A cultural history of the Super Bowl, or, is it still OK to watch pro football?

This is the beginning of the last chapter of my forthcoming book A FAN’S LIFE:

Much of this book has been dedicated to complaining, about, among other things, sports, sports fans, the Internet, plutocracy, consumerism, authoritarianism, inequality, and much more besides. Let’s face it, there’s a lot to complain about at the moment.  (Like all people, we have been born at a bad time.)

And, the world being what it is, I could continue in this vein pretty much indefinitely.  For instance, the last major sports event that took place before all the games suddenly went away was, appropriately enough, American sports’ ultimate Big Game.  The Super Bowl represents almost everything that’s most obnoxious about big time sports in this country.  A grotesque amalgam of pomposity (each game is assigned a Roman numeral, and the coin flip alone is accompanied by a level of ceremony appropriate to the investiture of a pope), commercialism (the media breathlessly “rank” the commercials broadcast during the game, at a cost of eleven million dollars per minute), militaristic nationalism (a flag approximately the size of Rhode Island is usually unfurled before kickoff, while a screaming comes across the sky in the form of a couple billion dollars of Air Force equipment), and unabashed worship of the celebrity-entertainment complex (the halftime show invariably makes a Las Vegas revue seem tastefully understated), the whole thing is an advertisement for so many awful things about a culture which specializes in advertising its awfulness in the most garish ways possible.

I watched it though.  Why? Because on some level, despite all their undeniable awfulness, I still care about sports, and everything they’ve meant and still mean to me after a half century of caring about them.

I don’t remember the first few Super Bowls at all: a (small) part of what my book is about is how I went from being totally disconnected from the world of sports at the age of 10 — I’m pretty sure I didn’t even know the Kansas Cirty-Minnesota Super Bowl in January of 1970 was even happening — to becoming a fanatical little sports fan over the course of the next year or two.

One thing that interests me is the role that the Super Bowl — which was pretty much a kind of exhibition game/marketing stunt in its original incarnation, when the NFL was the established league and the AFL was the arriviste upstart — played in cementing the NFL’s transformation into by far America’s most popular and profitable sport.

Note that until at the very least the late 1950s, college football was a much bigger deal than the NFL, which from the 1920s through the 1940s was a basically raggedy ass operation — the Mara family bought the New York Giants in 1929 for $500! — while major league baseball in that era made the NFL look very much like a minor league enterprise by comparison.

My very rough understanding is that television was the big driver in the historical shift that, between roughly the famous 1958 Baltimore Colts-New York Giants championship game, and the Jets’ upset of the Colts in the 1969 Super Bowl, catapulted the NFL ahead of both the MLB and college football in the American sports hierarchy.

Today the NFL is the unchallenged king of the American sports world, in both financial and cultural terms, which raises the question, for me anyway, of what attitude progressives ought to have toward this largely indefensible activity anyway?

This isn’t a comment on the excessive attention we give to sportsball, as many an LGM commenter who has extremely elaborate opinions on the Star Wars series refers to the world of sports in general. That’s a separate and also interesting topic, but this weekend the topic is football in general, and the NFL in particular, and the Super Bowl with even more particularity.

So, as Hyman Roth would say, enjoy!