Super Bowl Weekend
We went to the big game
The most remarkable thing about the Superbowl was the noise—incessant and deafening and overwhelming. During the six or seven hours we spent at Sofi Stadium on Superbowl Sunday, there was not one single moment of respite or quiet. And, I suppose, that was to be expected. The Superbowl never tries to hide what it is—it’s a spectacle, loud and garish, extravagant and excessive.
At the NFL pre-game tailgate, bands like The Chainsmokers and Vintage Sound or something like that played on a stage at an unbearably high volume. In tents, there was food and drink and seating but every available seat in the shade was occupied and those occupants never ceded their territory so there was an interminable amount of standing and walking around. There were people, everywhere, from the moment we pulled into the Forum parking lot in a full bus, where we were joined by dozens if not hundreds of other full busses. Peppered throughout the lot were people holding signs with the names of various corporations—Microsoft and Visa and Loews and on and on.
It was bright and sunny and hot as we milled through security amidst a swarm of humanity. There were just so many people, many in football gear. Any number of times I had the distinct impression we were surrounded by a great many Trump voters. There were black people there too which was nice, but mostly it was a lot of white people with red faces and a lot of money or solid connections to get them into the game.
My wife Debbie and I were at the Superbowl as guests of PepsiCo because Debbie is friends with their chief design officer, a delightful and charming Italian man named Mauro who has a flair for fashion and evangelizing design. It was a whole weekend that began on Friday with a buffet dinner and a deejay and a private concert with Jennifer Hudson who is one hell of a live performer. Also, her outfit was flawless. The next day there were activities like a Porsche driving experience and shopping excursions and spa appointments. There was a gifting room where we received a pair of very comfortable Allbirds. There was all kinds of swag—water bottles and a clear plastic bag for the stadium and a jacket with the game logo. There was a PepsiCo market perpetually stocked with their products—chips and nuts and cereals and oatmeal and energy drinks and sodapops and did you know Pepsi makes the Starbucks ready to drink beverages? They do! The market was an amusing little confection because you could take whatever you wanted throughout the weekend. Mostly I just wanted to admire how neatly it was stocked, so I did.
At one point on Saturday afternoon, I got a notification from the app, and oh yes there was an app for the weekend, saying we could come down to the Pepsi Lounge to meet Shaq(uille O’Neal). I opted out because I was watching HGTV in our hotel room but I’m sure it was great. That night, there was a decadent dinner at Beauty & Essex which, I learned, was owned by Chris Santos. When he suddenly appeared, I was two cocktails in and whispered loudly, “Oh my god! It’s the Chopped guy.” And then he mentioned Chopped! As an avowed fan of reality tv and competitions especially, I was delighted, simply delighted.
You’ll be glad to know the food was great. I now trust Chef Santos’s Chopped judging even more. The highlight was a grilled cheese dumpling in a soupçon of tomato soup served in one of those fancy amuse bouche spoons. It was absolutely delicious. The next day was the big event. Debbie went to a “chalk talk” where Terry Bradshaw and Michael Strahan talked about football. I opted out of that, too! I’m not really into football for a great many reasons so I knew the game would be enough for me. And also, HGTV.
I grew up in Nebraska where there is no professional team but there are the Cornhuskers, the college team at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. On game days, Memorial Stadium becomes the third largest city in the state. It’s the best time to get shopping done because people who aren’t at the game are generally watching it. I have a father and two brothers and not to be all essential about gender but I gleaned a reasonable amount about the game from being around them and, later, dating men. When you are forced, for love or like, to ensure endless hours of SportsCenter repeating the same four stories over and over, you absorb a few things.
But I also watch the news. In addition to understanding a few fundamentals of the game, I know that the game takes an unbearable toll on players’ bodies and hundreds of former players have been diagnosed with CTE, a traumatic brain injury. I know the league is rife with racism at every level. Colin Kaepernick took a knee more than five years ago, to bring attention to police brutality and the fragility of black life and both the NFL and the country refused to allow him to get back up. It’s hard to enjoy a sport that takes so much and gives so little back to the people who make that sport’s popularity possible.
As Debbie and I wandered around the tailgate and then found our way to our very good seats in a beautiful, massive new stadium, I thought about how conflicted I felt. When Mickey Guyton sang the national anthem and absolutely nailed it, I refused to stand. It was uncomfortable because I was the only one I could see who stayed seated. There was this silent peer pressure to stand but I just stared into the distance and rode out my discomfort. The NFL and the military have a mutually beneficial relationship for many years so there was a huge flag unfurled over the field and salutes and fighter jets flying over the stadium. It reminded me, as it does every year, that there is a lot of rhetoric around patriotism and the Super Bowl that makes very little sense.
