Super Bowl Observations, Part Two

So The Game is over; along with it, so is the hype, the bullshit, the "buzz" about Paul McCartney performing four songs (a "secret set list") between halves, and along with all that, we're now treated to reviews and critiques not only of the game itself but the commercials.

Oy.

First of all, without delving into the commercials, my other half and I agreed that the only really prurient commercial was for some "Daddy" site, and was fairly entertaining, not because it provided the only real cleavage of the night (aside from the women teetering as a result of excess alcohol consumption) but because it poked fun at government-type committees. But the fact that I don't remember the name of the site says plenty.

Second, I was not impressed by any of the ads this time around, aside from the FedEx commercial featuring Burt Reynolds getting kicked in the happies, and only because I've been wanting to do that for years. Burt isn't a bad guy, and he was really impressive in Boogie Nights (good title for a sordid but magnetically appealling movie). It's just that I've wanted to kick Burt Reynolds in the happies for a number of years; I'm not really sure why, but I know that the FedEx ad did something for me. It's not like I'll be more likely to use FedEx over UPS (and who really uses DHL for anything?). But it was a good ad.

Third, the Paul McCartney half-time show was a weird exercise in false demography. In three years, the NFL has gone from Britney Spears and Aerosmith to NippleGate to McCartney, which is really a bizarre, mid-stream switch. The show itself, for me, was good, because I'm a Beatles fan and McCartney's performance was really good, especially considering he's 62. I caught myself wondering whether he was actually singing or if it was a lip-sync deal and concluded it was a combination (ie hidden backing vocals but a working mic). My only real problem with his performance, then, was the fact that most people in the audience aren't wanting to see a 62-year-old guy rock out to tunes that were popular 40 years ago. I don't mind, personally -- in fact I prefer it to the over-choreographed, disposable garbage that passes for entertainment these days -- but seeing the crowd bopping along with young fans just reeks -- to me -- of on-site Payola. I'm not buying it. A 15-year-old girl with her hands in the air shouting and screaming like it's the Ed Sullivan Show for some guy older than her father? Please. The biggest bit of irony was seeing McCartney perform Hey Jude (if I recall correctly) while the Statue of Liberty was shown on the walkway videoscreens (the four vertical "screens"). Considering he's from England, it was an odd choice of imagery, at least in my opinion. And he kept thanking the "Super Bowl" and not "Jacksonville" or "everybody" or "America." It felt somewhat sterile. Certainly a safe choice; but football has become an unsafe, non-sterile sport, so why try to keep it clean? Weird. Good. Strange.

The Super Bowl -- and the half-time in particular -- should excite and thrill viewers. The only thing that came close were the fireworks. And odds are they were a lot cheaper to procure than Sir Paul. No offense.

Next.

The game itself was really not too bad, because both Bill Belichek and Andy Reid are solid, able coaches and they both are players-first types; so the resultant low-scoring first half giving way to the two coaches' adjustments wasn't a shock, and was certainly welcome. I'm surprised, however, that when the Patriots scored their second TD and I said to a friend "Watch, they'll turn on the jets now, it's over," the Eagles came back and made a game of it. I predicted the game would be a 13-point win for New England, and had those damn Eagles not gotten that last TD, the Patriots could have come back and kicked a field goal and won by -- you guessed it -- 13 points. Oh well, guess I'll go back to knocking over gas stations rather than betting.

Finally, I wound up going with a friend to a local bar other than Brother Jimmy's just to hang out and watch the game; it wasn't the same raucus, lose-your-shit-and-your-girlfriend-in-one-night kind of place that Brother Jimmy's is, but it gave us an opportunity to hang out, watch the game, watch the ads and not get hit on by some ugly girl named Reticula from the North Shore with the Brezhnev unibrow and the hairy arms. But Brother Jimmy's has somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 big-screen TVs and the place is a post-college frat party. In other words, pros and cons.

What I really notice is that there are a few holidays scattered through the calendar which invite people to get shitfaced for no other reason than it's fun: Super Bowl Sunday is one of them, inexplicably. Between that dynamic and the sheer commercialism the game has come to represent, I was put off by the fact that all I really cared about was the game, if at all. The Giants weren't playing so I was rooting against the Eagles, but the truth is I just didn't want Terrel Owens having a chance at sharing more verbal diarrhea on the podium at the 50-yard-line during the post-game. The game is increasingly about how much 30-second spots cost, not about football, and between the half-time show getting its own production credits and the remainder of the ads being largely irrelevant (could P-Diddy be a worse choice to hawk a shitty product like Diet Pepsi?), I wasn't impressed with much of anything that occurred between 6:30 and 10.

What I really think is that, from this point forward, my Super Bowl sundays will be spent with my other half with a variety of salsa, dips, finger-foods and either privacy or a place filled with friends. Next year I'll make sure to pay heed to the lesson I learned today: the Super Bowl experience has, and never will have, anything to do with anything remotely resembling football.