The Milan News-Leader
A Heritage Newspaper
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It's Stupor Bowl time
Jerry Hinnen, Fun & Games
PUBLISHED: January 31, 2008
There are so many reasons why I should be excited about this Sunday's Super Bowl.
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For starters, this is the last legitimate game of football available for the next six-plus months, our last glass of water before being forced to wander the gridiron desert.
Unlike past Super Bowls, this one actually offers an appealing match-up, what with the Patriots likely becoming the greatest football team assembled during my lifetime and the Giants the only team man enough to have really stood up to them yet this season. (Please compare this to, for instance, the Steelers-Seahawks mistake-fest from a couple years back.)
And the look on Peyton "I'll Endorse Anything" Manning's face as he has to watch his little bro take the field should be worth the price of admission by itself. (Or would be, if, um, my television charged admission.)
But in the end, none of that matters. I'm not excited about the Super Bowl. See, all that stuff above is football-related: it deals with players and plays, and storylines related to those players and those plays they make. In short, the on-field stuff.
And the Super Bowl couldn't care less about any of that. The Super Bowl is the sports world's biggest celebration of the off-field stuff: a 30-minute rock concert-slash-Broadway sing-and-dance number at halftime; beer companies spending the gross national product of several Southeast Asian countries to see who can come up with the most realistic CGI wisecracking dog for their commercials; player introductions so drawn-out and over-the-top ("Starting ... at right tackle ... from Blah Blah Blah St. ... No. 79 ... Joe ... Joseph ... Joey ... Smiiiiiiiith!") they should be sponsored by Barnum and Bailey's.
If the Super Bowl was the only day of the year I had to deal with this kind of three-ring circus attitude in the sports I watch, I could probably handle it. But the Stupor Bowl is simply the pinnacle, the culmination, the purest exhibition of the same hey-look-at-something-besides-the-game approach mirrored throughout American sports.
The examples are endless. At NBA games, pop music plays over the loudspeakers during game action. Dick Vitale used to be able to competently analyze a college basketball game before ESPN decided it was better off having him drop the analysis and focus exclusively on becoming a catchphrase-spouting, incoherent madman. For years, prime-time Olympic broadcasts have been plagued by endless athlete profiles that leave precious little airtime to actually see said athletes in action.
Of course, nothing epitomizes this style-over-sports-substance like the Super Bowl. And of course, I'll end up watching it anyway. I'm a sports fan. Sports fans watch the Super Bowl. I'm pretty sure it's required by some law or another (probably The Lay's Potato Chips Football Viewership Act of 1989, sponsored by the Prudential.)
But watching isn't the same as enjoying. And I'll likely enjoy the Premier League soccer from England I splurge for on my digital cable that Sunday morning — what with its 45-minute halves completely uninterrupted by commercials and announcers who actually, you know, discuss what's happening on the field — more than I enjoy the Super Bowl.
You can also forget "likely" when it comes to this season's high school basketball, wrestling, hockey, swimming, etc., matches. I know I'll enjoy those more. No loudmouth broadcasters. No T-shirt cannons. Nothing you could label an "extravaganza." And thank heaven, no computer-generated talking dogs.
At the high school level, it's still just the kids, the sports, and the fans. It's still a lot more super than other sporting events I could name.
Staff Writer Jerry Hinnen can be reached at 429-7380 or jhinnen@heritage.com.
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