Super Duper
We just watched Super Bowl LVIII. That means the first Super Bowl was in 1967 and it was between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs. It was a rout in favor of the powerful Packers of the NFL, whereas the Chiefs were from the expansion team AFL. It’s all about the NFL these days and there are five teams (Patriots, Steelers, Cowboys, Broncos, and 49ers) with more than the six appearances in the Super Bowl that the Chiefs have had. With tonight’s win in LVIII, the Chiefs become the seventh NFL team with at least four wins. The others are the Patriots, Steelers, 49ers, Cowboys, Packers and Giants, in that order. I am not sure how many Super Bowls out of 58 that I have watched, but I am going to guess that my first one wasn’t until at least 1977 (being overseas and then in college and graduate school). In the ensuing 47 years, I would guess that I might have sat through at most ten of those games. Let’s be honest, I am not exactly a fan of professional football.
Today, my friend Mike gave me a quiz about the twenty most watched shows on TV over the past year. It seems that with the exception of #15, the Academy Awards Show, all the other 19 were all NFL games. Even the Rose Bowl, the Cotton Bowl or the Army/Navy game didn’t break into the lineup. The NFL had 2022 revenues for its 32 teams in total of $18.6 billion. The steady upward trend of those revenues ratchet upwards at a slightly steeper slope since 2014 and with the exception of 2020, due to COVID game cancellations, it has just kept ticking upward. Roger Goodall, the Commissioner, earns $65 million per year and the top coaches earn $10-12 million. That’s nothing compared to the best players like Patrick Mahomes, the three-time MVP (including tonight) of the Super Bowl, who signed a $450 million 10-year contract that broke all NFL records. All this is to say, the NFL is big business and it is as ingrained in Americana as anything can be.
No number of concussions or other traumatic injuries to players seems to deter the players or the public from thinking that football is the greatest thing ever produced in the United States. And for the life of me, I can’t understand why. I can understand that human beings have aggressive and competitive tendencies and that modern society does not allow those tendencies to be manifested in daily activity enough to satisfy the human urges, and that the natural outlet is through professional sports. Thousands of years ago, the same thing happened in Rome and elsewhere except it took the somewhat more raw form of the gladiatorial arena and was a blood sport for real instead of just by coincidence, as happens in the NFL.
Today, my friend Steve sent me an article from The Guardian that addressed the issue of why people vote for Donald Trump. The article taught me a new word, which was “extrinsic”, which is the opposite of intrinsic and means something coming from the outside. The specific reference is about extrinsic versus intrinsic values that guide people in their lives. It seems that psychologists have bothered to define those people who are one versus the other. The people driven by intrinsic values are prone to empathy, intimacy, self-acceptance and embrace change, are interested in human rights and equality, and generally protective of other people and the planet. The people who go the other way towards the extrinsic are instead all about prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth. The article feels Trump is “King of the Extrinsics”. This may be the best article I have read that tries to explain what we are going through in the nation at the moment. We are all painfully aware that there is a dramatic difference of perspective right now between the political right and the political left. I know we like to say that difference is between the conservatives and the liberals, but that is a harder and harder set of definitions to justify based on what is happening in Congress and the politically-motivated media. I am finding it more compelling to think of the differences as the right being extrinsic and the left being intrinsic in its value orientation.
I hate so say it, because many of my friends and family truly love football, and especially the NFL brand, but learning what I have today about the financial parameters of the NFL and its main participants, and being forced to admit that the NFL is unlikely to just fade away due to the physical harm the game is causing many of its participants (at least the playing sort), I’m beginning to think that NFL football may just be a big extrinsic activity and those consumed by the spectacle and violence of it all may need to rethink or recalibrate their value priorities. This thought came to me when I watched Travis Kelce at several crucial moments during and after the game. This is a player that has come to the attention of the world for two reasons. To begin with, he is a nine-time Pro-Bowl tight end who is arguably the best tight end to ever play the game. Secondly, he is the current paramour of the biggest phenomenon in the entertainment world, Ms. Taylor Swift. With the recent threat of her possible political endorsement of Joe Biden (as frantically telegraphed by key Republican operatives) on the heels of her amazingly popular $1 billion Eras Tour, her connection to a top Super Bowl contender like Kelce is a collision of almost all the worlds that inhabit the mindshare of America in 2024. To say that everyone is watching them is an understatement.
Well, Travis Kelce’s performance tonight was rather interesting. I am specifically NOT talking about his athletic performance, but rather his sideline and awards ceremony performance. On the sidelines at one point, his displeasure with being removed from the field by his coach led to a near-violent interaction with his 64-year-old boss. Such was his blood and ambition running hot at that moment. You could see the TV cut-always to girlfriend Taylor in the stands showing her acclaimed gentility being somewhat shaken by his actions. Then, when the Chiefs won and any angst associated with performative tension had passed, Kelce took the Vince Lombardi trophy from Mahomes and proceeded to howl and sing like a redneck in a most unbecoming manner. The televised look on Taylor Swift’s face said it all. This is a young woman with apparently great intrinsic values and a stage presence that is as refined and compassionate as any performer’s. And here was her boyfriend, admittedly in the heat of the moment, but acting like a bar brawler crushing beer cans on his forehead. He was looking mighty extrinsic at that moment and it made me wonder whether NFL football was a good thing for a nation that has swung a bit too far on the values spectrum towards the extrinsic.
I am not inclined to feel holier than thou just because I do not favor professional sports and particularly not NFL football. I’ve always been prepared to chalk that up to my cultural upbringing, spending formative years overseas where American football was not a thing. Or maybe it was my freshman year at prep school when I spent my fall semester learning and playing JV football and finding that my size did not make up for my lack of knowledge or killer instinct. But now, this article about extrinsic realities in the body politic and the societal fabric of America, has made me wonder about whether football isn’t a cause rather than just an effect of all this value shifting we are experiencing. I’m feeling like football may be duping the American public into thinking its violent aggression is a good pastime. I guess that makes me feel that what I watched today might be nothing but the latest Super Duper perversion of the American psyche.