Category Archives: super bowl

The NFL bet

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Fifty years ago, the idea of putting the Super Bowl in Las Vegas, coupling the two primary examples of American excess, was as surreal as those two prodigious entities. Mostly because the National Football League—its Super Bowl showcase already out of control in 1974 and proclaimed by a commentator in that year’s host city of Houston to be “the championship of the solar system”—was adamant in its holier-than-thou stance against gambling.

“I would go anywhere,” then-NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle declared during Super Bowl Week of ‘74, “to testify against any proposals favoring legalized betting in pro sports. There is no doubt about the suspicions involved with betting, and we must be above suspicion.”

But here we are. The NFL now gleefully partners with multiple sportsbook operations—MGM, Caesars, FanDuel, DraftKings—has bookmaking establishments inside NFL stadiums that are open on game days, and debuted official NFL slot machines in Vegas days before this year’s big game. Where there is money to be made by the league…

It was right to the point, then, for the New York Times last week to note that the first Super Bowl played in Sin City “feels like a moment manufactured for” Hunter S. Thompson “as Las Vegas furthers the polishing of its image with the imprimatur of the NFL, which has made a seminal turn of its own with a public embrace of the gambling industry.” Thompson, creator of the subjective, first-person narrative he called “gonzo journalism,” attended that 1974 Super Bowl and produced a Rolling Stones magazine article headlined “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl.”

That was a take-off on Thompson’s best-selling 1971 book, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.” And the idea of the Rolling Stones piece was to subject the NFL to Thompson’s critical eye; though he considered himself a football fan, he cast himself as apart from what he saw as the NFL’s self-serving model of integrity.

For Rolling Stone, Thompson wrote that the Super Bowl headquarters hotel in Houston was “jammed with drunken sportswriters, hard-eyed hookers, wandering geeks and hustlers (of almost every persuasion) and a legion of big and small gamblers from all over the country who roamed through the drunken, randy crowd….”

That Super Bowl Week, I spent the better part of one day with Thompson, assigned by my Newsday editor to study the then-36-year-old, slightly bald, bespectacled, casually dressed celebrity author who smoked Benson & Hedges through a cigarette holder. (Not the only thing he smoked.) And the irony was that he appeared to be searching in vain for the Las Vegas cliché of rampant immorality.

During lunch in the lobby of the aforementioned hotel, he muttered about the absolute normality surrounding him. Where were the players and high rollers propositioning prostitutes? He drove me without warning to a dilapidated roadside bar—which appeared to be a topless joint, though not in use for that activity mid-day—but quickly left, with nothing to report.

We spent some time at a Super Bowl practice session for one of the teams—Miami eventually clobbered Minnesota in the dull title game to come—and Thompson decided that “the players almost all strike me as being the same person. I’ve never seen so many boring people.”

Then, as now, the hordes of reporters had no real news to unearth; everything about Super Bowl opponents already has been widely disseminated by the time they gather at the championship site. “I feel like calling my editor and telling him there’s no story here,” Thompson said. “There really isn’t anything happening.”

He subsequently wrote for Rolling Stone, “For eight long and degrading days, I had skulked around Houston with all the other professionals, doing our jobs—which was actually to do nothing at all except drink all the free booze we could pour into our bodies, courtesy of the National Football League, and listen to an endless barrage of some of the lamest and silliest swill ever uttered by man or beast…”

It must be noted that “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was straightforward in Thompson’s depictions of his own drug-induced haze—pill-popping, pot-smoking, tequila-swilling, acid-dropping. And that, in “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl,” he described his “crazed and futile effort to somehow explain the extremely twisted nature of my relationship with God, Nixon and the National Football League…”

The Super Bowl—I covered seven of the extravaganzas—never appeared to reach the level of disreputable behavior perceived by Thompson, though his radar likely was more sensitive to such grotesqueries. The event most definitely is over-the-top—a massive royal ball for the elite, scripted as a morality play of American values and competitiveness, sold as entertainment for the masses—thanks to the reach of television. In short, a voracious money magnet for the league and its partners.

