How Big is 'The Big Game' This Year?
The first Super Bowl of the pandemic may feel different, but not much
Sports Biblio Reader 2.7.21
The Imagination of Sports in Books, History, the Arts and Culture
Also In This Issue: Super Bowl X; Pete Axthelm; Dave Kindred; Percy Beames; Photographing the Home Run Kings; Henry Aaron and Ty Cobb; Soccer Diplomacy; Borussia Mönchengladbach’s Hallowed Ground; The World Hockey Association; An Empty Beanpot; Wheaties to Honor Tommie Smith; Finding Transcendence in Art and Sports
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers and ageless quarterback Tom Brady prevented a rematch of the first Super Bowl when they defeated the Green Bay Packers in the NFC Championship Game.
I was looking forward to a Packers-Kansas City Chiefs game not just on behalf of family members in Wisconsin—my aunt famously stocked a “green room” in her house with Packers memorabilia from floor to ceiling and nearly every space on the wall—but also for the sake of history.
That first Super Bowl wasn’t officially called that, but the AFL-NFL World Championship game instead, and the Los Angeles Coliseum was far from sold out.
It was a transition point after several years of pro football wars, and as Vince Lombardi’s Packers’ dynasty was reaching its peak.
By the time Green Bay won the second Super Bowl over the Oakland Raiders, the new name was being branded, bought and sold, and the spectacle was on.
When that merger was completed by 1970, and as Lombardi tragically died of cancer, the Super Bowl was on its way to becoming an iconic event in American life.
More than just a game—with the winner receiving a trophy named after Lombardi—the Super Bowl has become a national holiday of sorts. Although an acquaintance, who loathes American football, has produced a following for his concerted efforts to see who’ll be the last person to know the outcome of the game.
Many of those watching dissect the commercials more than the jet sweeps and nickel formations on the field, as well as the halftime entertainment. References to “Wardrobe Malfunction” don’t need a qualifier.
People gather at bars, restaurants and private homes to watch what’s easily the highest-rated programming on American television every year. It’s been a fine midwinter respite since my childhood, and I can remember missing it only once.
Although this year figures to be different. A number of my local restaurants have been busily promoting the menu specials for “The Big Game” all this week. They don’t have to say anything more.
In America, the land of hundreds of live sporting events easily available to watch at any given time, there’s only one “Big Game.” And it will be the only game going on shortly after 6 p.m. New York time on Sunday.
What’s different is that these restaurateurs, still reeling from COVID-19 shutdowns, are serving up plenty of to-go options that they weren’t doing this time a year ago.
Whether it’s wings, lobster rolls, sliders or pizza, nearly every eatery I know of that was strictly dine-in until March 2020 is making a serious go of takeout, curbside pickup or delivery.
It’s how some of them are clamoring to hang on, as diners remain reluctant to come in, or local restrictions make it impossible to break even.
And with our epidemiologist-in-chief, Anthony Fauci, eternally dismissive of people having any fun the way they used to, even for the Super Bowl, many are surely to follow that joyless advice.
Sports media takes also figured to be maudlin, but I wasn’t expecting this gloomy piece from John Branch, a Pulitzer Prize winner, in The New York Times. Add him to the growing cadre of journalists who’ve been howling for months that perhaps there shouldn’t be any games at all. From Branch’s NYT riff:
The United States has not responded well to the coronavirus outbreak since it was declared a pandemic almost 11 months ago — faltering perhaps more than any other major country with such vast resources for problem solving. It has about 5 percent of the world’s population, but nearly 20 percent of its reported Covid fatalities. Tens of thousands more are likely to die in the coming weeks, whatever the progress of the vaccine rollout.
This has been a common gripe in American media, about how singularly bad the American response to COVID has been, when most advanced Western nations are also struggling. Meanwhile China, where the virus originated, still refuses to disclose anything about its death toll, or why it failed to contain what’s become a global disaster.
Branch quickly leaps to sheer absurdity in one sentence about the prism of the Super Bowl, through which we are supposed to see an entire sprawling, sometimes brawling nation of 330 million increasingly tribalistic people:
“People in the United States and around the world will gauge the American state of affairs by what they see during Sunday’s broadcast.”
