Hey, Sports Haters, I Don't Like the Super Bowl Either

Yesterday, a few hours before the Super Bowl officially started and a few hours into NBC’s interminable hellscape of a pre-game show, Patrick Stickles, the frontman/songwriter of Titus Andronicus, took to Twitter and started ranting semi-coherently about hating sports and corporate bullshit and the Super Bowl. (Ranting semi-coherently on Twitter is one of Patrick’s specialties; sometimes reading his feed is like reading drunken diary entries.) The gist of his hashtag-filled invective was: FUCK WHY DO PEOPLE GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THE SUPER BOWL?

I’ve hung around with enough artsy countercultural types to empathize with this point of view—if you grew up either hating sports because you hated the jockish mouthbreathers who were into sports, or simply not caring about sports because you were way more into drawing or skating or Kerouac or whatever, having a bunch of Super Bowl coverage and hype shoved in your face is annoying at best and a wave of soul-crushing marketing bullshit at worst. The NBA Finals happen every year, but there are hardly any NBA Finals parties and non-basketball fans don’t suddenly get excited about the games or make a bunch of different kind of dips. Why does everyone get all excited for the NFL’s title game?

I don’t know, and as a guy who likes watching NFL players run and catch and throw and hurl themselves at one another at incredible speeds, I’m not happy about it either. I just want to watch the last football game of the season, all right? And I mean the actual fucking game, the action on the field. I do not need a six-hour pregame show, or red carpet photos, or a bunch of puppies tackling each other adorably. I don’t need—or want—a bunch of ads that are reviewed by critics and treated like actual pieces of entertainment. I really, really don’t need Madonna strutting around a stage lit up to resemble the Final Boss from a classic arcade game while dancers decades younger than her writhe and thrust their pelvises—at one point, as she cavorted with the dudes from LMFAO, I imagined I now knew what it feels like to walk in on your septuagenarian grandmother having a threesome.

The worst thing is, this bullshit isn’t just incidental to the football, but affects it—the Super Bowl is a commercial broken up by occasional feats of athleticism. Right after Tom Brady got safety’d by the Giants’ defense—a big deal in the game, and a somewhat odd call that deserved to be replayed and analyzed—NBC cut to commercial rather than replaying and explaining what had just happened on the field. Fuck the people who want to know what just happened and why, we’ve got to show Elton John fall into a prison pit while Flavor Flav yells a catch phrase on behalf of Pepsi!

Then there is the archetypal Super Bowl party, traditionally attended by a bunch of people who have no interest in the game or even knowledge of the rules. For people who care about the game, except for the presence of snacks, this is the worst viewing experience possible. At one point, a girl sitting next to me on the couch loudly told her friend that she couldn’t drink too much because she was on her period. Jesus Christ. What happened to being ashamed of your bodily functions?

The game was pretty good: the Patriots’ first-half comeback, the Giants’ second-half comeback, a bunch of terrific defensive plays, and so on. Not that that’s what the Super Bowl is about. The Super Bowl is about polar bears drinking cola and Clint Eastwood sternly telling America to buck up and pull ourselves out of this national funk on behalf of Detroit car companies. It’s a pile of patriotic shit-sauce dumped on what should have been a delicious steak of large men running and hitting each other. So, on behalf of all football fans, I’d like to say sorry to Patrick Stickles and the rest of the people who have to endure the shit-sauce and don’t even enjoy the steak. Please believe me, we’re not happy with all the ads about raping a woman who turns into a car either.

@HCheadle