Hunter S. Thompson died in 2005, of suicide. But he appeared to sense, a half-century ago, this just-consummated no-guilt relationship, which nicely fits Sin City’s marketed dispensation that “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” There already are hints that the Super Bowl could return there annually.

If so, they’re made for each other.

Not the Detroit Lions

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(A version of this appeared in Newsday’s Opinion pages)

Here comes another Super Bowl, our 21st-Century version of Christians vs. lions. And I am wondering, in spite of its enormous popularity—more than 50,000 spectators attending gladiatorial games at the Colosseum back when everyone used Roman numerals—did the whole Christians-lions thing end because they ran out of Christians?

What if the National Football League, the bread and circuses of our modern culture, were to run out of players? Is there any chance that increased awareness of participants’ brain damage, something we’ve been reading about for more than a decade, will multiply the number of liability suits, gradually scare off insurance companies, advertisers, schools and colleges—not to mention parents of potential kiddie footballers—in a domino effect that eventually would dry up the NFL’s feeder system? Putting football (like democracy?) on a slow-motion decline into oblivion.

Silly, no?

The Super Bowl, and football in general, remain our most popular form of escapist entertainment. Of the 100 most-watched telecasts in 2021, 75 were NFL games. The NFL’s annual revenue, which has topped $15 billion a year, is roughly four times what it was at the beginning of the century. The league’s new 11-year deal with media partners is valued at $110 billion. We clearly love the spectacle.

Yet the sport’s barbaric nature is progressively more obvious with the accumulating reports of CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease associated with repeated blows to the head.

After the 2005 publication of forensic neuropathologist Bennet Omalu’s 2002 discovery of CTE in the brain of late Pittsburgh Steeler Hall of Fame center Mike Webster, there was a 37.8 percent drop in tackle football participation among all ages—from 8.4 million to 5.22 million—over the next 12 years.

In 2015, when a medical study revealed increased risk of memory problems for kids who played tackle football prior to age 12, the NFL took evasive action by backing nationwide Mom Clinics, meant to convince parents about the safety of having their tykes—as young as 5—cracking heads in youth leagues. To keep the supply of gridders coming.

But news of middle- and high-school teams being suspended has spread across the nation—sometimes due directly to heath concerns, often because there no longer were enough children willing to play.

The NFL, which initially dismissed Omalu’s findings, at last established a concussion protocol and instituted penalties for intentional head-to-head blows it calls “targeting.” But Omalu continued to argue that brain damage isn’t strictly from clinically diagnosed concussions and that safety measures such as improved helmets “don’t stop the brain from bumping around in the skull. We have to take the head out of the game.”

According to Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist and director of the CTE Center at Boston University, the disease now has been found in the brains of more than 315 former NFL players—including 24 who died in their 20s and 30s, several of whom committed suicide. The most recent was 32-year-old Phillip Adams, who last April shot and killed six people in a violent rampage in South Carolina before killing himself.

That’s a lot more unsettling than watching Giants quarterback Daniel Jones, earlier this season, emerging from a tackle rubber-legged, with little imaginary birds twirling around his helmet. Or Arizona defender Budda Baker being carted off the field on a stretcher after a violent collision during a recent playoff game.

Though CTE is detectable only in posthumous examinations, researchers are concerned about the cognitive fog and erratic and impulsive behavior in the disease’s potential victims. So when Tampa Bay receiver Antonio Brown bizarrely stripped off his equipment and walked off the field, mid-game, against the Jets last month, BU’s CTE Center co-founder Dr. Chris Nowinski acknowledged in an online post, “Like you, I wonder if Antonio Brown’s behavior is caused by CTE.”

We will only know if his brain is examined after he is dead. When it is too late.

 

 

Not just another game

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A few things have changed since I was last directly involved in Super Bowl coverage for Newsday 20 years ago. There was no pandemic then, of course. At the time, Tom Brady was nothing more than a low-round draft choice who had just finished his rookie season, during which he appeared in one game, tried three passes and completed one. He was David; he would become Goliath later.

