Do Not Say To Me The Word "Sportsball"
On nerds having their cake and eating it too when the jocks just wanna watch the Big Game
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. The cliché is often misunderstood, but it means that there’s going to be give and take with the things you like. You can’t have a sterling reputation and all the power in the world, for example. There’s going to be some good and bad, much in the same way as you can’t both keep your wonderfully decorated cake on display and also eat that cake at the same time. Sports fans know this all too well. Anytime a major event takes place, like the Super Bowl, you see an endless stream of nerds and political junkies tweeting “OH, IS A SPORTSBALL HAPPENING TODAY?” The term “sportsball” is so hacky that the mere sight of it rightfully makes sports fans’ assholes pucker like a mouth hit with a huge shot of citric acid. The Super Bowl is happening Sunday, so I would expect a banner day for people with anime avatars or blue checks for their work with Politico or whatever repeating that word on the timeline. It’s something that someone should have to live with by now.
Or is it? Does the saying “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” really apply to football fans in this case? Yes, the NFL is the most popular sport in the United States right now. I’m not sure how close the NBA lags behind, but those playoff viewership numbers are staggering enough to give the duke to football soundly. The second Sunday in February, which used to be the first one, and then not even a decade ago, it was the last Sunday in January, is a holy day for folks like me who spend all of fall and the first half of winter glued to their televisions for anywhere between four and eight hours on the Lord’s Day. It’s the culmination of a season, and even for people whose teams didn’t make it, it’s one last time to enjoy the game before it goes away for seven months. No, the preseason doesn’t count either. The offseason, player transactions, and the draft are fun musings, and yes, the NFL even when there are no games being played can often hijack sports news cycles. No matter what the move is, there’s nothing that compares to the games. Theoretically, the Super Bowl should be a nirvana for football fans, and not even someone as repulsive yet omnipresent as, say, Movie Bob or a Krassenstein Twin should be able to take that away from us:
That being said, is the Super Bowl really for football fans anymore? In a way, you can never strip the game from the day, but the league itself uses the event as a way to lure in non-fans to partake under a gigantic tentpole, which is fine in theory. If the goal is to lure people into watching the championship of your league by sandwiching a performance by someone like The Weeknd or Bruno Mars or Paul McCartney or Left Shark f/ Katy Perry with a football game, okay, I get it. Maybe someone tunes into the regular season because they liked what they saw before and after the concert. If not, thanks for the eyeballs that drove up the price the networks and league received for advertising revenue. But that’s just it. The draw isn’t the multimedia experience surrounding the game. There are people who tune into the game, who go to Super Bowl parties, who actually look forward to watching the fucking commercials.
There’s nothing that exemplifies monetizing the rot more than treating 30-second spots designed to sell you more crap you may or may not need as appointment viewing. Commercials may activate the laugh reflex, but at the end of the day, content whose sole purpose isn’t something to which one should look forward. It’s commercialism in its crassest, most debased form. Not even Christmas is nakedly about the propagation of the consumerist system, and what’s worse is that while the cost of the commercials, both in production and for the real estate on the Super Bowl program, might be inconsequential to a large enough company, it still shows how rotten the system is. A company could drop a couple mil on a Super Bowl ad that will probably be forgotten within a month in the midst of a labor dispute or a downsizing to maximize corporate profit. The effect on the bottom line again might be negligible on the ad, but it’s the mindset that leads to spending money, not even on the circus portion of “bread and circuses,” but on carnival barking about the circus over spending it on the people who actually make the product is, in a word, gross. The same people who cackle about “sportsball” will also happily glom onto Super Bowl commercial grade sheets the next day.
