I hate the Super Bowl

This blog is called “Curmudgeon-In-Training”, but I rarely post anything at all curmudgeonish. Well, read on, ‘cause that’s about to change.

While attempting to drum up some interest in yesterday’s “big game” (Who am I kidding? I was trying drum up some paying of attention. “Interest” was out of the question from word go.), it occurred to me that I hate the Super Bowl.

Not “dislike”, nor “feel strongly negative about”, or any other less-harsh descriptor. Hate. I hate it. As in, I have “a feeling of dislike so strong that it demands action”, which is, in my case, writing this post.

To illustrate my point, here’s a brief lists of the positives and negatives of this event, strictly from my selfish and unappreciative point-of-view:

Positives:
1. World (although I question this – where are the Canadians?) championship of American football.
2 The game that everyone plays the entire season to reach. The goal.
3. Um, that’s it. I got nothing.

Negatives

1. So effing over-blown it makes me want to puke. Nothing on Earth, except maybe (maybe!) the arrival of the Messiah, needs a 5-hour pre-game show. There is no way the game could ever live up to the pre-sell. Even if you used Bill and Ted’s phone booth to assemble every great football player who ever lived, in his prime, and put them on the field in a true “All-Star” game, it wouldn’t live up to the hype that is the modern Super Bowl. Hell, the Civil War and WWI didn’t live up this much hype. I think the Revolution and WWII did, though. My opinion.

2. Over-commercialized to the point of being a parody of itself. I found myself reaching for the off switch right about the time Marv Albert told me that an official review of a play (Hasselbeck’s non-fumble in the 4th) was the “Barbisol Close Shave Play of the Game”. This after HOURS of assault on my resolve not to buy the ridiculous nonsense being hurled at me non-stop during the TV and radio broadcast.

3. Inanity heaped upon inanity. The halftime recap from Berman, Jackson, Irvin, and Young was the least-insightful talk about a football game I have ever heard from so-called sports broadcasting professionals. While I can no longer stomach Berman (hey, that’s pretty funny), and I think Steve Young is as bad on TV as he was good on the field, I do have high opinions of Tom Jackson and Mike Irvin as broadcasters (certainly not for Irvin as a human). I think they know what they’re talking about most of the time. You’d never know it from their comments yesterday. The reason (my opinion): They had about 10 seconds each, and they were under instructions from ABC to dumb it down for the 150 million viewers who never watch football on TV. Plus they had to shout. And it went that way all week. Men and women who know what they’re talking about and who have something to say were reduced to speaking in 15-second sound bites that conveyed no information worth knowing. What a time-waste.

4. Input on a football game from people who know nothing about football. While the true experts were being muzzled, we spent hours upon hours witnessing the equivalent of the painful “man-on-the-street” interview. It seems like the less a person knew about the match-up or the game of football itself, the more opportunities they had to speak into a microphone. Don’t let Michael Irvin tell what he knows to be true from personal experience in big games and his relationships with the players who are going to be on the field. But let’s let Ed from Watauga (who’s only at the Super Bowl because he threw a football through the Dunlop Super Tire while riding a flaming tricycle in the big contest at NTB back in August) to spout off for a minute and a half on how Troy Polamalu’s speed allows the Pittsburgh defense to disguise both blitzes and coverages. Hey Ed, while you’re up there, what do you forsee in Israel now that Hamas has won the elections and Ariel Sharon is getting his falafel through a tube?

5. Sponsors, spokespeople, and general hangers-on are self-congratulatory to a stomach-emptying extreme. Highly paid senior executives of enormous corporations are the only ones able to buy their way into this party, then they spend the entire week congratulating each other and themselves for being able to be there. By virtue of the fact that they can buy their way in, they get the privilege of spouting off their uninformed opinions and unfunny schtick to an audience which is encouraged to think of these wankers as knowledgeable and interesting because they are in a position to buy their way into the party in the first place! Who are these people and why should I listen to them about ANYTHING?

6. The stench of greed (or, at the very least, the appearance of greed) rubs off on everyone associated with the thing. Remember when the Rolling Stones were young, angry, and anti-Establishment? Neither do I. Those days are so far behind Mick and the boys that it’s hard to believe they were once viewed as “dangerous”. Why were they there last night? To reach a bigger audience? For the exposure? Hell no. They got money-whipped. And just think for a second about how much money it takes to money-whip the Rolling Stones. Then multiply that by the number of people, organizations, groups, etc who sell their name, talent, message, etc to “the cause” (ABC, the NFL, and whoever else made money on that freak show). What’s the word I’m looking for here? Oh, yeah. Prostitution.

Yes, I know that this is the ultimate expression of “free enterprise”, and, given that, you would expect me to be a supporter of it. Let there be no mistake, I am a fan of free enterprise and heartily oppose most, if not all, attempts to curb it. But the Super Bowl represents the extreme end of free enterprise. And like extremism of all stripes (religious, political, musical, etc), extreme free enterprise is, to me, something that is very difficult to like or support.

So, what’s to be done? Am I calling for a boycott of the NFL? No. A consumer strike against Super Bowl advertising? Absolutely not. Storming ABC headquarters like it was the Bastille, and beheading Chris Berman? Well, maybe the last part.

No, there’s no call to action here. I don’t expect anyone to take action on my opinion on a subject that, in truth, means so little in the scheme of things. I don’t even expect you to agree with me. The Super Bowl is the annually the highest rated telecast on TV (by a WIDE margin, too) for a reason. Most of you out there seem to like it just fine as is.

All I wanted to do in this post was vent a bit (mission accomplished), and give the NFL and the networks notice that they are losing me. I know they don’t care, why would they? But, maybe, I’m not the only one…