Usher's reaction to performing at Super Bowl LVIII

The R&B legend was ecstatic to tell the world of his headlining spot at the Super Bowl Halftime Show. “As of August, I knew. And I had to keep it a secret up until the grand unveiling for the world,” Usher told CBS News. “And I couldn’t let my kids know. So, like, any kind of documents I’m receiving, you know, we had, like, a code word that we would only talk on the telephone to let it be known that we were discussing ‘Utah,’ you know?” Utah was the code word for the Super Bowl.

“You don’t get a chance to surprise your kids that often anymore. It’s like, there’s no fantasy moments,” he said. Usher’s kids advised him “to pray about” playing the Super Bowl in the past.

“You know, everybody says they want to win a Grammy, or they want to win an Oscar, or a Tony, or an Emmy. A Super Bowl is something that everybody wants to play,” he said. “And here it is. It happened.”

For more about the Super Bowl, football fans can check out When It Was Just a Game: Remembering the First Super Bowl by Harvey Frommer. The best-selling book delves into the history of the first Super Bowl, which was originally known as the AFL-NFL Championship Game. (The term “Super Bowl” was coined only in its third year.) The debut game, between the winning Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs, was played in front of only 61,946 people at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum—an audience well below the stadium’s capacity. Harvey Frommer, a sports historian and reporter, puts the tale of that momentous game together using oral history, gathered by hundreds of interviews with players, coaches, media and spectators alike.

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