Throughout the game, I looked around at all the people milling about, wearing expensive NFL gear, drinking beer, eating stadium food and I knew, in my soul, that whatever they pay NFL players, from the top of the roster to the bottom, is not nearly enough. We got two hotdogs and a Pepsi and it cost like $50, no exaggeration. The sheer amount of money being spent in that stadium was unfathomable. I now understand that many Superbowl tickets go to corporations and sponsors and the like, but I assure you, there were all kinds of people who paid, at a minimum, $3,500 a ticket, just to get into the stadium and sit in the nosebleed seats. The luxury boxes were selling for up to $1 million each. Seats on the fifty-yard line were selling for tens of thousands of dollars. And somewhere, in his fancy box, a billionaire was thinking about all the money he was making on the backs of mostly black men whose careers last, on average, a bit more than three years because of how brutal the sport is. It was a stark reminder that most of us are just playthings for billionaires in one way or another.
But we were there for football (ish), and the game was competitive and well-played insofar as I understand what good football looks like. There was a lot of fun celebrity spotting—the guy who played Donnie on Fraser and Chrissy Metz from This is Us, and the mayor of Flavortown, Guy Fieri. I got recognized by fans, always a flattering delight, a surprising number of times because I always imagined that the Venn diagram of people attending the super bowl and people who appreciate my work are two separate, distant circles.
What I really cared about, was the half-time show—it was a celebration of the music I grew up and into adulthood with. The show did not disappoint; it was probably the best I’ve seen. For one, watching the stage be assembled with well-coordinated precision in a matter of minutes was impressive as hell. It went from a football field to a concert venue as if it were nothing at all. Picture it—three Chevy Impalas, gleaming, in front of three stages. And 70,000 people in a stadium, jumping up and down, rocking their faces off to the hip hop stars of my Gen-X-eration. It was incredible to feel that energy vibrating through the venue, and to see people, all different kinds of people, having this one glorious moment of appreciation in common.
After half-time, all the anticipation having built to a crescendo and now seeping slowly out of our bodies, the game seemed rather incidental. The Rams won. As a sort of inside joke, Debbie and I were wearing Chargers gear but we were still happy for the hometown team. And then it was time to leave. It was a bit of an ordeal, streaming out of the stadium in this sweaty throng. The Cincinnati fans were understandably dejected—the win would have meant so much to them. And most of them were fairly good natured about the loss. The people who were behaving badly were some of the exuberant Rams fans. They kept doing a lot of call and response cheering. “Who’s house? RAMS HOUSE!” It was cute for a few minutes, then it was annoying, and then this one young man started taunting Cincinnati fans who were just minding their own sorrowful business.
As we made our way to the parking lot where the bus was waiting, the throng only grew larger and larger and the petty antagonisms rose through the air, becoming a fever pitch. After a day in the hot sun, drinking too much, hopped up on adrenaline, a great many people behaved very badly. It was disappointing in that I kept wondering why the game, the grand experience of it all, wasn’t enough. There were street food vendors crowding the edge of the egress, so we could hear bacon-wrapped hotdogs sizzling on their grills. We could smell the salt and grease and it smelled great. Rams fans were crowing as if they themselves had been on the field. And then, a woman in a wheelchair was trying to force her way through the crowd. She hit a woman in front of her with her cane, and that woman lost her entire mind. She started kicking the woman in the wheelchair and I was so stunned I said, “What the fuck?” loudly. And no one really stopped to do anything and the woman in the wheelchair smiled in a kind of dazed, vacant way, swinging her cane even more. The kicker’s boyfriend started jawing nonsense. It was a mess.
And then, just past the edge of the stadium grounds, I realized my phone was missing. I had been pickpocketed. I felt violated for a few minutes and then completely adrift because I do so many things with my phone—I read on it, I play games, I text and check e-mails. It’s my watch and weathervane. In an instant, I was back in like 1997. We got on the bus and waited another hour or so for the last-minute stragglers to show up. I wasn’t too stressed about the phone because I had Apple Care +, which covers theft and loss. A week later, I had a new phone and it only cost me a small deductible. Before that, though, we were on the bus, ears ringing, worn out, feeling deflated in that way one does after experiencing an intense amount of stimulation for an extended amount of time. Debbie and I looked at each other and smiled tiredly the way always do after one of our adventures. However conflicted I felt at times, I also had a lot of fun, because of the friends we spent time with, because both Debbie and I were fish out of water so we made the best of it, together. Eventually, the bus slowly lurched out of the parking lot. An hour later, we checked out of the hotel. We went home.
I really appreciated your Super Bowl write up. While reading, I felt like I was there; and your thoughts on the violence and degradation of the players echo my own. I never liked football; it is too reminiscent of Roman entertainment. (Then the released information about CTE confirmed my antipathy.) Thanks!
Thank you for the inside "scoop" on the SB. I have never been and now never will, even if I had the money to do so. You and I probably have the same level of understanding of the game because frankly I don't care about it. My husband used to want to teach me but gave up due to my lack of interest and complaint about the violence. I have daughters, but if I had sons, I wouldn't want them to play football. Reading your write-up brought the game to me. I could even smell the bacon sizzling on the grills.