Professional sports has become a spectacle in which millionaire gladiators perform for patricians sitting in their royal boxes. The hoi polloi is not welcome at the event, but can consume the sport, with commercials, safely at home. Their working class energy might upset the folks sipping their martinis.

This goes along with cities building and re-building professional stadiums everywhere, but neglecting participatory facilities for the young, who are increasingly sedentary, obese, depressed and with unheard of rates of diabetes.

So... men and women - get off your butts and take your selves and your children to the park, if you can find one. That should be the thrill. Oppose more stadiums for pros. Forget about being such voyeurs. Make them repair swimming pools, build running tracks for kids etc. in the city.

Actually, RSJ, we must have both been typing our comments at the same time because I hadn't read yours prior to posting mine.

Miftin, I neglected free agency in baseball, which is usually for older players near the end of their career, but you got my point.

Yes, it's incredible that all thse gung-ho sports fans terrified of 'socialist medicine' don't realize their sports heroes are functioning under a system that could have been designed by Eugene Debs or Norman Thomas. I think every American should be required to study a successful socialist democracy like Norway or Sweden in detail, but then David Horowitz and his ilk, in the name of 'academic freedom,' would have the teacher fired. I wonder what Horowitz would do if the teacher taught the lessons gleaned from pro sports in this country?

Professional sports, including football in the U.S. does give us an excellent example of socialist principles in action. Because of free agency, this is not so much the case with baseball. But hockey, b-ball and football are allowed to pick their new players according to how well (or how poorly) each team did the previous year. So, a team with the worst record gets to select first from the new crop of college seniors. The team with the best record, or the championship team(s) from the previous year don't get to choose a new player until far down on the ladder. This is an example of egalitarian socialism in action, and it works very well to maintain an overall high level of parity and competitiveness among the teams of that particular sport.

you idiots hate everything, you are so negative, please up your dosage!

The points made by Dave Zirin and some of the other commenters here are well-taken and accurate. I saw the Stupor Bowl yesterday and its ads for over-caffeinated drinks, nudge-in-the-ribs soft porn, infants vomiting for E-Trade (one of the more unintentionally hilarious spots), Dr. Bill the Cat Killer and Mr. "Ragin' Cajun" Matalin sharing a Coke, and all of the other clatter and chatter designed to sell useless crapola to couch-bound America -- an orgy of raw consumerism in bad economic times that dominated the actual game on the field.

But I have to admit that, to a football fan, the game was one of the best Super Bowls I've seen, especially because the underdog Giants won, pulling it out in a miracle heart-stopping drive in the fourth quarter.

Like Hamster, I won't be buying anything sold on the Super Bowl extravaganza, but I still enjoyed the game.

As a sidelight, I wonder if anyone has noticed that when uber-rich men get together to form a sports league, whether it be the NFL, MLB or NBA, it is always based on socialist principles -- everyone shares the wealth and the losing teams get the pick of next year's best players. Owning a sports franchise is essentially a license to print money due to this revenue-sharing -- you can't go broke no matter how badly your team stinks. And with the recent salary caps for players, a team owner cannot even buy his way to a championship team anymore. A curious comment on these alleged 'free trade capitalists' and their government-protected monopolies.

Good points, Hybridoma2001, and I'd pay to see Bush get into the ring with Osama as well. Now that would be a 'sporting contest' that would attract international attention -- we could probably pay off the deficit from the pay-per-view proceeds.

BTW, Trollwiththepunches, I know whereof you speak as I used to play, too, although not at the pro level; football teams are nearly as bad -- or good, depending on your persuasion -- as Boy Scout summer camps.

I love it, Little Brother! You have it in one. *applauds*

It is patently absurd that somebody should feel proud and happy that the team that plays in their city has won. They have done nothing to achieve that. Yet, humans are like that. We have that mechanism that loves to win, even vicariously. The tragedy is that the citizenry of the US feels the same way about war. Now that, is not harmless absurdity, that is a lot more serious and takes the fun out of the game, at least for me.

Today's NFL is not like our grandparent's NFL. It's all about $$$$. I like Zirin's idea of playing the game in the team's home park, but I can't imagine the NFL giving up all the money they get when they have these games in a neutral site. In our local paper today, if you having a Super Bowl ad in today's big game, it will cost you $90,000 per SECOND. Even the ticket prices are laughable. For the First Super Bowl, tickets cost $10, and for today's game, I saw a pair on E-bay going for $77,000.

Whatever happened to game being just a game? We have to watch 4 hours of tv today for just 2.5 hours of actual playing. I for one do not need all this hoopla, I just want to watch the game.

Just another mega-circus sponsored by bread manufacturers.

