The Super Bowl

It was a rainy February evening some thirty-plus years ago and I was more than a little nervously embarking on a first date with a testosterone-heavy native Angeleno.

Photo by Paolo Aldrighetti on Unsplash

“That,” said the testosterone-heavy Angeleno, jerking his head towards a small, dark bar as we bowled down Pico Blvd to the cinema at the Westside Pavilion, “is where me and my buddies go on Super Bowl Sunday.”

“That’s nice,” I agreed glumly, supposing that it would indeed be the sort of place where a testosterone-heavy sort of man would go with his buddies for his sports fix.

“It only has one television,” he said. “And we sit as far away from it as possible.”

I blinked, absorbing this.

“I don’t care for sports,” he explained.

I hitched my skirt up a little and arranged my legs at an attractive angle.

“Tell me all your hopes and dreams,” I cooed throatily.

Until then, I had never known it was an option for a man to be not a sports fan: experience had led me to believe that an obsession with people doing things with balls was an inextricable part of the gender, like shaving, and saying, “Can I help you with the housework?” in a house equally occupied by two of you. All of the many men in my family were sports buffs; so until then had been most of my boyfriends, male platonic friends, work friends, and even some of their wives and girlfriends too. Sport was already an art form in England, and when I arrived in America I learned that it was also a social occasion: events like the Super Bowl were celebrated with lavish parties, where families and friends, married couples, batches of singletons, workmates, churchmates, and neighbors would gather together to eat, drink, rejoice and commiserate, and throw themselves heart, soul, and passion into their shared enjoyment of the game.

When I was new to this country, I had nowhere to go on the days of the big games: single, and in those days short on friends, I would sit my solitary self down in my back yard, and listen to the comradely cries of joy, despair and ardent team loyalty echoing from other houses clear down the street; I would turn my ear towards the reverberating silence ringing in my own empty yard; my soul would rise in my chest, and I would cry silently, from the bottom of my heart, “Thank God it’s not happening here!”

To say that I am not a fan of sports myself is akin to commenting that Quasimodo struggled occasionally with his posture. I say this with no pleasure, because I see so many people deriving such joy from it in so many different ways; but if there is even one sport that will speak to me personally, I have yet to find it. Tennis gives me a headache; ice skating makes me feel cold; swimming makes me feel cold and wet; basketball makes me want to kill myself; volleyball makes me want to kill someone else. Do not get me started on golf.

It was unfortunate for my childhood, therefore, that the Universe decided it would be a really, really good joke to place me in a household of sports fanatics. My father and brothers were heartily manly men who rarely met a sport they didn’t like; but for them, the one sport that ruled them all was the melee of muddy ankle-scufflings known bafflingly to its fans as The Beautiful Game, which is English football.

Football, in the already dreary winter months, ruled my childhood home with an iron hand encased in a wet woolen glove. The matches happened on Saturdays, and each week leading up to them would be dominated by speculation about players whose very names spoke rainy afternoons: what form Bobby Charlton would exhibit, how Nobby Stiles’ leg injury was coming along, what Matt Busby had up his sleeve for Albert Scanlon and what Sam Leitch would have to say about it afterwards; the bulk of Saturday was spent sequestered in hermetic concealment from the outside world lest any stray syllable might trickle in to reveal the result of the match when it happened, and the horrible fate thus befall of the suspense being ruined when Match of the Day screened the pre-recorded action later in the evening. My father and brothers loved all of this. It is difficult for me to locate the words to express the depths of my own loathing.

All the girls I knew growing up didn’t hate football: some even, mysteriously, appeared to enjoy it. In my North London grammar school, emotions ran high between the followers of Tottenham Hotspurs (the Spurs), the team my own family followed, and those of Arsenal (the Gunners), who were our bitter enemies, and so bone-deep does the North London tribal rivalry run in even my blood that when Spike Lee once asked me during an interview, charmingly and even mildly flirtatiously, whether I were an Arsenal supporter, his thitherto soft-spoken and respectful interviewer astonished us both by snarling ferociously that those were “fighting words;” but ask me to name a single Spurs player, from those days or these, and I hope you’ve brought a sandwich because you’re looking at a long wait. I had a friend at university who was so devoted a Shakespeare buff that she appeared even to have enjoyed Coriolanus, who tried for three years to convince me that an afternoon’s struggle between Leeds United and Chelsea carried the same level of dramatic tension as did the duel between Macbeth and Macduff; but call me a particularly backward branch dragged in from Birnam Wood, because all I could see on her field of high histrionics was a very great deal of mud.

When I first came to America, I decided, along with various other experiments in personal reinvention, to try to see if my new American self could learn to enjoy these new American sports. I went to a baseball game, where I teared up pleasurably at the National Anthem, and ate a hot dog, and then some peanuts. So far, so good, I thought, my hopes rising a little: maybe I had at last discovered the sport that would win my heart. And then the actual game started. It did not win my heart. It also lasted considerably longer than it had promised it would, the mosquitos were out in force, and it’s surprising how many hot dogs and peanuts you can eat if you have nothing else to do, and, once you have eaten them, how particularly terrible you will feel for a very long time afterwards.

“Come and watch an American football game,” said a group of new Los Angeles friends. “We’ll sit with you in front of the television, and explain everything that’s happening as it happens.” So I did and they did. They very kindly and patiently explained everything very clearly indeed, and I put my mind to concentrating very hard indeed, and at last began to feel that I was gaining a grasp on the proceedings. It was really not so complicated after all, I decided, once you had established that a field goal was a good thing but a touchdown a better, and after a while I even began to feel sufficiently confident to start cheering for the team. I quite liked cheering for the team, I found, and continued to do so quite lustily. It was only halfway through the game and inches away from the ending of several these kind and patient new friendships that I noticed that for most of the afternoon I had been cheering for the Cowboys while everyone else had been cheering for the Rams.

When Mr. Los Angeles arrived in my life, I could not believe my good luck. Sports had just never done it for him, he said, he didn’t know why. He had tried out for the football team in high school, he said, out of curiosity to see what all the fuss was about, but had broken his arm at practice, and out of further curiosity to find out how long he could delay seeking medical help (this is a very Mr. Los Angeles story) had summoned the power of his far from unimpressive intellect to “tell the pain to go away,” which it obediently did for several days until at last his mother dragged him by the ear to the family doctor, who promptly sat down the teenage – and at the time squeaky-clean of personal habit – Mr. Los Angeles for a Marathon Man-style interrogation into his presumed drug use. Mr. Los Angeles has never much cared for sports since.

As for me, I’ve learned to accept my status as sports Philistine, here in Los Angeles as back in London, and to live with it. This Super Bowl Sunday I’ll be sitting quietly in my own back yard, just as I did when I first arrived in America, and – while I am delighted that Super Bowl parties are available for people who do enjoy them – I shall still be keeping a firm distance from any action that might be taking place, and still continuing to relish the peace of non-participation. But this year, as for the last thirty years, I shall have a fellow non-sports lover to enjoy missing the fun with.

Win-win, I’d call it.