A Super (Yawn) sunday
Epstein, Joseph
A Super (Yawn) Sunday joseph epstein This is going to be Super Bowl XXXI, and it is with no pride whatsoever that I have to report having watched the preceding XXX. Only two have left memories in...
...Only two have left memories in my mind...
...Dick Enberg's endless agreeableness makes me want to challenge him to a fight...
...Erich," I replied, "believe me, you don't need to know...
...Having no Jerry Jones, no Jack Kent Cooke, no Mike McCaskey, no beautiful and talented Al Davis, no egomaniacal, publicity-seeking zillionaire, gives the Packers a fine negative allure...
...Good God, I thought, poor Erich, up in his rooms reading Goethe and Rilke, even he has had his life invaded by Mike Ditka...
...According to a recent piece in the New York Times Magazine, interest in professional football has greatly lessened in recent years...
...Seven or eight years ago at lunch, Erich Heller, the great critic of Central European literature, whose illness had forced him to move into a retirement home, in his case an all-male retirement home, said to me, in his strongly Teutonic accent: "Joe, I haf a qvestion to esk of you...
...Three-hundred-and-fifty-pound interior linemen are not gladiators, soldiers in the trenches, but only extremely well-paid brutes in shoulder pads and helmets...
...Of course, Erich," I said...
...I suspect this is true, even though it was printed in the New York Times...
...Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor of The Weekly Standard...
...Yet if pro football seems to be losing ground, it has a lot of ground to lose...
...Only the quality of the game itself has been wanting...
...My own family, whose theme is ingratitude, has too few members left who still speak to one another to make such a dinner tenable...
...Nothing in the entire game, truth to tell, applies to life...
...As the game drones on, people drift in and out, and the chief interest is in who will win the pool...
...John Mad-den's enthusiasm for the crudity and brutishness of the game no longer seems quite credible...
...For the rest, all those Sundays now constitute a blur, in which I can barely make out the lined faces of the tyrannical Vince Lombardi, the merciless Don Shula, the phlegmatic Tom Landry, and the anxious Marv Levy...
...and it would be wonderful if some clever investigative reporter were able to uncover that Madden was working on a translation of the poetry of St...
...We organize a small betting pool, with the person who comes closest to guessing the total points scored winning...
...Have a Super Sunday...
...You may punt in football, but never in life...
...Monday Night Football is one of the few sports-watching habits I have been able to break, and it is pleasing no longer to have to worry about Frank Gifford's and Al Michaels's hairlines...
...It has lessened greatly for me, with more than fifty years in the supine business of being a sports fan...
...The second, when my own team, the Chicago Bears, crushed the New England Patriots...
...We eat a swell dinner, various cousins contributing side dishes...
...and the hype is no longer even close to believable...
...Third-down conversions are just that—a chance for another four downs...
...Who," he asked, "is dis Ditka...
...For all my grumbling, I think you should know that I shall once again be at my post—that is, on my duff on a couch before the television set—for this year's Super Bowl...
...The subject of this year's sermon will be that sports, and especially pro football, is a metaphor for absolutely nothing...
...In recent years, the true excitement has been over the commercials, which are more amusing than the football and which by now must cost up to a quarter million dollars a nanosecond...
...As the family cynic, I shall doubtless once again hold forth on the state of the sport...
...The reason is that for the past fifteen years, my wife and I have been the hosts of a Super Bowl dinner for her congenial family...
...Although sentiment and pro football go together like oil and water, I have decided to like the Green Bay Packers this year, partly because the team represents a small town, and even more because it does not have a single owner or small syndicate of owners, but is owned, in effect, by the town itself...
...The athletes no longer seem admirable or even interesting, and are exceeded in unattractiveness only by the small but dreary pack of owners...
...Bonhomie fills the room...
...the money has screwed things up hugely...
...I should like it much better, in fact, if they began to call it, instead of the Super Bowl, the Nice Bowl, and, while at it, dropped the Roman numerals...
...John Perse during the long commercial breaks...
...For a time it looked as if the game were to become as much a part of the culture as baseball once was...
...The first, when Joe Namath and the Jets shocked the greatly favored Baltimore Colts...
...What is it...
...Professional football is merely a game, an increasingly specialized and brutish one that you probably don't want your sons to play, and anyone who attempts to make more of it is fooling himself or trying to con the rest of us...
...So fatigued am I by the spectacle of it all that I have come to feel a strong personal dislike even for the announcers...
Vol. 2 • January 1997 • No. 19
