I won’t be watching the Super Bowl. I could get on my moral high horse and say that I’m boycotting it because CBS is going to show an anti-choice commercial—the same CBS that rejected a gay rights ad, by the way—but the honest truth is simpler: football bores me. So I’ll be AWOL while more than 100 million Americans sate themselves on the game, commercials, pork rinds, and cheap beer. But this time of the year I do recall the last time I was even in the same room as a Super Bowl broadcast: January of 2001.
The NFL hasn’t done well exporting its product to the rest of the world, which insists on seeing “football” as soccer. The rules of what the global community calls “American gridiron” are as incomprehensible to most as the intricacies of cricket are to Yanks. Nine years ago I was a Fulbright scholar living in Wellington, New Zealand, and was (literally) coerced into viewing the 2001 game. I received a formal “invitation” from the U.S. Embassy to attend a Super Bowl party; less formally the local Fulbright office was told to “strongly advise” all American scholars that it would be a “good idea” for them to attend. One of the things I particularly dislike about football is that it’s intrinsically intertwined with the kind of religion, nationalism, and militarism values nexus that’s antithetical to, well, the kind of person who believes in the goals of the Fulbright program. Nationalism was indeed the reason why American scholars were commanded to attend the embassy’s Super Bowl party. We were there to project American solidarity before nervous New Zealanders. The Super Bowl came just weeks after the Supreme Court anointed George W. Bush as the victor in the disputed 2000 election. This was horrible news in Wellington; Kiwis liked Bill Clinton and they adored Carol Mosley-Braun, his ambassador to New Zealand, and had hoped that an Al Gore victory would mean she would stay on.
Super Sunday did not begin well. In a harbinger of what would become President Bush’s paranoid style of dealing with the world, I was accosted by a U.S. Marine for taking pictures of the outside of the embassy. Apparently my photos constituted a “security risk.” Inside, the mood was one of startling and tense contrasts—officious members of the Bush transition team looking like Stepford diplomats with their paint-on smiles and matching flag lapel pins stood on one side of the room, and the skeletal and disconsolate remnants of the Clinton staff was hanging out with dazed New Zealand staffers on the other.
Someone on the Bush team had gone to considerable trouble and expense to make Super Bowl Sunday a “typical” American event, but this proved hilariously hard to replicate in a place over 7,100 miles from Los Angeles. There were, for instance, hotdogs, which became one-bite items left on plates. Seconds were politely refused when offered by uniformed waiters and with good reason: the wieners were what one might get if a bratwurst was blended with corrugated cardboard. They were, however, positively scrumptious compared to the “rolls,” rock-hard zeppelins that were several inches longer and thicker than the hotdogs and might have been fresh a week or so earlier. The less said about the ketchup and the relish, the better.
All I recall about the game was that it was the first time I ever saw a theater-sized flat-screen TV panel. To say that academics are not your typical football crowd is an understatement; if they like sports at all, most prefer baseball’s cerebral dimensions to football’s brute physicality. I had to ask who was playing and was surprised to learn that one of the teams was the Baltimore Ravens. I was vaguely aware that the Colts had fled Baltimore, but I had no idea there was another club on the Chesapeake named for Edgar Allen Poe’s poetic feathered foil.
The Fulbrighters preferred chatting with each other about our respective research projects and paid scant attention to the game. From the adjoining room we could hear the flag-lapel crowd hooting and booing. To complete the ghettoized scenario, the baffled New Zealander staff was huddling en masse by the food table. I struck up a conversation with one young diplomat, who asked me the charmingly phrased question, “Whom do you favor in the gridiron match?” When I told him I had no idea who was playing, had no interest in the outcome, and was far more interested in learning about New Zealand life, his face brightened and the verbal floodgates opened. In the true spirit of Fulbright ideals, a cross-cultural exchange ensued over topics such as national idiosyncrasies, film, books, and cultural misunderstandings. The food came under the microscope, with New Zealanders proclaiming the baked beans tasty, the potato chips (“crisps”) too salty, and the hotdogs and coleslaw unidentifiable.
One man looked furtively over his shoulder and confessed that he and other New Zealand staffers had been “ordered” to attend the event, and that none had ever before seen American football. Anxiety ran deep over the highhanded attitudes of the incoming American staff. (History proved the staffers prescient.) As conversation gravitated toward politics we Fulbright scholars were asked to explain the Bush-Gore election. (None of us could!) Every now and then several of us would wander into the adjoining room for appearances’ sake, but the only part of the broadcast that received favorable comment from New Zealanders was the halftime extravaganza—back then, Britney Spears was all the rage in New Zealand as well. I don’t recall who actually won the game, but I do remember an impromptu lesson on the glories of Jonah Lumu and New Zealand rugby. To this day I follow New Zealand’s national rugby team, the All Blacks, more than the the NFL. Thus, while millions of Americans are indulging in today’s game, I’ll retreat to my memories. I do confess, though, I hope there are some of those nine-year-old hotdogs hanging around. I’d like to ship them to CBS executives in the hope that they come down with botulism.
