Dear Jesus: Please Keep Us Safe, This, And Every Super Sunday
Reflections On The Transformation Of America's Biggest Annual Sports, Entertainment, And Corporate Orgy, In An Age Of Hyper Paranoia And Security
Photo by Gene Gallin on Unsplash
I should get this out of the way.
I’m not a football guy.
Just hearing the disembodied voices of any television Sports announcer at any game droning on about pass attempts and completions, yards gained or lost, sacks, rush attempts, receiving yards per reception, (or in one instance last night, hearing an announcer talk in excruciating detail about the advantages of changing the length of a lineman’s cleats on a slippery, painted field) my eyes glaze over.
It wasn’t always that way.
In ancient times in the mid-60s, I was a kid that enthusiastically dressed out in full gear for numerous games for a couple of years in the YMCA’s “Gray-Y” after-school sports program.
A local athlete and College student from the University of Richmond named Richard Epps volunteered his time as both a coach and role model, taking unskilled youth and giving them their first opportunity to understand and develop the specific skills to participate in seasonal Sports.
It didn’t hurt that Richard would always roar into the school parking lot, adjacent to the baseball fields and basketball courts at Ridge Elementary School, always slightly late, in his impossibly cool green Ford Mustang.
Richard was handsome and looked like he could have been a member of the Dave Clark Five. Most importantly he was coordinated, throwing footballs with perfect spirals and impossibly high arcs, demonstrating the hook shot in basketball with grace and perfect precision, sweeping the hair and sweat out of his eyes. He showed us how to grip a football with our fingers over the threads and release it by slightly spinning the ball clockwise as it left the palm.
My fourth-grade male classmates were all in, so I really had no choice. It seemed clear: participate in Gray-Y or be an outcast.
The advantages of participation seemed obvious at the time.
Football was beginning to seriously compete with baseball and basketball as entertainment in the American consciousness, as the NFL and rival AFL were broadcasting games on the Sports divisions of the three major networks. That was our YouTube in the mid-60s.
Great players, almost superhuman, like Bart Starr of The Green Bay Packers, and Johnny Unitas of the Baltimore Colts, showed pre-teen youth how to excel at a rugged and difficult game. I had at one time, before a house fire, my original Wilson football helmet, autographed by the great Johnny U on a visit to the Chrysler Plymouth dealership In Richmond. One of my fellow player’s fathers was a salesman there and graciously loaded up his station wagon and hauled us all down to the dealership to meet our hero.
I’m only guessing, but maybe players at that time, before sports agents, didn’t get paid as well before the two major leagues were incorporated, so even star players needed a side hustle. Johnny Unitas brought out a long line of fans young and old.
Unitas, in coat and tie, sat grimly in a folding chair on his off day in a car dealer’s showroom, behind a nondescript table with less well-known rival player Andy Styntula.
If the point was to sell cars, it was moot, no one was paying attention.
Unitas and Styntula sat for hours, patiently autographing countless footballs, objects, and fan cards. We might as well have been going to meet the Beatles.
Less cool, but essential, were the coaches, like Vince Lombardi of the Green Bay Packers.
Packers games, due to star quarterback Bart Starr, had the unique distinction of being legendary in their own time, in no small part due to Lombardi’s coaching genius, stalking the sidelines, admonishing even the star players for not having their attention fully focused on the game. It was seeing a coach like Lombardi that made me completely grateful that I had Richard Epps.
Lombardi, who the Super Bowl trophy was named for, looked like your angry grandfather, stalking the sidelines, screaming, ranting, bending the players to his will, as the mud and blood splattered, the bones cracked, and the weather intruded on the field conditions. Winning, he said wasn’t everything, it was the only thing.
Football at that time was exclusively an outdoor sport, there were no stadiums that were hermetically sealed from weather and air currents, or fields that were carefully and meticulously groomed and decorated with paint. Every play executed added more green chlorophyll, brown soil, and blood to the jerseys. The players literally wore real turf.
In the 1970s, when the first sealed environment was constructed to play the game in the Houston Astrodome, real turf, no doubt enormously expensive to maintain, was replaced by astroturf. Real turf, it was said, slowed the game down. I don’t know if I’m the only one who feels this way, but the intensity of old-school football faded away as players no longer fought the environment. It was safer and more secure. Even the coaches seemed to back away from the “Lombardi model”. You had the grim and quiet demeanor of Tom Landry, gentlemanly, meticulously dressed, as an exemplar of a winning coach. Compared to Lombardi, Landry made a safe space for a future championship team in the Dallas Cowboys.
My father and I bonded over football as Coach Epps sent multiple mimeographed play diagrams home to absorb with their specially coded names and numbers.
Unfortunately, it was all Greek to me, the curved lines indicating directions to run, block or rush, Xs and Os indicating offense and defense, (we were obligated to play both for the experience and lack of numbers) and the overall strategy of a particular play did not translate to real-life play. Diagrams aren’t real life.
It annoyed me more than my father could scan the complicated diagrams, and see my place in them, and I couldn’t. In actual play, it all happened too fast to think ahead, so I faked it. On every play I was missing the eligible receiver I was supposed to interfere with playing defense, and almost always failed to block bigger kids who ran me over to get to Rusty Harper, our quarterback, on offensive plays.
I was actively failing and felt shame.
Despite that reality, after our first season, in which I valiantly struggled, I got an award, a paper certificate for “Most Improved Player” which made my father enormously happy.
