On the menu today: I know you want to argue about Bad Bunny and his performance at the Super Bowl halftime show. You know it, and, as Dan Aykroyd used to say while impersonating Bob Dole, the American people know it. So, I’ll let you have at it, but keep in mind, the selection of Mr. Bunny was less of a statement about the actions of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and more about the NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s plan to make the league relevant to people who don’t really like watching football. Elsewhere, over in Italy, U.S. Olympic skier Hunter Hess is receiving a blizzard of criticism, including from the president, while few Americans know the name of American-born Chinese freestyle skier Eileen Gu. Read on.
It’s All About the Money
Go ahead, get it all out of your system. Let the comments section burst into flames on a scale of The Towering Inferno from the hot takes about Bad Bunny and his performance at the Super Bowl halftime show.
If you can find anyone who was a diehard Bad Bunny fan before the halftime show and who found the performance a disappointment, please call my attention to that person. I’m sure one or two are out there, but I suspect that even if Mr. Bunny — a.k.a. Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio — had turned in the worst lip-synch debacle since Ashlee Simpson, his fan base would have felt the need to insist his performance was great, out of solidarity and to not let his critics get “a win.”
And please do the same if you can find anyone who didn’t like him before Sunday and/or vehemently opposed Mr. Bunny’s perspective on ICE enforcement, but who came away from the Super Bowl halftime show impressed. Again, I’m sure those people exist, but they’re rare.
You can vehemently oppose the political views of a particular performer and still appreciate their art, but apparently some people find that perspective too cognitively dissonant.
The point is that, fairly or not, before he performed a single syllable, Bad Bunny became a litmus test on the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement. He stepped onto the field as a human Rorschach test.
I know some people object to Mr. Bunny because he raps in Spanish, and thus they cannot understand what he is saying. But I would note that you can say the same about plenty of hip-hop performers who are rapping in English. Or, depending upon the song and performance, Bob Dylan. Or Tom Petty. Or Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs’ “Wooly Bully.” There are those of us who will go to our graves insisting the chorus on Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” is informing the listener that “there’s a bathroom on the right.”
So, if you don’t understand what Bad Bunny is saying, you’re just following in the footsteps of a proud American musical tradition.
But my guess is that until a few months ago, a decent chunk of Americans age 40 and older thought “Bad Bunny” was a rebuke you would hear at Hugh Hefner’s mansion.
Mr. Bunny has been Spotify’s most-streamed artist four of the past five years. “He has 19 videos on YouTube with more than one billion views — the most of any artist on the platform — and his channel has 51.7 million subscribers.” For perspective, the “alternate halftime show” headliner Kid Rock has 2.38 million subscribers to his YouTube channel. U2 has almost 3.3 million subscribers on YouTube, Sabrina Carpenter has 12.9 million, and Beyonce has 28.7 million. Nicki Minaj, who seemingly overnight became every Trump fan and Christian’s favorite hip-hop artist, has 28 million. [Insert snake-handling/“Anaconda” joke here.]
Now, there are other measuring sticks of the size of a performer’s fandom, but the YouTube numbers indicate that Mr. Bunny has a massive fanbase. These fans may or may not be NFL fans, but they likely tuned in last night because they wanted to watch him perform, boosting the Super Bowl’s already massive ratings even higher. (On Saturday night, I saw a sign at a bar in Washington that said, “Did you know that there’s a football game at Bad Bunny’s concert Sunday?”)
The National Football League has maxed out its audience among people who actually enjoy, you know, watching football. One survey last year estimated that approximately 70 percent of American men follow the NFL to some degree.
(Yes, yes, I know that there are people out there who are still boycotting the NFL because the league is “too woke.” These people have joined the ranks of vegans, crossfitters, and atheists as people who cannot merely make a decision; they must always inform you that they’ve made that decision.)
As far as we can tell, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell aspires to the status of Alexander the Great, to one day gaze upon “the breadth of his domain, and weep, for there are no more worlds to conquer.” (Yes, pedants, I know there’s no evidence that Alexander actually said it.) But now the NFL has maximized its level of interest, television audience, and revenue from people who like watching the game, a.k.a., watching the most amazing touchdown catch they’ve ever seen in their lives waved off by the referees who concluded an offensive lineman was an ineligible man downfield because he stepped more than one yard past the line of scrimmage. Or watching the referees convene a Council of Trent to determine when the receiver had full possession of the ball.
In search of new worlds to conquer, Goodell is determined to make his league important, relevant, and worth following among the portion of the population that doesn’t like football.
You may scoff, but you may also recall a performer by the name of Taylor Swift:
The report, which pulled data from advertising company Apex Marketing, states that between her first appearance at a Chiefs game Sept. 24, 2023 and that season’s AFC Championship contest Jan. 28, 2024, Swift generated $366,753,290 for the NFL across all equivalent brand value. That figure is measured across social media, TV, radio, digital news and print news.