At the 2001 Super Bowl, in fact, the perceived impact of the opposing quarterbacks was the very antithesis to this year’s ballyhooed star-power Brady-Patrick Mahomes expectation: Which of them, Baltimore’s Trent Dilfer or the New York Giants’ Kerry Collins, would avoid fouling up the situation? (Collins threw four interceptions, so Dilfer was the default winner.)

For that game, the Giants’ second-string quarterback, not afforded the opportunity to bail out Collins, was Jason Garrett, who these days is the team’s offensive coordinator and, in some minds, has underdelivered in that role. Garrett’s current job belonged in 2001 to Sean Payton, now head coach of the New Orleans Saints, who were just denied a spot in this Super Bowl by Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

The world turns. Things evolve, things disappear altogether. The venues for four of my first five Super Bowl adventures have been demolished—Houston’s Rice University Stadium (1974), New Orleans’ Tulane Stadium (1975), Miami’s Orange Bowl (1976 and ’79).

But this year’s championship game returns, for a third time, to Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium, which first hosted the event in 2001, when I witnessed Baltimore’s 34-7 walloping of the Giants. That big pirate ship—made of concrete, eminently sinkable—remains behind one Raymond James Stadium end zone.

Tampa, furthermore, is still a town where you can get a really good victory cigar—and therefore seems an ideal place for the Big Game. Tampa’s historic Latin quarter, Ybor City, endures as a Cigar Capital, and it was there that I found “master roller” Roberto Ramirez, considered No. 1 in his craft in his native Cuba before he defected in 1996. He was cigar maker to U.S. celebrities and politicians, had been invited to the White House, and was still at his job in his mid-70s, according to the most updated internet information I could find on him from 10 years ago.

The other Super Bowl constant, as true now as when I was immersed in the hullabaloo for the first of seven times in January 1974, is the event’s status as the Great American Conversation Piece. The Great American Timeout (maybe even more so now, in the midst of the plague and political division). The Great American Spectacle.

The Super Bowl’s exalted position in our national culture can be explained, at least partially, by the phenomenon that hot air rises. This Great American Sideshow is inflated, like the blimp overhead. Its scale is exaggerated; the Great American Fish Story. It is undeniably hard-wired into the circuitry of our American lifestyle. Citizens avoid planning weddings and other major happenings on Super Bowl dates.

And the NFL’s manifest destiny marches on. Super Bowl sites already are set for 2022 (at the Rams/Chargers new home in Inglewood, Calif.), 2023 (Glendale, Ariz.), 2025 (New Orleans.) The only reason the 2024 location isn’t set is because the league’s upcoming regular-season expansion to 17 games would set up a conflict with that year’s Mardi Gras festivities in New Orleans, which had been the designated host. Speculation is that the 2024 game will end up in Las Vegas, emblematic of Great American Overindulgence.

The Super Bowl’s place, as something akin to a national religion, is such that in 1990 a Columbia, S.C., Presbyterian pastor named Brad Smith conceived the “Souper Bowl of Caring,” asking churches to organize the collection of $1 contributions after services on Super Bowl Sunday for soup kitchens and charities.

At the 2001 Tampa Super Bowl, Smith was permitted by the NFL to stage a press conference for his project—“Enjoy the game but think of the less fortunate,” was his pitch. Only a single reporter and two TV cameras showed up, while thousands or other journalists were busy reporting on Baltimore star linebacker Ray Lewis’ year-old murder case and Tampa’s reputation for strip clubs. Smith was not deterred. “Why not use the power of sports?” he said then. “Nothing transcends divisions in our culture like the Super Bowl game.”

So the annual frivolity is upon us again. This time, many of the spectators in Tampa will be of the cardboard variety. This time, Covid-19, the monster under our beds, is lurking, and among the consequences is exacerbating food insecurity across the country. But Smith’s organization, tapping into the power of the Super Bowl, now reports having raised $163 million. Which sounds worthy of a good victory cigar.