That season was the first time I felt the wrath of sports parents, and even more weirdly, angry mothers standing on the sidelines screaming at me, apparently because they felt I had personally betrayed and subverted the glory and potential of their kids, who were more naturally talented.
Coach Epps implored me to keep at it and asked my father to continue to go over the plays, that is, to keep “improving,” but like math, it just didn’t take. I was small, thin, and uncoordinated. My fate was sealed when, in what I felt was a massive betrayal by my personal hero Richard Epps, football season morphed into basketball season, and I was relegated to the permanent status of being on the “B” team with the nerdish uncoordinated kids.
Clearly, I had no future in Sports.
It haunted me for years and still does to a degree.
Despite the barrier of time that has passed and my acceptance of the fact that I’m just not interested in sports or football because it serves as a painful reminder of my failure to succeed, I still feel drawn to at least watch the Super Bowl.
There is, clearly, no resemblance between the mid-1960s era of Sports and the NFL to today's cynically marketed, entirely corporate-controlled entertainment orgies.
Perhaps the scales tipped in the 80s era of trickle-down economics and the ascension of the corporation as a domestic overlord. There is no doubt that today’s NFL, in a powerful alliance with Hollywood, The US Military, The US Government, and a powerful merchandising and video content arm is a monster. I couldn’t even paste NFL-owned content for replay on this Substack, nor can anyone on any other website without express permission.
The strangest “pre-game” content I came across, waiting for the actual kickoff, was a press conference held some days earlier, emceed by the head of security for the NFL, in conjunction with The Department Of Homeland Security.
It was a grim affair, with the main message being that, at the largest corporate and annual professional Sports event in the country, with 70,000 attendees, the potential for the largest security threat in the country exists, but not to worry, the DHS has your back. That message directly contradicted the fact, announced at the same press conference, that there was no credible evidence that there were any threats that would affect the safety of the players or fans.
Attendees were urged to charge their phones prior to entering the stadium and to be on alert for, I kid you not, human traffickers. If you see something, say something. Every attendee, the DHS assured us, is screened and vetted. Canine handlers were at the ready to sniff out chemicals, homemade bombs, or other dangerous weapons of mass destruction. The air itself was being tested. Cyber security was deployed, and resources and law enforcement personnel were to prevent the sale and distribution of the black market, unapproved official NFL merchandise.
The NFL basically gave over security autonomy to DHS.
If the government spent a tenth of the resources they spend at the Super Bowl on, I don’t know, say, the safety of rail workers and citizens that live near the rails, operating trains with Civil War era brake systems, maybe REAL threats to the safety and security of the country could be thwarted.
God forbid that Ice-T, Gordon Ramsay, Sir Paul McCartney, or LeBron James should have their privileged attendance threatened by human traffickers. It’s clear the corporate / government axis is there to make sure their real investments, the celebrity moneymakers, bankers, and VIPS, should see no risk or harm.
The US military, always strangely celebrated nearly annually at the Super Bowl in expensive and glowing tributes, were this year idolized in a pointless military flyover dripping in identity politics and jingoism. It was a “History making moment” because all of the pilots, the ones who drop the bombs that cause all the death and destruction in actual wars in real life, are female.
Cue the national anthem and it’s like Jesus himself ordained the Blue Angelic fleet as a sign from the heavens that, at least in the corporeal realm of sacred football stadiums, all is safe and well.
Speaking of Jesus, even he was deftly marketed as another commodity at the Super Bowl, with seemingly nothing to sell but a message of hope, love, and kindness. The ads were apparently sponsored by an organization called “He Gets Us”, and when it comes to the NFL and The Super Bowl, even Jesus, the man who stormed into the temple and flushed out the corrupt merchants and moneylenders pays dearly. The organization that paid for the ad has some controversy swirling around it:
“At first glance, there appears to be no monetary motivation for the ads, with the organization's website stating, "He Gets Us is a movement to reintroduce people to the Jesus of the Bible and his confounding love and forgiveness. We believe his words, example, and life have relevance in our lives today and offer hope for a better future."
The news organization KCUR also listed many recipients of funding from The Signatry, and despite the claims that He Gets Us isn't aligned with any churches or denominations, there are quite a few major churches on this list.
Along with that, Lever News reported that the Servant Foundation has donated more than $50 million to the Alliance Defending Freedom, an organization declared a hate group by the SPLC that is intensely anti-LGBTQ+ and has played a role in legislature pushing to ban abortion and allow for discrimination against LGBTQ+ people.”
I’ve lived now through 57 Superbowls, and I’m genuinely astounded that it turned from sports-focused into a powerful manipulating tool of propaganda used by the government, the military, and pseudo-religious organizations that might be aligned with Christo-fascism.
Interestingly, as I was watching a Fox Channel broadcasting the game exclusively, another Fox-affiliated news station broke in with a bulletin from the Pentagon that yet another “object” had been shot down, somewhere, out of an abundance of caution, but no details as to the parameters of the threat. What, the corporate media gasp breathlessly, is going on up there?
I suppose that was a great comfort to pop superstar singer Rhianna, levitating with her dancers on platforms in the high altitudes of the hermetically sealed, DHS-secured, State Farm Insurance Stadium, singing 13 years of pop anthems to Jesus, the Air Force, and whoever else was tuned in.
I can almost hear Vince Lombardi screaming from the heavens “What The Hell Is Going On Down There ?!”