Tomorrow an estimated 200 million viewers around the world will sit down to watch the Kansas City Chiefs take on the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LVIII (that’s 58 for normal people).
After the interminable pre-game show and between the avalanche of advertisements (“side effects may include…”) each costing this year US$10M for a 30-second slot, there will be some form of sport played although actual action on the field is on average for any NFL game only 11 minutes for over three hours of television coverage. Some US$16B will be wagered on this year’s game, by far the biggest day for gambling in America.
One can count on one – maybe two hands – the times when the Super Bowl was close fought or exciting. The Helmet Catch of Super Bowl XLII by Giants wide receiver David Tyree; a young Tom Brady’s 90-second drive in SBXXXVI setting up an Adam Vinatieri field goal for the win.
Sadly most of the time, one of the quarterbacks or the whole team gets stage fright and the opposing side opens up a comfortable half time lead. We sit stupefied going into the third quarter wondering why with a rising ennui that with work tomorrow surely there was something better we could have been doing rather than drinking watered down beers and scoffing cheese laden nachos.
Football, like all sports, is a celebration of athleticism. A wide receiver catching a ball while staying in bounds can have all the grace of a ballet dancer. A perfectly thrown pass hitting a receiver in the end zone, or a jagging run through defenders by a full back are things of sublime beauty for those who appreciate sport.
Always exceptional, America saw it fit to invent two other games, baseball and basketball. Marking all three is a complex set of rules that are so open to interpretation and discretion – travelling in basketball, strikes vs balls in baseball, and pass interference in football – that referees and umpires often make decisions that go on to provide the suspense that all sports fans crave.
But what makes football so unique is that violence is at its very heart. Its essence is violence and this means it is very dangerous to the young male athletes who play it. This was brought home most impactfully earlier this year when 24-year-old Bills Damar Hamlin, while tackling an opponent, was hit so hard in the chest that his heart stopped. For fifteen minutes in front of a television audience, team medics performed CPR before it started again. This might have been a freak occurrence but the dangers of serious injury are always present. Retired referee Ed Hochuli told Newsweek that at least six times a game he “would wonder how’s that guy gonna get off up off the ground? He’s got to be dead.”
And it is not so much these big hits but the cumulative impact of playing the game that is where the real tragedy lies. In the book League of Denial, the authors chronicle the effects of repetitive hits to the head and their link to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Cross sections of the brains of players who died from the disease showed their brains had become like swiss cheese resulting in dementia and psychosis. Chargers linebacker Junior Seau, who delivered some devastating hits in his time, depressed and erratic in his retirement, shot himself in the chest aged 43. It is said, like Dave Duerson, he wanted doctors to examine his brain which indeed showed he had CTE.
And it’s not just brains: it’s knees, ankles, shoulders, backs, hips… the career of one of the most promising stars, Raiders running back Bo Jackson, was cut short when he fell badly on his hip. Supremely talented, he had a replacement and went on to play major league baseball (.250 batting average) probably saving his body from further damage. These are just the high profile cases, never mind all the college and high school players whose bodies have been chewed up by the game. Increasingly many parents do not allow their children to play full tackle football.
But still the game persists and its violence is fetishised. How many times must we see the replay of KC quarterback Patrick Mahomes having his ankle rolled on in the Divisional Round? It recalls the most gruesome injury – that of then Washington Redskins QB Joe Theismann and his career ending injury on Monday Night Football when his right tibia was visibly broken in two when sacked by Lawrence Taylor.
It is hard to see how this game would be allowed if it was invented today. But still we watch and perhaps along with the Made-for-TV mass shootings and America’s photogenic wars in Vietnam, Iraq and elsewhere it is cut from the same cloth. It is a strange country and it may be that strangeness and its seam of violence have made America the superpower it is, at the cost of millions of lives.
Gambling, violence and bad food: the Super Bowl really is a perfect expression of America. We have the Eagles by 3….
