My Favorite Super Bowl

 

 

 Allegedly, some 200 million people will watch the Super Bowl today. I suspect millions will be girls and young women hoping for glances of Taylor Swift, but still…. I will not be watching; I find gridiron football boring. It’s too slow, too hyped, and non-strategic for my tastes.

 

I do, however, have a tale about my favorite Super Bowl. I was a Fulbright scholar posted in Wellington, New Zealand, when George W. Bush was about to take office in the United States. Back in New Zealand, Dubya’s team was throwing its weight around and trying to erase the presence of outgoing U.S. Ambassador Carol Braun Mosley. She was enormously popular among New Zealanders, so the Bushwhackers were anxious to show some good ‘ole Texas hospitality. Let’s just say they started off on the wrong boot.   

 

The New Zealand staff was—key word—ordered to attend a Super Bowl party at the United States Embassy. So too were all American Fulbright recipients in the country, both senior scholars such as me, and those undergrads and graduate students designated as junior Fulbrighters. By gum, everyone was going to be treated to hot dogs, beer, potato chips, hamburgers, and all the fixins. All flown in from the US of A.

 

Among New Zealanders, football is soccer and they didn’t know gridiron from a waffle iron. In January, a summer month Down Under, attentions are focused on Union Rugby and the fate of its national team, the All Blacks–named for their uniforms. Jonah Lomu was the big star there and, at 6’4” 265 pounds, he was literally a big one. Nor is a group of academics and wannabes exactly your average red-meat gridiron crowd. The Bush advance team was ensconced in a side room watching the game on what was then  a rare big screen TV. They were screaming their heads off, while the rest of us awkwardly milled about by the food and wine table.

 

I decided to break the ice by walking into a crowd of New Zealanders and introducing myself. I was charmed when one senior liaison asked me, “Whom do you prefer in the gridiron match?” I replied that I didn’t care for U.S. football, didn’t know who was playing, and had come to learn about and from New Zealanders. The ice melted. Soon, other Americans joined in and a lovely transnational conversation broke put. We were having so much fun that we strategically decided that we would pair up and take turns entering the TV room to make our presence known. This would mask the “jolly good chinwag” we were having at the expense of the clueless Yanks engrossed in the game.

 

One of the topics of hilarity was the food. Hot dogs are not a thing in New Zealand and, as it transpired, the rolls didn’t arrive in time so the embassy ordered what they hoped would be an approximation from a Wellington bakery. Epic fail! They were about two inches too long on each end, had about a five-inch diameter, and an overbaked biscuit-like texture. My new friends declared that the “sausages” were “interesting,” but wondered if Americans always placed them in “buns.” That was their polite way of saying they were terrible. We explained the miscalculation and had another good laugh.

 

I had no idea who won that day, though I was surprised that the team from Baltimore was called the Ravens, not the Colts. My highlight was meeting New Zealanders, hearing about Jonah Lomu, and discussing politics and lifestyles. Later, a gentleman I met there took me to a rugby match to see Lomu in action. He was everything he was cracked up to be, as dominant in rugby as Secretariat was in horse racing. Outside of the America, many have called him the greatest athlete in sports history and I surely not dispute it. (Lomu tragically died of kidney disease at age 40.)  

 

Let the record show that the Ravens won that Super Bowl, a fact I looked up on the Internet as I didn’t see a score in the Wellington Post. No matter, no one at the National Library where I posted said a word about the “match.” Actually, I’ve not seen a  football game since the early 1970s. Nevertheless, every Super Bowl day I smile and think of my trip to the U.S. Embassy in Wellington, where I learned the magic that comes from making cultural connections rather than presuming an Americentric world. Go All Blacks!

 

Rob Weir

 

Here’s a highlight video of Lomu in action.     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsXTa7UCGlk&t=2s

 

The haka, which is performed before each All Blacks match. I’d be quaking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiKFYTFJ_kw