A Super Bowl survey

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(not really)

And here’s another geographical fact about Kansas City. Not only is it decidedly in Missouri—apparently news to a New Yorker named Donald Trump—but there also is not really a corner to stand on at 12th Street and Vine (“with my Kansas City baby and a bottle of Kansas City wine”).

That specific intersection, referenced in Wilbert Harrison’s 1959 chart-topping hit, hasn’t existed since an urban renewal project wiped out a section of 12th Street 60 years ago. Also, though officially adopted in 2005 by Kansas City, the song was written by two California teenagers who never had been to Kansas City.

Which, again, is in Missouri.

Granted, though, it is a state that can seem to be all over the map.

There is, for instance, a California, Mo. A Washington, Mo. A Louisiana, Mo. An Oregon, Mo. A Nevada, Mo. (Named by a fellow who immigrated from Nevada City. Which, any cartographer worth his salt knows, is in California.)

There even, for the internationally aware, is a Cuba, Mo. A Mexico, Mo. A Lebanon, Mo.

And no surprise: There is a Missouri City, Mo. (Though it’s hardly a city; population 279). There most certainly is not a Missouri City, Kan.

But, anyway. As a former resident of Missouri (during my college years), I can report that the state has a lot of moving targets. The climate is one: “If you don’t like the Missouri weather,” the saying goes, “wait 10 minutes.” Dreadful humid heat, sleet, tornadoes, snow, rain. Sometimes all on Thursday.

Just as evasive is a set way to pronounce the state’s name. About half the natives—generally speaking, those is the urban centers and along the northeast side of a sort of diagonal Mason-Dixon line—say “Mizz-ur-ee.” To the west and southwest, and in more sparsely populated areas, it’s “Mizz-ur-uh.”

I had just graduated from the University of Missouri—hailing from out of state, I’ve always said Mizz-ur-ee—and had left the region when then-governor Warren Hearnes announced with some fanfare in 1970 that both pronunciations were correct. Still, Missouri politicians continue to get flack from the locals for switching to an “ee” or “uh” ending depending on where they are giving a speech.

Okay. There is a Kansas City, Kan, directly across the Missouri River and roughly a third the size of Kansas City, Mo. But it is not the home of the Super Bowl champion Chiefs. In the wake of Trump’s embarrassing faux pas, in which he Tweeted how the big game’s winners had “represented the Great State of Kansas,” some clarification is in order.

The Kansas Kansas City is the come-lately Kansas City, incorporated in 1872—two decades after the Missouri Kansas City officially materialized. And the story is that the Kansas Kansas City took its name to fool New York financiers—maybe they would think it was the booming, established Missouri Kansas City—into sending a monetary boost to their town.

Over time, the two states have become friendly enough neighbors, but they do have a tense history going back to open violence involving anti-slavery (Kansas) and pro-slavery (Missouri) factions leading up to and during the Civil War. And sports, mostly through a long-standing rivalry between the two state universities, indelicately played on that history for the next hundred years.

The schools’ football rivalry was called the Border War—taken literally from the bloody Civil War era skirmishes—for decades before it finally downgraded to the Border Showdown at the beginning of this Century. Less menacingly, Norm Stewart, who for 32 years coached Missouri basketball, delighted in getting under the skin of Kansas fans—partly by his claim that, for Missouri road games in Lawrence, Kan., he avoided spending a single dime in the state of Kansas by booking his team into hotels and restaurants (and gassing up the team bus) 40 miles away in Kansas City.

Stewart recently admitted that story was just a myth. But it demonstrated that he knew the lay of the land. And that Kansas City is in Missouri.

All aboard the bandwagon

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About “long-suffering fans:”

At the end of the 1986 season, the New York Giants qualified for their first Super Bowl in the 21st year of that event. (Sorry: “XXIst year.”) A fairly long drought, but hardly forever. They last had been in a pre-Super Bowl NFL title game 23 seasons earlier, before bumbling through 17 of 20 non-winning campaigns between 1964 and 1983.

Anyway, there had been all this talk—not unlike the post-Super Bowl 52 (“LII”) babble referencing Philadelphia Eagles followers—about the Giants’ “long-suffering fans” finally being rewarded. And that struck at least some of the 1986 Giants’ players as a bit much.

