Masculine Identity and The Super Bowl

Hi everyone, welcome to A Manly Podcast. I’m your host Matthew, and on A Manly Podcast, I talk about issues related to men and masculinity in American culture and society.

For this episode I’m talking about masculine identity at the Super Bowl and at the Super Bowl masculinity is everywhere really and it kind of just oozes out of every pore, right? One of the things I noticed about this year’s Super Bowl is there were just a lot of middle-aged to old white guys there you know, besides of course the players themselves John Batiste singing the National Anthem and Kendrick Lamar at the halftime show.

During the pregame at one point they turn to Paul Rudd and they’re like looking at him and they’re like, “Wow look how young he looks he hasn’t aged a day in 20 years and I’m you know, I’m kind of blinking, looking at my TV screen, and I’m like, “He looks old, he has wrinkles guys. I mean he doesn’t look terrible, he doesn’t look bad, but he looks older than he used to.

There was John Ham and Bradley Cooper introducing the Chiefs and Eagles. There was Brad Pitt who pre-introduced the game and then Tom Cruise actually introduced the game and then you know they love turning to Adam Sandler who looks pretty ridiculous and at one point he’s like he’s talking to Paul McCartney from across the booth. There were the announcers, Tom Brady and Kevin Burkhardt against that really weird French Quarter backdrop. I can, you know, I’m okay with just seeing them in the announcer booth, I don’t need the extra. You know Tom Brady really has gotten the heat for being a bad announcer this year and I don’t really care, you know, whatever, he’s learning, he’s getting better. But one of the things he tried to be funny during the Super Bowl and he said um well you know my first Super Bowl here when I won was a blur not like a lot of the other blurs people have in New Orleans. I’m guessing Tom Brady isn’t much of a drinker.

And during the pregame show, you know this Super Bowl was obsessed with AI and during the pregame show there was a really weird AI tribute for this old Fox commentator and two-time Super Bowl winning coach for the Cowboys back in the 90s Jimmy Johnson.

And, oh man let me tell you, that AI was just bad, like really bad. Like, like if you’ve ever seen The Mummy Returns and you’ve seen the CGI of the Rock at the end of that movie like we’re going that bad. And, you know this coach he loved it and he was in tears and it probably takes a lot for a football coach to cry and so, oh man. They would have just been better off with a traditional tribute highlight reel.

The ads that leaned into masculine identity this year were mostly poking fun at it. That Mountain Dew Baja Blast commercial where there’s this magical macho genie like man who transports this young woman who drinks a Mountain Dew Baja Blast into this like tropical private island where you know singer/songwriter Seal becomes an actual seal and then he’s singing this like 1930s Hollywood musical number with all these killer whales and you know dolphins and other marine animals. The genie guy is just weird, he’s like part macho mountain man, part hippie man, part creepy private island billionaire, and then he likes bringing guests to this island and showing them these weird musical numbers.

There was a Bud Light ad with Post Malone and Shane Gillis who, you know have this really kind of frat boy, masculine energy trying to relive the college days with their end of the cul-de-sac party, but they’re really constrained in their masculine energy by these suburban rules like HOAs. And then you know, there’s Channing Tatum in this STOK coffee commercial where he’s, it looks like he’s about to go on a toxic tirade to the Wrexham soccer players for playing bad, but then he’s just complaining about their um you know, he’s complaining about their celebrations and he’s showing them, he turns it into a Magic Mike moment dancing and then the end of the ad they’re all dancing and celebrating in the locker room around a big Stok coffee. The only ad that really leaned into like a macho masculine energy was this ad with Antonio Banderas for Bosch which makes like refrigerators and power tools and they were like “Be a boss when you use a Bosch,” and they also had like a man using power tools who turned into Randy Savage. It was just really funny for me because I had gone to see Antonio Banderas in Babygirl like a month ago and he plays a husband in that film, Nicole Kidman’s husband, and he he can’t give his wife sexual satisfaction, he can’t bring her to orgasm and he hasn’t been able to do this in their marriage and that’s kind of the whole point of the movie because she chooses to have an affair because he can’t sexually satisfy her. Then at the end of the movie he learns how to and their marriage is back to normal, it’s happy again.

Now masculine identity on the field at the Super Bowl, on the field was pretty positive. Now football, that’s a whole other story and we’ll get into that a little later in this episode. But you know clearly Kansas City was outplayed and they knew it. They said as much in their press conferences at the end of the game um but you know they were pretty they were pretty 50-50 on offense all season. I mean, they had some really close games like the Chargers almost beat them. They barely got that win on a field goal that hit the upright you know that hit the goal post and went in. And Denver was about to beat him with a field goal and then they were able to block that field goal. When they faced the Eagles defense, they were really just no match for them. Like their defensive line just kind of just steamrolled them, and you know the Eagles at the end of it seemed I would say I don’t know if humility is the right word, but they definitely had some of that. They were very vindicated, they were very satisfied at the end of the game. A lot of people you know didn’t think they would be there.

