Super Bowl Shuffle

Here’s a confession I probably shouldn’t make in public: I’m not really fond of football. This is an unfortunate fact, given that I live in Texas. Don’t get me wrong: The State of Texas is most certainly the finest place in this great crazy nation, a bright shining beacon filled with freedom and armadillos and breakfast tacos and sprawling ranches featuring old military tanks you can rent for fun. But hoo, boy, do Texans love their football.

To each his own and all that, but let’s face facts: Basketball, baseball, tennis, golf, extreme skiing, parasailing, and whittling an entire chess set out of leftover half-chewed pencils you found in your junk drawer are all more interesting than football. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to write the rest of this column quickly, lest an irate torch-toting ragtag gang of football fans arrives at my door, ready to drag me to Dallas to view the pure unadulterated beauty of the Cowboys’ stadium and watch endless loops of old game footage until I take it all back.

Right now, you might be thinking it’s not that I really dislike football but simply that I don’t understand it. Wrong! I understand it just fine. Football is a game in which a bunch of burly dudes run around for about two seconds at a time. When they hear a whistle, they stop. Then, after mumbling among themselves, they run around again for about two more seconds until they hear another whistle or someone gets a concussion. The most exciting moments in football, in fact, are when someone gets to run for more than three seconds uninterrupted.

Do you see where I’m going with this? Football is the sports equivalent of being caught in a giant traffic jam. The other rare exciting moments in football involve end-zone celebration dances — unlike the No Fun League, I adore celebration dances of all sorts — but life is short, and is it really worth it to sit through eons of boredom to catch those rare moments of joy?

To be fair, I don’t really like the other kind of football, either — that would be soccer — because, as everyone knows, it is a communist sport. Now that I’ve alienated at least half of my reading audience (hopefully that includes those quick trigger fingers with the propensity to write hate mail), let’s move on with the show.

So anyway, I watched the Super Bowl. I did this because I’m an American and I’m obligated as a citizen to watch the Super Bowl each year, or so I’m told. Given that I’m at least somewhat interested in the inevitably loony commercials and the frequently insane halftime show, it’s not a completely bad way to spend a Sunday evening. Plus, there’s wine and vats of tortilla chips and that amazing dip you can make by mixing melted Velveeta and Ro-Tel and regret.

It has been suggested that the Super Bowl offers an interesting yearly glimpse of the American zeitgeist, and perhaps that’s true. In my more cynical moments, I tend to think it’s something silly and meaningless we do together as a culture, like forcing people to wear masks on planes unless they can successfully pretend to nurse a tiny cup of Diet Coke or a sad little bag of pretzels for an entire three-hour flight.

But let’s think big and go back to the zeitgeist. Speaking of masks in general, as well as the thousands and perhaps millions of disposable masks currently piling up in the ocean, causing numerous dolphins and sea lions and schools of clownfish to rightfully get a bit concerned, there sure weren’t a lot of masks at the Super Bowl! Is this a sign that perhaps the bevy of largely inconsistent and frequently arbitrary masking rules around the country is on the way out? I sure hope so, although I sometimes suspect we’ll be wearing masks on planes until December 2086.

More zeitgeist: I absolutely loved the halftime show, featuring a bunch of old people who are also amazing hip-hop artists. Don’t get mad — I’m old too! We poor souls in Generation X — the last sane generation, to be frank, although I do have hope for Gen Z — were proud of this halftime show, which was stocked with our fellow Xers and was magnificent and glorious, even though the occasionally baffled faces of various kids in the room sometimes suggested otherwise.

Say what you will about the Super Bowl, but it does bring America together. Here’s another bonus: For about two hot seconds, it made Twitter lighthearted again. As you may know, when Twitter started out, it was mainly people making random jokes and posting pictures of their food. These days Twitter is largely a festival of lies and self-referential light slander coated with a bunch of crazy anonymous people threatening to kill your dog.

“If you’re stoked about this halftime show, it’s time to book your colonoscopy,” one viral meme declared. Dick Butkus, the former Chicago Bears great who now excels at Twitter, added that the robust rapper 50 Cent “looked like he was hit by inflation.”

Outrageous, I know. As an aside, despite my football aversion, I did once watch a short documentary devoted entirely to Dick Butkus. Called “The Monster of the Midway” — you can find it on YouTube — it’s basically a bunch of former NFL players describing the sheer terror Butkus inspired in their hearts. Featuring dramatic music and a deep-voiced somber narrator comparing Butkus to a “wounded grizzly” and saying things like “A philosopher once defined a great man as someone who never reminds us of anyone else,” paired with endless footage of old No. 51 crushing people on the field, it is nothing short of amazing. I kind of want to watch it again.

Oh, dear. Send help: Maybe I do like football after all.