Offensive guard Chris Godfrey, having watched Giants’ fans proclaiming on television at the time that, at long last, they “were No. 1,” noticed that “I’m on the team, but it’s kind of hard for the players to take credit for this.”

The way running back Joe Morris saw the phenomenon then was, “A lot of people were waiting for us to win so they could say, ‘I’ve been a Giants fan all these years.’”

Offensive guard Billy Ard decided, “I don’t care who jumps on the bandwagon now. But when you win, they’ll cheer. And when you lose, they’ll boo.”

It’s a tricky dynamic. The fans invest passion—and money—into their team, and therefore an identity. But it’s not a two-way relationship. And the players, though they are well compensated for the entertainment value they provide, are the ones doing the heavy lifting.

For comparison, there is no indication, for instance, that Broadway show audiences, concert crowds or moviegoers take credit for the high quality of performances they attend. In sports, there is what Robert Cialdini, an Arizona State University psychology and marketing professor, years ago termed BIRG—Basking in Reflected Glory.”

When the team wins, at least. A research group of C.R. Snyder, MaryAnne Lassergard and Carol Ford coined the corresponding term CORFing—Cutting Off Related Failure—to describe the inclination of fans, after a defeat, to distance themselves from their team. A “we won,” but “they lost” deal.

Such wishy-washy loyalty would appear to undercut the “long-suffering” label. In fact, “long-suffering” synonyms—uncomplaining, patient, forgiving, tolerant, stoical—suggest the opposite of CORFing.

I’ll give the Eagles’ fans this: Their emotional connection with the team likely is more permanent than that of the players, whose careers are brief and who often are traded away or leave in pursuit of a better contract. The mercenary thing. And fandom really is balled up in a sense of community.

And it had been 57 seasons since the Eagles were on top of the NFL heap. It’s just that hanging civic and personal pride on the championship success of the local team seems risky. Philadelphia would be the same metropolis today had the Eagles lost to New England in the big game. And all those “long-suffering” fans, well within their rights to celebrate and enjoy the moment—excluding the cretins responsible for public violence in Philly—should understand that they were not the ones blocking and tackling and throwing touchdown passes against the Patriots.

It’s not “we won.” It’s “our team won.” That should be plenty good enough for any fan, long-suffering or not.

Play calls have gone terribly awry before Super Bowl 49

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So, here was my story for Newsday in the Nov. 20, 1978 edition (which came to mind after some commentator or another called Seattle’s final pass attempt in Sunday’s Super Bowl “the dumbest call in the history of the National Football League…”)

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East Rutherford, N.J.—To the Giants’ coaching staff—specifically, offensive coordinator Bob Gibson—went the George Custer Medal for Incredibly Faulty Calculations. Oh, the Giants and their fans were ready to hang that one around his neck, all right.

Let’s go to the videotape, just the last 20 seconds of yesterday’s Giants vs. Philadelphia Eagles game: Giants lead, 17-12. Third-and-two at their 29-yard line. Clock running. Philadelphia has neither the ball nor any timeouts remaining. Many of the 70,318 fans had begun filing out of the stadium a minute before, when Giants safety Odis McKinney intercepted a pass, deflected through Mike Hogan’s hands, at the Giants’ 10.

Apparently the Giants have won their sixth game—the first time since 1972 they have won more than five. The sensible wisdom of the moment is quite obvious: Be conservative. As one would turn out the lights when leaving a room, one would likewise have his quarterback assume the fetal position—football embraced close to the stomach—and lie there until the last few seconds of the game go away.

But Gibson, in a hurried phone conversation from the press box with the other coaches, orders quarterback Joe Pisarcik to hand off to fullback Larry Csonka off tackle. Further, the play dictates that Pisarcik do a dance step, a reverse spin before the handoff.

And Pisarcik—oh, my…he FUMBLES. Philadelphia cornerback Herman Edwards has the ball…on the RUN…and…and…

Dramatic, no? Philadelphia wins, 19-17. After it surely had lost.