Really? Which people? Other than journalists and the always-online types who need their daily outrage? Who have a negative view of America in general? I don’t know many people who have ever thought of the Super Bowl like this, even before the pandemic. They don’t now.
But wait, there’s more:
“The question is whether the world at game’s end is any different. Maybe it will be a source of unity, a boost for American pride. Maybe if Kansas City Coach Andy Reid wears a mask, or Jim Nantz of CBS suggests that Americans get vaccinated, it could be a teaching moment. Might the production feel too political, or too preachy, or not enough of either?
“The only certainty on Sunday is that the death count from Covid-19 will rise, by the hundreds or thousands just in the United States, as millions watch a football game.”
And how many people will die on Sunday from cancer, heart disease or dementia, or in a car accident or as the result of a crime? How many people who’ve become depressed and suicidal because lockdowns destroyed their jobs, closed their schools and shattered their social well-being will seriously consider, and possibly follow through with, ending their lives?
Sometimes I think there are more people out there than I realize who don’t want this pandemic to end, because it’s become a convenient way to channel their unhappiness, unrelated to COVID, in their own lives.
Whether that’s the case with Branch or not I don’t know, but he misses the point about the impact of sports, the arts and other daily activities that have been taken away from us or severely restricted for nearly a year.
He uses the word “frivolous” a lot, as if sports are ancillary to human flourishing. They matter deeply to people who love to play and watch them, just as live music, theater and art galleries matter to even more people.
I can’t think of a more important time for these things to really matter, as eerie as it feels to watch a game with few people in attendance, or to tune into a virtual concert.
Yet they are there for us to enjoy, and in which to find some comfort as we gradually try to reclaim our normal lives. If you can’t get interested in seeing a 43-year-old Brady match wits with Chiefs QB Pat Mahomes and the defending Super Bowl champion Chiefs, then you truly are a killjoy.
Yes, the Super Bowl is an overwrought melodrama, with cheezy entertainment, over-the-top patriotism and increasingly woke commercials. It may be overdue for an overhaul.
At its heart, however, it’s just a ball game, like the first Super Bowl, which didn’t need a snazzy moniker to be pleasurable most of all for what happened on the field.
For further reading:
“When It Was Just a Game: Remembering the First Super Bowl,” by Harvey Frommer
More Gridiron Gronkin’
From the archives of Texas Monthly, a look back at Super Bowl X, played in Miami. Gary Cartwright’s gonzo-ish look at the spectacle between the Steelers and Cowboys—on the field and “the week of debauchery” beforehand—included cameo appearances by “North Dallas Forty” author Pete Gent, Phyllis George and others on hand to celebrate the event’s first decade;
From The Ringer, the recent evolution of the NFL tight end, featuring two in Sunday’s game: Rob Gronkowski of the Buccaneers, and Travis Kelce of the Chiefs, and how they’ve helped transcend the position with their playmaking talents. It’s a pattern that Bucs coach Bruce Arians traces back to Tony Gonzalez;
A year after the Green Bay Packers came into existence, the Little Chute Flying Dutchmen first took to the frozen tundra in a nearby village and played semi-pro football for 30 years, until 1950. At Wisconsin Public Radio, Jenny Peek chronicles the exploits of the Flying Dutchmen, who competed against the likes of the the Appleton Reds, Manitowoc Gales, and, in the team’s earliest years, the Packers themselves;
From Tablet, Rabbi Stuart Halpern asserts that Jews know who the real Super Bowl heroes are: the men who move the chains. They’re not unlike the unglamorous but essential figures in Jewish history and culture, “the volunteers who take on all the tasks that are thoroughly mundane and absolutely necessary for communal life to function.”
A Few Good Reads
Jon Wertheim of Sports Illustrated remembers Pete Axthelm, the New York newspaper reporter, sports betting celebrity and author of “The City Game”—my favorite basketball book—who died far too young, 30 years ago this week:
“Without lording over anyone, Ax, as he was inevitably known, seemed to do everything better than everyone else. He wrote with more flair and more vigor. He told the best stories—but he also knew how and where to find them. He was more natural on TV than the trained sportscasters, his disheveled appearance notwithstanding. He was wittier than the wits and more philosophical than the deep thinkers. He put larger sums into action than even the most hardcore gamblers.
