On Sunday I went to a Super Bowl party in London, which makes me think I must secretly be getting homesick because I would never ever ever go to a Super Bowl party at home. There must be something about London that makes me want to cling to the very tradition that I would be actively scoffing at if I were at home. The same impulse that caused me to reject beer and buffalo wings at home, made me seek them out here: interest in the game made me unique here just as lack of interest distinguished me in the States. I felt special realizing that I’m the only member of my six person flat that thinks of a football as oblong as opposed to spherical.
While I’ve never been a big sports person I can usually at least get by feigning interest in American sports. My mother is a rabid Orioles fan, so I manage to keep reasonably abreast of the rankings in the American League, and there are even complete half an hours that I find myself diverted by whatever football game is playing when my dad turns on the TV on Sunday. I’ve never been able to muster any sort of affection for basketball due to the fact that, at five one, I’ve always felt the creator of the sport must have had it in for me, but two out of the three major televised American sports is not bad. Here, however, I’m entirely in the dark. There are three fairly serious rugby players that live on my hall who also happen to be rugby fans, and I tune out while they go on for hours about England versus Italy, or if Scotland really can beat France this time. The internationalism of the teams intrigues me, as it makes it sound like we’re gearing up for a third world war instead of a Sunday past time, but I can’t see the point of a game that seems hell bent on reversing thousands of years worth of evolution in its brutality.
It was thus with more than usual interest that I began to pay attention to the results of the football playoff games that were announced on my daily NPR podcasts. Because the Ravens, who are the only team I would feel any sort of allegiance to for geographical reasons, were not in the running, I began to invent a rooting interest in Seattle. I loved the fact that they had never been to a Super Bowl before, so despite knowing nothing about their actual ranking I began to think of them as underdogs, and to wish them well in their quest for ultimate victory.
I had no particular plans to watch the Super Bowl, however, and was only vaguely aware of its actual date. The decision to go to a party was made the night of when I received a call from my friend inviting me to her friends’ apartment to watch the game. I had planned to spend the evening in reading King Lear, but it felt un American to reject the offer after spending the afternoon listening to commentary on Scotland’s chances against top seated France. I was going to show the Brits that if you are going to pound an athlete mercilessly in hopes of extracting an oblong ball from his grasp you had to be at least civil enough to allow him a helmet. And that we saved their ass in World War II. So, feeling giddily ugly Americanish, I set out at nine thirty on Sunday evening to watch The Game.
The end of the evening, however, left me with less appreciation for American sports than for British TV. Because British TV is nationalized there are far fewer commercials than in the US. To watch the Super Bowl with few commercial breaks of any kind, and with British commercials when they finally did appear, robs the Super Bowl of half of its draw. It also makes one realize just how little football is actually played during a game. In order to cover up the long stretches where nothing happens without the aid of commercials, the Brits turned sports pundits who sat behind a desk in front of a network logo and shared interesting statistics about past Super Bowl winners.
Along with the conspicuous absence of commercials, the commentary on the game was noticeably different from American broadcasts. The level of commentary was almost absurdly basic because the broadcast was at least partly geared toward a British audience who, it was supposed, had little or no knowledge of the rules of the game. It was entertaining to hear the announcers explaining the concept of a “first down,” or what it meant to be “off sides;” it was like watching a broadcast of football for dummies. However, this was not all a bad thing. I had never paid more than passing attention to the games that I had seen at home, but now I was hooked. All of a sudden I understood exactly what was going on in my television screen.
After the first half, however, when the Seahawks failed to rally and it was getting into the wee hours of the morning, I discovered that football, unlike literature, does not become more interesting once one has a deeper understanding of the rules. Without commercials to divert me, and without hope that my team might pull ahead, I started to worry about how I was going to get home since the Tubes had stopped running. In the end my hosts offered me their futon as accommodation for what was left of the night. Grateful not to have to find a Night Bus or spend money on a cab I accepted. This offer of hospitality, from people I barely knew, gave me a much better feeling of American camaraderie than watching the game had. And it was snuggled on a futon, fully clothed with un-brushed teeth, that I observed the great American tradition of crashing in someone else’s apartment, and I was proud to be an American.
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