To the Eagles—specifically, Edwards—went the Little Engine That Could Ribbon for hanging in there. His run with the Pisarcik fumble covered 26 yards and was as easy as it was totally unreasonable. “Things like that,” Edwards said, “well, that’s why you keep playing every play, right to the end. I don’t know why it happened or what happened. The ball just fell out. There was no hit on the play….”

Back to the videotape: Pisarcik, as he turns, has the ball begin to slip off his fingers. Anyway, as he looks to find Csonka, Csonka already has passed. The ball appears to float from Pisarcik like a soap bubble; on closer inspection, it apparently brushes Csonka’s hip.

Gibson avoided the post-game elevator when he noticed reporters already aboard. Outside the press box, angry fans called for almost five minutes, “We want Gibson! Send that bum out here!”

To head coach John McVay, facing a large room full of pencils and pads and microphones after the game, went the Patience Citation for repeating—many times—the coaching staff’s reasoning for not having Pisarcik fall on the ball.

“You run that play 500 times and you don’t fumble,” McVay said, reduced to a shrug and a sigh. “There was an Eagles’ kid lying around on the ground for a while there. Maybe they were faking an injury, and we didn’t want to get the clock stopped on that, so we decided we’d go for the first down. We figure that’s a pretty secure play, guys. A hand-off to the fullback has got to be a secure play.”

Hardly anybody agreed. Once again, the videotape; a closeup of the Giants huddle: “In that situation,” Giants center Jim Clack said, “you fall on it. When Joe came into the huddle and called the play, everybody in the huddle—EVERYBODY in the huddle—said, ‘Let’s fall on it. Let’s don’t take a chance.’ But Joe, well, he can’t just change a call like that.”

Pisarcik said, “Sure, the thought went through my mind to just fall on it, But….”

But earlier this year Pisarcik was “yelled at pretty good” (Clack’s words) for changing a play call sent down from the press box by Gibson. Pisarcik admitted that, saying, “Hey, sure. I’ve been yelled at. More than once.”

To Pisarcik, then, went the Ulysses Plaque for Carrying On Despite Various and Frustrating Rough Journeys. Pisarcik’s teammates and, in fact, even director of operations Andy Robustelli, made it clear that blame for the play should not be placed on the quarterback. “My main concern,” Robustelli said, “is Joe. That the players stand behind him. We have to make sure the players don’t lose confidence in what we’re doing. I didn’t agree with the call.”

The more the play was replayed, the more outrageous it seemed to the Giants. To the Eagles, too. “I wish that wouldn’t happen against the Giants,” Philadelphia linebacker Bill Bergey said. “Dallas or Washington, yes. The Giants, no.”

So unacceptable was the manner of defeat that a Giants’ helmet came flying onto the field as Edwards bounced up and down in the end zone with his teammates. Towels and other handy items were hurled among the Giants. “I was ducking helmets,” said reserve quarterback Randy Dean. Linebacker Harry Carson remained seated alone on the Giants’ bench for five full minutes after the game. Approached later in the lockerroom, he said, “Don’t ask,” and walked out. Pisarcik, when first approached by reporters, bellowed, “Get out of here!”

Probably tackle Brad Benson was best able to reason it out. “If the uncertain things didn’t happen in football,” he said, “then why would people come out and watch us play? But the bad part for me is that I really enjoyed it until the end.”

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[I came to think of that play as Moby Fumble (Thar the Giants Blow It!), as the Archduke’s Assassination—similar to the incident that triggered World War I, that fumble led immediately to the firing of Bob Gibson and, at the end of the season, the firing of John McVay and the resignation of Andy Robustelli. That play left the Giants in ruins. And the New York Times reported today that Gibson, who had been a close friend to McVay for years and that season had carpooled daily from their New Jersey homes to Giants’ practices with McVay, never coached again, never spoke publicly—and almost never privately—about the fumble. And recently was diagnosed with cancer.]

