Superbowl Every Year

Every year, back comes the Super Bowl. It is the closest Americans get to throwing Christians to the lions in a Coliseum.

Of course, since Christians are a majority in our delightful money-worshipping theocracy, we can expurgate the violent tendencies of a beer soaked, unhealthy snack-stuffed populace by throwing two teams of highly paid professional athletes at each other.

The only alternative programming known to me in the media is the Puppy Bowl of the Animal Planet Channel.  This is sufficiently important to be covered by Variety, the bible of the entertainment industry. I have an unusually high “cutesy” tolerance, but this canine phenomenon, with its attendant spin-offs and franchises (and extended parodying of professional football) is enough to generate nausea even in me.

Why counter programming in the first place?  I have just spent too much time taking care of folks who have had head injuries to spend time watching them get systematically caused.

I didn’t watch the Superbowl, but even I (moi!) learned that the star of the game was injured.

Of course, I don’t know a cornerback from a quarterback, and if I dared to show my face in a sports bar (unlikely), I would probably be strung-up by my thumbs and used as a Jewish piñata because of my strong anti-head-injury polemics.

By now everybody knows about the dangers of concussion in football players and such and the meager amount of cash the NFL is going to pay more than 4,500 former players who sued the league because they did not know much or how badly their brains could get hurt – and the NFL kept denying any harm would come to them.

I have even spent too much time treating big handsome men who got cut from various teams in my office, reduced to tears from physical or psychic pain and/or chronic pain from injury.

Since I have never been inside a men’s locker room for some fairly obvious reasons, I must rely on the accounts of others who have told me that it is not uncommon for players to be directed by their coaches to attempt to cause injury to members of an opposing football team and eliminate them from competition.

Somehow, a mixture of this ethos, this kind of standard, with inspiration and prayer, has become what America values and worships.

I am not part of mainstream America.  I sit here fighting tears, as I think of the men who will someday end up in offices like mine because of the Super Bowl or other competitive sporting events.

I really like men.  I love men.

I married one.

They do not need to get beat up (or for that matter, really drunk) and do things they feel sorry for later.  Life is hard enough without this sort of thing.

From living through soccer championships when I was in Europe to what I see now on the internet, I believe that in all the American spirit and heritage, this sports worship is what I like least.

A Lutheran chaplain once told me that he mourned the American ideal of idolatry of the body.  There is no doubt that I meet more people worried about building their muscles than I do about building their spirit or intellect.

Idolatry of competitive sports — and football in particular — is a step beyond this.

Where force is worshiped, injuries (to the most precious human brain in particular) will occur, and intellects and spirits will be broken, most likely permanently.

I could not stand to watch the Super Bowl or anything like it — it would be torture of the worst sort.

Many years ago, in Oklahoma when I had a radio talk show, we discussed the high incidence of spousal abuse at Super Bowl time.  When emotions run high, like with this kind of event, the reactions diffuse, making such observations very plausible.

I once worked with a (Midwestern) neurosurgeon who was a highly enthusiastic football fan and invented a helmet to diminish the risk of head injury in football.  He submitted it to appropriate league authorities and told me that he was politely declined, told that implementing such things was simply too expensive.

I don’t know how they judge relative expense.  I have heard of NFL football referred to as “Billionaires (team owner) hiring millionaires (players).”  I guess they don’t really believe in protecting their investments.

Me, I do the best I can to come up with personal counter-programming.  In the past, I have taken advantage of near-deserted libraries on days of major athletic events.  Now, be it academic work or intellectual indulgence, whatever I  want to read or know can be accessed from the computer in my lap.

This little essay will probably increase the bounty on my head and hasten the day I become a piñata.

However, I am grateful that I live in a land of free speech, so that I can write things like this.