The NFL hasn’t done well exporting its product to the rest of the world, which insists on seeing “football” as soccer. The rules of what the global community calls “American gridiron” are as incomprehensible to most as the intricacies of cricket are to Yanks. Nine years ago I was a Fulbright scholar living in Wellington, New Zealand, and was (literally) coerced into viewing the 2001 game. I received a formal “invitation” from the U.S. Embassy to attend a Super Bowl party; less formally the local Fulbright office was told to “strongly advise” all American scholars that it would be a “good idea” for them to attend. One of the things I particularly dislike about football is that it’s intrinsically intertwined with the kind of religion, nationalism, and militarism values nexus that’s antithetical to, well, the kind of person who believes in the goals of the Fulbright program. Nationalism was indeed the reason why American scholars were commanded to attend the embassy’s Super Bowl party. We were there to project American solidarity before nervous New Zealanders. The Super Bowl came just weeks after the Supreme Court anointed George W. Bush as the victor in the disputed 2000 election. This was horrible news in Wellington; Kiwis liked Bill Clinton and they adored Carol Mosley-Braun, his ambassador to New Zealand, and had hoped that an Al Gore victory would mean she would stay on.
Super Sunday did not begin well. In a harbinger of what would become President Bush’s paranoid style of dealing with the world, I was accosted by a U.S. Marine for taking pictures of the outside of the embassy. Apparently my photos constituted a “security risk.” Inside, the mood was one of startling and tense contrasts—officious members of the Bush transition team looking like Stepford diplomats with their paint-on smiles and matching flag lapel pins stood on one side of the room, and the skeletal and disconsolate remnants of the Clinton staff was hanging out with dazed New Zealand staffers on the other.
Someone on the Bush team had gone to considerable trouble and expense to make Super Bowl Sunday a “typical” American event, but this proved hilariously hard to replicate in a place over 7,100 miles from Los Angeles. There were, for instance, hotdogs, which became one-bite items left on plates. Seconds were politely refused when offered by uniformed waiters and with good reason: the wieners were what one might get if a bratwurst was blended with corrugated cardboard. They were, however, positively scrumptious compared to the “rolls,” rock-hard zeppelins that were several inches longer and thicker than the hotdogs and might have been fresh a week or so earlier. The less said about the ketchup and the relish, the better.
All I recall about the game was that it was the first time I ever saw a theater-sized flat-screen TV panel. To say that academics are not your typical football crowd is an understatement; if they like sports at all, most prefer baseball’s cerebral dimensions to football’s brute physicality. I had to ask who was playing and was surprised to learn that one of the teams was the Baltimore Ravens. I was vaguely aware that the Colts had fled Baltimore, but I had no idea there was another club on the Chesapeake named for Edgar Allen Poe’s poetic feathered foil.
The Fulbrighters preferred chatting with each other about our respective research projects and paid scant attention to the game. From the adjoining room we could hear the flag-lapel crowd hooting and booing. To complete the ghettoized scenario, the baffled New Zealander staff was huddling en masse by the food table. I struck up a conversation with one young diplomat, who asked me the charmingly phrased question, “Whom do you favor in the gridiron match?” When I told him I had no idea who was playing, had no interest in the outcome, and was far more interested in learning about New Zealand life, his face brightened and the verbal floodgates opened. In the true spirit of Fulbright ideals, a cross-cultural exchange ensued over topics such as national idiosyncrasies, film, books, and cultural misunderstandings. The food came under the microscope, with New Zealanders proclaiming the baked beans tasty, the potato chips (“crisps”) too salty, and the hotdogs and coleslaw unidentifiable.
One man looked furtively over his shoulder and confessed that he and other New Zealand staffers had been “ordered” to attend the event, and that none had ever before seen American football. Anxiety ran deep over the highhanded attitudes of the incoming American staff. (History proved the staffers prescient.) As conversation gravitated toward politics we Fulbright scholars were asked to explain the Bush-Gore election. (None of us could!) Every now and then several of us would wander into the adjoining room for appearances’ sake, but the only part of the broadcast that received favorable comment from New Zealanders was the halftime extravaganza—back then, Britney Spears was all the rage in New Zealand as well. I don’t recall who actually won the game, but I do remember an impromptu lesson on the glories of Jonah Lumu and New Zealand rugby. To this day I follow New Zealand’s national rugby team, the All Blacks, more than the the NFL. Thus, while millions of Americans are indulging in today’s game, I’ll retreat to my memories. I do confess, though, I hope there are some of those nine-year-old hotdogs hanging around. I’d like to ship them to CBS executives in the hope that they come down with botulism.
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