Halftime

This past Sunday was Super Bowl Sunday.  A day of NFL self-indulgence.  In the NFL all but one of the 32 teams are owned by someone who is not wealthy.  Not only is the owner of the soon to be LA Rams building an over one billion dollar stadium, but he is buying a $725 million mega-ranch in Texas.  It should come as no surprise that the NFL likes money.  Two of the teams in the league annually face each other in this American gladiator spectacle.

Ad for Cold Play for Super Bowl 50 halftime

American football is a sport of fast movement, brute strength and strategy.  Quick decisions are required of a quarterbacks as a 300 pound defensive linemen and 240 lb fast linebackers break for the man holding the ball.  The game is increasingly centered around a good quarterback and, on the opposite side of the ball, good defensive lineman. Running backs are now secondary to the offense. You have large men running into each other at full speed, and while they lack the swords, daggers and battle axes of the Roman Gladiators, they have their hands, bodies, and helmets.  Unfortunately, professional football players are more and more succumbing to head injuries,  Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) was first diagnosed on a former Wisconsin citizen, Mike Webster.  Ken Stable, a quarterback with the Oakland Raiders recently died and was diagnosed with the same disease.  While we seethe at the brutality of the sport we nonetheless watch the games.  While this Super Bowl did not set an over-the-air attendance record, it came in second to last year's game, it was still very popular.  The game has become a full week of shows and extravaganzas with this years broadcasting network having a special on the best Super Bowl commercials, and another on the best half-time shows.  There may be no other one item that speaks of current American culture as the Super Bowl.

Who will the lion eat?

As brutal as the sport of football is, and regardless of how much it forms our current cultural patterns and invokes a harking back to Roman times, the halftime shows are a different kind of entertainment than that presented in the Roman Coliseum two centuries ago.  I am not much of pop culture aficionado, so I had to ask my spouse who the opening group was of the 2016 Super Bowl halftime show.  It was a group called Cold Play.  Astonishingly, I recognized one of their songs.  Maybe, on second thought, I am not such a pop culture out-caste after all.  This group was followed by Beyonce and a retread from last year Bruno Mars.  Why the NFL cannot just have one group instead of three I don't know.  More money I guess.  I heard yesterday, that the performers actually pay the NFL to be in the halftime show.  That apparently started several years ago, according to the broadcaster on sports radio, with a performer whose name I cannot recall.  On third thought, I really am not much into pop culture since that name is not in my memory.  I guess getting time in front of over 111 million persons in a television audience is worth their paying the NFL.  While I could take Cold Play, I started getting a headache from the other two.

Will the tiger win?

The persons involved in the halftime shows of the gladiatorial disputes in Roman times decidedly did not pay to play.  Rather, they were criminals or Christians.  While the lead singer from Cold Play would jump up and down, and over the stage, in Roman times they used a version of the seesaw (or as I grew up, teeter totter), with one condemened person on each end.  One going up, and the other down.  Today Las Vegas oddsmakers even take bets on the color of the liquid to be dumped on the head and back of the winning coach.  In Roman times, before the wild beasts would be released the crowd placed bets on which of the two would first succumb to death by a lion or bear.  The animals were trained to the scent of man, and had been on a diet of human flesh to intensify the training--and to make sure they succeeded in killing a human.  As one commentator noted, the organizers (not unlike advertisers are paid to produce a commercial today) had "succeeded in serving its purpose: to keep the jaded Roman population glued to their seats...."  Today, persons are glued to their seats not just for the halftime show, but for the ever-present commercials during the Super Bowl.

Gladiators in Roman time

With this Super Bowl, the NFL has a half century of spectacle under its emblem.  They have now gone away from using the pretentious Roman numerals to common Arabic numerals.  Perhaps Roger Goodell thought that  L in Roman numerals would be more difficult for the common person to decipher than XLVIII (48) or XLIX (49).  Yet, Roman games lasted for centuries.  The Super Bowl may have begun with the Packers playing the Kansas City Chiefs, but in 242 B.C. the Roman Games began when two sons decided an appropriate end of life celebration for their father was to have slaves battle each other to the end (ie death) at the funeral.  In 189 B.C. animals were introduced as another act.  Rather than simply having humans battle one another to the death, why not add some more spectacle--watch a lion eat a human.  The Roger Goodell of the Roman time, Julius Caesar, used the events to "inspire fear, loyalty, and patriotism."  Perhaps Roger is the Julius Caesar of our time.  One historian notes that Caesar relied on the trainers of the beasts to manage, breed and train the animals for fighting.  To put it in NFL terms, they coached the beasts.  The animals had to be trained to avoid a disappointing performance that failed to please the citizens of Rome.  In fact, as time went on and the empire grew, so to did the spectacle become more cruel, more flamboyant and more elaborate. Super Bowl halftime shows have evolved in much the same manner--more flamboyant and more elaborate.

American Gladiators--Cam Newton fumble in Super Bowl 50

If one looks and thinks hard enough we can find a variety of parallels between many occurrences. Yet, the Super Bowl is like no other event in American modern sports history.  It draws well over 100 million persons world wide to their televisions.  It commands the highest advertising revenue in television.  Sometimes the game may be the main show, and sometimes (Seattle blowing out Denver two years ago) it is the side show.  Whichever it is, as brutal as the game is it does not match the savagery of ancient Rome.  I, personally, would prefer a halftime show of a marching band, or perhaps the Chicago Symphony, but the draw to pop culture demands a group that generation X'ers and Millennial's would pay to see.  The American Gladiators will take the stage again next year, and again next year there will probably be two or three performers to please those with performers of the pop culture.  It could be worse, we could be Rome.

Images from Google