February 14, 2022
Re: Super Bowl LVI, the Spectacle of the NFL, and a Valentine from Kierkegaard
I should get a few things out of the way first: I am (perhaps against my better instincts) an avid football fan, and, though I was hoping the Cincinnati Bengals would win Super Bowl LVI, I have no rooting interest in the Bengals. Moreover (as if last night’s bacchanalia left any room for doubt), I readily concede that the NFL has now so thoroughly surpassed all other professional sports that it belongs in a tier by itself. In fact, the NFL’s dominance is precisely what I want to question, because pro football has become less a game than a performance. This is by no means a “hot take.” From the commercials (which cost nearly 7 million dollars per 30 seconds) to last night’s get-hyped intro by The Rock to the annual halftime show, the NFL neither conceals nor apologizes for its pageantry. But what about the Super Bowl itself? It is telling that, in the wake of the Los Angeles Rams 23-20 defeat of the Bengals, one of the most popular hashtags on Twitter was #rigged. Indeed, several critical calls (or no-calls) by the referees determined the outcome of the game. But this has been true of many Super Bowls. Unlike championship rounds in other sports (e.g., tennis, golf, or baseball) the result of a football game is but an approximation of what took place on the field of play. It could have been otherwise, and everyone knows it. Still, this is of no concern to the NFL. With increasing shrewdness, the league realizes that the game is but an occasion for a larger and far more important spectacle, from which, it seems, we can hardly avert our eyes.
A thought from Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (Kjerlighedens Gjerninger, 1847) on Valentine’s Day: “But, now, what is love? Love is to presuppose love; to have love is to presuppose love in others; to be loving is to presuppose that others are loving. … Love is not a being-for-itself quality but a quality by which or in which you are for others.”