The Beer and Ball Syndrome

About this time every year, the beer drinkers stir.

They emerge from tight little subcultures to proclaim their presence by celebrating what has become their national holiday.

It’s Super Bowl time.

An estimated 150 million Americans, most of them involved in the building trades, plunk themselves down before their tee-vee sets and engage in a ritual as spiritual as a sunrise service. They watch a field of 22 men bash themselves senseless in the name of Sport.

It’s a male thing this ritual, although women, to assert their right to be as loud and dumb as the guys, are making themselves heard, thus, at last, creating a national activity other than wife-swapping that crosses gender lines.

My own woman, Cinelli, would rather dance naked at a bikers’ convention than spend her day watching football. I watch the game alone, trying to work cosmic meaning into the ballet of violence that has replaced sex and armed robbery as a national pastime for at least that one day.

There was a time when I shared the moment with men I felt might enjoy the camaraderie of watching the game together, but I quickly tired of belly-bumping and shouting yeee-haaaaw! at the television set.

And I don’t drink beer.

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That is perhaps the critical element that disassociates me from those who read divine meaning into a pass by John Elway. I would not drink beer if I were dying of thirst in Hell, and I certainly wouldn’t drink it out of plastic bottles.

All of this--the Super Bowl, beer and plastic--comes together because of an effort by the Miller Brewing Co. to test-market plastic beer bottles in L.A. The bottles, it appears, are not recyclable, and around here, partner, we place recycling right up there with God, gravity and pepperoni pizza.

It seems Miller was trying to cash in on the Super Bowl Syndrome by announcing the presence of its ersatz bottles at a time when everyone was stocking up on America’s favorite malt beverage.

Anheuser-Busch, by plunking down millions, won the right to be the only beer advertiser during the Super-B game and I suppose Miller was trying to get a little chunk of the action on the side.

Every entrepreneur in America seems to understand that this is the season of the male, a kind of bonding that precedes war and rutting, and a time to merchandise male-oriented products.

That’s why a movie like “Varsity Blues,” a film about sex, beer and football, will someday join “Gone With the Wind” as an American classic among roofers and drywall plasterers. It isn’t the sex or nudity that’s important in the thing, it’s the beer and football. They go together like love and herpes.

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Beer is important in America. About $50 billion worth is sold each year. Our annual per capita consumption is in the neighborhood of 22 gallons. Without beer, no houses would be built. Without beer, no one would get through college. Without beer, football would be as dull as lawn bowling.

Archeologists have dated beer back 6,000 years to the Sumerians. For my friends who didn’t make it through high school, that has nothing to do with summer, which, you will note, is spelled with two Ms.

Sumer lay between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq, which we bomb periodically to keep Our Boys in shape. War, like football, requires conditioning.

The ancients discovered the fermentation process by chance. To put it in simple terms, they learned that by drinking bread you got drunk. Much later, the Romans refined that knowledge, built a colosseum, added violence, and spectator sports were born.

But wait. Some good may come of this. Japanese researchers at a university near Hiroshima have discovered that beer inhibits the action of cancer-causing compounds called heterocyclic amines. Lab rats fed beer actually outlived those who stuck with Diet Pepsi and a little white wine!

What, you ask, does that mean? It means that all those guys sprawled out before the tee-vee set Sunday, swilling Bud and scarfing down pizza, are going to last longer than all us smartass know-it-all martini-sippers.

Next thing you know they’ll discover that belly-bumping raises the IQ by 10 points. Makes you wanna holler yeee-haaaaw! and reach for a Bud.

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Al Martinez’s column appears on Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com