I finished playing football at the time Super Bowl’s started. Could I have predicted this once a year major event would become the spectacle it has become, no way!
Today. across the nation, millions are engaging in the sacred preparation of their “Special dip or burn your mouth wings.” There will be parties, all kinds of parties, and heated debates over whether a 30-second beer ad was “transcendent” or “a cry for help.”
I have to be honest: if this were a regular season Sunday, a matchup between New England and Seattle would be the last thing on my television. I’d probably be watching a documentary on the history of harvesting cranberries before tuning into that. But they’ve “earned the right” to play for the championship, which in sports-speak means they’ve survived a four-month modern gladiator contest without losing too many arms or legs.
Besides, at a Super Bowl party, nobody actually watches the game. The real competition isn’t on the field; it’s in the kitchen. It’s about who brought the “weird cocktail” that looks great on Instagram but tastes like antifreeze, who made the best seven-layer dip (the architectural feat of our generation), and who managed to wear a “the coolest outfit” that is essentially a $250 jersey.
When I was younger, Suzy and I did the party circuit. But after several years of missing every single touchdown because I was stuck in a thirty-minute conversation about property taxes or why the Panthers didn’t make it to the Super Bowl this year, I retired. Now, I prefer the “small gathering” model—just a couple of friends and the ability to actually hear the announcers pretend to understand why the Coach decided to kick a field goal, ad nauseam.
However, as I stand here aggressively dicing onions and peppers for my own cheese dip, a profound—and slightly hilarious—question haunts me: What does it actually say about our society that over a hundred million people are synchronized in this exact ritual?
We aren’t filling the pews of churches. We aren’t gathered in town squares listening to a “Great Leader” inspire us to reach the stars. We aren’t out in the streets completing a massive community project to fix the world. No. Instead, we have collectively agreed to follow the whim of thirty-two billionaires. We have decided that for three glorious, violent hours, the highest form of human achievement is watching highly-tuned athletes ram each other at warp speed while we consume cheese and chips.
Perhaps that is our community project: the brief, shining moment where we all agree that for one afternoon, the most important thing in the universe is a poorly shaped ball made of cowhide, and determining whether “Bad Bunny” was better than “Snoop Dog.”
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