Bowled over

By
Saul Landau                                                                      Read Spanish Version 

Super
powers show they have the biggest stick in the playground just like
Super Bowl competitors exhibit their super muscles. This year, I
watched the Super Bowl not from the warm and crowded Tampa, Florida,
arena where tens of thousands made their religious pilgrimage to this
year’s holy shrine, but from a friend’s garage on a super wide
plasma screen.

On
this realer than life screen, I watched General David Petraeus
representing the military. Dwarfed by the giant players surrounding
him, he offered embarrassed smiles for the cameras. “Why isn’t he
in Afghanistan?” asked one of my fellow viewers.

“Priorities,”
responded another. “What’s more important?” No one answered
him.

Following
the coin toss, I awaited ads from banks that have lost billions in
the Wall St. scandals. Passes, runs, kicks, commercials, penalties,
fumbles, interceptions — and the folksy John Madden discussing these
themes as if they belonged in a course in the philosophy of football,
one step down from business ethics.

Who
to root for? Every spectator needed to pick a favorite. Ben
Roethlisberger, the Pittsburg Steelers quarterback and Harley
Davidson motorcycle fanatic, or Kurt Warner, the Arizona Cardinals
playmaker who told the public before the game that God would decide
the winner? I live in neither city, but recall the Cardinals once
played in St. Louis like their baseball brethren. I rooted for the
refs, but they would disappoint me as well.

Christmas,
Yom Kippur, Easter, Thanksgiving and Super Bowl Sunday have become
the nation’s religious holidays, the host announced, to explain his
reason for throwing a party in the midst of serious economic malaise.
Metaphorically, the game symbolizes a clash of disciplined athletes
who will show the less powerful how they too can become insensitive
to pain. The very words “Super Bowl” should renew men’s
religious faith, “and their potential for idiocy,” said one woman
in the small viewing audience.

Most
of the women sneered at the prospect of watching football and
retreated to another room to see the final Australian Open tennis
match between Federer and Nadal. NBC had its token woman doing
“color” reports from the sidelines during the actual game.

Women
have yet to try to do the dangerous things men do on football fields.
Women “serve” football as cheerleaders for those meat wrenching
contests and are supposed to know how to emit proper sounds of
approval and disapproval during the course of the game. “That was a
super play,” said one young woman trying to impress her boyfriend
after a receiver dropped a pass. He looked embarrassed.

Men
discuss strategy. Most women don’t — and shouldn’t — care about
such exclusively man-made “sports.” Football, like war, needs
battle plans and is played under certain rules — enforced by
“officials.” Men focus their aggressive energy — no it’s not
sexuality — against each other’s bodies for the duration of the
contest. Each player uses his flesh, muscle and bone in ways that
would cause normal (untrained) people to suffer serious injury or
death. Officials penalize teams only when their players make
premature advances or unleash “unnecessary” violence. For
example, a tackler can spear a receiver in midair, in the midsection,
before he comes down with the ball. The sound of the collision is
audible as the tackled player falls heavily to the ground.

I
watched a Cardinals wide receiver leap, catch and get speared by a
Steelers defensive back. I flashed back to August 12, 1978, when Jack
Tatum, an Oakland Raiders’ defensive back, hurled his body through
the air into Darrell Stingley of the New England Patriots during a
pre-season game at Oakland’s Coliseum. Stingley lay unconscious on
the turf. Tatum’s body force had compressed Stingley’s spinal
cord and fractured two of his vertebrae. The refs ruled Tatum’s
“tackle” as “legal.” Subsequently, the NFL made a minor
adjustment to penalize the kind of tackle Tatum administered. Tatum
later proudly described his “hard hit” in his autobiography,
Final
Confessions of NFL Assassin Jack Tatum.
(Stingley became a quadriplegic and died in 2007 at 55)

Almost
thirty one years after that painful collision, I watched several
similar body impacts on the HD screen. Luckily, the hard-hit players
managed to force the cobwebs out of their brains and ran or limped
off the field. Dozens of injured heroes from the Steelers and
Cardinals sat on the sidelines or watched from hospitals as their
steroid-riddled brethren — juiced by injections of speed — showed
the world what “competitive” means.

More
than one injured player eagerly received a Novocain injection to mask
the pain so he could keep playing. “That shows heart,” explained
the announcers, referring not only to the recently injured player but
to those who had endured seventeen games of mutual battering, bone
breaking, concussions, torn cartilages and sprains.

Half
time! During the intermission at Super Bowl 38, Janet Jackson had
also showed heart, well, a breast that accidentally slipped from its
flimsy covering. CBS paid huge fines for their insult to public
decency even though Jackson discretely replaced her exposed milk
gland so the players could resume their publicly decent mauling.
That’s clean sport!

The
guys dressed in black and white striped shirts called several
“unnecessary roughness” penalties, including roughing the passer
and the holder. One wit suggested a penalty for “roughing the
football.” In other words, it’s “legal” to hit a rival hard
enough to knock him out, or paralyze him, as long as the hit is made
during the play itself and doesn’t involve “dirty” play, like
punching or kicking. A player can use a shoulder or forearm to
administer a knockdown blow, but not a karate chop.

This
year, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band with Steve Van Zandt
performed 12 minutes of boring tunes with indecipherable lyrics; but
with high energy and enthusiasm. As the 60 year old rock laureate
slid across the stage on his knees in an act of rock bravado, NBC
executives breathed a collective sigh of relief. Bruce had no mammary
glands to fall out of his costume.

The
super famous Springsteen had opened the inaugural festivities. By
signing him to “party” at the Super Bowl, NBC could use his name
plus the ritual itself to sell more than $200 million worth of
advertising. Advertisers spent $100,000 per second to market their
brand names.

During
half time, some of the women who were watching tennis came in with 3
D glasses to watch the commercials on the wide HD plasma screen. I
saw them with the 3 D glasses and still don’t remember them. But
they were impressive! Subconsciously, I’ll probably think of
Doritos when I get images in more than one dimension. Hmm, nice and
salty!

In
the past, I have viewed the great football ritual in sports bars,
hardly comparable to Romans watching a live performance of lions
chewing Christians. Like many in the viewing garage last week, I
slipped
a chip
into some dip and raised my beer glass without ever taking my eyes
off the screen, because I didn’t want to miss a super athletic feat
or at least a super act of violence. Hey, I live in a Super Nation —
well, it used to be.

No
other empire has such super football teams or such a super military
apparatus. So what! they haven’t won a war since 1945 — that one
with a little help from the Soviet Union to defeat Hitler’s armies.
So what! they had to drop two atom bombs on Japanese cities!

The
super economy, however, has sunk into recession or worse. How sad to
see a super mall with lots of empty parking spaces and few customers
in mall stores, which have laid off employees, to benefit from post
holiday super sales, and super discounts!

Less
affluent sectors, however, still experience super emotions in the
realm of psychic and material deprivation. Think of the spiritual
uplift tens of millions received from ingesting the strength
generated by the protein-laden heroes of The Super Bowl, the most
watched television event in the country.

Medical
experts say more men will suffer heart attacks and strokes from
eating too much fat, drinking too much and feeling depressed over the
loss of money they had wagered on the Cardinals. A small price to pay
for super sports culture! We love sports. We play them when we’re
kids and bet on them ever after.

Luckily
at my friend’s party, no one drank too much so we didn’t have to
witness someone’s wife reading a riot act to her husband who got
overly inspired, albeit vicariously, by the antics on the screen.
What a super experience, watching a Super Bowl, living in a super
power and getting to witness such competitive sport in high
definition! Wow! Maybe next year the Pentagon will allow us to watch
the war in Afghanistan as well!