With Tom Brady lastly, most likely off the scene and the age of Patrick Mahomes upon us, this yr’s Tremendous Bowl promised a brand new starting for soccer in America, a type of cultural reset after the Kaepernick-Trump years. Rihanna again on stage for the primary time in 4 years! Two Black quarterbacks going through off for the primary time in Tremendous Bowl historical past! Greg Olsen’s emergence as America’s favourite play-by-play man and the enduring gap-toothed attraction of Michael Strahan! At every flip of the half-day behemoth that was Fox’s pre-game protection, viewers have been handed some recent invitation to imagine that we’ve got entered a brand new period. However as kickoff grew nearer and the jingoism thickened, a darker fact grew to become clear: the NFL has not modified. It’s simply discovered a brand new and larger solid of characters to purchase into its bullshit.
No nation has America’s reward for mixing sport, militarism, movie star, and consumerism right into a single package deal, and there’s no higher demonstration of that reward than the Tremendous Bowl. Fox, a community utterly comfortable with the dying cult of recent America, is possibly the right residence for an project like this, its on-air skills mixing soccer pedigree and inconsiderate patriotism in excellent, Tremendous Bowl-ready proportion.
Tremendous Bowl Sunday was, we have been confidently instructed from the start of Fox’s protection, “the largest day of the yr”, “the largest spectacle on the planet”. Tom Rinaldi, prowling the State Farm Stadium sideline in a examine blazer and sneakers like a type of Fox Sports activities Seinfeld, solemnly declared, ““Greater than 200 million Individuals will likely be united by sports activities in the present day. That’s the ability of soccer.” All of which is, maybe, honest sufficient: the Tremendous Bowl is the largest spectacle on the planet, simply so long as you ignore the World Cup ultimate, the Champions League ultimate, the Tour de France, the Cricket World Cup, or the Olympics. Unworldly delusions of grandeur bearing no connection to the details: it’s the Tremendous Bowl on Fox, child!
The relative self-discipline of the every day Shannon Sharpe-Skip Bayless shoutfest kicked off Fox’s extravaganza, earlier than it gave technique to the pre-game presentation correct, a boozy six-hour marriage ceremony of a present by which a bunch of center aged guys stood round on the sting of the televisual dancefloor, speaking excessive of one another. A weird early tribute to Michael Vick because the pioneer who paved the best way for Black quarterbacks within the league – no point out of every other Black quarterbacks – set the tone, and from there Fox was rapidly into its stride.
There was a lot breathless warzone reporting from outdoors the group accommodations: “In roughly 28 minutes, the Chiefs will likely be boarding the buses and heading over to the stadium!” Rinaldi inexplicably devoted one in all his tragically corny human curiosity items to the topic of wheat. Over footage of a harvester plowing by means of a discipline and troopers climbing a wall, he intoned, “Greater than the setting or the stakes or the time, we actually come for the query. That when the percentages are lengthy, the time quick, stress nice, what is going to they do? They’ll do what we’ve at all times accomplished. Reply.” Um, OK Tom. No matter you say.
The Tremendous Bowl is at all times a primary instance of American Bloat, however watching the manic cuts between segments and celebrities (Tracy Morgan! Jon Hamm! Brad Pitt! Gordon Ramsay for some cause!) created one thing just like the sports activities broadcasting equal of a kind of viral meals movies the place a slab of meat is marinated, then sluggish cooked, shredded, chilled, pulverized, and sprinkled over a recent piece of meat that’s then marinated, sluggish cooked, shredded, rolled right into a burrito, fried, sliced, stacked right into a tower of burger buns, then coated in melting cheese.
Tremendous Bowl Sunday shouldn’t be solely in regards to the soccer, after all: it’s in regards to the half-time present, the pre-game musical numbers, and the advertisements, all of which invariably say way more in regards to the state of the NFL and the US than something that occurs on the sector. One pre-game business for NFL Play 60, the league’s youth health initiative, featured a baby asking Roger Goodell, “How does it really feel to be booed on the NFL draft?” (Goodell’s unconvincing, straight-from-central-marketing reply: “I really adore it as a result of it’s a method for followers to work together.”) One other featured a complicated dialogue about cultural appropriation. The subtext was to current the NFL as a league that had listened, that had heard its critics’ complaints and was now again in tune with the occasions, newly delicate and culturally inclusive.
Babyface sang America The Lovely whereas strumming a guitar adorned with the Stars and Stripes and the digital camera minimize to Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni hocking up an enormous gob of spit. Actor Anthony Mackie delivered a boilerplate monologue in regards to the “promise of America”, after which Fox’s on-air crew was principally wanting to remind everybody that Mackie, who’s Black, is the brand new Captain America. There was an prolonged tribute to Pat Tillman, the previous NFL footballer who enlisted within the army after 9/11 then died in Afghanistan, that featured veterans of shade who’ve acquired scholarships from the eponymous basis arrange after his dying. The anthem featured the primary all-female Navy flyover in Tremendous Bowl historical past.
All these gestures appeared superficially “woke”, the type of factor to set the racists and proper wingers off – as if the NFL had caved to the pursuits who supported taking a knee throughout the Kaepernick wars. However they have been really about assimilating new adherents to American energy, about displaying how the football-military advanced might develop and alter with the occasions, enlisting new topics. That is the brand new America: a rustic with the identical messianic sense of nationwide future as at all times, solely friendlier and extra various. It’s the identical previous murdering machine with higher PR. Take coronary heart, innocent civilians of the Center East: the missiles should still be on their method, however no less than they are going to be fired by ladies.
As the sport wore on and Fox’s protection wound in the direction of its inevitable conclusion (the season two premiere of Subsequent Degree Chef), an unlucky fact was forgotten amid the jingoism and the celebration, the confetti and the bloat: Pat Tillman grew to become disenchanted with US army adventurism, and was killed by pleasant fireplace, a truth the members of the army coated up for weeks afterwards.
Tremendous Bowl LVII could have proven how the NFL has developed past Trumpism, however soccer within the US stays a monster principally unchanged: casually bombastic, in love with its personal significance, and blind to the reality of the nation round it.