In the league’s most recent season, her appearances drew an estimated $634,304,163 from equivalent brand value through the AFC Championship game.
Much of that revenue comes from social media and digital news, Apex’s Eric Smallwood told MarketValue.
“The ‘Swift Effect’ and the corresponding media exposure continued for the NFL and the Chiefs prior to the start of the 2024 NFL season. . . . The media blitz continued as the Chiefs kept winning games and were featured on national broadcasts, leading into the playoffs and now the Super Bowl,” he said. “Taylor was visible at games, and those appearances garnered media attention from sports-media outlets and those entertainment media outlets not normally covering the NFL.”
Now, you can quibble with the particular numbers, but there’s no doubt that a whole lot of Taylor Swift fans started buying Travis Kelce jerseys and watching the games who otherwise would not have made those purchases or watched those games.
Whether we football fans like it or not, Goodell and the league are going to continue trying to sell the game to people who aren’t that into football. Next year, the NFL is going to play nine regular season games in overseas stadiums — in Melbourne, Australia; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Paris, France; Munich, Germany; Madrid, Spain; Mexico City, Mexico; and three games in London, England. I’m not sure the players and coaches love the idea of traveling halfway around the globe for a game, nor the fans who lose out on another home game. But the league and its owners make a fortune in merchandise, television rights, once-a-year ticket opportunities, and so on.
Goodell, seemingly with the consent of the owners, is determined to turn the NFL into a global game, and that doesn’t just mean geographically; he means across all demographics and corners of society.
Meanwhile, at the Olympics . . .
Few human beings have achieved as much in their first two decades of life as Eileen Gu. Born in San Francisco to an American father and a first-generation Chinese immigrant to the U.S., Gu was raised in the Sea Cliff neighborhood in San Francisco, one of the wealthiest in the city. She attended the private prep school San Francisco University High School — current tuition, $68,090 — and accepted to Stanford University, where she is currently a junior majoring in international relations. She got a 1580 on her SATs. Along the way, Gu proved to be an absolute prodigy in freestyle skiing. In early 2019, she represented the United States in the 2018–19 FIS Freestyle Ski World Cup. Objectively gorgeous, she also is a professional model, represented by IMG models. She has appeared in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.
She is, by every measure, an American success story. Well, every measure except one.
In 2019, she changed her national affiliation for international competitions and started representing the People’s Republic of China. On June 6, 2019, she announced:
I have decided to compete for China in the upcoming 2022 Winter Olympics. This was an incredibly tough decision for me to make. I am extremely thankful for U.S. Ski & Snowboard and the Chinese Ski Association for having the vision and belief in me to make my dreams come true. I am proud of my heritage, and equally proud of my American upbringings. The opportunity to help inspire millions of young people where my mom was born, during the 2022 Beijing Olympic Winter Games is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help to promote the sport I love. Through skiing, I hope to unite people, promote common understanding, create communication, and forge friendships between nations.
Chinese law bans dual citizenship; it appears the Chinese regime made an exception for her.
At the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing — arguably the worst Olympics ever, a post-Covid dystopian exercise providing a propaganda bonanza for the repressive host regime — Gu won gold medals in big air and halfpipe, and a silver medal in slopestyle, becoming the first freestyle skier to win three medals at a single Winter Olympics. She is the fourth-highest paid female athlete in the world, almost all of it from endorsement deals.
I’m not really a fan of this new de facto “transfer portal” for Olympic athletes, but I know there are countries that would like more competitive Olympic teams, and athletes that might not qualify for their own countries’ teams but might qualify if they represent another country. But that wasn’t the case for Gu; she was about as certain to make the U.S. Olympic team as any American could be.
She had a choice of being an American Olympic superstar, or a Chinese one, and she chose China.
She qualified for the finals Saturday.
I mention all this because the president of the United States is raging on Truth Social about U.S. Olympic skier Hunter Hess.
It brings up mixed emotions to represent the U.S. right now, I think. It’s a little hard.
There’s obviously a lot going on that I’m not the biggest fan of, and I think a lot of people aren’t. I think for me, it’s more, I’m, I’m representing my like friends and family back home, the people that represented before me, all the things that I believe are good about the U.S. I just think if it aligns with my moral values, I feel like I’m representing it. Just because I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S. . . . . I just kinda wanna do it for my friends and my family and the people that support me getting here.
If those words are intended as criticism of the current administration, that’s an awfully mild way of expressing it. This morning, you can find a lot of furious denunciation of Hess among the president’s supporters.
I wonder how many of them even know who Eileen Gu is.
ADDENDUM: In 2018, the New York Jets had a quarterback named Sam Darnold, a defensive lineman named Leonard Williams, and a kicker named Jason Myers. None of them had a particularly good season, as the team finished with four wins and twelve losses, and fired Todd Bowles at the end of the season.
Last night, the Seattle Seahawks won the Super Bowl with a quarterback named Sam Darnold, a defensive lineman named Leonard Williams, and a kicker named Jason Myers.