Loving and hating the Super Bowl
February 2, 2014 -- Updated 1448 GMT (2248 HKT)
A security guard stands in front
of MetLife Stadium Saturday, February 1, in East Rutherford, New Jersey,
the site of Sunday's NFL championship game between the Denver Broncos
and the Seattle Seahawks.
HIDE CAPTION
Buildup to Super Bowl XLVIII
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Gene Seymour: Super Bowl points up how NFL's money machine mars joy of game
- He says that and coverup of players' long-term injury make him ambivalent about football
- Some question whether it's moral to support NFL, especially its overbearing corporate culture
- Seymour: Can we not simply enjoy football? Big Business has overpowered the game
Editor's note: Gene
Seymour is a film critic who has written about music, movies and culture
for The New York Times, Newsday, Entertainment Weekly and The
Washington Post.
(CNN) -- As far as I'm concerned, John Matuszak said
everything there is to say about professional football back in 1979
when he was playing the role of a bent lineman in "North Dallas Forty."
Matuszak, or "Tooz" as
players and fans knew him, was something of a renegade individualist in
the National Football League and the movie's script gave him the
opportunity to unleash a rebel yell: Embittered by his team's tough
loss, and by an assistant coach's lame scolding, his character goes off
on the coach, shouting at one point, "Every time I call it a game, you
call it a business. Every time I call it a business, you call it a
game."
Gene Seymour
And it's that very
dichotomy that looms even larger during Super Bowl week. The media keep
insisting there's a game being played Sunday night in New Jersey. But
all anybody really cares about is the Business -- as in, the torrents of
revenue being raked in from advertising (have you seen that there are
now trailers---for the commercials?), the marketing, the gambling and,
of course, the partying that goes on not only in New York and New Jersey
in the lead-up to the Ultimate Game, but from sea to shining sea Sunday
night.
Players know it, for
sure—and it continues to embody my own ambivalence about American tackle
football. I get caught up in the game's drama, its unexpected twists,
its ongoing tension between best-laid game plans and the ever-looming
potential for their disruptions. I get caught up, too, with the sideline
rants, growls, collisions and screw-ups caught at varied speeds by the
wizardry of NFL Films.
But while football's
orchestrated aggression and violence may entertain me, my family and
friends--and the rest of Living Room America—we're all newly alive to
the physical and mental risks these players are taking. How does one
stay passionate about football in the face of the grim, steadily
mounting number of cases involving ex-players undergoing physical and
mental injury and anguish over the sport's long-term effects?
In last Sunday's New York
Times Magazine, author Steve Almond wondered whether it was immoral to
watch and enjoy the Super Bowl while knowing full well that playing the
game has caused "catastrophic brain injury ... not as a rare and
unintended consequence, but as a routine byproduct of how the game is
played." I've expressed similar misgivings here about
the flood of disclosures about long-term injury and the manner in which
the NFL tried at first to either disregard or demean this peril.
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It's not just the
dementia, memory loss and other symptoms that cast shadows over the
NFL's gaudy, golden image. This seems the right place to mention that
Matuszak, who was so physically imposing as a player that he seemed
invincible, died 10 years after "North Dallas Forty" was made. He was
only 39 years old and his death was attributed to an overdose of
prescription pain medication. Gregg Easterbrook, who publishes the
weekly Tuesday Morning Quarterback column for ESPN.com, wrote this week
that painkiller abuse "may be pro football's next scandal." Over time,
watching these players run into each other at top speed while imagining
what their minds and lives will be like 20 years afterward could finish
me off as a fan.
So could the sheer
fatigue of witnessing, year after year, the NFL's seemingly
inexhaustible capacity for inhaling money, which only compounds its
overbearing corporate culture. I already have little patience with the
game's ethos as articulated in such bromides as "Doing Whatever It Takes
to Win" or that deathless line that the late, exalted Green Bay coach
Vince Lombardi appropriated from a John Wayne movie, "Winning isn't
everything, but it's the only thing," which even Lombardi, the man for
whom the Super Bowl Trophy is named, came to believe was too simplistic.
Such platitudes have made tackle football a useable, if not overused
metaphor for what it's like to work, live and, above all, prevail in
modern corporate society.
But it's not just a
metaphor. Hard-working men such as my father found release, empathy and
satisfaction watching the comparably hard work of his beloved New York
Giants for decades. It used to be enough for he and millions of fans
over the decades of professional football history to watch skilled
craftsmen ply their trade, defy the odds, impose their wills, share
their joy and passion. It'd be nice, too, if somewhere in the hype and
hysteria, we could all calm down enough to see the Super Bowl in such
elemental terms.
But as near as I can
tell, it's the Business that now holds an overpowering edge over the
Game. And what's worse: I can't tell how much longer the Game itself
will hold out.
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