John Riordan: NFL an enduring and stubborn king in US sport
FAMILY AFFAIR: Mother Donna Kelce (C) gives cookies to her son's Jason Kelce (L) of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce (R) of the Kansas City Chiefs during Super Bowl LVII opening night. Pic: Christian Petersen/Getty Images
When the Chinese spy balloon hovered with a mix of menace and mirth across a significant swath of the continental United States last weekend, the unit of measurement of choice was the football field.
The inflated white material carrying surveillance equipment was helpfully described as being 15 football fields x 15 football fields. That seems like an impossible amount of first downs for any offensive unit to crank through.
Soccer might be rising in the US and while every summer still owns baseball and basketball can claim to be the most common sidecar of choice in cities and suburbs across the country, American football is an enduring and stubborn king. This weekend's Super Bowl will be the 57th showdown of the best teams in the AFC and the NFC; Super Bowl LVII to adhere to the correct gladiatorial nomenclature.
Since the late 1960s, the NFL has successfully managed to inflate this event into a worldwide spectacle, its countless sideshows evolving at a staggering pace making it as overhyped a spectacle as was the Chinese spy balloon, which was ultimately shot down by a military jet as soon as it was safely over water off the coast of South Carolina's Myrtle Beach. If you've ever been to that sweaty seaside town, you'll know the balloon took a fateful wrong turn that never ends well.
And who can say whether or not that same jet will lead the traditional flyover that greets the closing bars of the Star Spangled Banner; it would be the sort of clownish patriotic act so apt for an event like this.
Anthem duties are being handed this year to Kentuckian Chris Stapleton, the country music star who showed up last Sunday at the Grammys performing alongside Stevie Wonder. No snide reaction here, it was good.
The Super Bowl is as annoying as it is essential because, obviously, the NFL season has to culminate somewhere and, to be fair, recent renditions have offered a little more value for our money than the dark days of the 2000s and the 1990s when it was more often than not a washout.
On Sunday in Arizona, just outside Phoenix in the city of Glendale, the AFC champions, the Kansas City Chiefs will take on the NFC champions, the Philadelphia Eagles.
Not that it matters this weekend in what is a contest that is as finely balanced as it can possibly be but the two teams have only met three times in the last decade, all regular season games going the way of the Chiefs. Whatās rare is better.
You get the sense, simply from observing, that the outcome is of little consequence to the neutral observer. The sideshows are the thing. The Rihanna half-time performance, the media circus that has inflated beyond purpose, the multi-million dollar commercials being launched almost a month out, morphing into boxsets rather than one-off blink-and-you'll-miss-it showings.
But there are good football elements feeding into the anticipation too. For the first time, both opposing quarterbacks are Black players, another necessary breakthrough to nudge things along. Chiefs playmaker Patrick Mahomes and his Eagles opposite number Jalen Hurts have contrasting skillsets, too, helping to prevent any lazy stereotypes from being thrown their way.
Chiefs coach Andy Reid used to be the Eagles coach. He took them to their second Super Bowl in 2005 but the starved fanbase was forced to wait until after his tenure came to a slightly messy end before they could reach the promised land, the 2018 success over Tom Brady's New England Patriots.
Two years later, the almost as hungry Chiefs finally won their second, 50 years separating their Super Bowl IV victory from Super Bowl LIV.
The Big Gameās infamously frenzied ticket demands mean the respective fanbases - up there in the top five or six of most rabid in the NFL - are diluted considerably, not that we'll notice when weāre watching the production put together by Fox.
That goes some way to explaining why the two-week void between the final down of the AFC Championship and the coin toss in just over 48 hours is filled by non-stop speculation and futile prediction.
I have better things to do with my time, if you can believe thatās true so I have opted to tune in to the only pre-game narrative that matters, the Kelce brothers. Chiefs tight end Travis will be hoping to get one over his older brother, Jason, the Eagles centre.
They have a Super Bowl ring each and are both equally beloved by their respective clubs. At the start of this season, they decided to spin their jovial personalities out into a podcast called New Heights, named after Cleveland Heights High School where they first excelled as teenage players before heading off to success in college and the pros.
The successful series, a somewhat amusing meeting of football minds, one sharper than the other, has notched a quarter century of episodes and it could not have scripted a better scenario than the two stars going head-to-head this weekend.
Inevitably, their parents have been drafted in for the ride and basking in the fact that theyāll have a winning son no matter what while also promising that theyāll go to hug the loser first.
As the happy pair approach the climax of a season during which one of their fellow NFLers almost died, it would miss the point by about 15 football fields if any of us scoffed at a pair of brothers enjoying the fruits of their athletic prowess.
Damar Hamiln could well have been an AFC or Super Bowl opponent of either of the Kelces if it weren't for the freak incident that caused him to collapse just over a month ago. Now a medical specialist is predicting heāll play again. If that's not a cause for unironic celebration this weekend, who knows what is?
Speaking of unironically enjoying the success of an athlete who seems to exist on a different biological planet to the rest of us, I canāt leave today slip by without paying tribute to the NBAās greatest current star, LeBron James.
As Claire de Lune wrote better than I could in Thursdayās Examiner, the NBA and the Lakers got it right when marking the moment King James surpassed the NBA all-time scoring record, hitting and surpassing 38,388.
The game was halted for ten minutes while the opponents, the Oklahoma City Thunder waited patiently to get back to beating the hosts, a minor glitch on the festival atmosphere.
It felt awkward but right. āBefore we know it, time has marched on,ā pointed out de Lune, āwhether weāve taken stock of whatās around us or not.ā LeBron James, like Lionel Messi, might only be around for three or four more years. We canāt let that slip by.
The Laker whose record he eased by at a faster rate, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, sat seemingly strategically next to the net nearest to the home bench. If James had not been so impatient as to break the record right before the end of the third quarter, he could have done so under the watchful eye of the master at the other end. That would have been a picture for the ages.
When Kareem broke Wilt Chamberlainās then record in 1984 at the temporary Utah Jazz home base of Las Vegas, he purposefully deployed his trademark skyhook shot.
On Tuesday, he sat as close to that part of the court as he could, from the television viewerās vantage point anyway.
The great ones can control time and space and LeBron James was not going to rely on a free throw to break the record. He wanted to strike a very LeBronian tone for the dozens of A-list celebrities in attendance. His fadeaway jumper brought the house down and the midgame ceremony that followed brought Kareem out to present him with the ball that touched nothing but the bottom of the net.
The great ones can also control their emotions much more effectively than us mortals. The only time an impressively passive Kareem cracked a smile as the points fell away was when when Anthony Davis hustled to keep the ball in play to allow James to bank it in and get within two.
Only seven players are within 10,000 points of his tally and heāll surely cruise past 40,000. Itās worth noting that playoff scores donāt count towards one of the most impressive records across all of team sports.
As with the Super Bowl, itās futile to resist the pageantry of a moment like that. The Thunder players continued to idle as James hugged his mother Gloria, his wife Savannah, his daughter and his two aspiring ball-playing sons.
After his quick speech, the pre-planned hugs rounded out with Jay Z and Magic Johnson, the game needed to restart with his team five points down. They would lose and their season seems lost as high profile trades pass them by.
But anyone who was there or who stayed up past midnight on the east coast will care little.
@JohnWRiordan
