The highs and lows of Super Bowl Sunday

By B.G. Kelley

The Super Bowl is the most watched sporting event of the year in America.

Last year's Super Bowl enticed 111 million viewers to their television sets - an American record for TV viewing, eclipsing the 2010 Super Bowl record of 106 million. In fact, the top five most-watched events in U.S. history are the last four Super Bowls and the finale of M*A*S*H, which ranks third. And no event typifies more the marriage of sport and money. Indeed, 30-second commercials cost between $3.5 million and $4 million.

Yet, can I be frank? The slickly packaged Super Bowl can sometimes be insufferable.

Viewers will be subjected to a blizzard of pregame hype by TV talking heads who will bring us stories of how hard the coaches worked, even depriving themselves of sleep by spending overnights at the office breaking down game film and planning strategy. Or we'll hear how humanitarian, charitable, and family and community oriented the players are. There will be stories about how many obstacles the participants have surmounted to play - as if the working stiffs of America have never worked hard, or overcame adversity, or helped their communities, or given to charities - and whose reward isn't millions of bucks.

Just tee the football up and kick it off.

Hating the hype, I do something more purposeful, like running, or reading, or writing during the pregame stuff (which is certainly far better for my body, my mind, and my soul). Still, I confess: I will watch the Super Bowl game. Even then, I know I will suffer a dose of ennui sometime during the game. That's why I keep a book, a magazine, or several newspapers in my lap while the contest goes on. Often I find myself reading more than watching because too many of the Super Bowls have been stinkers.

And I usually don't pull for one team over the other. My interest, for the most part, is pretty much dispassionate, which, of course, may make it seem that watching the Super Bowl is a total waste of my time - and maybe it is.

Apparently, though, a lot of people are not like me. I'm guessing that many Super Bowl viewers watch it simply because it is de rigueur to get together with a riotous crowd at house parties and sports bars and eat and libate liberally (Super Bowl Sunday is the second-largest day for food consumption in the United States, after Thanksgiving). They root for their team, and the rooting is, of course, exponentially intensified by the proportionate amount of libation.

Fan or no, the event has become a conversational common denominator, just like politics, or the economy, or the weather, crossing all socio-economic, cultural, and educational class lines. Every year my postman, my pharmacist, and my teaching colleagues offer up pregame opinions and postgame analysis to me.

But perhaps above all, the Super Bowl brings, at least for a day, what we all need from our often pressure-riddled lives: Escape.