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On average, I’d say I watch somewhere in the neighborhood of
one full football game a year and it just so happens to be the Super Bowl. The large
game. The grande enchilada.
That’s the only football game I’ll
watch from the opening kickoff through the post-end credits scene where Sam
Jackson shows up with a zany plan.
There’s
really no reason for me to watch the aforementioned large game. I don’t have
the stomach to gamble and I’m clearly not much of a football fan. On top of
that, my office doesn’t even have a water cooler, so there’s nothing to gather
around on Monday and dissect the Xs and Os of the game.
And by Xs
and Os I mean the commercials and the halftime show.
Despite
all of that, I still make it a point to watch and have since my days as a small
boy.
Every
year my parents, sister and I would dine on hoagies and wings, eating them off
football-themed plates and napkins. My dad would spend half the game reminding
my mom of how football worked and the other half waving the white flag in the
face of her never-ending onslaught of questions. Every single year.
It
warms the cockles of my heart just thinking about it.
Another
tradition was the decorations. For whatever reason, as a youth I got it in my
head that I needed to be the official decorating committee of my family’s Super
Bowl festivities.
So
starting on Super Bowl eve, I’d cobble together a bunch of hand-made pennants
with crudely scribbled slogans on them: Go Niners! Go Giants! Switzer’s a bum!
And so forth like that.
Then I’d
wait for the first floor of our family home to clear out. I liked to work in
private, so I’d dawdle until everyone wandered to other areas. Perhaps I thought
it was best for artwork of that caliber to hit the audience all at one time.
That way they could drink in the deep-seated commentary I was trying to convey in
one giant gulp.
Once the coast was clear, I’d go to work
taping these banners and musings – which would have been cute if they’d been scrawled
by a first graders, but were probably mostly just depressing coming from a
seventh or eighth grader – all across the house.
Even after my embarrassingly long
fixation on homemade home decoration finally subsided, the Super Bowl was still
a fun time.
As I aged, I spent several years
working in retail and in retail-like jobs. During my time in those industries, I
worked on every major and minor holiday from Christmas and my birthday to Arbor
Day and that one where everyone must talk like a pirate all day. Yet I never
once worked on a Super Bowl.
Looking back on it now, I’m not
sure if this was something I actively sought or it just worked out that way.
But it is a fact.
The family-gatherings have since
ceased, but I still look at Super Bowl Sunday as a certified mid-carder on the
holiday spectrum. No matter where it’s spent, it’s still nice to surround myself
on that day with greasy food and pretend like the game is something special,
even though without fail any shine is guaranteed to wear off after each team
has possessed the ball one time.
By then the realization hits me
that it’s just another football game full of players whose names I don’t know.
And then there’s the fact that the
commercials are never as good as people expect and the halftime show always disappoints,
but hell, all of that is tradition too.
Maybe the reason non-football
people like myself and my family got so wrapped up in the Super Bowl is timing.
The game is a late-January/early-February event.
January sucks and so in that way,
the Super Bowl is more of a celebration that we’ve put that barren wasteland
behind us and we’re inching closer towards Valentine’s Day, spring, my birthday
and summer.
All the
good and important stuff that this country holds sacred. Or maybe, more likely,
we all just really like flip our New Year’s resolutions the bird and eat greasy
food without having to feel bad about it for just one day.
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