Given that Super Bowl LIX kicks off at about 10.30am AEDST tomorrow morning, it has been making its way into my news feeds a bit lately.
I don’t actually care that much about gridiron, and have never found the patience to watch an entire game, to be honest.
Tomorrow will not be an exception. Apparently many people will be gathering at pubs around Melbourne to watch the game, but I will not be one of them. This is because, whilst retired and able to drink beer whenever I want to, I don’t see starting at 10am when the Anglers Hotel opens its doors as a wise life choice. [I’m planning to do lunch at the Savage Club on both Wednesday and Thursday, and both lunches will involve wine.]
As one concession to this special occasion however, I have dragged my Cleveland Browns jersey out of the wardrobe to wear tomorrow. When I bought it 27 months ago from Rebel Sport for about $40 – a deep discount – the player named and numbered on the back had just left the Browns for some team more likely to be successful (a familiar story), and I have never really paid close enough attention to the NFL to find a reason to wear it.
But for tomorrow, I will make an effort – me being quite contrarian in my choice of NFL team.
However, the interest in the Super Bowl on this far flung corner of the globe from the USA does beg the question as to why does this matter to us anyway?
As I have written in my blog several times, organised sport, both in terms of players and spectators, is a matter of economics.
The Industrial Revolution led to the rise of the organised football codes in the UK initially, as greater wealth and leisure time enabled people to rise above the drudgery of their normal dreary lives to enjoy something joyous and uplifting. Horse racing, the ‘sport of kings’ became more accessible as more people had money to bet on it or to own thoroughbreds (a sub breed of Arabian horse descended from 3 stallions and 7 mares imported to the UK in the 18th century).
The Victorian Gold Rush suddenly made 1850s Melbourne the wealthiest city in the world for four decades – bringing with it the early development of Australian Rules football, the popularisation of horse racing, and the birth of Test Cricket.
Having the time to watch a sporting match of some sort, or to buy overpriced tickets to that game, to say nothing of the associated fan gear, is a sign of both individual wealth, and, more broadly, of societal wealth.
We live in a society where people can afford to ‘chuck a sickie’ to day drink in a pub whilst watching a game popular only in one particular country most of us never want to visit, and to buy the otherwise obscure fan gear of limited relevance to our usual sporting alliances.
That the opportunity is there for us to congregate in such pubs and bars across the country to do so indicates that this is merely not a matter of individual high disposable income, it is a sign that there are enough people with sufficient discretionary money to spend on this that pubs are going to open early on a Monday (virtually the only pubs who are open before 12pm these days are those with poker machines) in order to rake in the money from the punters.
I suppose that this is a good thing – that we are wealthy enough to celebrate even the most irrelevant sporting events at the most inconvenient time imaginable despite all the regular background chatter about interest rates, housing inaffordability, and related economic doom and gloom.
Lost For Words! 