Nonetheless, my company this week said she wanted to watch the Super Bowl . . . for the half-time show and the commercials. Okay, whatever. (The fact that she kept referring to the "Philadelphia Vikings" gave me a clue that she didn't know a whole lot more than I about the game itself. Then again, anyone knows more than I.)
I started high school in a small town. Decades earlier, a young man had died as a result of a football injury. I don't know the particulars, but from that point on, football was banned from that school system. So we cheered on our soccer team in the fall, oblivious to the power of football on a high school level. Jump ahead a couple of years, and I begin my junior year at a brand spankin' new regional high school. And there's a football team! As I'm on the cheerleading squad (because, as we should all know, there were no girls' sports pre-Title IX), I need to learn the game. I failed at that. But I was able to follow directions. If the cheer was "Push 'em back, push 'em back, waaaaay back," I was good to go. No idea what it meant. And the same can be said for "First and ten, do it again!" No idea.
I grew up in a house where sports were somewhat banned. My father, an industrial arts teacher, resented the fact that more money went to physical education and sports than the arts, so his answer to that injustice was to ban sports from his home. When my mother was widowed at the age of 51, she became a fan of the Dallas Cowboys, mostly because she had a military friend who lived in Dallas. I don't know if she ever understood the game, but she loved watching it.
Me? No, I don't think I will ever embrace football. As for the halftime show . . . Meh. Not really a fan of Timberlake. And, apparently, the commercials in the first half of the game (which I watched) were nothing compared to those of the second half. So, watching the Super Bowl did not let me down anymore than if I hadn't watched it at all. And I'm okay with that.
My Facebook newsfeed this morning was full of Super Bowl commentary. Yours probably was, too. Maybe it was a nice break from political commentary. But politics is a game I understand. And, it seems to me, a game more important than football? Or maybe that's wherein lies the key. The "taking a knee" controversy aside, football is not political. So the Super Bowl provided a nice distraction from all things political? Okay, fair enough. But Super Bowl is over. Time to get back to the issues that are threatening this country? And there are many.
Go, Vikings!
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