Super Bowl : How to Feed a Fan

So the gang’s coming over for Super Bowl Sunday and you want to do your part. You want to make the occasion match the hype of those TV infobits on Super Bowls Past--the ones delivered with the martial portentousness of a “Victory at Sea” narrative (cut to Bud Bowl soldiers on the march).

You want to make the place festive and inviting. Piquant, even. You think of putting out a nice spread, because the sights and sounds of all that human demolition tend to stir the carnivore’s juices. Maybe an assortment of antipasti: olive crostini, seafood salad with pesto, or Ligurian chicken, arugula and ricotta salata salad. And a cool Vernaccia di San Gimignano to wash it down.

After all, it’s only a game, right? And as more or less civilized adults, you and your friends prefer a certain, shall we say, ambience.

Say what!!!???

Forget the genteel pretensions. Forget the fancy food. It’s strictly suds and chips. You could put out a bowl of guano for dip and nobody would know the difference. Just keep it coming, and keep the place clear of clutter because indoor football crowds tend to jump up a lot and even fall down in convulsions; you don’t want stuff busted up.

You may joke about how you’re not so much opening your front door for a friendly group of football fans as unlatching a gate for a lowing herd of Sunday Bubbas. And, sure, once things get under way, conversation tends to go the route of John Madden’s WHAP! and POW! balloon exclamations.

But the truth is that even though most of them have been yawners after the first quarter, the Super Bowl really isn’t only a football game (and get the pronunciation right: It’s fupbow ). It isn’t even the Ultimate Game (as the surly Dallas running back Duane Thomas once said, “If it’s the ultimate game, how come they’re having another one next year?”). Underneath the tonnage of glitz that has made Super Bowl Sunday the third leg of the holiday season (after Christmas and New Year’s), it’s every year’s last rite for the Boys of Autumn. And--don’t laugh--it has deep levels of meaning.

Forget that it’s the last red-meat game of any consequence until the fall. All you have to look forward to now, in the NBA’s post-Bird/Magic era, are clusters of interchangeable gazelles leaping through an 800-game season; grim Swedes and Slovaks deadlocked in Grand Slam tennis marathons; jittery track stars, high-strung as violins, running in fuzzy telecasts from Oslo, or baseball’s Proustian slouch through another year of statistical ooze.

Forget even that fupbow is the quintessential American game, a paradigm of corporate and military strategy designed to seize territory, either incrementally in the trenches, or in quick aerial strikes.

What football really does is stir a tribal memory buried in the DNA. For a few hours on Super Bowl Sunday, we’re peering out of the safety of caves again, re-enacting a primal struggle from a time when we were closer to the elements and were perhaps more brutish but certainly no less savage than we are today.

The truth is that, even before de-genderization hit the fan, civilization has offered less and less room for the kind of maleness that is at the root of self-definition--man testing himself in mind and body and spirit--something that still needs expression if we’re to aspire to health and discovery. The ethos of manhood is in very bad odor these days; every “real” man is on the one hand necessarily disgraced by the Bosnian atrocities, and on the other embarrassed by a movement that encourages hugging trees.

Everything a man can say about being a man becomes a cliche as soon as it hits the air. So he keeps his mouth shut and looks at the tube to remember the nervous high of screwing one’s courage to the sticking point and playing out an unambiguous action with all of one’s strength and speed against measurable opponents. And he cheers a moment of grace, of the slipping through the ruck to a memorable triumph.

There are lots of nasty things you can say about football’s latent misogyny, and you can recall Ian Shoales’ line, “Football players are like prostitutes; they ruin their bodies for the pleasure of strangers.” But in our overmanaged public life, the Super Bowl is epic and all-out. And at the end, people do go off the field as friends, the best and next-best at what they do.

That’s what I think anyway. But what do I know? My pals and I aren’t even going to the Bud Bowl. We drink the beer that comes with the delivery dog. That’s bonding.