Suuuuper!

Today I went to my friend Mary’s house to watch Super Bowl XLI, I think it’s XLI, on her big-screen HDTV. First, HDTV matters. It really matters. I could see the droplets of Miami-winter rain on the Bears’ uniforms, the fear in Rex Grossman’s eyes, and the relief in Peyton Manning’s face. Though, as one of my friends pointed out, it almost made it too real. It was like playing a video game, Madden 2007 say, instead of watching football.

I haven’t had enough time to wander around Chicago in the past couple of weeks to get a really good idea of Bears-mania. But, the buildings downtown have their lights spelling out “Go Bears”, and they’re putting out special issues of the papers. There’s certainly a sense of excitement and a higher-than-normal chance of seeing a Bears jersey or hat.

I love football. It’s my favorite sport by far. I know, intellectuals are allowed to like baseball, but football’s supposed to be for big Midwestern guys with mustaches and a Bud Lite in each hand.

But I think football is the true intellectual sport. First, it is plainly strategic. Put an (allegedly) ‘roided-up Barry Bonds at the plate, and I don’t care if your outfielders are deep and your second baseman’s at the edge of the grass ready for a long cut-off throw; homers aren’t fielded, and you can’t out-strategize a 300-lb. guy with a bat.

But in football, every play starts from scrimmage, and every play requires that the defense have a shot to stop the offense. Every play gives both teams an opportunity to draw up their little x’s and o’s and pit them against each other. And then every play gives the players the opportunity to adapt their play and their position to suit what they see going on on the other side of the ball.

That’s the cool part. It isn’t just players strategizing, like in tennis where the coaches aren’t allowed to talk to the players during the game. And it isn’t just the coaches, like in baseball, where the players almost always have an opportunity to get the coach’s advice. I mean, they even have the third base coach, whose job it is to give the player the strategy of whether to stand up on the base or keep going to push it to third or home.

But in football the coaches set the play in motion but the players need to know every play, and every player, in order to take that play and adapt it to the other team’s strategy.

OK, so let’s say you’ve got third and one on your own 45 and the coach calls for a draw up the middle, right of the center. Then, the QB sees the safety inching up as he’s getting ready to snap the ball. Safety blitz? Maybe. Problem is, if it is a safety blitz, the running back’s going to be trying to drive the ball forward just as the safety’s filling the hole. A good QB will audible something else, maybe a run outside, allowing the safety to collapse into the line of scrimmage just as the running back is five yards down with no safety to stop him. Coach’s call might have been good, but it would’ve been awful if the QB hadn’t been able to read a defense.

So that’s why I like football as a sport. But what about as a phenomenon, as a means of entertainment?

I had a teacher once who blamed all wars on the lack of “festival”. If people couldn’t run around in big costumes high on alcohol or some other culturally-specific drug, then they’d run around in camo and shoot each other. I agree with him to a point, but only to a point.

But I do think that a festival, an event that involves competition and celebration with defined rules and proscribed conduct is healthy for a society as well as for individuals. People got to let stuff out, and they need to be able to dream big. Maybe a mechanic in Indianapolis doesn’t have much to look forward to in terms of what the elite thinks of as "a life"; without a 401(k), his retirement’s going to be mean, and with his long-term smoking habit, his health won’t be too swell either.

But, if he can take pride in a team, if he can find something to talk about while performing the umpteenth oil change, then so be it. And if he’s willing to watch advertising to do so, and therefore advertisers are willing to pay money to show games, then yeah, pay the players a reasonable amount. Most of the players come from disadvantaged backgrounds anyway, so let’s make sports, which requires discipline and initiative, let’s make it one route out of the ghetto or the blue-collar lower-middle-class donut hole so many people are stuck in.

I am an incredibly political person, and a liberal one at that. I’ve knocked on hundreds and hundreds of doors and made thousands and thousands of phone calls for political candidates. And I think it’s a shame that more people don’t care about politics. Domestic politics, even, it’s hard to interest people in, never mind international politics.

But I don’t think everyone can or should think about the miseries of this world with every waking moment. Because that just leads to us being miserable. And if you’re miserable over in your country, and, unable to really change anything in this particular moment, I’m miserable over here in my country, then neither of us is better off; we’re both just miserable.

And the point, the whole fucking point of this goddamned life is to try to not be miserable and help others do the same. So let’s watch our unimportant sports—that’s the point of them, that they’re unimportant—and live their drama by watching them and so make our own lives, unimportant as well, a bit happier, a bit more common among our fellow citizens, and a bit more full of chips, dip, beer, and Super Bowls.