SAN FRANCISCO — I look at my friends and see they are all
weaklings. Pale, soft, and cursed with amusingly spindly legs —
they sit in ragged little heaps very close to the large television
screen in the living room of a crowded apartment, chain-smoking and
furiously draining bright red beer cans.
None of these welterweights ever played any football in high
school. Serious young men of such meager proportions wound up as
scrabble-team ringers and rock musicians, not promising monsters of
the gridiron. I imagine one of my particularly neurotic college
buddies taking the field in heavy pads and an over-sized helmet,
chattering nervously in the huddle and then, after the hike,
running in circles for a few seconds, and yelping before being
ground to a fine paste by a tattooed M1 Abrams with $300
cleats.
At that image, I can no longer hide my laughter, so it’s a good
thing the rest of the party is too busy watching the game to
notice. Indeed, the tube had never before seen devotion of this
magnitude. Normally, this talkative crowd would have no trouble
drowning out a squawking flat-screen with arch reflections on
literature, politics, and the love lives of trashy
acquaintances.
But not today: Today everyone is keeping their witticisms to
themselves. Eyes are focused; hands are shaky and tense. They run
corn chips through seven-layer been dip and shovel them into their
open maws. Over the crunching, I hear only the soothing murmur of
game-play grunts and shoulder-pad thuds.
WELCOME TO SUPER BOWL XXXVIII in San Fran. Given the crowd’s lack
of muscle tone and green politics, one might expect this bunch to
be less enthralled by the biggest game in football, a game which,
according to a small, clueless minority, is a brutish sport.
Thuggish skull-cracking is prized above nimble athleticism and
perplexing parallels to modern warfare are the order of the
day.
And your expectations would be crushed right about the time that
Panthers’ quarterback Jake Delhomme stumbles out of the pocket
looking for a receiver. Patriots linebackers roar past his blocker
to maul the quarterback from his vulnerable blind-side. Struggling
like a tender antelope in the unforgiving jaws of a ferocious wild
cat, Delhomme flounders but manages to fling the ball away before
he crashes on the turf.
The living room erupts in raucous cheers. “Damn, he got dropped
cold,” screeches my friend, the 130-pound librarian/actor. His
roommate, a skeletal special education teacher/musician, concurs.
“Did you see his helmet bounce?” he shouts, cracking open a fresh
brew and ripping a hot wing in half. “Did you? Oh man, that was
awesome!” They both pound the coffee table like mental
patients.
Surprisingly, these two insane fans care little for the
Patriots, or the Panthers for that matter. Last year, many of us
transplants from the East tried to solidify our newly won
residential status by endorsing the Oakland Raiders in their
ill-fated effort to defeat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. In that
contest, our loyalty was contrived at best, as we became, at least
once the second quarter rolled by, uniformly impressed by the
liquor-swilling talents of the extravagantly-costumed Raider
faithful staggering about outside the arena.
This time around, no one even has a dog in the fight. Instead of
taking sides based on hometown pride or the talents of an
especially charismatic player, the guests at this Super Bowl party
made the decision to rally behind the guy delivering the monster
hit, regardless of his team affiliation. Onlookers feel free to
channel their emotions not towards joy in victory, or dismay in
defeat, but to a wild, ecstatic toast to the sport’s unrivalled
cult of celebration.
This crowd isn’t made up of dedicated football aficionados, but
of armchair theorists obsessed with the ironic possibilities of
watching sports they’ve ceased to enjoy on a visceral level. We’re
going through the motions, acting out the traits unfairly linked
with the majority of true sports fans — gorging on junk food,
screaming incomprehensible obscenities at flag-happy referees, etc.
— when the outcome of the match is no longer of any real
importance.
After the second quarter ends, a few toss a Nerf football in the
rain outside but we are drawn back in when we hear that Kid Rock, a
noted master of populist pastiche, has taken the stage for his
half-time performance. Yet instead of using the opportunity to
scoff at his lack of talent we applaud enthusiastically, because
that’s what the fans on the field are doing.
WHEN I WAS YOUNG and thus much less inclined to scrutinize its
cultural significance, I’d behave this way while watching the Super
Bowl with my dad and little brother — sans the booze and swearing
of course. Back then, I really liked football and would have been
less preoccupied with what might fall from Janet Jackson’s
corset.
Scholarly and exhaustive in my approach, I was a self-taught
pigskin strategist with a fairly sophisticated sense of the sport’s
ethos — one I picked up from Paper Lion, not a Sony
Playstation game. I could watch games all Sunday long.
Now, I sit and see my friends desperately mimic how my younger
self enjoyed this game, and I’m starting to grasp at the strands of
a theory. Regardless of our tin-foil constitutions, we all liked
football when we were younger. Then, many of us started wondering
if all the perceived machismo surrounding the game ran contrary to
our new-found self-consciously “creative” pursuits. So we bid adieu
to open-field tackles, third-down conversions, and long bombs, and
instead embraced abrasive rock music, art, and New German cinema in
their stead, kidding ourselves into thinking we had made the leap
to a more evolved state of mind.
We may no longer harbor the same affection for football we once
did but I, for one, still insist on resisting the temptation to
hold it entirely at arm’s length, the same way I’d handle a
historical film or socio-political movement. I hope my
well-intentioned friends try to do the same at some point, because
our gleeful simulation of stadium revelry is, in part, a cry for
help.
