A Baseball Fan's Take On The Super Bowl

This Is Not Going To Be Pretty

Ed Dykhuizen, Staff Writer

Well, thank God that football is over. Thank God.

Don't get me wrong, I like football, as a game. When the players actually do their thing on the field, it's a lot of bone-crunching fun, with plenty of opportunities for displays of graceful athleticism as well as dominating power. The game combines the visceral impact of boxing with the grace of tennis. In almost every game I see, I witness a few plays that are marvels of skill and perfectly balanced synchronicity.

It's everything that involves the word "football" besides the actual playing of the game that I dislike. I don't like the hoopla. I don't like the rabid fans. I don't like the players. I don't like the pre-game show, the post-game show, the half-time show, the corporate synergy tainting every single broadcasting bauble with the stench of advertisement.

If I could say one thing to the entire football world, it's "calm down." No game, no nothing could live up to the mania with which you all carry on. It's a great game, but it's no reason to act like this.

To me, sports is all about a twelve-year-old boy in the stands, grasping good luck charms, every fiber focused on making his favorite team win, by dint of pure will and unyielding faith. Ladies and gentlemen, that twelve-year-old boy was me. (Sob!)

Anyway, the point is, I think sports should have at least a touch of introvertedness to them. I like the self-assured calm that still pervades much of baseball, the kind of calm that indicates knowing confidence and maturity.

It all seems to have more substance when the yelps and "Woo!"s are interspersed with some moments of quiet and reflection. I love to see people get their lives wrapped around a sport. I just prefer it when whatever resultant irrational energy is channeled into exploring aspects of the sport and arguing about them rather than into getting drunk and screaming for three hours non-stop.

This brings me to my main beef with football -- the fans. I live in Minnesota, where nice, rational, quiet people get the chance to act like obsessive jackasses when football season rolls around. Every year, the Vikings lose in the playoffs. And every year a few lunatic Vikings fans are caught on camera crying, berating the team for betraying them once again.

Oh, grow up. The great blessing of sports is that when your favorite team wins, you can rejoice and revel. And when they lose, you can blow it off, saying, "Hey, it's just a sport. And there's always next year." Or you can argue about where they went wrong, and get mad at the coaches -- that's always fun.

But when you can't move on and are actually deeply affected by a loss, you have a problem. That means you're filling a hole in your life that should be occupied with love and community and the truly important things in life with what is, in essence, a trivial entertainment.

I know, I know, not all football fans are like that. And there are manic fans in every sport. See, it's a matter of degree: Only in football are there so many crazed numbskull fans to overshadow the rational ones and give football a distasteful persona.

This overly demonstrative, misdirected fervor has been transferred to football players. See, in baseball, which is my frame of reference, the pre-game introductions are mannered, respectful affairs. The players are on pins and needles with excitement, but they know to keep it inside, because it's more deeply affecting and meaningful that way.

This is true in a more general sense. For something to truly be treasured, some of the feeling has to occur inside yourself. It can't all be shouted out into the ether with the endlessly expressive "Woooo!!!"

Anyway, the point is -- did you see the Super Bowl pre-game introductions? They made me realize that I hate football players. I hate their peacock-like tendency to do irritating little dances at the slightest provocation. I hate their chest-thumping roars of meaningless, obscenity-laden blather, like a pack of bears making displays of dominance for the benefit of the females. I hate all the preening showmanship.

Basically, I say, don't advertise yourself. If you're great, prove it on the field. On occasion, a little personality, a little demonstrativeness can be cute on a sports field. But when everyone is in competition to do the best dance after getting a tackle, it just gets excessive and irritating. Yeah, you're great. Whoopee for you. What do want, a medal? Let's keep it in context. You're not a national hero. You?re not doing anything significant besides playing a freaking game.

And the mania has been transferred to the bells and whistles surrounding the game, particularly the Super Bowl. Because the game is apparently not enough on its own, we've got *NSYNC! Britney Spears! Nelly! Aerosmith! In a backstage skit: Ben Stiller! Adam Sandler! Chris Rock! As many famous people as we could heap on at once! Who cares who it is! Next up: Eminem and Gerald Ford in a duet of "Whip It!" Doesn't make sense? Who cares, they're famous!