I haven't missed a Super Bowl ever; but, it is a bit sad for me because it means the end of football season. Having seen the all, I have found that 8 out 10 are such blowouts that they are not even interesting football. This looks to me like it will be another boring blowout by the Patriots. Nevertheless, I will watch and root for the New York Giants and hope the game is exciting and close.

An interesting part of the Super Bowl is all the betting that it excites, kind of a Super Spike in gammbling on the outcome of the game. I cannot keep up with the many incidents that one can bet on,- first field goal, first quarter total score, first sack, passes completed,...a crtical mass of parimutual cooperation that makes us all equal, regardless of race, age, ethnicity, gender. No wealth is created, it is actually redistributed, something like what happened every umpteen years or so in the Old Testament (somewhere).

2000 years from now when archeologists and such try to figure out what made our civilization tick, what bedrock of faith drove the common consciouslness, they'll focus on Santa Claus Parades, complex toys, and Super Bowl betting records.

tnewman, thanks for the links.

I suppose there's all sorts of ways to look at football and, consequently, at this article. You could say that football is a microcosm of war, which it is, with the old "my city against your city" thing. You could say that, whether you like football or not, it provides employment for large numbers of people, which it does. You could say that football has changed for the worse, what with all the corporate sponsorship and hoopla, which it has. You could say that, in comparison with all the other more important things going on in the world, an article about football doesn't belong on Common Dreams, which maybe it doesn't (except for the earlier "Superbowl Shame" article, which really wasn't about football per se, but was, instead, about corporate exploitation and child labor in Africa).

Or you could just say that football is boring and pointless, which it is. At least that's what I think.

Maybe it will be a sign that we're on the right track when Americans start thinking that their choice of a President is more important than who wins the gosh-darned Super Bowl.

The halftime show is sponsored by Bridgestone Firestone -- a company which uses child labor, abuses workers' rights and destroys the environment on their rubber plantation in Liberia. Check out http://www.StopFirestone.org for more information.

Send an urgent action e-mail to the NFL and Firestone NOW: http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/NFL08

Dumb sport, with brief bursts of action between interminable huddling and officiating. Even dumber event.

Football is an American game. But I think I love baseball and tennis better. Roger Federa!

Here I go again with my references to philosophy. Nonetheless, William James as well as Immanuel Kant wrote essays about sport and how it could be a possible replacement to war and feelings of national superiority. James wrote his essay around the time of the modern Olympics. James believed that violence was a powerful part of human nature and that it would be something difficult to entirely remove. His short essay, the Moral Equivalent of War, makes this argument.

Wouldn't it be lovely to see George Bush put on a pair of boxing gloves and slug it out with Sudam Hussein? It would be a great media event!

But all childishness aside, in my life as a child, we often settled disputes between groups of kids in the neighborhood by playing a game of tackle football or basketball. Afterwards, many of us became friends or at the very least, tensions were relieved. We had a hall monitor in high school who was an ex-marine drill sergeant. When two students couldn't settle their dispute, he'd take them to the gym, alone, and have them put on a pair of boxing gloves.

There is much to be said that's positive about sports. Unfortunately, there is a lot of negative things to be said about professional sports today. I prefer to watch a little league game these days, or high school sports. To me, they are much more entertaining and exciting. Children also learn to deal with defeat and how to work as a team. To me that is the true value of sports; it teaches a child many things that can't be learned in a classroom.

off22

yes, zirin is cool.

i think he misses a hook here, though.

Before it is anything else, before it's even a football game, the Super Bowl is first and foremost a two week entertainment festival for the rich and shameless: a corporate Woodstock with suits and sports cars subbing for ponchos and patchouli. Less free love and drugs, more hookers and scotch.

this may be true, but the super bowl started because an upstart league challenged a glitzier, bigger league. and since, the league has had the most egalitarian business model. what with revenue sharing, even with the smaller market teams.

but anywayz. not that important, i suppose, given the state of the world.

Go Pats! Push for Perfection!

I didn't read the article, I just thought I would check the comments and see if anybody here really gives a rat's ass who wins the "Big Game".

What a bunch of sour, elitist jerks! Dave Zirin does a great job of finding progressive angles to our national sports scene. You 'commenters' are sooooo politically correct and soooo far above us little people who are into football.

Go Patriots! 19 in a row!

How utterly silly. This demonstrates what passes for news on the mush headed "progressive community". To even comment on such a mindless junk heap of nonsense as football is beyond belief. Who really cares that one could not see because of the pyros. The best game ever? Only totqally mindless people would even know where the game is to be played. I did not and could not care less. It is because this nation has such mindless idiots that will watch something as silly as football, that it will not surprise us that the fascist John McCain has a very good chance to be president.

I remember the football player's strike of the early 80s. The team owners scoured the country looking for talented "scabs" to replace the big-named regulars.

