner to Jerry Rice to John Elway. Three years ago we put together an All-NFL Players Choir. People said, ‘Forget about it; you’ll never get those players in choir robes.’ Somehow, someway it was done.”

Few-Harrison calls it “taking the helmets off some of these guys and showing another side to them.”

Tisha Ford, the NFL’s Special Events/ Business Development Manager, exuded, “The Gospel Celebration is family-oriented, it’s a beautiful message, and it’s unique.”

The NFL players who participate are not clowning around. They practice for days beforehand, bring their children and parents and grandparents to the celebration and make an entirely emotional night of it.

Did Few-Harrison ever dream her idea would last so long?

“Never,” she said. “When we first started, the NFL probably sanctioned 50 or 60 Super Bowl events. Now they’re down to 10 – like the NFL Taste, the NFL Legends, Habitat for Humanities, the Athletes in Action Brunch, but far fewer because they wanted to do fewer, but do them better.”

Ticket sales, performers and more announcements will come as soon as the Gospel Celebration puts up its own website in the coming weeks.