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COMMENTARY
February 4, 2012
Ugly spectacle
The Super Bowl will occur Sunday, according to usually reliable sources. If gentle reader is a big fan of American football, or football in any other kind, or professional sports in general, he has come to the wrong place. All your Super Bowl needs are available, elsewhere. This is the anti-Super Bowl site.And let me boast of my principal disqualification from making any comment on this major public event. I have never seen a Super Bowl game. On one occasion, I actually went to such lengths to avoid it, that I caught a terrible chill. I do not intend to watch Super Bowl XLVI, by way of getting a little education. My preparation consists entirely of reading a few scattered Internet items. Yet I refuse to recuse myself! So, let us start with the segue. I did see a football game this week, or rather the upshot of one. This was a soccer-football match in Port Said, Egypt, visible through international media. Some dozens of people died - mostly, I gather, from knife wounds. For all I know the players had been well-behaved; it was the fans who could not handle the result. In a Scottish tabloid (Daily Record), there was an interesting sidebar in which a couple of Scottish referees recalled their experience, trying to officiate in Egypt. These battle-hardened men, from a country much associated with football hooliganism, were hardly surprised by what happened at Port Said. They had been flown into Egypt, after all, only because Egyptian referees were too scared to serve. The fans there "were just crazy for their football," as one of them put it, politely. Apparently it is perfectly normal, in Egyptian football, for the referees to be escorted from the field by riot police, after any big match. The police also make themselves helpful by arresting, immediately, any player who contests a referee's call. Now, I don't think we will see anything like this in Indianapolis. There are real cultural differences between nations, and sports traditions evolve differently, and so far as I am aware, ritualized mob violence is not yet a regular feature of the North American sporting life. It happens only sporadically. Remember Vancouver; remember Montreal; remember Philadelphia. And there I am thinking only of hockey wherein, by tradition, only the players brawl. It is true that our North American cliché of the sports fan remains the couch potato, not the yob. Our football is associated with junk food, and tins of weak beer; with fat guys who wouldn't survive scrimmage. Since feminism, that stereotype has been spreading to the other sex. And sure enough, from material in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, I learn of the extraordinary commercial effort to reach these customers. Millions of dollars for a 30-second spot; the celebrities of Hollywood enlisted; and this year as never before, technological outreach. For this immense market now drips with electronic gadgets, and the television spots can be used to pull them in, interactively. Through electronic banking, they can buy stuff impulsively while they watch, from out of a fog of irrational euphorias. This information is itself appalling. Consumerism is now advancing dimensionally beyond what we had previously known, and human beings have been reduced to a sucking apparatus. The same technology is now being employed in the competitive business of pulling in voters. It is now possible to electronically tailor the candidate's pitch to what a cloud of automated survey indicators says the voter wants to hear - reducing all politics to "Coke versus Pepsi." Which, in turn, puts the machinery of our Nanny State in the hands of its most cynical exploiters. But not to wander from professional sport. We see above the two aspects of mass spectator events. In his own essay attacking professional football, the late George Orwell fixed upon the first of these: "that sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will." It brings out the worst in any rivalry, whether between municipalities or nations. The whole Olympic notion of universal brotherhood through sporting competition was always a lie, as all national rivalries within the modern Olympic movement attest. Violence in professional sport has been the experience of history. The standard first reference is to the Nika riots in sixth-century Constantinople, between Blue and Green fans of the chariot races, in which tens of thousands were killed; but rioting between rival fans has been a fixture of all mass sporting and entertainment events, wherever and whenever there have been big cities. That is one side, but the other is the use of circus and sport, to make the masses docile; to distract them from hard realities in their daily lives, and idiotize them into subservience. The couch-potato syndrome likewise has its antecedents through time. One extreme swings easily to the other. Professional sport puts that ball into play. A mob in any form is ugly, and the encouragement of mobs is wrong. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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