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Letter From America: The Big Game, Part 37
American football insanity takes over when it’s time for the Super Bowl
By Gersh Kuntzman
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL
Jan. 27 issue — America’s most-watched sporting event—the super bowl—is just around the corner. I couldn’t be more bored. It’s not that I don’t love American football. It’s a fantastic sport, a rare mix of naked aggression, intricate play-calling and graceful athleticism. No wonder this Sunday’s Super Bowl XXXVII—the Big Game in sports-crazed America—will be watched by a staggering 131 million fans.

     
     
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        NO, MY DISGUST is purely professional. As a reporter at a major New York daily, my work for the past month has been dominated by football. Not that I’m a sportswriter, mind you. But whenever one of the local teams makes the playoffs—and this year, both the New York Jets and Giants did—my job description changes from Gatherer of Important Facts to Pathetic Civic Booster/ Football Shill.
        The task is to make sure there is something in the paper every day that will get readers increasingly excited about the upcoming weekend’s game. Not surprisingly, we reporters become pretty desperate. In years past I’ve done stories about longtime season-ticket holders who are convinced that “this year” our team is “goin’ all the way, baby!” I have profiled the guy who dances inside the fleece-covered mascot costume. I’ve written about people who met their future spouse at professional football games—not to mention that hardy perennial, astrologists who say the stars predict Victory for Our Heroes.
        This year I was out of ideas.
        “Get Bruce Springsteen and James Gandolfini on the phone,” an editor ordered. “They’re big Giants fans.”
        Of course, neither Springsteen nor Gandolfini, the star of the country’s hottest TV show, “The Sopranos,” returned my call. So I settled for octogenarian “60 Minutes” TV “essayist” and “star” Andy Rooney, who was foolish enough to answer his own phone. We chatted for three minutes before I’d exhausted my line of aggressive questioning about his favorite Giant (he’s partial to Tiki Barber) and his prediction for the game (“This is our year”). Baby.
        Hardly scintillating reading, but necessary when you’re trying to whip up civic pride. I mean, we all know that fans in our opponents’ city are less passionate in their rooting and, therefore, more likely to be complicit in their team’s certain loss to our team this weekend. Our fans, of course, have much better pregame parties. Our fans are more intelligent than their fans. And, by extension, the spouses or girlfriends of “the fans of our opponents are clearly less comely than our spouses or girlfriends.
        Mercifully, the Jets and Giants both lost early in the football playoffs. But that has eliminated only the local angle from my promotion of the game of football. I’m still in full hype mode, since the Super Bowl is the highest-rated sporting event of the year (we all try not to think about the dismal pattern established by the first XXXVI Super Bowls, almost all of them one-sided routs) and because (gasp) the dirty little secret about the Super Bowl is that winning or losing doesn’t really matter.
        In fact, the Super Bowl is such an American institution precisely because it demands so little commitment. Baseball and basketball are arguably more popular, but their championships are conducted as a best-of-seven series that could take two weeks to conclude. What casual fan is going to stick around for that? The Super Bowl is an afternoon and a six-pack of beer—and both the euphoria of victory and the sting of defeat usually wear off with the effects of that last.

Newsweek International January 27th Issue
•  International Editions Front
•  Atlantic Cover Story: Hope of the World
•  Latin America and Asia Cover Story: The Fear of Food
•  World View: It's Time to Talk To the World
•  Letter From America: The Big Game, Part 37
•  International Periscope & Perspectives
•  International Mail Call
•  The Last Word: Hugo Chavez
        Because football’s championship attracts so many nonfans, the greatest excitement of the Super Bowl is watching the commercials shown during the broadcast. It costs $2.1 million to buy a 30-second spot, and big-spending corporations save their best and splashiest creations for it. Often they hire top movie directors like Spike Lee and the Coen brothers to work some cinematic magic on behalf of the sponsors’ products. This year newspapers have already offered gushing coverage of Lee’s new Pepsi ad, as well as a spot for H&R Block, the tax-preparation company, featuring bankrupt country singer Willie Nelson making fun of his predicament.
        This is sport? Where’s the passion for The Game? I’m not saying Americans should demonstrate their zeal with English-style brawls in the stands. But it would be nice if people tuned in to the championship for reasons other than watching the Goo Goo Dolls sing or scoping on the pop icon Beyonce Knowles as she guzzles a sugary, tooth-rotting soft drink.
        I’m as guilty as anyone. Now that the Jets and the Giants have been eliminated, I don’t even know who’s playing this year. But you can be certain I’ll be watching. I mean, we are talking about Beyonce Knowles in a bikini!
       

Kuntzman is also a columnist for the New York Post.
       
       © 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
       
       
   
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