Again, this seems to be the football spirit: Let's heap it all on as hard, as thick and as fast as humanly possible. Never mind that what makes these celebrities interesting (well, some of them are interesting, anyway) is more than can be encapsulated by having them sing a few bars of "Walk This Way" or engage in a sound bite of backstage tomfoolery. Whether any of it is actually interesting or entertaining is submerged under an orgiastic, frenetic piling on of empty stimulation.

And then there are the pre-game shows! The post-game shows! The specially created commercials! The hype analyzing the commercials! The hype analyzing the hype! Stop the presses -- this just in: People are excited about the Super Bowl! More about this burning issue for the next three hours. It's all such a massive expenditure of energy, effort, and excitement that any sensible person has to wonder if it's all worth it.

And then you see the game, and you realize that's it's not. Again, I'm not saying that football is a bad game -- far from it. It's just that it's not great enough to warrant all this attention. Baseball isn't either -- no game is. It makes you wonder what we're missing in modern life that makes us spill so much mania into a sport. Maybe we need a good war or something.

I guess the reason I feel passionately about all this is that my enjoyment of football is being compromised by all the sound and fury surrounding the game. I want to like it, I want to get into it, but I don't want to be in league with the face-painting, beer-guzzling behemoths that fill the stands and the brutal, mindless thugs on the field (who, in their defense, have been sucked into this perverse world by the exploitative machine of college sports). And I especially don't want to be dragged along by the steamroller of corporate-manufactured hype.

What About Baseball?

After all, this is a baseball column. And I do have some baseball-related conclusions about my distaste for football.

See, baseball fans have been crying in their imported beers for decades now about how baseball is no longer America's true pastime. They shed a tear thinking about the '50s and '60s, when New York teams won every year and no one really paid much attention to any of the other sports.

And maybe that was a fun time, even a better time. But times have changed, and America's True Pastime, football, has become a bloated, ugly, graceless gorilla by the machinations of the modern American spirit, in which overstimulation is the ultimate cure-all. Just think if baseball's dignified, history-drenched character was replaced by a world of face painters.

But this is the essential struggle of baseball right now, isn't it? Owners are crapping their pants because baseball teams aren't as profitable as other sports, and doesn't have command of that young demographic that they do. So the powers-that-be are constantly tinkering. Throw in interleague play and more rounds of playoffs. Teams are building fancy new "mallparks" with wacky features and tons of fun diversions in between innings. They're trying to make it like football, where the game on the field pales in comparison to the pretty lights and shiny things surrounding it.

I say, thank goodness baseball is no longer America's pastime. I hope fewer and fewer people come to the games. I want baseball to be a quiet, contemplative game, reserved for those of us who really want to become emotionally and deeply involved with its subtle intricacies. All the casual fans coming out for razzle-dazzle and spectacle can go see "Jurassic Park 3" instead, and leave the rest of us alone.

I say all this because I know that, despite what the owners or other alarmists tell you, baseball is not going to die out if it doesn't keep growing in popularity at the same maniacal pace that all sports did in the '80s and '90s. In the first half of the century, teams survived on a tiny fraction of the attendance that modern games attract.

Look at the saddest team in the majors, the Montreal Expos. They still attracted 926,272 paying customers last season. That's 11,000 people per game. Pathetic by Major League standards. But by any normal, rational standards, that's tremendous. 11,000 people coming together to watch one little show at one location, almost every single day of the week. That's unreal.

If baseball does continue to decrease in popularity, as I suspect (and hope) that it will, it will keep on just fine for my purposes. The World Series may not show up on CBS, but it'll be on ESPN. Baseball players may not get 20 million dollars a year, but they'll get 5 million. Baseball may not attract all of the best athletes. But they'll still be good; there will still be stars.

That last point is a bit of a worry. But, in part, it's irrelevant, and that's part of what makes baseball stand out -- it's not just about brute athletic ability. The greatest natural athlete of '90s baseball was probably Bo Jackson. The worst? Probably John Kruk. But John Kruk was a better baseball player than Jackson any day of the week.

But baseball is probably already losing the Dave Winfields, the athletes who can hack baseball, basketball and football with equal measures of brilliance. That is a shame, but I don't see anything anyone can do about it.

Anyway, I'm going to have to stop my ramblings on that sad little note. I'm trying to hold myself to under 2000 words. Any responses? I'll consider it a personal affront if I don't get at least a few messages that rebut with "Vikings RULE!!!!! You SUCK!!!!"

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