Roboculture and the Super Bowl

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[edit] Introduction: Football, Technology and War

FOOTBALL IS WAR.

This metaphor has become ingrained in common parlance as not only a recognized account of football rhetoric, but also as a validation of America's status as a battle-hungry superpower. As broadcasters and sportswriters speak in terms of entering another team's 'territory' and mythologize the quarterbacks who command their offense with the adeptness of a seasoned 'field-general', football is placed (at least linguistically) on a level with military combat.

Eisenhower: Let's Get Busy
Eisenhower: Let's Get Busy

An even more striking allusion exists when one considers how football players are often seen to take on the characteristics of military technology. Players are quite often described as 'launching long-bombs' and firing 'missiles', where larger players take on the role of 'tanks' or are seen as mirroring the foot soldiers of WWI by 'battling in the trenches'.

It is almost assured that President Eisenhower was not intent on describing a sport when he referred to the American Military Industrial Complex, but the relationships between technological progress and the game of football are unquestionably signifcant.

[edit] Football as Industrial Progress

American football set a standard as one of the first professional sports to whole-heartedly embrace technology as paramount to maintaining a high level of game play. In football, coaches on the same team remain in constant radio contact over the course of a game and have 15 seconds of radio communication with their quarterback prior to each play. Through 'coaches challenges', a referee is made to revisit a past play through the aid of video replay to assess whether the call made on the field was the correct one. And of course, the synergy of football and technology led to the invention of the popular sports drink, Gatorade.

However, the relationship appears to penetrate even further into the construction of American football, not only as a discourse, but as an athletic event. Mandelbaum describes football as a cultural product of the industrial revolution. A play in football consists of several players, all specialized in their duties and abilities, acting as a collective force working towards a particular goal. In this way, the game acts as a mirror of the factory assembly line (Mandelbaum, pg. 124).

Robo-Brady?
Robo-Brady?

Furthermore, players and teams are statistically measured based on their 'efficiency' (passing, kicking, 3rd-down etc) and are naturally judged superior if they perform at a higher efficiency rate (i.e. suceeding more times than failing). Seltzer describes the 'statistical persons' characteristic of 19th Century Realist literature and the invention of a culture of numbers, models and statistics in the opening chapter of 'Bodies and Machines' (Seltzer, 5). In a similar way, football coaches favour certain players, formations and plays in certain situations based on formal statistics and probabilities, but also through informal models of causality (for example, if a certain player is used in a particular situation, how will it affect the player's or team's performance in a similar/different situation later on in the game). A succesful coach will develop a mastery of managing these formal and informal model in order to best situate his roster of 'statistical persons' over the course of a game or season.

Furthermore, in football, there is an emphasis on the calibrated measurement of time and space: the clock is seen as a constant variable in a team's strategy and a team's success is determined based on their ability to gain accurately measured areas of the field (Mandelbaum, pg. 122). The phrase 'forward progress' is used to represent this conquering of space and signifies the most forward point a player has reached on a particular play. A team 'progresses' down the field with hopes of reaching the end zone and being rewarded with points for the realization of its goal.

Invoking the term progress, once again, illuminates the technological connotations existing within the discourse of football. Slack and Wise describe the typical goals of progress as 'material betterment' and 'moral betterment' (Slack and Wise, pg. 10) and these goals are also the crux of the football usage of the term. If a team moves down the field and reaches the endzone, it too is rewarded with material betterment (in the form of six points) and moral betterment (in the form of game momentum and the development of the team chemistry). Not surprisingly, these rewards are most often bestowed to the team which is most efficient over the course of a game and since "exhaustion is the constant nemesis of progress" (borrowing from Rabinbach), players are substituted in and out in order to maintain maximum efficiency.

[edit] Super Bowl XLII

A question thus arises regarding the consequences of a team obtaining such a level of efficiency. Extrapolating the metaphor of progress over the course of a team's season (with a team being rewarded with wins rather than points), the New England Patriots, holding a 17-0 record going into Super Bowl XLII, would be emblematic of such a ideal. If, as a society, progress is valued as a source of material and moral betterment, then it would follow that the Patriots (as opposed to their opponents, the New York Giants), would be embraced by the football viewing public as the Super Bowl's "fan favourite" and act as a symbol of societal improvement and personal ameloriation.

However, as Stephen Brunt wrote (Globe and Mail, Feb. 2/08) just days before the game was to be played, the Patriots and their quest for perfection was met with fervent ambivalence and hostility from American football fans.

Brunt affirms, "Give us a plucky underdog overcoming long odds, a team or an athlete struggling past disappointments to triumph, or even the lessons of failure itself, of being a good and honourable loser. There's grist for everyone's mill there, real-world parables, a way to invest meaning into what might otherwise be an empty spectacle."

Such a statement rebukes the outright equivalence of progress with moral betterment. It appears that in sport, the moral tale exists not in the absolute acheivement of progress through maximum efficiency (as is the case of the Patriots). but rather in the will to overcome adversity and hardship as exemplified by the Giants.

[edit] Conclusion

Therefore, is the discourse of sport (and football in particular) a site of struggle between the societal myth of progress and the athletic myth of hard work and resiliency? Can the two exist concurrently within the rhetoric and value systems of modern day sport? Does such a struggle give credence to Slack and Wise's questioning of the myth of progress?

This year's Super Bowl may work as an illustration of a conflict in discourse, where competing discursive elements within the 'American Dream' paradoxically coexist within one of the nation's most cherished institutions.

[edit] References

Brunt, Stephen. "The Team Nobody Likes." Globe and Mail, February 2nd, 2008.

Mandelbaum, Michael (2004). The Meaning of Sports Public Affairs: New York.

Rabinbach, A. (1990). "From Idleness to Fatigue": The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA.

Seltzer, M. (1992). "Case Studies and Cultural Logistics": Bodies and Machines. Routledge: New York.

Slack, Jennifer Daryl and J. Macgregor Wise (2005). Culture and Technology: A Primer. Peter Lang: New York.

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