The last Super Bowl I did watch was probably in the late '80s, and only then because our upstairs neighbors in Chicago invited us to their day-of party. Abby and I went reluctantly, more out of social obligation than any excitement. Basketball is my sport. I played a small forward at Christ the King High School in Lubbock, Texas during the early '70s. So I'm more likely to spend time in front of the TV set during March Madness or the NBA playoffs.

To put this piece of writing in perspective, then, I am commenting on the Super Bowl without having seen it. This might sound more difficult than it actually is. Or at least it seems that way to me. Even if you don't watch the Super Bowl, it's still impossible to completely escape if you look at the sports section of the newspaper or read the funnies or watch any TV. From an anthropological perspective, it's hard to consider the Super Bowl as anything other than our national ritual celebrating traditional masculinity.

According to Ronald Smith in Sports and Freedom, the origins of football are closely tied to masculine values. During the 1890s, when there was considerable criticism of the brutality in Ivy League football games, Theodore Roosevelt, a Harvard graduate, wrote that "he was 'utterly disgusted' with Harvard President Eliot and his faculty's call for a ban on football. Roughness, said Roosevelt, was an advantage of football. A man in the real world, he said, 'can't be efficient unless he is manly.'"

As the social legitimacy of masculinity's aggressive ethos has increasingly come into question during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, brutal sports have provided acceptable and controlled venues for sustaining conventional ideas about manhood. In other words, as the social pressure for males to step outside the usual manly virtues increases, so does the appeal and popularity of social sites advancing those manly virtues - like football (and other sports, like wrestling, extreme sports, and so on). This increase in popularity can be seen through the jump in the number of Super Bowl viewers through the years, from 44,270,000 in 1970 to 86,801,000 in 2002, and the willingness of advertisers to pay higher prices for their commercials to be aired, from $42,000 per minute in 1967 to $2,100,000 per minute in 2003 (statistics from www.superbowl-ad.com). According to The Washington Post, the street prices for this year's $400 to $500 Super Bowl tickets were $2,500 to $3,000. These numbers suggest just how important Super Bowl Sunday is considered to be in our cultural life.

But there are other indications as well. I'm thinking, for instance, of all the pages devoted to the Super Bowl in the Post's sports section weeks in advance of the game - more than any other sports' championship playoff. Or consider the four hour pre-game show - longer than the actual game itself. Or what about the spectacle that is the half-time show? And then there are the newest, the best commercials that companies produce to air specially on the Super Bowl - so much so that there is almost as much hype about them. In the grocery ads, you'll find sale foods designated for the Super Bowl. If you turn to the comics page, you'll see the Super Bowl represented in a number of strips. "Blondie and Dagwood" sticks in my mind. Dagwood had outdone himself on Superbowl Sunday, purchasing an abundant array of food items for his buddies to feast on. He and his male friends indulged so much that they complained all evening about the state of their stomachs to their wives, who told them they would not be eating like this next year.

If the Super Bowl doesn't indicate the importance of traditional masculinity to our cultural capital, I don't know what does. Our annual celebration of manhood continues to thrive year after year. Would I eliminate the Super Bowl if I could? I doubt it. Would I change its significance? Yes. How? I'm thinking along the lines represented in Michael Messner and Donald Sabo's book, Sex, Violence, and Power in Sports: Rethinking Masculinity. In the final chapter, "Changing Men through Changing Sports," they suggest an eleven-point strategy for creating healthier sports and healthier relationships between men and women (look at their book for more details about each of the points):

1. Be a buddy to your body.
2. Stop excessive violence in athletics.
3. Recognize men's issues in sports.
4. Resist locker room sexism.
5. Fight sexism in sport media.
6. Teach young athletes non-sexist values and practices.
7. Work for gender equity in athletics.
8. Confront homophobia and heterosexism in sports.
9. Become an advocate for minority group athletes.
10. Get more women involved in sports.
11. Push the "man" question.

For the purposes of this essay, all I'm suggesting is that we study our own tribe, become aware of the social values and mores that guide and form our cultural practices - in this case, as they relate to masculinity. If you gain a little distance, watching twenty-two men compete dressed in helmets and pads that exaggerate the male physique can seem as odd as any foreign ritual.

Send a comment about "Critiquing the Super Bowl I Didn't Watch" to Pat McGann.