Roger Federer smiling wolfishly to the group: a return to woke? Adam Sandler hangdog within the Levi’s Stadium stands, Jon Bon Jovi mooching on the sideline like a retired dentist on a cruise, Billie Joe Armstrong belting out American Fool in the course of the pre-game present below his immobile meringue of fogey-blond hair: have been they an indication? A New England Patriots crew who have been neither favored to win nor broadly reviled, then promptly repaid a grateful public by dropping: was this the Tremendous Bowl which proved that historical past actually can transfer on, that America is just not fated to stay hostage to the tremors and hatreds of the previous? Nicely, sure and no.
A 12 months after Donald Trump made American soccer’s showpiece all about him, Sunday’s sport in Santa Clara at all times promised a kind of correction – a cooling of the temper, even perhaps an finish to the manipulation of sport for political ends. As at all times one of the best ways to gauge the success of this mission was because the gods meant: via a TV display screen. Trump – saddled with traditionally low approval scores, dealing with a bloodbath on this 12 months’s midterms, and little question cautious of risking a public look within the deep blue sea of the Bay Space – was absent on this event, and he saved the F-22 fighter jets that have been scheduled to be a part of the pre-game flyover away from Levi’s Stadium too. (Unspecified “operational assignments” have been the explanation provided for the jets’ withdrawal, which implies there’s in all probability a low-ranking member of the Trump administration placing large cash on a US army strike someplace in Latin America as we communicate.) And but, the absent autocrat nonetheless weighed on proceedings, his curdling affect turning each second and gesture on Sunday right into a referendum on the prospects for a post-Trumpian sporting future. Might soccer be regular once more?
The Seahawks and the Patriots did their half by providing up a sport of punishing protection and attritional offense that had all of the carefree appeal of a medieval torture process. Can soccer be regular once more? That is still unclear, however on this proof it could actually actually be boring, which is possibly a type of progress. Regardless of one of the best efforts {of professional} jaw surgery affected person Jake Paul, the pre-game chatter was largely about de-escalation: even the ESPN host Pat McAfee felt moved to point out, on his first go to to San Francisco, that town was nothing just like the city hell described by the catastrophizers of Fox Information and different rightwing media retailers. Maybe, for as soon as, the Tremendous Bowl wouldn’t be dragged into America’s tedious and interminable tradition wars. Between Paul’s racist critique of the half-time present and the choice spectacle provided by Turning Level USA, possibly all the proper can do now could be squawk impotently into the void.
On the sphere, Joe Montana, Peyton Manning and a bunch of different footballing legends acquired issues shifting by throwing out peace indicators via a pre-game honor guard of younger girls with violins, and from there the tone of this Tremendous Bowl as a grownup affair, all strings and restraint, was set. Even the pre-game ceremony to mark this 12 months’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence had a shrugging, nearly apologetic high quality to it, the sermonizing transient and symbolism feathery: this was jingoism, however on Ozempic. YouTuber Charlie Puth was a shock option to sing the nationwide anthem, and nobody appeared extra shocked than the person himself: dressed within the type of a enjoyable dad on his method to parent-teacher night time – button-down shirt, tie, brown leather-based jacket and straight-leg denims – Puth distributed with the usual bombast and delivered The Star-Spangled Banner in a feline whisper. Maybe greater than some other current installment of American sport’s greatest day, this Tremendous Bowl appeared decided not to attract consideration to itself. “I do know we received the Tremendous Bowl, however we may have been slightly bit higher on offense,” victorious quarterback Sam Darnold advised sideline reporter Melissa Stark after the sport. Even in triumph there have been learnings to glean, takeaways to digest, enhancements to plan. This was the Tremendous Bowl as company retreat, a second to pause, mirror and reset for the 12 months forward.
In Mike Tirico and Chris Collinsworth, NBC boasted two play-by-play announcers with the character to fulfill the soporific second. Collinsworth, calling his sixth Tremendous Bowl, provided a clinic in stating the plain, noting halfway via the second quarter that “that is shaping up as a defensive sport”. He’s actually not Tom Brady unhealthy, however then nobody aside from Brady is. In the meantime Tirico, realizing the dream that fired his defection from ESPN in 2016 to name his first ever Tremendous Bowl, needed to juggle duties at Levi’s Stadium along with his position anchoring NBC’s protection of the Winter Olympics, a truth viewers have been reminded of roughly as soon as each 30 seconds on Sunday night time. “Champion might be topped in half-hour,” Tirico introduced at half-time with a theatrical pause, earlier than including with an elongating flourish: “Mmmmaybe extra.” It’s a very good factor NBC has the massive man locked all the way down to a protracted contract, as a result of it’s unclear whether or not anybody else working in media at the moment has the expertise to supply materials this sturdy. Tirico is probably the most white-collar commentator in American sports activities; he has an unparalleled ability for making each in-game name and on-set interjection sound like one thing your accountant would possibly say to you as he’s strolling you thru your tax return. In that sense he was the right on-air complement to this turgid encounter, an anti-hype man to swimsuit the occasions.
Sure, however was it woke? Was the stagecraft behind this Tremendous Bowl, each within the stadium and on TV, some type of “assertion” about America In the present day? Is progressive tradition now “again” in any significant sense? The selection of Unhealthy Bunny to headline the half-time present might have been ragebait for Crimson America, however nonetheless convincingly the sphere at Levis’s Stadium was terraformed to resemble the hinterland of San Juan (it was not very convincing), the Tremendous Bowl didn’t in the end herald some everlasting “flip” on the a part of the NFL towards cultural progressivism. Nobody, not even Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio himself, “libbed out”; nonetheless welcome or sudden it might need been, the half-time spectacular noticed no large protest about ICE or lament of the nation’s speedy descent into authoritarianism. After final 12 months’s Tremendous Bowl become a Trumpified debacle, Sunday was all about night up the ledger, about welcoming the game’s non-Maga contingent again into the tent – a venture through which the inclusion of Unhealthy Bunny, the day’s lack of on- or off-field drama, and the bipartisan shock over $180 burgers all performed a galvanizing position.
As at all times it was the adverts, reasonably than occasions within the stadium, that stated probably the most concerning the state of the world at the moment. Aside from just a few outliers – Man Fieri as “some man” in an advert for Bosch energy instruments, Adrien Brody going technique for TurboTax, William Shatner as a near-incontinent ambassador for Raisin Bran named “Will Shat” – this 12 months’s commercials marketed merchandise that match a reliable variety of recurring classes: AI, playing, meals supply and insurance coverage. Right here, in taxonomical miniature, was an excellent abstract of what tradition has in retailer for us: slop, hypothesis, a retreat from the commons, and indemnification – if we’re fortunate – in opposition to the disasters that await. Amid the tedium of motion on the sphere, this Tremendous Bowl provided a strong commercial for the theater and violence of capitalism as traditional.
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