Super Bowl Essay : United States May Be Obsessed, but Most of World Doesn’t Care

Millions of people will not attend a church service of any kind Sunday. Instead, they will participate in a form of secular religion; they will worship at the altar of the great god, football. This Sunday is, after all, Super Sunday.

About 90,000 zealots will participate in person, and another 90 million or so via television, in the liturgy that will be celebrated in Palo Alto. To many of them, the game between the San Francisco 49ers and Miami Dolphins for the championship of the National Football League is not a matter of life or death; it’s more important than that.

Sports, especially the most popular game of all, football, are probably the single-most important activity in their lives. The reasons for this cultural phenomenon have been studied by psychologists, poets, historians, sociologists, theologians and other scholars who have tried to unravel a mystery that once was left to some amateur scientists markedly ill equipped to explain it--the nation’s sportswriters. In their wisdom, the scholars study the effect of simple games on the human race and try to assign motives and myths to them.

There is no denying that football and other games strongly influence American lives. Their impact begins in childhood and grows even stronger in adulthood, fueled by television, and by newspapers that devote more space to sports than to economics, science, medicine, religion, education and the arts.

Among the spectators and television viewers Sunday will be scientists, politicians, doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, corporate executives, novelists, ministers and the flower of academe. More importance will be attached to the game by many than, say, to the arms talks and President Reagan’s budget.

The nation again is caught up in a unique American experience. Football is played and observed by Americans of all classes, colors and faiths, yet has virtually no significance in the world outside the North American continent. Ninety percent of the planet’s population would rather watch soccer.

Americans’ obsession with football once led Chicago columnist Mike Royko to write, “I get a little tired of a society that is more interested in statistics for passing in the National Football League than in knowing something about what positions your congressman takes on issues--or even who your congressman is.”

Football excites the masses, if not Royko, in this country because it is inherently violent, requiring policemen (officials), laws (rules) and enough safety equipment to protect a soldier in the trenches to control the brutality.

It is essentially a chess game, played out on a field 100 yards long and 53 yards wide. Sunday’s game probably will have about 140 plays, the NFL average. Most of them will fail. For all the skill that abounds in sports, most teams and athletes fail 50% of the time.

And, for all the hype lavished upon it (even to identifying it with a Roman numeral) by the sycophants among the hundreds of sportswriters covering it and the millions of dollars spent by ABC to televise it, the game probably will contain only a little more than 15 minutes of action, although it will require about 3 1/2 hours to play.

The playing of the game, or who wins or loses it, probably will count less to the NFL, ABC and possibly the players than counting the money. ABC is extracting $1 million for a one-minute commercial, a record for the industry.

Still, the scholars who have examined sports, seeking to go, as they often say, “beyond the sports page,” view games such as Sunday’s as something a lot more significant than a bunch of plays that will be discussed and rehashed by sportswriters and the chatty entertainers in the television booth as if they are as important as the arms race.

Football to the noted scholar and author, Michael Novak, is one of three sports--the others being baseball and basketball--that he labels ‘the holy trinity.’ Writing in The Wilson Quarterly, Novak once said the three sports “are rather like religions--not like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or any of the world’s other great faiths, but forms of secular religion nevertheless. The elements of religion are visible in them: dramatic re-enactments of struggles representing life and death, involving moral understanding and development, evoking awe for powers not wholly in an individual’s control, and employing public liturgical figures who stand in for the people as a whole.”

Novak recognized the violence and brutality in football. “There can be no doubt,” he wrote, “that football is essentially a celebration of physical and psychological aggression, something like war without death.”

Football is not only the nation’s most popular sport, but the most intellectual one, in the view of William Phillips, editor of the Partisan Review. “It is, in fact, the intellectuals’ secret vice.” he once wrote. “Not politics, not sex, not pornography, but football, and not college football, but the real thing. Pro football is the opium of the intellectuals. . . . Much of its popularity is due to the fact that it makes respectable the most primitive feelings about violence, patriotism, manhood.”

Novak said games, including football, also function as a religion by providing a source of emotional release. “In a culture like ours that praises sentimental virtues and represses destructive ones,” he wrote, “some way must be found to channel aggressive tendencies. Football is one such channel.”

Despite the game’s violence, football to Novak is not all bad. Critics of football and other sports, in his view, “misunderstand an important point concerning the relationship of the game to moral understanding and development; the kind of virtues celebrated in our sports have more to do with helping us to understand the basic human situation than with offering us practical guides to moral behavior.”

While such noted sports psychologists as Bruce Ogilvie and Thomas Tutko have found no evidence that sports build character, Novak believes that, “Sports form our character at a level deeper in some ways than the merely ethical. They show us what it is to be an individual confronted with one’s own terrors and what it is to show persistence and courage.”

The 49ers and Dolphins, more than other NFL teams, have shown this season what Novak referred to as “achieving effortlessly the click of disparate individuals acting together as one.” That is, he said, “a rare and precious experience.”

The mistakes of the athletes who will fail Sunday while playing under uncommon stress--and they may include even Joe Montana and Dan Marino--will not go unnoticed. Their failure, perhaps even their humiliation, will be about as public as it can get. Sportswriters, some hostile and many merely cynical, will report their errors with enthusiasm, and ABC’s merciless cameras will freeze them in brilliant color.

The few players who have taught themselves to lose and to learn from their errors will not make excuses and accept their failure with grace, behavior which Novak believes is one of the virtues of sports. “One of the most important experiences in sports is the experience of public failure,” he said.

Mistakes are inevitable Sunday despite the high quality of the competition. By all accounts, the 49ers and Dolphins are the two best teams in the land. But in football the action is collective rather than individual, and as skillful as Montana and Marino are, their success will depend as much on their blockers, receivers and teammates on defense as their ability to pass a football. In baseball, and basketball to a lesser degree, the players succeed or fail more often on their own merits.

Political conventions get less media attention than Super Bowls. The number of words written on this one, considering the quality of the teams and the attractions of San Francisco, probably will set a record. Odds are, there has been little written that wasn’t reported during the season. While sportswriters probably will stir little debate with their flowery literature on Sunday’s game, the television commentary will be analyzed, praised and criticized as much as the Administration’s tax reform ideas.

If ABC follows the usual television pattern, the action Sunday will not be allowed to speak for itself despite the presence of cameras capable of isolating it and replaying it in slow motion. The telecast will be a talk show. The show will not have a beginning but a “top.” Statistics will be said to have been made “on the year.” Passes will not be thrown in front of defensive backs but “underneath” them. There will be too much praise for ordinary deeds by too many loud, excited and harsh voices, even though common sense dictates that the event entertain us, not the announcers.