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It’s easy to not quite get the Super Bowl. What exactly is it: a sporting event, a music show, a fashion parade for the world’s coolest pair of shades, a new version of the Chippendales with the hunks wearing tight trousers and skid lids? Or, in its latest incarnation, a chance for the world’s most frenetic lawmaker to sink his last putt in a round of golf with Tiger Woods, board Air Force One and say: “Fly me to New Orleans.”
Or is it a chance to watch several vast and amiable black guys bulging out of their suits and bantering away about a possible three-peat, while Trombone Shorty plays a touching version of “America the Beautiful” and an announcer calls for a moment’s silence to mark the importance of “faith, family and football”?
It’s all of the above, of course. Because the Super Bowl might seem like a monster of modernity, but really, it’s just a turbocharged reversion to the big gig that started it all, the ancient Olympics. OK, these did include some sporting challenges, but they were as much about the aesthetics of the human form as recording a personal best, and the rest was cultural stuff, as were the wraparound add-ons at the appropriately named Caesars Superdome in the Big Easy.
Back in the day, Emperors Hadrian and Antonino Pius looked on as Taylor Swifts in togas sang their songs, cheerleaders in mini tunics flaunted their wares and poets spouted their iambic pentameter.
On Sunday it was Emperor Trump who, while tweeting crossly about the pointless one cent piece, gazed out from beneath his miraculously cantilevered quiff at his adoring minions as Kendrick Lamar rapped from the bonnet of his Buick GNX and Serena Williams looked fabulous while performing the LA Crip Walk. You like to imagine that at least one or two Americans were thinking of e.e. cummings’s famous line, “I thank you God for most this amazing day.” But maybe not. No, there’s no new thing under the sun. The Super Bowl is as old as the Ancient Olympics.
It’s really just a turbo-charged reversion to the big gig that started it all, the Ancient Olympics
As it is, today’s NFL is bigger than ever and preparing to take over the world — and the world is very willing. Next season there are NFL matches in Berlin, at Wembley and Tottenham, and now the Pittsburgh Steelers will play in front of 80,000 at Dublin’s Croke Park. The whole thing is very smart marketing. The Philadelphia Eagles’s dismemberment of the hot favorites Kansas was largely down to the humiliation of Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who had a nightmare of a game.
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