“And—this is really saying something—he could drink more heroically than anyone in the joint. Which is why Pete Axthelm didn’t make it to age 48.”
Longtime sports columnist Dave Kindred breaks away from the genre in his latest book, “Leave Out the Tragic Parts,” a memoir of his grandson’s ultimately fatal alcohol addiction triggered by his parents’ divorce. Kindred explains in this video why “it’s a story I could not NOT write.”Kindred, who had missed covering The Masters only once since 1967 until last year, wrote in November about the other occasion he was not in Augusta. That was 1986, when he attended his son’s wedding and wasn’t on hand to witness Jack Nicklaus’ memorable win at the age of 46;
From The Age in Melbourne, Greg Baum writes about Percy Beames, who became a journalist in the mid-20th century after careers as a cricketer and Aussie Rules football player. For 30 years he was the chief writer in both sports for The Age, and died in 2004 at the age of 92: “Almost to the end, he was such a fixture at the MCG that you wondered that if they took him away, it might fall down;”
David Davis, a friend of this newsletter and author of the recent book “Wheels of Courage,” about the rise of wheelchair and disabled sports, pens another feature on sports photojournalism for the Defector. This about Harry Harris, who shot Babe Ruth and Henry Aaron, including the latter’s 715th homerun in 1974;
Howard Rosenberg, author of the 2018 book “Ty Cobb Unleashed,” sends in a recent column he wrote about Henry Aaron and Ty Cobb, and what he calls “one of the meatiest intergenerational of all racial baseball stories;
From the U.S. Sport History blog, a review of the 11th edition of “The Complete History of the World Hockey Association” by Scott Surgent, a mathematician and sports historian. Richard Macales, who’s written about about the American Basketball Association and other defunct sports leagues, concludes that Surgent’s book is a meticulously detailed history and statistical archive of the league that lasted from 1972-1979, linking the careers of Bobby Hull, Gordie Howe and Wayne Gretzky while bringing big-time hockey to Quebec City, Winnipeg, Houston and Hartford;
The Beanpot hockey tournaments—featuring Boston College, University, Northeastern University and Harvard University—were to have been played this weekend at Boston’s TD Garden. But an event that’s “part of the fabric of Boston” has been cancelled for the first time ever due to COVID-19. The men’s event goes back 69 years, the women started in 1979, and like many other college athletic teams in various sports, some have been scrounging around for other opponents. Harvard’s not playing at all, due to an Ivy League decision to cancel all sports;
College sports writer Matt Brown recently interviewed Jenn Hattfield, a former Harvard field hockey and lacrosse player, about her career as an Ivy League athlete and her current work writing about women’s sports for the analytics sites FiveThirtyEight and Her Hoop Stats;
The fine Sports Stories newsletter this week explores the life of ballerina Maria Tallchief, a native of the Osage nation who became George Balanchine’s prima ballerina known most famously for her role in “Firebird.” Eric Nusbaum writes that he was reminded of what he most admired about Michael Jordan: “What I’m really looking for now is that moment of transcendence: to be carried away by grace and power and artistry.” Sports Stories also has set up an online store with t-shirts, caps and screen prints;
More than 50 years after raising his fist during (and getting banished from) the Mexico City Olympics, U.S. sprinting gold medalist Tommie Smith will be featured on a Wheaties cereal box. The limited-box edition, which will be on store shelves in April, will honor Smith, now 76, as a “racial equity trailblazer;”
From the Bundesliga Fan blog, a remembrance of the Stadion am Bökelburg, the former home of Borussia Mönchengladbach, which during the club’s glory days of the 1970s displayed the talents of Günter Netzer, Berti Vogts and Jupp Heynckes. Its opening in 1919 was delayed by World War I, and after the club moved away during the 1990s the ground was redeveloped for a housing complex.
Now Hear This
A recent episode of the New Books in Sports podcast featured DeMontfort University professor Heather Dichter, author of “Soccer Diplomacy: International Relations and Football Since 1914,” published last year by the University Press of Kentucky. She’s also a fellow at the Centre for Sports History and Culture associated with DeMontfort, in Leicester, England.
The Sports Biblio Reader e-mail newsletter is delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search recent archives. The full archives for Sports Biblio Digest can be found here. This is issue No. 233, published Feb. 7, 2021.
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