The first bad sign is Tuesday before the game. Speaking before a tangle of sweaty flesh and Japanese electronics plastered with the corporate logos of “news outlets” 49er receiver Randy Moss says: “Now that I'm older, I do think I'm the greatest receiver to ever do it. I don't think numbers stand. Because [though] this year has been a down year for me statistically, I don't really live on numbers. I really live on impact and what you're able to do on that field.” Here’s the only number, Randy, that 49er Faithful care about: Super Bowl victories. Jerry Rice helped San Francisco win three, which is three more than you’ve won on any team. Taking a circuitous shot at Rice while also revealing your complete misunderstanding of football on the eve of the biggest game of your life is troubling if not unexpected. If you’re so great, why did you bounce from Minnesota to Oakland to the Patriots, back briefly to Minnesota, to Tennessee and finally to S.F.? What’s next, some lousy Cardinal from Toledo visiting the Vatican for Easter Mass and claiming that he’s the greatest Catholic virgin of all time?
The second bad sign is Niner cornerback Chris “Sweet Stuff” Culliver’s response to a question about gay players being welcome on the team: "I don't do the gay guys, man. I don't do that… No, we don't got no gay people on the team. They gotta get up out of here if they do. Can't be with that sweet stuff. Nah, can't be in the locker room, man." This comment is unacceptable from a Crimson Tide booster, let alone a nickel back on a defense that’s been porous in recent weeks. Culliver quickly backtracks and professes his love of the LBGT community by producing Halloween photos of himself dressed as Alice B. Toklas and/or Hillary Clinton. Culliver’s management team also holds an emergency press conference at legendary French Quarter gay bar Napoleon’s Itch, offering free Kahlua and Cremes* to anyone in 49er chaps or holding a Mazda Miata pink slip. Before a raucous crowd of Dutch sailors and Tea Party fundraisers, Culliver dances to Abba’s “Does Your Mother Know?” then gets teary-eyed: not only does the former South Carolina Gamecock support renaming SFO after slain gay supervisor Harvey Milk, but Culliver has also been in discussions with Bishop Desmond Tutu and Richard Branson to rename the Virgin Airline Counter “Chocolate Milk.” Despite these honorable intentions, a radical sect calling themselves Lesbians For Greater Sensitivity to Victims of Lactose Intolerance immediately condemns via a twitter feed posted to Craigslist (see: Women Seeking Girls Seeking Womyn) the Chocolate Milk idea as “a misogynist slap in the face to oppressed food allergy sufferers everywhere, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or number of Pendleton shirts in your closet.”
(*The evening’s theme was “Come Join The Gland War In Russia!”)
The third bad sign occurs minutes before kick-off when 26 children stroll to the center of the Superdome field: a chorus from Sandy Hook, Connecticut, the tragic scene of the latest school killings. In white polo shirts and khaki pants the choir looks less like an assemblage of harmonious voices than a pint-sized MIS department on its way to Chevy’s for the holiday luncheon (one complimentary alcoholic beverage per person). But far more depressing than a restaurant full of techies drunkenly texting each other across the table is the maudlin abuse of “America The Beautiful” as cameras obediently pan across the Stars and Stripes, bored special teams lunatics in eye black, and Baltimore Coach John Harbaugh with his arm around a girl young enough to be his daughter (wait, that is his daughter!). I half-expect the little girl in the red dress from “Schindler’s List” to do cartwheels to the fifty-yard-line, then disappear beneath a squadron of Labrador puppies parachuting down from a Texas Air Guard drone expertly controlled President George W. Bush, a can of Old Milwaukee in one hand and a Pentagon joystick in the other.
But despite my 9/11-sharpened cynicism and horror-fatigue, the singers’ angelic faces soften the sharp edges of my iceberg heart. A 49er is after all a greedy bastard hoping to get rich; we are not without humane emotion. Then someone who goes by the name of Alicia Keys sits a white piano and plods through a dreary version of “The Star Spangled Banner.” My phone vibrates with a message from a friend watching from Europe: “Mercilessly exploiting children to promote the disarming of Americans for deeply sinister reasons and the sickening national anthem ritual with Alicia ‘I am liberal, here me meow” Keys is to sell the illusion that America is the Land of the Free at the very time that it is being consumed by an Orwellian tyranny and financially destroyed. How can you even watch?”
Not exactly Gipper-like pregame chatter. But a trash-talking Euro pansy pacifist cannot compete against my three red bulls and triple espresso washed down with a pound of raw elk liver. Besides, as someone who’s actually suffered the indignity of his father hosting a Democratic Central Committee meeting (before my dad was banned for life for suggesting that certain of Stalin’s tactics should be considered when dealing with local school districts, e.g., Trotsky and the Mexican axe), I take seriously my civic responsibilities. Which is to say, it’s Super Bowl Sunday, you commie bastard, and the 49ers are playing. So while I can complain about the over-produced schlockfest that the spectacle has become, the opinion of a soccer-loving froteur lounging at an Amsterdam cafe smoking Afghan hash and sipping wheat grass hardly matters. That’s bad sign number what, nine?
Then CBS cuts to a shot of soldiers in a tent somewhere, which causes everyone in the room to moan: if these are the “troops” protecting us from those dastardly cave-dwelling. Freedom-stealing psychos, then it’s adios, America. Memo to the marketing department of our military-industrial overlords: when enflaming our collective star-spangled love muscle with images of G.I.s, make sure they look like a Marine Corps Color Guard, not the Scientology recruiters outside Walmart.
Speaking of which, is there anything more depressing than the sight of a young, attractive family going door to door with their pamphlets full of pious desperation? Yes, there is: people who run in the street, inches from oncoming traffic, when the sidewalks are deserted. The sight of an oblivious jogger hum-dumming down a busy street is a profanity, especially when I want to turn right on a red. Listen, I believe that roads, gas and power industries should belong to everyone, but I don’t have a death wish. If you see me running down Geary in broad daylight, it’s because someone or some thing is after me… Wait, what am I doing? It’s gametime! See what the clever Euro has done? Distracted me. Like Moss. Like Culliver. Like those Dutch sailors in their striped tunics! Another round of White Russians, Jacques-Pierre, and I’ll be ready to invade anything!
Next week: the game itself. Maybe.
In the meantime, here’s a wonderful behind-the-scenes documentary on the 1976 Super Bowl X between the Steelers and Cowboys in Miami, with guest appearances by Bill Murray, Christopher Guest and Lynn Swann: http://mediaburn.org/video/tvtv-goes-to-the-superbowl-4/ -- dig it or don’t. ¥¥
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