Let’s start with the conceit that this game is the only super thing
we have left. Super power, super economy, super you-name-it… gone. You
can beat the Bushes for that, but we’re all out of super -- except for
the Super Bowl. That celebration of an all-American $9 billion industry
(estimated because the National Football League has never opened its
books), not to mention millions more in subsidiary and dependent
businesses, offers us a national holiday that has arguably superseded
Thanksgiving (thanks for what?) and Christmas (electronic excess and
obsolescence).
Even little Everytrader has a shot here. Without insider
connections, you undoubtedly have a far better shot at winning a
football wager than gambling in the stock market.
The Big Four
Here are the four biggest reasons to watch this Super Bowl.
1. It’s Not Soccer
American exceptionalism is alive and thriving on Super Bowl Sunday.
National Football League franchises are overwhelmingly owned, managed,
and manned by American citizens. Neither immigration nor foreign
capital has made a perceptible dent in the game. And you and I have
proudly subsidized all this. American taxpayers have built many NFL
stadiums. Most American universities, with their government grants, have
sports schools attached; those multi-million-dollar athletic
departments (despite claims, they are rarely profitable) train the
players and one of academia’s latest revenue-producing innovations --
sports management departments -- train the front-office personnel.
American football is barely played outside the country. Call it a
failure of colonialism (as baseball and basketball might), but it’s
really a tribute to good old-fashioned protectionism. Those other major
sports, even ice hockey, are increasingly being taken over by Latin
American, Asian, or Eastern European guest workers. Pro football remains
a native game.
The “futbol” that most of the rest of the world plays is a game that
American male athletes and sports fans have never found compelling. Why?
What’s not to like? The so-called “beautiful game” is exactly that, and
the past several generations of American school-age girls and boys were
lucky to have recreational soccer programs. But there was no room on
the sports “shelf” for a game so poorly suited to commercial TV
interruption and American domination.
(It’s not as if soccer is in any way effete. Its fans are famously
thuggish. In fact, currently, the nationalistic Russian mobs who roam
cities beating up people who do not look Slavic have taken to calling
themselves “Soccer fans.”)
2. No Dogs Were Harmed in the Making of It
The controversy over allowing Michael Vick back into the select company of other NFL felons -- reportedly about one-fifth
of the playing population -- faded after the Philadelphia Eagles
quarterback showed contrition, spoke to schoolchildren, proved to be one
of the most electrifying performers in the game, and then lost early in
the play-offs, avoiding the embarrassment of PETA demonstrating at the
Super Bowl.
At
30, Vick was clearly better than he had been before his 21-month
imprisonment. He had added a previously missing work ethic and level of
concentration. One wonders if the sharpening of Vick’s focus had to do
with losing what might have been his primary outlet for sadism and
violence: the brutal world of training fighting dogs and then killing
the losers in often unspeakably cruel ways.
There is no question that violence stirs fan blood. Football players
know this; they have been remarkably hostile to attempts to soften the
mayhem, especially those ringing helmet-to-helmet shots, an offspring of
the modern technique learned in PeeWee leagues of “putting a hat on
him” (which means tackling headfirst rather than the more traditional
style of wrapping one’s arms around the ball carrier’s legs and dragging
him down).
Most pro football players seem to be on the side of the hats. A more
careful game won’t be football anymore, they say. It won’t be the
American game -- even for some of the doctors watching who treat the “epidemic of concussions blazing through schoolboy football.”
3. But No Chicks
The title of Mariah Burton Nelson’s 1994 book, The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football, seems
ever more prescient. The so-called feminization of America (really the
slow movement toward equality) is reflected in most sports, many
boardrooms, and the military. Resistance is stiff, from human resources
violations to rape. Conservatives keen over the suffering of the average
male. It’s tough when you suddenly have to compete against an expanding
talent pool that includes women who are better than you. Mr. Average
Mediocre can no longer count on his members-only credential to keep him
in the game. Unless, of course, the game is football.