A lot of people thought the Lions were going to be in the Super Bowl, not the Eagles. Their coach said, you know all said all the right things at the end. Football is the ultimate team sport, we trusted the process, we trusted in each other, and everyone came together and they became world champions, and then you know a week later the the season starts over, right? They go back to the drawing board because you know football’s a business.

This Super Bowl was fun at the beginning cause it was in New Orleans, right around Mardi Gras and they had a lot of Jazz and Cajun flavor to start. It added a little something extra to the Super Bowl from the more sanitized Super Bowls of LA or Las Vegas. They had Harry Connick Jr., they had the marching bands, they had Trombone Shorty and Lauren Daigle sing, America The Beautiful, and then John Batiste of course with his awesome piano doing The National Anthem, Kendrick Lamar and SZA at halftime. There was a diverse and eclectic range of fabulous musicians showing off their artistry and creativity.

It’s also important to recognize though as entertaining as it is, with 126 million people tuning in, this is a highly curated event, and the NFL has to appeal to a massive audience. It hopefully is a clean game with good sportsmanship and and few to no injuries. It also seems important then when an audience is this large and when a lot of the people who play in the NFL are people of color that it feels diverse and inclusive but also it has to appeal to a conservative audience as well, which is really interesting to see that dynamic. Now football at the heart of it is a violent sport and the objective is very colonial as Caribbean theorist Édouard Glissant once noted. You’re advancing on someone’s territory, taking their land yard by yard, inch by inch till you score and you do that as many times as possible. And how do you stop them? Well you smash them to the ground. No, you you have to be aggressive, you have to tackle them to the ground.

The football field is a place where skilled athletes play a nuanced and complex game that brings them together. It also though is a space where they get hit over and over and over which can cause a disease called CTE that can cause long-lasting health issues. Pro football players are modern-day gladiators who showcase their masculine prowess and athletic skill to millions of fans watching every Sunday, and within the contained space of a football field they’re allowed to exhibit elements of toxic masculinity. Pro athlete is a revered position in American society because of the money, fame, and the joy people get, the joy the fans get from watching them.

One of the reasons I still enjoy watching football and probably like a lot of other Millennial men is I grew up playing the video game Madden. And you know, I loved playing as the different teams, I loved playing as the different players, l loved doing the play calls. And it was really fun to play with the players in the video game and then you would watch on Sunday and see those same players and I remember from the ratings in the game I would know how good the players were or how good people thought they were.

At the beginning of the football season Amazon Prime released a documentary about the Madden video game and it was was it was a fun documentary but one of the episodes was about this queer black software engineer named Gordon Bellamy and he was really interesting cause he had a great story and he also talked about how he helped really create and made the video game, went from it being like two-dimensional to like a three-dimensional actually looking like a football field and playing actually playing like football in a video game and he also was really the catalyst for putting the players names into the game and if you never played that doesn’t seem like a big deal but it is a big deal because then the players aren’t just numbers in the game, they’re names and then you can associate the names with actual players when you’re watching football, and it brings like a whole another level of of participation, of interest for you. It brings a whole another level of engagement. This inspiring story brought me back to my joy playing Madden as a teenager.

The NFL is great at sharing inspirational and heartwarming storylines about you know star players as well as unsung heroes. The NFL is great at packaging their product for their audience. They just know the right content the right buttons to push and they feed that to their streaming service, social media, NFL Network, and they kind of keep the conversation going all year round for fans whether it’s you know, the combine, free agency, the Hard Knock shows, and all the behind the scenes experiences and footage. And it’s important to acknowledge that, you know athletes have to overcome insurmountable odds to get to the NFL. I mean there’s so many things that can derail someone even if they have the drive and talent whether that’s injuries or finances or family issues or mental health issues. There’s a there’s a you know a million things that can go wrong for people.

Thinking about the Madden documentary in contrast to this other show I watched American Sports Story Aaron Hernandez on FX which was quite critical of the NFL actually. This was a dramatic retelling of the true crime podcast, Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc. Aaron Hernandez was a superstar tight end for the New England Patriots about a decade ago who was convicted and given a life sentence for the murder of Odin Lloyd. He later killed himself in prison. During the last episode, a doctor discusses the severity of his CTE, Chronic Trauma Encephalopathy, a neurogenerative disease caused by repeated blows to the head. Symptoms can range from aggression, memory impairment to suicidal ideation. She says in the episode that it’s the worst CTE they’ve seen in someone his age but researchers can’t draw direct link, there’s no scientific proof between you know CTE and someone’s violent actions. The show suggests a number of factors led to Aaron’s violent actions including his father’s highly competitive nature and emotional pressure he puts on him when he was young. It suggests he was pushed into the NFL too soon by then University of Florida coach Urban Meyer. Now this claim hasn’t been verified, but it also suggests that Aaron was a closeted gay man and that his marriage was just for show. It suggests that Aaron was never allowed to be his true self because he had to live up to the image of being a gladiator, this football superstar that he necessarily didn’t want to be.