Football and underinflated heads

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In the run-up to the Super Bowl, amid too much attention to shrunken footballs, let us consider deflated heads. This week’s report of another deceased player found to have suffered from head-trauma disease related to the sport, and a medical study revealing increased risk of memory problems for kids who play tackle football prior to age 12, are what ought to scare the stuffing out of the NFL.

This is the kind of real news—as opposed to the vacuous Super Bowl media angst over players who won’t answer questions, Tom Brady’s sniffles and the chain-of-custody for game balls—that speaks to the future health of a $10-billion-a-year business. That so many former players, and potentially so many children entering the sport, will be losing their marbles prematurely would appear to dull the Big Game’s usual fireworks-and-marching-bands atmosphere.

And it could gradually siphon off future talent and fans, which is why the NFL, as reported by the New York Times, has been taking evasive action by backing nationwide Mom Clinics, meant to convince parents about the safety of having their tykes—as young as 5 years old—cracking heads in youth leagues.

It has become fairly standard for the NFL, and many of its players, to reference increased study of concussions and improved protocol in treating head injuries as their assurance against having a screw loose in later life. True enough that we all have learned plenty about the dangers over the years.

Long ago and far away, during my high school days on the football team in Hobbs, N.M., we dismissed “getting our bell rung” as an insignificant test of toughness. My friend Ronnie Foster, in fact, perfected a ball-carrying style in which he would lower his head to meet a would-be tackler, spinning away from the helmet-to-helmet blow to keep on going. I tried this in practice, with some success, but was fortunate to spend most of my time on the bench, so that I never got enough game-time action to render myself any goofier than I am.

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That was 1964. In 2002, Dr. Bennet Omalu, a forensic neuropathlogist, diagnosed so-called “punch-drunk” syndrome—specifically, CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy—during his autopsy of former Pittsburgh Steelers lineman Mike Webster. But it wasn’t until 2010 that the NFL announced it was hanging posters in all of its teams’ lockerrooms to warn players about the long-term dangers of head trauma.

“Why this took so long, I don’t know,” Omalu told me in a telephone conversation at the time. “I’m no genius; this is something I read about in medical school more than 20 years ago.” Since Omalu’s discovery about Webster, CTE repeatedly has been found in deceased old players. Former New England Patriots running back Mosi Tatupu, who died at 54 in 2010, was the latest cited in a Wednesday Boston Globe article.

Of course, there have been rule changes to prevent “targeting the head area,” restrictions on contact in practice and scientific work on finding the perfect helmet. But Omalu has argued that brain damage results not just from specifically diagnosed concussions but also from repeated blows to the head, and that helmets “do not prevent concussions or sub-concussions, because they don’t stop the brain from bumping around in the skull.”

“We have to take the head out of the game,” he said.

As a cerebral exercise, discovering a way to do that—and still have football as we know it—is a far bigger challenge than keeping all the pigskins inflated properly. Especially when fellows such as Jim Tressel, when he coached at Ohio State last decade, instituted the “Jack Tatum Hit of the Week Award,” glamorizing the viciously aggressive defensive play of a man known as the “Assassin,” and whose savage 1978 hit on New England’s Darryl Stingley left Stingley paralyzed the last 29 years of his life.

Maybe not everyone in football has a screw loose, though. A year ago, the school board in Marshall, Tex.—which fields a perennial state gridiron powerhouse and where Hall of Fame quarterback Y.A. Tittle played high school ball—approved plans to replace the district’s entry-level, tackle-football teams for seventh graders with a flag-football program. At least until they are a little older, those Marshall kids won’t have deflated heads.

Deflating footballs, pumping up the Super Bowl

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In the investigation of shrunken footballs, we are reassured that one thing that will not be underinflated is the Super Bowl itself. The whole idea of the NFL’s traditional two-week gap between its conference championships and the Big Game is to pump an otherwise empty information vacuum full of hot air. And this fits the bill perfectly.

From the earliest of its XLIX—sorry, 49—editions, the Super Bowl has succeeded at being America’s most puffed-up happening, an over-the-top exercise in nothing of real consequence. To now have a morsel of scandal for conspiracy theorists to chew on, and for thousands in the sporting press to comb over, feeds the ballyhoo beast.

