In the investigation of shrunken footballs, we are reassured that one thing that will not be underinflated is the Super Bowl itself. The whole idea of the NFL’s traditional two-week gap between its conference championships and the Big Game is to pump an otherwise empty information vacuum full of hot air. And this fits the bill perfectly.
From the earliest of its XLIX—sorry, 49—editions, the Super Bowl has succeeded at being America’s most puffed-up happening, an over-the-top exercise in nothing of real consequence. To now have a morsel of scandal for conspiracy theorists to chew on, and for thousands in the sporting press to comb over, feeds the ballyhoo beast.
This is all about hue and cry. And a reminder that annual media protestations of the NFL bamboozling the public with Super Bowl hype—even as said media gleefully traffic in such overkill—miss the point. That is: The Super Bowl defines hyperbole. It oozes hyperbole. It seethes with hyperbole. It strives for (and achieves) wretched excess—a self-important, overdone confluence of all that is modern America: Cut-throat competition, commercialism, conspicuous consumption, televised violence, with a clear hankering back to a male-dominated society.
The hand wringing by some pundits, that the deflated-ball caper will degrade this year’s Super Bowl, from an elite game to a spectacle, reveals a decided ignorance of the fact that the NFL purposely evolved the thing into a spectacle decades ago. The express purpose of Super Bowl exaggeration is to draw in the non-football fan, and now the curiosity about whether New England coach Bill Belichick or quarterback Tom Brady might try something sneaky guarantees more eyeballs.
The Super Bowl already is the most watched TV show every year, and proof-positive that we have become a spectator society. The Super Bowl Party, once a village, has morphed into an entire nation, with less and less to do with the game and more an experience in overindulgence, to the delight of businesses dealing in nachos, adult beverage and gambling.
Running with such an overdose concept, a North Carolina man created a Web site in 2007 seeking 50,000 signatures to propose, to his local Congresswoman, a day-after-the-game national holiday. That effort, in the grand American tradition of a three-day weekend and in recognition of the debilitating Super Sunday immoderation, failed. But the idea was revived last year by a fantasy football group that submitted a petition to the Obama administration’s “We the People” site, which invites citizens’ voices in governing. (Among current “We the People” petitions—alongside those on issues of same-sex marriage, the Michael Brown case and mandatory vaccinations—are three railing about NFL officiating—which may be further proof that we are not a profound people.)
Consider that a 2011 essay by Robert Lipsyte, the unusually perceptive practitioner of sports journalism, argued that the annual National Football Lollapalooza might be the “only super thing we have left” in this land. “Super power, super economy, super you-name-it….gone,” Lipsyte wrote. Leaving us with a national holiday that rivals Christmas and Thanksgiving while serving as a proxy for military and economic superiority.
What we seem to be stuck with is the Super Bowl dichotomy of triviality and significance, which certainly was on full display as far back as the first of seven Super Bowls I covered for Newsday, in 1974.
That year, Miami’s future Hall of Fame linebacker Nick Buoniconti confided to a couple of us ink-stained wretches that his coach, Don Shula, had overruled team doctors who planned surgery on Buoniconti’s elbow just before the game. Five Miami players, in fact, acknowledged having to play with various pins in their bodies to hold together broken bones. (One of those five, safety Jake Scott, kidded darkly that the team’s biggest fear was a “lightning storm.”) The game clearly was a big deal.
Meanwhile, though, I spent an afternoon during that year’s Super Bowl media day with the self-proclaimed “gonzo journalist” Hunter S. Thompson, who had covered two presidential elections and gained fame with his surreal, drug-infused novel “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Thompson had been assigned to chronicle the week’s theoretically crucial doings for Rolling Stone magazine, and found, instead, that “I feel like calling my editor and telling him there’s no story here. There really isn’t anything happening.”
If Thompson were still around—he committed suicide in 2007—I doubt he’d be shocked about allegations that New England fudged the rules by shriveling some footballs. Nor should we be, given how athletes so regularly are praised for their “competitiveness” and lauded for attempts to get any edge possible. The euphemism for bending rules is the honored skill of “gamesmanship.” Another bit of news at the 1974 Super Bowl was then-commissioner Pete Rozelle’s admission that seven teams had hidden players beyond their roster limits during the season as a hedge against injuries.
Dishonesty aside, the current mischief, rather than a buzz-killer, has been a godsend to sports talk radio and an attention-grabbing bonanza for the NFL. The already bloated Super Bowl continues to expand in our consciousness.