The Great American Spectacle

THE WHAT HO! SUPER BOWL SPECIAL COLLECTOR’S EDITION REPORT

To the average non-American, American football looks less like a sport and more like a high-speed traffic accident involving people dressed as futuristic gladiators. If you are from a nation that plays actual football - which Americans call “soccer” for reasons involving a long-standing national commitment to being confusing - you are used to a game where the players move continuously for 90 minutes.

American football is not that. It is a game of intense, explosive action that lasts for roughly eleven minutes, distributed over a period of four to five hours. The rest of the time is spent on commercials, replays of the eleven minutes, and grown men in headsets looking very concerned about pieces of paper.

The goal of the game is for one team to move a ball that refuses to bounce in a predictable direction to the other end of a 100-yard field. The field is divided into sections marked by white lines. These lines exist primarily so that various men in striped shirts can throw yellow flags at them. A “flag” is the referee’s way of saying, “Stop! We need to discuss a very specific rule that was written by Alexander Hamilton in 1784 involving the way a player used his pinky finger.”

The players are generally divided into two groups: the “Offense,” who are trying to move the ball, and the “Defense,” who are trying to ensure the Offense requires emergency medical attention. The most important person on the field is the guy named “Quarterback.” His job is to shout a series of random numbers and colors - “Blue 42! Hut! Omaha!” - and then either throw the ball to a teammate or hand it to a guy who has trained all week to run headfirst into a wall of 300-pound humans.

Before we get to the Super Bowl, I have to address the team names. In European football, teams have dignified names like “Real Madrid” or “Manchester United.” In America, our teams are named by highly caffeinated seven-year-olds who choose from a list of “Things That Are Scary or Cool.”

This is why we have the Bears, the Lions, and the Tigers (hold on, the Tigers are a baseball team). In football, we have Bengals, which are just fancy Tigers. If a city couldn’t find a scary animal, they opted for a profession. The Packers are named after people who put meat into boxes. The Steelers are presumably named after people who make steel. The Cowboys are named for, well, Cowboys. Then you have the Cleveland Browns, named after a guy named Paul Brown. As it turns out, naming a multi-billion dollar franchise after a color-surname combo is considered the height of creativity in Ohio.

Let’s talk about the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl is to American football what the moon landing was to aviation, except with more salsa dip. It is a sacred secular holiday where Americans are legally permitted to consume their body weight in chicken wings, pizzas and seven-layer dips.

Yesterday, we had the Super Bowl LX in Levi’s Stadium in the SF Bay Area (Woohoo, my home town). The Super Bowl, by the way, is the only event in America that uses Roman numerals. If you tuned in expecting a spectacular display of superhuman athletic prowess, you were likely disappointed. The highlight of Super Bowl LX was three hours of commercials for Artificial Intelligence, interrupted by a Puerto Rican wedding.

The game featured the Seattle Seahawks (a bird that doesn’t actually exist in biology textbooks) and the New England Patriots (people who enjoy throwing boxes of tea off ships). Trump, whose idea of athletic activity is to reach across the couch for his cellphone, was asked to predict the winner. He picked the Patriots and explained with his characteristically refreshing candor that has warmed the cockles of many an American’s heart, “They didn’t vote for me in Seattle.”

The Seahawks won 29-13, mainly because their defense, ominously nicknamed The Dark Side, spent the entire evening treating the Patriots’ quarterback like a senior citizen trying to navigate a revolving door while carrying six bags of groceries. Seattle’s Kenneth Walker III ran through so many people that they were forced to name him the Most Valuable Player.

A 30-second Super Bowl ad now costs roughly the GDP of a small island nation. So, companies are forced to be creative, which is just another word for drugs-fueled. For example, the Comcast commercial reimagined a version of Jurassic Park in which the dinosaurs are tamed using a high-speed router. The standout commercial was by Dunkin’, which btw has stopped appending Donuts to its name. In a masterpiece titled “Good Will Dunkin’,” Ben Affleck reimagines his Oscar-winning film as a 1995 sitcom. He plays a math genius who solves complex equations using donut holes, while half the cast of Friends and Seinfeld stood around looking confused. It culminated in Jennifer Aniston introducing her new boyfriend, Tom Brady, wearing a shaggy wig and asking, “How do you like these nuts?” It was the most Boston thing to happen since the Tea Party, only with more glaze. I don’t think anyone knew what was going on.

Then there was the Halftime Show, starring Bad Bunny. It may be the first time the headliner spoke more Spanish than the average American understands (which is not much), but nobody cared because Lady Gaga showed up to sing a mariachi version of a pop song. The stage featured a literal wedding, a nail salon, and a domino game. It was less of a concert and more of a very loud, very expensive family reunion that 100 million people crashed. It was great!

At the end of the game, we crowned the Seahawks the “World Champions,” causing sporadic fireworks to break out in Seattle suburbs. It is technically true that the Super Bowl champs are also “World Champions” because I can’t imagine any other country being crazy enough to play this specific version of rugby.

If you happen to be in a predicament where you are forced to watch this with Americans, the most important thing to do is look at the screen during a replay and say, “He really stayed low on that block,” no matter what is happening. Everyone will nod solemnly and hand you the guacamole dip. By the time the confetti falls, you’ll be too full and comatose to remember the score, but you’ll definitely feel more American.

Congratulations to the Seahawks and my friends in Seattle. Enjoy the feeling!