You’re all going to hate me, but I don’t care about the Super Bowl. I just don’t. Maybe it’s anti-American. This year it’s anti-New England, and anti-social, some might even say borderline sociopath. I still don’t care.
It’s not because I’m a girl in the worst sense of the word, heightened estrogen levels have not blocked my ability to understand sports. It’s not because I have better things to do than watch eleven guys play full contact tag-because I don’t.
If you ask me the real gems of televised Super Bowl coverage, or any championship game for that matter, are not in any highlight reel, they’re in the post game coverage.
Where else can you see muscle-bound giants crying harder than when Macaulay Culkin dies in My Girl. Where else can you see red-nosed team owners slur their way through speeches, coaches’ and players’ embraces become uncomfortably long, and self-important commissioners bestowing trophies as if they were bestowing knighthood?
I might not watch every minute of these games, but I yearn for the post-game interviews. Sweat-covered , distracted, players layered with freshly printed championship hats and t-shirts, parade around with their uniformed brood, spitting out every cliché ever spoken about team work and persistence. Sports reporters stomp around the field, referencing the names of players wives and children, partly to show their deep knowledge of the team, but mostly to rub their mock team intimacy in the faces of the filthy masses watching from home. Anchors are no better, bringing their banter to new lows in both information and pretension.
Even more entertaining than the reporters are the poor slobs they stick microphones in front of. What better time to make your television debut than after several hours of binge drinking at a seedy bar.For these reaction interviews camera crews rely on two staples of post-game idiocy, the drunkest guy in the place and the equally drunk girl in the pink hat.
After cutting to footage of hordes of number one signs and raised bottles of Miller Light, these representatives of Patriots or Red Sox or [insert name here] Nation, bring stellar commentary on the night’s events.Such insights as “It was awesome!” and “Go Pats!” round out the male arsenal of game analysis, along with equally riveting gestures toward the jersey number they so proudly wear.
For female fans on the street, the pink hat with team logo tells the world that it is possible to be a true sports fan, while retaining all the femininity of the color pink. Women in freshly-bought jerseys and an even more recently found affinity for the team, relay that “just jumped on the bandwagon for the excuse to get plastered” or the “I thought guys might like me if I pretended to be interested in football” perspective.
The content of their rambling always references the team in question as “we,” as in “I’m so excited that we won,” as it is undeniable that their recent purchases did give the team that extra push it needed to trump their competitor.
I guess it’s not the Super Bowl itself that I hate. I can appreciate the skill required to punt a leather ball through a couple of sticks or fake out a swift-footed three hundred pound man-really, I can. But, what suckers me in to plopping down in front of a specially purchased, soon to be returned TV on game day is the car crash of a post-game show-I want to look away, but I just can’t.