Last year?EUR??,,????'???s Super Bowl took place on artificial FieldTurf at Detroit, Mich.?EUR??,,????'???s Ford Field.

“Nothing can go wrong,?EUR??,,????'?? turf master Phillip Jennings said about the pressure he?EUR??,,????'???s feeling this month. ?EUR??,,????'??We’re talking [about] an event that 50 million people are going to watch.”

This year, the game is at Dolphins Stadium in Miami, where Super Bowl XLI will be held Feb. 4. On that night, while 70,000 spectators watch the action, Jennings will obsess over the traction. He wants no problems underfoot.

“We’re not watching the field,” Jennings said. “We’re watching their feet.”

His company, headquartered in Soperton in Georgia?EUR??,,????'???s Treutlen County, employs 200 workers, grows nearly 3,500 acres and does more than $20 million in worldwide sales annually. Jennings conducts business in 25 countries, including Dubai, Greece, the Dominican Republic, Fuji and Tahiti, none of which is in the NFC East.

Jennings does lots of home landscaping. He’s sodded numerous golf courses all over the country and around the globe. He’s even dabbled in a cricket field or two.

But the Super Bowl is, well, tall grass. “Our reputations,” Jennings said, “are on the line.”

In 2005, those reputations were greatly enhanced. At Super Bowl XXXIX in Jacksonville, when the New England Patriots beat Philadelphia for their third Super Bowl triumph in four years, Jennings and Pennington Seed had themselves a super-duper Super Sunday.

It wasn’t just the gushing of George Toma, the original Sodfather of the NFL, the legendary Kansas City Chiefs groundskeeper and Super Bowl sod Svengali.

There were also the gushing e-mails from the champion Patriots, extolling the Jacksonville grass. “We had several from players calling it, ‘absolutely the best field we’ve ever played on,’” Jennings said.

That’s the goal for this year, too. The XLI field was first planted in July 2005. It’s nearly five acres of Princess 77, about twice as much as necessary for the Super Bowl. Over the past 18 months, Ed Mangan, the Atlanta Braves field director and now Super Bowl groundskeeping guru, has periodically checked on the turf.

“If you can please Ed Mangan,” Jennings said, “you can please God.”

Mangan the Magnificent is pleased. This, despite the fact that there was a 17-degree, potentially destructive freeze one December day. Jennings had workmen out covering up the field on a cold Christmas Day. If you’re a blade of grass, it’s not easy being green in mid-winter in Middle Georgia.

Jennings’ work crew has used fertilizer sprayed on the blades of the grass that travels up the tissues of each blade, enhancing the color. There’s been overseeding, presoaking seeds, pregermination. Anything, and everything, to make that Bermuda (which gives the grass strength) look good.

“We have done so much with this grass,” Jennings said, “it’s like grass on steroids.”

For the game, the grass will be cut to a perfect 5/8ths-of-an-inch height.

Sources: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, www.sodfather.com