This is all about hue and cry. And a reminder that annual media protestations of the NFL bamboozling the public with Super Bowl hype—even as said media gleefully traffic in such overkill—miss the point. That is: The Super Bowl defines hyperbole. It oozes hyperbole. It seethes with hyperbole. It strives for (and achieves) wretched excess—a self-important, overdone confluence of all that is modern America: Cut-throat competition, commercialism, conspicuous consumption, televised violence, with a clear hankering back to a male-dominated society.

The hand wringing by some pundits, that the deflated-ball caper will degrade this year’s Super Bowl, from an elite game to a spectacle, reveals a decided ignorance of the fact that the NFL purposely evolved the thing into a spectacle decades ago. The express purpose of Super Bowl exaggeration is to draw in the non-football fan, and now the curiosity about whether New England coach Bill Belichick or quarterback Tom Brady might try something sneaky guarantees more eyeballs.

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The Super Bowl already is the most watched TV show every year, and proof-positive that we have become a spectator society. The Super Bowl Party, once a village, has morphed into an entire nation, with less and less to do with the game and more an experience in overindulgence, to the delight of businesses dealing in nachos, adult beverage and gambling.

Running with such an overdose concept, a North Carolina man created a Web site in 2007 seeking 50,000 signatures to propose, to his local Congresswoman, a day-after-the-game national holiday. That effort, in the grand American tradition of a three-day weekend and in recognition of the debilitating Super Sunday immoderation, failed. But the idea was revived last year by a fantasy football group that submitted a petition to the Obama administration’s “We the People” site, which invites citizens’ voices in governing. (Among current “We the People” petitions—alongside those on issues of same-sex marriage, the Michael Brown case and mandatory vaccinations—are three railing about NFL officiating—which may be further proof that we are not a profound people.)

Consider that a 2011 essay by Robert Lipsyte, the unusually perceptive practitioner of sports journalism, argued that the annual National Football Lollapalooza might be the “only super thing we have left” in this land. “Super power, super economy, super you-name-it….gone,” Lipsyte wrote. Leaving us with a national holiday that rivals Christmas and Thanksgiving while serving as a proxy for military and economic superiority.

What we seem to be stuck with is the Super Bowl dichotomy of triviality and significance, which certainly was on full display as far back as the first of seven Super Bowls I covered for Newsday, in 1974.

That year, Miami’s future Hall of Fame linebacker Nick Buoniconti confided to a couple of us ink-stained wretches that his coach, Don Shula, had overruled team doctors who planned surgery on Buoniconti’s elbow just before the game. Five Miami players, in fact, acknowledged having to play with various pins in their bodies to hold together broken bones. (One of those five, safety Jake Scott, kidded darkly that the team’s biggest fear was a “lightning storm.”) The game clearly was a big deal.

Meanwhile, though, I spent an afternoon during that year’s Super Bowl media day with the self-proclaimed “gonzo journalist” Hunter S. Thompson, who had covered two presidential elections and gained fame with his surreal, drug-infused novel “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Thompson had been assigned to chronicle the week’s theoretically crucial doings for Rolling Stone magazine, and found, instead, that “I feel like calling my editor and telling him there’s no story here. There really isn’t anything happening.”

If Thompson were still around—he committed suicide in 2007—I doubt he’d be shocked about allegations that New England fudged the rules by shriveling some footballs. Nor should we be, given how athletes so regularly are praised for their “competitiveness” and lauded for attempts to get any edge possible. The euphemism for bending rules is the honored skill of “gamesmanship.” Another bit of news at the 1974 Super Bowl was then-commissioner Pete Rozelle’s admission that seven teams had hidden players beyond their roster limits during the season as a hedge against injuries.

Dishonesty aside, the current  mischief, rather than a buzz-killer, has been a godsend to sports talk radio and an attention-grabbing bonanza for the NFL. The already bloated Super Bowl continues to expand in our consciousness.