Why I Didn’t Watch the Super Bowl
One in three Americans watch the Super Bowl. One in three — not one in here adults, but one in three Americans, which makes the Super Bowl…
One in three Americans watch the Super Bowl. One in three — not one in here adults, but one in three Americans, which makes the Super Bowl not only he most watch event of any kind on television, but a cultural touchstone and as close to a common religio-social ritual as we have in the United States.
And this is probably an undercounting. The Nielsen ratings count TVs and households, but it’s unclear whether they take into account the massive parties that are organized for Super Bowl Sunday. Walk through a supermarket in the days before the game —wings, chips, dips, sodas are front and center. The focus is on the parties. The same goes for your local liquor store.
Super Bowl Sunday, therefore, is a national holiday of sorts, a day on which football fans are joined by the rest of the nation to eat, drink and pretend to care about what’s happening on TV. It is a day of betting pools and barbecued wings, a day of actually watching the ads and reveling in the mediocrity that tends to characterize the half-time show.
I watched Grace and Frankie.
I stopped caring about football back in the 1980s. Ken O’Brien was the quarterback of the Jets, my boyhood team, and I came to the realization that the game bored me. The Jets were barely relevant — a few playoff losses amid a string of consistent mediocrity, a team lacking in personality. I kind of liked the Joe Montana 49ers, but I found myself less and less engaged with the sport until, some time during the early 1990s, I just stopped paying attention altogether.
Football wasn’t boring, per se. The game, after all, featured, and still features speed, skill, and artistry of a high order, with feats of athletic prowess that can be truly remarkable. (The trick play that turned Eagles’ quarterback Nick Foles into a touchdown-catching receiver, which I saw on a web recap, was a thing of beauty.)
The violence of the game — I was coming to see it as problematic. When Jack Tatum buried his helmet into Darrel Stingley in the late-1970s, leaving Stingley, an all-pro receiver, crumpled and broken on the turf, the public was aghast, but kept watching. Tatum’s relish at the hit, his lack of remorse and the way the league brushed it off — these things never made sense to me.
The same goes for Joe Theismann’s injury in 1985 — his leg snapped when he was sacked by Lawrence Taylor and Harry Carson in a perfectly legal play. The hit is iconic, often ranked among the most brutal in the league’s history — but rather than driving away fans, it appears to have been among the catalysts for the NFL’s growth.
I continued paying attention, but watched less and less. It was harder to justify using this violence as entertainment, though I won’t pretend this about some moral high ground. Had the Jets been real Super Bowl contenders, this might have turned out different. Perhaps, I would have continued watching.
But I was losing interest, and something clicked. I can’t say what or exactly when it happened, but I stopped caring about football, stopping paying attention to the Jets, started asking myself what made the sport so popular — and wondering whether its popularity is healthy for our culture. I can’t answer the last question — fans have to ask themselves how much on-field violence they are willing to condone, whether the league is doing enough to safeguard its players and whether the sport warrants the kind of reverent and passionate following it has.
I write this without judgment, knowing I’m in a small minority. And I write this knowing that my move away from football does not amount to a boycott — though I do support those who are boycotting over the treatment of Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick, though, was only the final straw when it comes to the sport, and it comes at the end of a long list of grievances that include the centrality of violence to its brand, its seeming endorsement of a masculinity that extols not just toughness but brutishness, and its implied and overt embrace of militaristic nationalism.
Violence is the sport’s chief selling point. The nastier the hits, the higher the ratings, which the NFL understands. It makes this violence the focal point of much of its advertising, even as more and more evidence accumulates as to the short- and long-term abuse the sport inflicts on its players. Busted bodies and damaged minds. We’re seeing more and more parents withhold their kids from the sport, more players walk away early, and some ex-players question the sport’s legitimacy.
Shaun King, in a piece for a The Intercept, says the league “has done a masterful job at mainstreaming the violence of the game, so that fans and spectators don’t feel too bad about what’s actually happening out there.”
“Too many of us are OK with this violence, on a conscious or subconscious level, because we don’t know these men,” he writes. But the game has crossed a line and, “as it is now being played, is ruining lives” — the brain damage suffered by so many players has left them with damaged memory centers and altered personalities. He quotes a Boston University study that
says “repeated brain trauma triggers progressive degeneration of the brain tissue” that can lea, even years after the injuries, to “memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression, depression, suicidality, parkinsonism, and eventually progressive dementia.”
Think of Muhammad Ali in his final years, beset by Parkinson’s and two-plus decades of punishment in the boxing ring — or Jovan Belcher, the Chiefs player who killed his girlfriend and then himself. His family believes his actions were tied to brain damage sustain on the football field.
Mix in the way the sport distorts views of masculinity, engenders a what has come to be called — the notion that manliness is equated with toughness, with physical dominance and control, even with a willingness to use brutality to force submission — that has seeped into players’ personal lives. Football shares this with other sports, and the impact on society in terms of violence against women and children has been devastating. But it appears worse in football, and the response to this problem has lagged the other big-time leagues.
The same goes for the NFL’s militarism. Military language and attitude pervades the sport — blitz, bomb, red zone, trenches, formation. This isn’t new. It was there when I was a kid and has not changed much since. But kids can be excused for not finding fault with the language. We all played war games in my neighborhood, along with some fairly bruising pickup games of tackle football on he field at St. A’s. I even played a year in high school (what was I thinking?), before I walked away.
Adults should be more thoughtful. Again, I am not making a broad moral claim. My reaction to the implied and overt militarism is directly tied to my situational pacificism (I am a pacifist, for the most part, it do allow for a proportional response to end a threat to life) and opposition to the use of military force in all but the narrowest of circumstances. So I find the military imagery — think bomber jets, military bands, color guards — off-putting. These trappings are intentional, and endorsed by the armed forces. The Department of Defense paid the NFL for several seasons to stage these demonstrations of military force. This is not patriotism; it is a form of nationalistic propaganda that uses the marshal nature of the sport to normalize the military’s growing foot print. As Tyler Myrrlees, an academic at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, says that film and other cultural products are “designed to make money and build popular support for the DoD, normalize war readiness and buildup as a civic virtue, and promote each old and new war as right and good.” He was writing about the American film industry, primarily, but the militarization of the NFL pregame functions the same way, and its why Kaepernick and other players’ anthem protests angered many owners and members of the permanent military/foreign policy establishment.
The other major sports play the nationalism card, with color guards and armed services nights, but none take it as far as the NFL, which despite more recent criticism of the league by veteran’s and pro-military groups, has been a reliable propagandist for the armed services.
Most will argue that football is just a game. And in its most basic form, it is. But it’s also a national religion, and its rituals say a lot about who we are as a nation. The central role of violence and militarism in a national sport is evidence of our endorsement of these attitudes. I refuse to be a part of it.