Some very good reads accompanying Super Bowl LVIII on Sunday, set for Allegiant Stadium on the Las Vegas Strip, and we promise none of them have anything to do with Taylor Swift:
My favorite piece comes from Tablet magazine, where Marc Tracy writes about the inception of the American Football League and specifically three Jewish figures writ large over the history of that circuit: Sid Gillman, Sonny Werblin and Al Davis. Tracy argues that decade-long period helped pro football create the spectacle that became the merged NFL:
The AFL’s story is a quintessentially American tale of a group of outmanned, outcast insurgents working on the margins, forced to break with the old way of doing things and in the process creating a brasher, more exciting version of the mainstream—a mainstream that then remade itself in the insurgents’ image.
Coming in a close second is Sam Borden’s heart-wrenching story at ESPN about Chicago Bears great Steve McMichael, who was named to the Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2024 but whose friends, family and former teammates are hoping will be able to make it to Canton in August. The defensive lineman is suffering from ALS and this is a terrific, compassionate writing about a difficult subject;
I didn’t realize the imaginary yellow line that can be viewed only on television is 25 years old, but at The Atlantic Jacob Stern offers a retrospective history on how it’s made following from home/bar/etc. a lot easier than in person;
At Throwbacks, Michael Weinreb serves up five football-oriented novels, with Peter Gent and Dan Jenkins figuring in understandably, along with a Kurt Vonnegut twist;
A team of sports reporters at The Wall Street Journal examine the desert scenario of a Super Bowl and a growing sports culture in Las Vegas and the rise of the sports scene in Saudi Arabia;
Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports adds a college basketball component to a similar argument, arguing that Jerry Tarkanian’s UNLV Rebels of three decades ago helped pave the way for theNFL, NHL and other sports arriving in Vegas, as well as the NCAA Men’s Final Four in 2028;
What would Hunter Thompson think of the sport he loved contesting its championship in the city whose excesses he masterfully chronicled more than 50 years ago?
As for the venue for Sunday’s Chiefs-49ers contest, well, Allegiant Stadium exemplifies all that’s rotten with modern architecture IMHO. I know this is Vegas, and the home team is the Raiders, but making a gaudy building “fast and angry and intimidating” to suit the owner is nothing to crow about. A fellow sportswriter thinks it looks like a Roomba, and it’s hard to argue with that;
The Super Bowl is also the platform for people who obsess over television commercials, and a marketing professor assesses what some companies are paying a precious $7 million for in a 30-second byte;
It’s been 40 years since Apple’s groundbreaking Super Bowl ad that added to the lore of the game, and specifically the made-for-TV spectacle it’s become;
A more recent Super Bowl tradition has been an interview with the Commander-In-Chief, but that’s a scratch given Joe Biden’s shocking press conference this week regarding his cognitive maladies;
The halftime entertainment is Atlanta-based artist Usher, who follows a line of stars who didn’t get paid as much as you might think. Given the targeted demographic of this spectacle being very unlike me, that’s when I take a break to reheat the Buffalo dip and finish what’s left of the wings.
For further reading
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