Or is it?
The Superbowl has become an American cultural phenomenon renowned for its seemingly endless hype, stratospheric betting ($1.39 BILLION in 2025), innovative and memorable television commercials, notorious half-time entertainment, and world-wide audience. It’s the championship game of America’s National Football League and is the most-watched, single-day sporting event in the world.
This year several things added even more interest. The Kansas City Chiefs were competing in the event for the third year in a row as the AFC champions. Taylor Swift is still dating Chiefs Tight End Travis Kelce, so pop culture groupies normally not interested in sports were swept into the audience. The halftime show featured a rap singer who just swept 5 Grammies the week before (interesting coincidence, no?). There were rumors that Elon Musk bought commercial time (at $8,000,000 a minute) to deliver news about how much wasteful spending his Department of Government Efficiency has found so far. That rumor turned out to be false, but I know a LOT of people who anxiously awaited those commercials. And for the first time in history, a sitting president attended the game in person.
Though we lived in Missouri for 23 years before moving to Florida, I wasn’t really interested in who won the game. Watching the Superbowl just seems to be the accepted thing to do on the second Sunday of what is usually a dreary and boring February in most of the country. And, it’s an opportunity to eat and drink a bunch of junk food. Who doesn’t love that?
Randy doesn’t have much interest in a football game that doesn’t include the Packers, but we have houseguests, so we decided to watch the spectacle. I’m glad I’m not really a Chiefs fan. I know many who are, and I’m sure they’ll be bummed for days over the way they got their butts kicked by the Eagles. It was almost painful to watch and I’ll lay odds that Chiefs fans don’t consider it “just a game” after that drubbing.
Neither, I’ll bet, is it “just a game” to the companies who lay out $8,000,000 a minute for commercial time. I didn’t understand a lot of the commercials. And the most I remember about them is a bunch of flying mustaches and bushy eyebrows. I don’t even know what products those were for. I remember the sloths too. They were kinda, sorta, cute. But I’m still kind of trying to make a connection to what sloths and beer is about. It’s true that being a beeraholic can turn you into a sloth, but I wouldn’t necessarily consider that a good thing. Unless I sell beer, maybe? OK, I’ll buy that selling beer to sloths is a marketing strategy someone might celebrate.
I remember Matt Damon and David Beckham in a commercial, although I don’t know that I would have known who they were had they not identified themselves in the dialogue. No memory of what the commercial was for though. And, oh yes, I remember Harrison Ford (who I did know) in a pretty good Jeep commercial. But an electric Jeep? Huh?
The real game, though I didn’t know it until the morning after the Big Show, was the half-time performance by a rapper named Kendrick Lamar. Full disclosure…I’d never heard of Kendrick Lamar before I became aware he was going to be this year’s half-time entertainment. I didn’t care enough to look him up before the game. His performance was color themed red, white, and blue, which I liked a lot. It featured a black man (who I later found out was actor Samuel L. Jackson) dressed up like Uncle Sam. He rapped several songs and I am being honest in saying that I caught (this is not an exaggeration) about 4 words in the entire performance. I thought the show was boring and irrelevant to anything I care about.
I was wrong.
The internet was on fire the next morning about all the symbolism, “signal”, and underlying messages in the entire production. And though I don’t get it all, I can’t say I’m unhappy that the world is talking about all of it.
First of all, the stage they constructed for the performance resembled a play station game board (pictured above) and the last visual image of the performance was folks in the stands helping light up a message that said GAME OVER. And then Lamar’s last words were from his “song” by the same name…TV Off. All his “music” is said to be symbolic and IYKYK. I didn’t know, but I got quite an education from social, mainstream, and alternative media the next morning. Yikes!
There’s way too much other stuff to go into here, and most of you would think I’m a nut case anyway if I did, but I’ll tell you this. There are those out there to whom the halftime show meant something, and I think they got the message loud and clear. There’s a culture war going on all around us. Programming and manipulation is coming at us from all sides and most of us don’t have a clue. I could argue it’s better that way, but there’s no way we’re going to climb back to the surface from the abyss we’ve fallen in until we understand what’s really going on in the world in which we exist.
That’s the game that was really played on Superbowl Sunday. Why not create enough controversy around the acknowledged biggest game on the planet to help bring the subversive, unacknowledged games we’re playing to light?
Phew….ok….shake it off. In a way, in this post I’m starting to ask the unanswerable question, what is the meaning of life. And that’s not what this blog is supposed to be about.
So let me end on a much lighter note.
As I was writing this, I remembered the Superbowl commercial I liked the best. It was the one where Tom Brady’s batteries wore down and they had to be replaced with Duracell. I didn’t have to think (at all) to decipher what the point of the commercial was, what the product was, or wonder what the ad agency might have been smoking when they pitched the ad concept to corporate decision makers. The commercial was short, cute, and to the point. I loved it.
I love playing games. But I think I’ll stick to stuff like Rummikub and Cribbage.
P.S. The weather here in SW Florida is really magnificent in February. Have I mentioned lately how much I love living here?
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