Football is the last estrogen-free zone. No wonder high school and
college teams have such bloated rosters. (College teams routinely
“dress” 85 men, compared to a pro team’s 53.) This gives more boys the
chance to imagine themselves in the testosterone club, even if many of
them hardly ever get into a game. Later, as jock alums, they will donate
to alma mater and speak reverently of how old coach taught them to be
men -- or at least not women.
Yes, there are girls playing in some youth and high school games,
even in college, mostly as kickers. But the freakishness of it is still
the story. The NFL is so relentlessly misogynistic that off-field
incidents like those involving Brett Favre when he was a Jet and Super Bowl-bound Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger
tend to be dismissed as boys-will-be-boys antics. Unfortunately,
there’s a certain logic to this: since they began playing the game,
they’ve been told they can be real men, not girls, not sissies -- if
they submit to Coach, play hard, and play in pain. In return, their
perks and entitlements will be those of conquering warriors.
4. The Faux Volunteer Army
If football really is the bread and circuses of this dying empire, the injuries suffered by the gladiators (disproportionately
African-American) make the game more real, more urgent. And their
willingness to take the risks absolves us from blame. After all, they
volunteered. They really want to play this game, the media reminds us.
These aggressive, competitive men have an intrinsic need to prove
themselves to themselves, each other, and us. And where else, the media
asks us, would they make so much money and find so much acclaim?
At Goldman Sachs? The Mayo Clinic? Skadden, Arps? No, no, these
sturdy lads are often from the underclass and they have leveraged their
skill and dedication into some college studies and a job in football.
That many of these gladiators, clearly smart enough to absorb
complicated game plans, feel that football is their only shot seems to
be an indictment of American opportunity. What about all those high
school and college football players who put all their chips in their hat
and still didn’t make it to the pros?
Maybe some of them joined the National Guard.
It’s here, of course, that the entire metaphor may go offsides for
you. Or at least become uncomfortable. Football -- Army? Gladiators --
mercenaries? What about all the strong young men and, increasingly,
women who feel that their only shot at getting an education and a
meaningful life is joining the military during wartime?
The author and journalist Richard Reeves made the connection neatly
when he wrote: “We have a volunteer army, the National Football League
with guns, and we are the spectators.”
As spectators we rarely see the young people die in either volunteer legion. Restrictions
during the Bush years on journalists filming combat deaths or even
showing returning caskets kept the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at a
comfortable remove until they became distant and routine. Old news.
Maybe even a little boring for people without loved ones on active duty.
On NFL broadcasts, players with broken bones and torn tissues are
quickly carted off lest their teammates lose heart. For those of us
watching on TV, the collisions seem almost like cartoon hits. How can
those players just pop back up? Is it the pride, the adrenaline, that
allows them to pretend they are made of steel? Of course, the real
damage, the dementia brought on by head trauma, is years, even decades,
away.
It’s hard to believe how recently the concussion discussion began in
earnest, as if players hadn’t been hit in the head for more than a
century. It was launched several years ago by the revelation that former
pro football players were being diagnosed with dementia, and even dying
from suspected long-term brain trauma, at disproportionate rates for
their age. It was helped along by a number of workers’ compensation
cases and the superb reporting of Alan Schwarz of the New York Times.
The concussion discussion has replaced steroids as the NFL health topic, although the issues are joined:
larger players seem to be at greater risk for early death, and bulking
up via steroids probably contributes to harder hits. The discussion has
also raised the question of whether parents should allow their children
to play the game -- years of small, unreported traumas to the head can’t
be good for developing brains. It even occasioned a rare but telling ESPN column on abolition.
Lest you consider this enough piling on the all-American game, labor
troubles loom with a lock-out possible in March. Because the main issue
is money -- the teams want to share less revenue (currently 60%) with
the players -- the media tends to characterize the conflict as
“billionaires versus millionaires.” Actually, most owners are rich from
other businesses and would not have been allowed into the NFL unless
they were financially secure, while few players survive more than about
three years in the league. The owners also want to increase production
(adding two games to the regular season) without taking more
responsibility for health-care costs.
If you are still passionately following football or, worse, allowing
your kid to play, you may just be an old-fashioned imperialist running
dog. Not that all football fans are bloodthirsty hounds feeding off the
crippled hindquarters of the dying animal of empire. 