Throughout the season, the unknowns wore the same uniforms from the same teams, played extremely exciting football (every bit as exciting as the seasons prior and since) and the fans had a great time watching these guys.

The networks made tons of money just like before. The professional sportscaster pundits would sit there after a big play and say something like:

"That was a terrific 86 yard punt return, one of the most exciting I've ever seen, by....uh....well, his name is Roy Jones, and three months ago he was working as an auto mechanic in Des Moines, Iowa....He attended the University of Nebraska for one year and played football as a walk-on, but when his father died unexpectedly he was forced to quit school and support his mother...."

Funny how the subject of football and gayness has come up repeatedly in this thread.

Especially funny because football IS gay in every possible sense of the word.

I should know, cause I used to play.

The great game of football!

Before you can call a game great, it ought to be played by not just one country. Soccer is great, tennis is great, even golf, and rugby are great. Football is just an American game.

Well, I'm an Australian and I've never much seen the point of American football - time for yet another time-out while the refigerators catch their breath. And: lets replace the entire team with a different team *during the game* because the ball is now going the other way. That's not a team. It's a corporation.

But then again, I loathe sports in general. And no, I am not gay. Just another IT geek.

dmitri-

Zirin is a sportswriter, and he publishes articles at the rate of many sportswriters, many of which do not appear on this site. He reaches more audiences than Commondreams.org, including the very conservative athletic crowd.

Football was not always nationalist violence. It used to be a sport of the underprivelged, the poor, getting paid at a rate nobody would play for anymore. Most elites looked down upon football... there were not corporate sponsors, no opportunities for patriotism gone wild. I suppose I understand your "violent" stance, but it is no UFC, boxing, or other sport whose only goal is to inflict pain.

Zirin is in constant battle with the very conservative sportswriter crowd. If it gets old to you, that is fine, but respect somebody who is trying to illuminate realities on a different level than the standard world news platform. Sport has been hijacked by a very very conservative ideology, and Zirin gives many sports fans a reality check on the rampant elitism and racism that has infected standard thought on sport.

I loved his book, and would reccomend it to any liberal sports fan.

Yes, it's a money machine and a marketers dream, but there is a much darker side to the scheme. Football in general, is camouflaged nationalism (and warfare) and teaches children, from a very early age, to focus on the differences between people. "They" wear blue, their bad. "We" wear orange, we're good. It's proper (often required) to dislike "them" and anyone who supports "them". Those who support "us" are our friends and comrades.

Here's an idea, let's cut funding for arts and music in school so that we can maintain team sports. Yeah, I see the logic.

Get over yerselves, people. It's a great game. I ignore the two weeks of hype and just watch the game. Even the ads are entertaining, of course I don't buy the crap they're selling.

*yawn* Do we really need to see a bunch of over-sized, steroid-pumped men smashing into each other on a field? Since when is it important to the overall health of a nation to see violence and the glorification of a male-dominant, heterosexist culture played out on a sports field. Personally, I don't get the obsession with this kind of violent game. Why anyone thinks it has any redeeming value is beyond me. I'm Canadian and I feel precisely the same about hockey. It'll be interesting to see how many men will now impugn my manliness on this "progressive" website. For the record, I'm gay so yeah, leave the fag jokes out.

Dude--Where have you been for the past 48 years--or haven't you heard that since Pete Rozelle became commissioner of the NFL, it's mission statement was changed from "playing football" to "providing entertainment"?

When you are an "entertainment" instead of a "sports" business you want to have the largest audience possible--translate women and children rather than almost exclusively men--and that is why:

There are the cheerleader babes prissing and prancing on the sidelines.

There are the dumb-ass "mascots" romping all over the field.

There is an hour "pregame" show that looks and sounds more like "Entertainment Tonight" meets "Oprah" than anything that has to do with sports.

The half-time extravaganza of the Superbowl features the likes of Michael Jackson or PauL McCartney instead of the Univ. of whatever marching band.

The sideline reporters are mostly ladies (jocks even in the adreneline rush just after a big play are less likely to break out in a burst of profanity or sexually explicit expletives in the company of a woman than another man) who ask a player to described his "feelings".

I remember growing up in Philadelphia in the late 50's and early 60's and watching the Gisnts, Eagles, Browns, and Steelers play. These guys absolutely and really despised each other and some of them thirty years after the fact, in middle age, being interviewed by NFL films on controversial plays were still angry at cheap shots or blown referee calls. that was because they played with a passion totally lacking in today's NFL.

Today all the players hot dog and prance around like a bunch of prima-donna celebrities. There has not been a quarterback who was anything other than an extension of the coaching staff's collective egos since Johnny Unitas retired.

After the game they shake hands, hug, and some even kneel in prayer. They have become as phoney as our politicians. Yawn--hope all the women and kids enjoy thier superbowl special 6 hour extravaganza--becasue football it ain't.