They’re also the same people who will flock to the telecast, not for the games, but for sneak peek trailers for the latest nerd culture things that are coming to theaters or streaming. This year’s previews include the Amazon Middle Earth series Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a prequel series based off JRR Tolkien’s unfinished notes regarding the Second Age, the fall of Númenor, and the rise of Sauron. The fact that they’re releasing the teaser trailer here isn’t the offense, namely because I like world of Tolkien and am looking forward to this series too. It’s not the fact that we’re getting the trailer. It’s the fact that you’re going to have entitled nerds elbowing people at the Super Bowl party to quiet down to watch a teaser that will be available on YouTube within minutes of airing live so they can feed their egos and either have the thrill of awaiting the next big thing in their nonstop ride of big things catered just to them or to have the right to bitch and moan about how bad it looks, which gives them primacy online.
If that wasn’t bad enough, you will also have a legion of Very Serious Professional Managers hawking over you the next day at work if you didn’t have the PTO or the foresight to take off. You dared enjoy a marquee event that didn’t involve work? For shame! Think of how many dollars you are costing your benevolent employer:
If this feels like missing the forest for the trees to you, congratulations; you’re human. The same class of PMC and capital soak the working class for billions approaching trillions in wage theft every year. You can’t enjoy yourself because you have to make money for the people ahead of you.
All of it, the commercialism and the nerdgasms and the skullduggery and guilt tripping swirl into this vortex of shit that coalesces into that vile word that these people, these awful, awful people throw around thinking they’re so clever, sportsball. It’s not that people who don’t like sports are using it because they want a piece of the pie. They have the whole goddamn bakery to themselves. I’m not saying that sports fans are marginalized, especially in America, because that’s hardly the case. What I am saying is that rarely do you get the spillover of sports into other media that happens with sports, especially with regards to the Super Bowl. Whenever politics intersects with sports, it’s mainly conservative politicians telling activist athletes to shut up and play. Of course, they embrace sports when one of them is “brave” enough to espouse beliefs of the Republican Party, only the fourth most lucrative racket in the whole world outside of pharma, crypto, and fossil fuels.
Scripted entertainment is a little more welcoming to sports with various movies about athletic endeavors or the odd athlete making a successful crossover into acting like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Dave Bautista. Still, you don’t have one-on-one games at the intermission of Hamilton to help bring in sports fans. It’s all one way. Couple that with the fact that nerd culture is everywhere nowadays to the point where it chokes out other forms media within their own biomes, and the idea that dropping trailers to Marvel movies or other franchise shit during the Super Bowl is necessary feels one-sided and superfluous.
To wit, every single sportsball shithead gets to have their cake and eat it too. Their cake is not a lie; rather, every bite they take regenerates tenfold to the point where their entitlement permeates everything like an especially rancid fart in a crowded room, an apt analogy since every tweet with that wretched word in it would smell like a fart if it had an odor. It’s not that sports, the NFL especially, are immune from critique; it’s just that everyone who posts something like “oh lol there must be SPORTSBALL today lmao am I right fellow nerds?” never does it in good faith. They don’t give a shit about racist hiring practices among teams for coaching positions or the plight of the player with regards to head trauma. It’s because people aren’t talking about Marvel or about how Orange Man Is Bad or about what they themselves are interested in, just a self-centered, bullshit mindset from the same people who will dare post this shitty image macro every time someone questions whether Disney or whoever might be a predatory corporation:
I try to cast a wide net with this newsletter, and I do the same on Twitter. However, I used to have bad opinions on stuff I didn’t like, but the more grown I got, the more I realized that just because something’s not for me doesn’t mean it’s bad. Besides, it was more fun to get a passing knowledge in things like NASCAR or UFC so I could laugh at the jokes and dabble in shitposting about it. That’s my advice to anyone who ever thought of posting the term “sportsball” as a complaint about sports dominating the timeline for one of a few days on the calendar when there’s really a happening going on in one of them. If it doesn’t affect you, just don’t give a shit about it, especially if you’re one of the people who makes nerd culture or politics your entire personality and thus has larger apparatuses than even the National fuckin’ Football League catering to you every other hour of the day. Entitlement is a real shitty look.