Let's start with the cheerleaders, because I'm constantly surprised by how little people mention them. For a foreign-born U.S. resident such as myself, cheerleaders are possibly the most American thing about football (which, in deference to my readers, I'm not going to call American football, but just know that I'm hearing that qualifying adjective in my head).
The sport itself? It's rugby with more armor, more celebratory dancing, and way more stoppage time. The commercials? Sorry, UK agencies have been making weirder, funnier, racier ads than this for decades — if not quite on the same budget or with this kind of frequency. The nationwide overindulgence, with too much fried food and competitive beer drinking? Yeah, I'm sure soccer fans know nothing about that.
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Before you get too riled up, let me state for the record: I love America, and I love a good Super Bowl party. I've been going to them, on and off, ever since I moved to these shores 17 years ago. I approach them as an anthropologist would, with a keen eye for the rituals and the little behavioral quirks that are so common as to have become subconscious.
For example, I still smile at how wonderfully unfocused such affairs are. Even in the most exciting fourth-quarter fourth-down moment, there's always someone getting up to grab another beer; there's always some chatter about something unrelated. In an equivalent soccer situation — say, a World Cup final that's gone to penalties — the room would be silent as the grave, and you'd be staring at the screen so hard your eyes would bleed.
With football, though, there seems to be a general awareness that any important play will be repeated ad nauseam. You won't really miss a thing. Oddly enough, the only times the room seems to get really quiet are during the commercial breaks — because there's no guarantee you'll be shown any given ad again.
You could always look them up online, of course, but only advertising and marketing geeks seem to want to do that. Rather, everyone seems to watch the ads with one eye on the general mood of the room. Nobody wants to miss out on that one commercial everyone's going to be talking about in the office tomorrow. The joke in the winning ad won't necessarily be that funny, even after three or four beers, but it will somehow tap into the zeitgeist — rather like a dumbed-down, big-budget version of a New Yorker cartoon.
I will admit that I'm fascinated by the players and their shockingly bright garb. When the golden Niners and the purple Ravens lined up last year, I was struck by the thought that I was watching two teams of Space Marines from 23rd-century Mars. America seems to want its sportsmen to look like genetically-modified gladiators who linger too long at the buffet table. I love that one of football's most legendary players was nicknamed the Fridge, and that so many of his successors are endeavoring to look like mini fridges.
I still chuckle every time I hear the phrase "tight end," and I'm very sorry about that.
I love the patriotic fervor. I really do. Whenever the English soccer team plays, the stadium drunkenly and dutifully sings "God Save the Queen" along with the canned music, even though it's a dirge and we'd much rather have "Land of Hope and Glory" as the national anthem. But you guys go all out — not only the "Star-Spangled Banner", but also the delightful poetry of "America the Beautiful", amplified and belted out in the most operatic style possible. There's glitz and glitter and fireworks and confetti cannons, and the largest sponsor logos ever created.
It's quite the organized party, and yet for all the extreme choreography there's always an air of danger: something might go wrong. Maybe there'll be a wardrobe malfunction in the half-time show. Maybe the lights will go out all of a sudden, and a nation will turn to Twitter to laugh and vent and share.
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Amidst all this you have all those gents squeezed into suits or stripes, equipped with comically large headsets and microphones. They always look so serious, and I always want to tell them: lighten up! You're getting paid millions of dollars to play a game. It's as if you played a lot of Monopoly as a kid, and you really enjoyed Monopoly, and then you discovered that the entire nation wanted to tune in to watch you coach or referee at a Monopoly tournament. Why wouldn't you be smiling at your good fortune the whole time?
Which brings me back to the cheerleaders, and the weirdness around the fact that they barely rate a mention. We don't have a whole lot of cheerleaders outside the US, and we're fascinated by the whole notion — not so much the costumes, which seem to be getting far more revealing than any Janet Jackson accident, but the fact that this is one of the most dangerous sports in the world, and it's going on all the time on the sidelines, just out of view.
Are cheerleaders redundant, then? The glitz and glamor and branding of the modern Super Bowl would seem to suggest so. It's hard to bring cheer when you're being out-shouted by just about everything else in the stadium, and when the network has to cut away to commercial every chance it gets. Super Bowl partygoers seem either embarrassed by their presence, or they simply don't notice. They've become furniture.
So spare a thought this Sunday for your cheerleaders, America, especially as they'll be freezing their butts off in New Jersey. Those pom-poms are symbols of a simpler time in football. They're also as utterly, iconically American as the Statue of Liberty's torch.