Last year's Super Bowl, the National Football League claims, has a "potential" audience of one billion viewers. In reality, it probably drew about 100 million viewers - mostly in North America. America's big game is keen on proving it is also the world's big game. But American football - do you mind if I just call it "football" for the duration of this column? - may be a tough sell.
Super Bowls have a nasty habit of being anti-climactic. This year may not be the case. The New England Patriots face the New York Giants, in addition to matching two cities that are natural rivals, and the Patriots face history, and could possibly be the first team to go undefeated since the 1972 Miami Dolphins. But despite the NFL's earnest efforts to convince the broader world of its appeal, there seems to be no room in Europe's attention span for America's uniquely violent spectator sport.
Football has a colorful and uniquely American history. What evolved as an American version of rugby in the 19th century was instantly embraced on college campuses, popular at tony Ivy League schools and big Midwestern state schools alike. It was a rough and tumble youthful passion that the ruling class would enjoy and move along. Professional football from the NFL's birth in 1920 at a Canton, Ohio car dealership, had a decidedly gritty working class reputation. Its earliest seasons were played mostly in tough industrial towns like Akron, Decatur, and Green Bay. It struggled for attention, which at the time in America was focused on baseball, boxing, and horse racing.
It didn't really take off until after World War II. Part of it was that it was born for the nascent medium of television, with its stops and starts and set pieces. But more so, it reflected the times. The game is incredibly hierarchical, like the well-oiled capitalist machines of U.S. Steel or Ford Motors in their corporate heyday. There are the executives, the coaches, who make all the decisions. There is the glory-boy, the quarterback, who manages on the field. There are microspecialists like place kickers and punters. And none of it would work without the working class grunts, the offensive and defensive linemen who anonymously crash into one another the whole game through.
The league itself operated the same way, though ironically it came to fit the old joke that in America, professional sports is socialism for the wealthy. The teams are owned by a handful of wealthy guys, who keep things close to maximize interest and profits. It can be a stiflingly conservative organization, slow to change. It has been frequently challenged by upstart leagues that sought to liven up the sport.
One was the American Football League, which launched in 1960, and became so successful that eventually its champion and the NFL's champ would meet in the first Super Bowl, 1967, followed shortly by the official merger between to the two.
This year, the Patriots are the early favorites to win, and for New England fans - a sports mad region that was saddled with an embarrassingly bad team for generations - the team's success since 2001 is still hard to believe. The rest of the nation, however, is fed up with the team. They are boring, and worse, many insist they cheat: in the first game of the season the team was found videotaping their opponents' signals, producing information of no real value but tarring what is an otherwise historic season. But much of the griping is no more than jealousy that such a well-balanced league can have such a stand-out organization.
The Giants are one of the more surprising teams to come along in awhile. They managed to win three playoff games on the road, including one in frozen Green Bay in which the temperature got down to -20 Celsius. They "led" by Eli Manning, the usually underwhelming kid brother of the Indianapolis Colt's star QB Peyton Manning. Eli is a kid that seems to be genuinely rattled by his own fans, perhaps explaining in part the Giants very unusual 3-5 record at home.
They face a Patriots team that seems to effortlessly do everything right. They have fast and smart receivers. When they are covered, they can put up a running game as they did against the San Diego Chargers in the AFC Championship match. They are unstoppable when quarterback Tom Brady is on, and still pretty awesome when he is not (perhaps the secret to their offensive success is that he knows when which is which, and adapts as such). Their linebackers may be a bit slow and aged, but they're smart.
But the drama on Sunday is heightened by what happened on the final game of the season, played only on December 29. The Giants were the last chance to stop the Pats from going undefeated in the regular season. Both teams already had playoff berths, and could've rested their starters, but chose to put it all on the line in one of the best games of the year. The Pats prevailed 38-35 - coming from a 12-point deficit at one point - in easily the tightest game the Pats faced this year.
By Christopher Marcisz
