Even though I'm rooting for the hometown Colts in today's Super Bowl, everyone should take a few minutes to enjoy this, which, I'm sure, is the first time it's been referenced in the last two weeks. Were we ever so innocent? In the twenty years between Chicago's trips to the Super Bowl, the landscape of American football, professional and collegiate, and attitudes towards sports in America has changed considerably in the wake of intense commodification, relentless commercialism, celebrity idolatry, and performance enhancement. Maybe the "Shuffle" is to blame. Is it the moment that started it all?
Personally, I love football, warts and all. It is a game of genuine beauty: not the way, say, the Grand Canyon is beautiful, but the way a mathematic equation is said to be beautiful through its circumscription of infinite complexity by relatively few rules. A rubric for seeing order in seeming chaos. Plus, there's something extraordinary about the somatic and strategic control required of players and coaches, especially when they are challenged to marshal those skills in concert against an antithetic opponent.
But while the game itself might be, as Dennis Hopper once exclaimed, "a ballet of bulldozers," that doesn't mean football as a socio-cultural institution is faultless. Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction" during halftime of the 2004 Super Bowl drove the nation to distraction. But it shouldn't be the single nanosecond of nipple we 'saw' that disconcerts us. What about the half dozen beer and 'erectile dysfunction' commercials--one featuring a farting horse that burns a woman's hair, another a dog biting a man's scrotum--that are crammed down our collective craws? What about the fact that, despite the NFL's aggressive family-friendly marketing, most Americans can barely afford to take their family to a football game, let alone to the Super Bowl, the industry's crown jewel? What about the underhand manner in which sports media entities like ESPN create stories in order to report them as 'news?' (I'm looking at you, T.O.) And what about the spectacle of generally oversized, generally undereducated, and generally African-American men hitting each other with the force of small trucks? For a more substantial read on the subject, check out William Rhoden's "Forty Million Dollar Slaves." Or, read Daniel Gross's shorter NYT piece, "The NFL's Blue-Collar Workers" (21 January), which does a good job summarizing some of these concerns, though George Will's critique of the game may be even more succinct: "It combines two of the worst things about American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings."
Like I said, though, I still enjoy watching the game at all levels. I'll watch any two teams play football. Perhaps my ability to separate good from bad is because I'm able to watch with a critical eye informed by being a former offensive lineman and a current rhetorician. I'm able to, cribbing from my wife, "hate the player, not the game."
In future posts I'd like to examine my positions on football further, because, for all its troubles, I think the game also represents much about what is good in our country. And it is this, perhaps paradoxic, intricacy between football's positive and negative sides that makes it a significant topic. Football as fact and metaphor goes far to encapsulate and explain the poltical and cultural life of America, both individually and communally. Today just seemed an appropriate day to introduce the subject.
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