Super Bowl XL: "When Blogging Was Young, We Were Already Old"

A Previously Published Essay

Chuck Klosterman

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781451621136
• Subtopic: Popular Culture

Originally a blog for ESPN.com and now available both as a stand-alone essay and in the ebook collection Chuck Klosterman on Sports, this essay is about Super Bowl XL.

Super Bowl XL: “When Blogging Was Young, We Were Already Old”

Sunday, 11:30 p.m. ET

Here is a true story about Detroit that happened to somebody who isn’t me: A man employed at one of the city’s two major newspapers exited his downtown Detroit office to go home and drink a glass of wine. He worked the late shift, so it was already around midnight. The journalist adjusted his glasses and chatted on his cellular telephone, briskly striding down the sidewalk toward the company parking lot.

Suddenly, an unknown car pulled alongside the journalist, screeching to a halt; a large gentleman emerged from behind its steering wheel. The unknown gentleman walked over to the newspaperman and wordlessly punched him in the face, knocking him to the ground. “Get up,” said the puncher. “Get up!” The newspaperman did not get up, as he suspected following these directions would result in more face-punching. “Get up,” the unknown assailant repeated. “Get up! You know what this is about! You know what this is about!”

The puncher kept making demands, but the victim’s terror slowly morphed into mild confusion; to the best of his recollection, he had done nothing to warrant an unannounced pummeling.

“I think you have the wrong guy,” he said, still crouching on the Michigan pavement. “I’ve never seen you before. I was just walking to my car. You are hitting the wrong guy.” The journalist peered up at his attacker; the attacker looked down at his victim’s face. It became clear to the puncher that he was, in fact, punching the wrong dude. Obviously, this was an awkward situation. The puncher uttered an expletive, returned to this vehicle, and fled the scene. The newspaperman found his cell phone and readjusted his glasses. He found himself oddly unsurprised by the event that had transpired. This, after all, was his hometown.

It’s great to be in Detroit.

When ESPN initially asked me to cover Super Bowl XL, I was hesitant. I have a lot on my plate these days: I’m developing a sitcom for UPN about Antonio Davis’s wife (it is tentatively titled Oh, No, You Did Not Just Use the Metric System! and is slated to star Wanda Sykes). I’m also trying to reenergize the tourist economy of New Orleans with “unconventional” humanitarian Anna Benson (she’s like a cross between Thomas Paine and Albert Schweitzer, plus a killer rack). I enjoy watching football, but I also enjoy contributing to the actualization of society; in gambling terminology, this is what we refer to as a push. However, I eventually came to my senses: I simply could not pass up the chance to spend a week in hypersexy Detroit (the so-called Houston of the North) in order to hear 140,000 sportswriters explain why Jerome Bettis is a class act.

The Super Bowl represents different things to different people. To some, it’s akin to a secular holiday—a drunken, three-hour Christmas for anyone who hates Jesus. To others, it is simply the annual matchup between the finest pro football team in the American Conference and the finest pro football team in the National Conference; mysteriously, that is not the case this season, as both teams are from the AFC.

But regardless of how you feel, one question demands consideration: What does the Super Bowl mean to me? What does the Super Bowl represent to Chuck Klosterman, a random writer you have never met and (in all likelihood) have never even heard of? That is the quandary that has America talking. And that is the quandary I will attempt to answer through this sporadically updated weblog, a process Arctic Monkeys fans like to call “blogging.”

I have never “blogged” before, and “people” often ask me why I do not “have a blog,” or even “a decent cell phone.” The short answer is: “For pretty much the same reason I don’t commit crimes like rape.” If you’re interested in the long answer as to why I do not blog, you will have to read my blog, located at [email protected] (please leave comments and trackbacks!). As you might anticipate, I’m rather stoked about this new venture, as it will allow me to do the following “blog-o-centric” things:

1. Create useless slang for retarded hipsters.

2. Link to seventy-track collections of Paul Stanley stage banter.

3. Post seminude photos of a young Basil Rathbone.

I guarantee this will be the greatest one-week sports blog ever written, or at least the best one since Jacqueline Susann’s unforgettable blogging of the 1967 Ice Bowl. If this is not the best sports blog you have ever read, I will personally drive to your home, clean your garage, wash your car, shingle your doghouse with pancakes, and blow up your children with dynamite. That is my guarantee.

I shall not Vanderjack this opportunity; like Kobe against the Raptors, I am Napoleon Solo (i.e., unstoppable one-on-one). So, wassup, rockers? Do you (metaphorically) feel me? Are you enjoying all these hyperpresent pop-cultural references that will make absolutely no sense to anyone in sixty to ninety days? It’s time we all embrace a little game I like to call North American football. It’s time to make keen references to Shaun Alexander’s addled skull. It’s time to get punched by random citizens of Detroit. This is Super Bowl XL. And I am ready. And using italics.

Monday, 10:23 a.m. ET

I am currently typing in ESPN’s Detroit command center, which essentially means I am on the eighteenth floor of a very confusing building that is (apparently) supposed to signify the city’s renaissance, inasmuch as the facility is named the Renaissance Center. This is a universe without corners; the Renaissance Center is essentially four cylindrical skyscrapers that provide no sense of geometric order. I keep hoping to bump into Ron Jaworski; I have no doubt he could enthusiastically explain the logic of this structure, as well as detailing what I should do if I step out of an elevator and everyone in the food court has dropped into Cover 2.

It’s oddly quiet here on the eighteenth floor; there are about fourteen dudes in one room and all of them are staring at laptop computers. Two people are talking about Brett Favre’s possible retirement, and I occasionally hear John Clayton’s dulcet voice mention something abstract about free agency. Everyone is understated; somehow, I anticipated more physicality. Thus far, I have exchanged a playful forearm shiver with absolutely no one.

There is apparently an ESPN “Global Planning Meeting” at 11 a.m.; there are several sheets of paper on the walls proclaiming this event. I suspect this meeting will be where ESPN (a) plots how to cover the Super Bowl and (b) decides how it will respond to the Palestinian elections (I say we play hard to get). It’s weird being here, because everybody knows each other, and I don’t know anyone, and everyone has work to do, and I have nothing to offer; all I can really do is look at the Internet and check the results from the SAG Awards. I see that the big winner was Crash, a movie designed for people in Los Angeles who just figured out that racism is problematic (and must therefore be secretly central to every conversation any two Americans ever have). I wish one of those bears from Grizzly Man would eat Matt Dillon and Ludacris.

In other news, an intriguing dynamic is beginning to emerge within the hearts and minds of the Motor City. The local Detroit media appear obsessed with two diametrically opposed scenarios: The first is that Super Bowl XL is going to prove their community is a vibrant, dynamic metropolis with limitless resources ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Super Bowl XL
• More by Chuck Klosterman