Josh Rivera who plays Aaron Hernandez does an incredible job with the part taking us through the pivotal moments in Aaron’s life. He achieves glory on the football field, becomes, his rising star becomes a superstar and then it all falls apart leading to jail and death. Researchers can’t prove that CTE led to his violent actions but we can also say that it probably didn’t help and more than likely contributed with a number of factors to what happened. Early on in the show he and his brother are training, running running up a hill together. He beats his brother DJ up the hill and then their father meets them at the top and says something along the lines of you know, Both of you, both of you will play on Friday and Saturday, but you Aaron, you’re a gladiator son. You’re going to play on Sunday, you’re going to play under the bright lights.” All the pressure is on Aaron to achieve greatness and glory, to make generational wealth for his family and leave a legacy for them. And he does that he he does that at the expense of his body and according to the show, his his own true self.

The sad part about football is that the more you watch the more injuries you see. For instance, the Lions at the beginning of the season were by far and away the best team in the NFL but by the time it got around to the playoffs, their entire defense was injured. There was no way they were going to be able to make it to the Super Bowl. Towards the end of the season I saw Tank Dell, a wide receiver for the Houston Texans, have his leg utterly destroyed on a touchdown catch in KC. I mean, they like needed a vacuum cast to stabilize his leg that he tore so many things. it was, the game was stopped for 20 minutes it was definitely the most gruesome, one of the most gruesome injuries of the season. They don’t even know if he’ll be back next season. Chris Godwin, a wide receiver for for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, had his foot nearly torn off by a defensive player colliding with him with a helmet when he should have been resting in a game that the Buccaneers were losing. In the video I saw, his foot was like dangling. The starting quarterback for the Dolphins Tua Tagovailoa, got his fourth concussion earlier in the season and then came back to play starting quarterback later in the season, even though there were many players on social media who were encouraging him to retire. Chris Olave, a wide receiver for the New Orleans Saints, got his fifth concussion this season since 2021 and has not returned to play since.

About a third of former living NFL players believe they have CTE according to a Harvard study and of the 376 brains of former deceased players that have been donated to Boston University’s CTE lab, 90% of them have CTE.

Now concussions did decrease in the NFL this year and they had a large article about it on nfl.com but it’s also important to note that concussions and injuries in football are going to obviously be more than other sports even sports like wrestling or boxing.

There’s really no equipment that can prevent concussions or CTE. The guardian caps in a study showed that in in on-field conditions, the Caps actually make no difference even though they’re supposed to help blunt the impact or collision of a hit. The only thing that helps to heal concussions is time really. A study showed that adult men need about 25 days to recover from a concussion. This is the NFL though and there’s only 17 games in a season, and every week there’s millions of fans watching and there’s a lot of money to be made. The NFL has gotten a lot more rigorous about their concussion protocol than even a year ago. The pressure and incentive to medically clear players must be overwhelming.

One of the sadder stories of a football player who died from CTE was Junior Seau, who was a celebrated linebacker for the San Diego Chargers and he later played for the New England Patriots and he took the Chargers to the Super Bowl. He was kind of a hometown hero for San Diego when I was growing up and there was this big restaurant in Mission Valley called Seau’s that had the biggest TV in town, but in 2012 he died by suicide and even though he had no reported concussions his brain was found to have CTE. I have a love-hate relationship with football. Sometimes it’s really fun to watch a chess match between great coaches and great athletes. It’s fun to watch different players developed from week to week, be on tenterhooks for games that are cliffhangers and watch teams like the Jet and The Bears that have really high hopes and expectations for their season flounder and flop under the pressure. But I do cringe at the gruesomeness, I do cringe at might happen with some of these long- lasting health issues that these players might face, and the toxicity at times.

America loves football and if anything this past year proved in the NFL which is the most popular sport in America and college football the second most popular sport in America that America loves this sport now more than ever and it it makes sense. America is the land where white settlers colonized and took it from Indigenous people advancing much like a football team does over the land, yard by yard, inch by inch.

For American men football and their fandom is an important part of their masculine identity, but as a man in America I also feel it’s important to be aware, to be conscious that football causes CTE. To know things that like a third of high schools in America don’t have athletic trainers. It’s up to the coaches, the other players, the parents at the youth level to detect and notice concussions. It’s important to recognize that as entertaining as the sport is we should take our blinders off and be able to be conscious, have a conversation around how healthy tackle football is for people and despite all its good and positivity for men does it not also create an unhealthy culture denying an epidemic of CTE after the roar of the crowd fades and the stadium lights have faded.

Thanks so much for taking the time to watch or listen to A Manly Podcast. Please like and subscribe here on YouTube, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

I talk about a topic related to men and masculinity each week. On my next episode, I’ll be talking about men and masculinity in the films The Substance and Babygirl. Till next time, Bye!