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It’s easy to become distracted when watching the Super Bowl: by the stark bright lights, by the pom-poms, by the always overblown and ever disappointing halftime show. Distraction, in the form of advertising is the centrepiece of the event: commericals are predicted, pored over and reviewed with as much if not more vigour than the game itself.
Nothing, however, can ever take one’s mind fully from the innate violence of the game. American football is a sport set up for the collision. Two rows of 320 pound men, butting rams’ heads on every play; running backs for whom going “up the gut” is a mark of ultimate respect. That is, charging right at the enemy’s fortifications where he is strongest, pounding him where he hurts least so that he might hurt a little more: an idea central to the self-conception of America herself. But the National Football League is a celebration of literal violence; a party for real combat. Here, beyond the surface sheen of the oh-so-pretty lights and sounds, the sporting metaphor is lost amidst piles of wrecked bodies.
American football is inherently brutal, and with that brutality comes an inescapable obsession with the idea of masculinity. To be tough is to be masculine, and ever the twain shall meet inside the electrically charged dressing rooms of the NFL. To complete the unhealthy triptych, the game is also deeply insular in a most curious way. The winner of the Super Bowl is designated as World Champion, despite the USA being the only country in the world to have a professional league: World Champions by default, if only because no external challengers are permitted. Baseball’s crowning glory is to win the World Series, a competition of 29 American teams and one from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Here, the nomenclature is even stranger: other countries around the world, like Japan, Puerto Rico and Cuba, do baseball as well and perhaps better than the USA. Yet the World Series persists, anachronistic and bovine, like an animal wary of raising its nose above the border trough for fear that its neighbours might be bigger, tougher: better all-round than it and its petty concerns.
Why the need for this patently false bravado? The States were founded with a frontier mentality: settlers pushing ever further west in search of new hope, land and opportunities. This is a young history acutely positioned in the minds of many Americans today – filtered, as so much of modern life is, through sport. In Ben Fountain’s inventive novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, our eponymous hero returns home from the war in Afghanistan to an equally arduous Tour of Laudatory across the US, climaxing in a brutally satirical drawn-out scene inside Texas Stadium, formerly home to the Dallas Cowboys. Lynn and his company move inside the home locker room to be dwarfed by behemoths in shoulder pads expressing their desires to join the war. The line between athlete and soldier becomes increasingly blurred; both exist to follow instructions to do physical harm with the aim of overwhelming superiority. To win at sport is to cause the death of thousands of hopes: in Fountain’s hands, football becomes war and the war a game of football, played out on desperately civil lines. When a frontier culture ceases to expand, it must look inwards for its violent kicks.
Perhaps this insularity is explicable by the USA’s epic size; a man born in Texas may never venture further than the county in which he’s born, let alone cross the State line. Here, a talented football player will attend the local high school followed by a slightly less local College – Texas Tech perhaps, or Baylor – and only then, if he’s the best of the very best, will he enter the NFL Draft and have his horizons raised. To Green Bay, New Orleans or Buffalo, New York – it matters little, for these places are but America herself. With the aggressive frontier mentality comes a choking obsession with localism, of the kind exhibited by “Swede” Levov in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. The Swede is the embodiment of the American ideal, revered by his small New Jersey community for his youthful athletic feats. Yet his house of cards comes crashing down when his daughter commits an act of terrorism – against the US, and by inextricable association against Swede Levov himself, for his bland projection of American hopes and dreams. Maybe, when confronted by a limitless Montanan sky or an impossibly broad Texas panhandle, the only reaction is to look down, to lower your gaze to your shoes and your mind to the only thing that makes sense: to the arc of a ball or the swing of a bat; to the vibration of the bleachers as they rock to the pounding of one thousand feet. To quantifiable, tangible things – the qualities that Roth’s Levov represents in all his small-town glory.
These themes reverberate just as loudly in the Antipodes. In Christos Tsolkias’s latest novel Barracuda, Danny Kelly is a champion swimmer; the first time he fails fails coincides with the first time he competes outside of Australia. Kelly finishes fifth at the Pan Pacific Games in Tokyo, and promptly abandons the sport for good: a victim of the chasm between his country’s size and its inability to see beyond its own navel; a victim too of its use of sport as an international bludgeon with which to boast. Yet, as Tsolkias depicts, this tactic comes fraught with the danger of potential loss; far better to have a sport like Australian Rules all to yourself, so that the sharpness of loss can be internalised within your borders. In every frontier culture, no matter how well established, there must lie an unspoken fear – that what you have is not enough and might never be so; that losing in sport, so thinly veiled a metaphor for life, might very easily equate to the shrinking of your hard-won borders.
So I sat to watch the Super Bowl at play, in all its glitzy, gaudy glory – and realised for the umpteenth time that this sport provides a cloak over its nation’s inadequacies, by distilling an infinitely complex whole into sixty minutes of bish and bosh and the evocative hiss of a dozen pom-poms, shaking in unison. Perhaps, then, the title of “World Champions” bestowed upon the Seattle Seahawks that January night in New Jersey is not such a misnomer after all; rather it’s the ill-disguised longing of an isolated culture to belong to the rest of the world. It’s the equivalent of a man stood on a London street, babbling and bragging away to all and sundry in Portuguese, or Vietnamese, or Sudanese: hopeless, but universal all the same.
About Teddy Cutler
Teddy is a sportswriter exploring where the worlds of literature and sport intersect. His writing highlights sport as metaphor: as an expression of cultures, and, on a human level, as a technicolour image of our own lives. He supports Aston Villa Football Club, which has taught him that sport's losers invariably have more interesting stories to tell.
