In 2019, the Boston Globe’s Stan Grossfeld spoke to tailgating couples outside a New England Patriots football game and asked if Tom Brady would ever come between them.
“Would you ditch your spouse for Tom Brady?” Grossfeld asked. The survey said: “Abso-freaking-lutely.”
Brady may finally be retired, but his hold on our region’s hearts is still lock strong. Who else retires just as a Hollywood blockbuster with your name on it, “80 for Brady,” hits the theaters? It may be Valentine’s Day this Tuesday, but let’s face it, America’s real love affair is with the pigskin.
Our matinee idol, Brady, may not be in the Big Game this weekend, but regardless, given a choice between watching this Sunday’s Super Bowl and spending a romantic evening alone with your lover, I think we all know what most Americans would say.
“Get the game on, baby.”
Americans love their football gladiators, their real men. They love their game, packaged with pregame military flyovers and color guards, cheerleaders, and celebrity entertainers at halftime.
America’s love for football defines who we are.
If aliens landed on earth this Sunday night, and peeked into our living rooms, they would instantly get us.
“What is it they are watching?” they’d first ask. Fifteen minutes later, they’d beam up their report to the mother ship. “They are transfixed by a large screen that displays a coliseum where their species hit each other repeatedly and brutally in some kind of voyeuristic and sadistic spectacle. Very disturbing!”
And now, thanks to the Northampton-based Media Education Foundation (MEF), there’s a highly acclaimed documentary to help educate us earthlings that our obsession with America’s darling NFL brand is deeply perverse.
Called “Behind the Shield: The Power and Politics of the NFL,” the film features renowned Nation magazine sports journalist Dave Zirin and is a condemnation of an institution whose influence in America goes far beyond the gridiron.
“Whether we’re football fans or not or even sports fans, we all have a stake in understanding just how powerful the NFL has become as a cultural and political force in this country,” says Zirin, who co-produced and co-wrote the film with the Media Education Foundation. Forget “80 for Brady,” and watch Zirin peel back the NFL onion instead.
“The Shield” is the NFL’s iconic logo — its red, white and blue emblem. It’s one of the most recognizable symbols in not only sports but all over the world. It represents a brand— an identity — that’s deeply woven into every fabric of American culture and one, Zirin says, the NFL will, at any cost, protect.
“Given that the NFL itself admits it’s more than just a game,” he says in the film, “I’d argue that it’s every American’s job to take a close look at the values and ideas the league promotes, and to ask whether the shield and everything it’s come to represent have done more to reveal what’s best or to obscure what’s worst about this country.”
Zirin’s question is a good one. Which is why the Media Education Foundation sees the Super Bowl as a super teachable moment and is streaming the film for free through Sunday night at BehindTheShieldMovie.com.
“There’s nobody as fearless as Dave Zirin when it comes to taking on the league and cutting through the fog of propaganda and PR the league routinely puts out,” says MEF production director Jeremy Earp, who directed and produced “Behind the Shield” with Loretta Alper. “We want to make it as easy as possible for people to hear his voice in the run-up to the game.”
I watched it, and it convinced me, once and for all, to give a boot to my own football love affair. It wasn’t easy. Like Zirin, I grew up “an absolute sports freak,” as he puts it. But the NFL has a dark side that can’t be ignored.
That was most recently obvious when Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin collapsed at a game in early January. Time and time again, NFL executives and team owners have shown they are more concerned about damage to the NFL brand than to their player’s brains and bodies.
And while the NFL has always portrayed itself as a positive and patriotic social force that represents the best of America, what’s behind “The Shield,” Zirin says, is a multibillion-dollar corporate leviathan steeped in a toxic brew “of hyper-masculine posturing, sexism, misogyny, racism, homophobia, bullying and flag-waving jingoism.”
Football is America, says the NFL in its promotions, but what the NFL projects in who and what we are culturally as a nation is not the America I’m proud of. Ask ex-Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores what he thinks.
“The NFL is racially segregated and is managed much like a plantation,” said Flores who is suing the league for racial discrimination.
“Its 32 owners — none of whom are Black — profit substantially from the labor of NFL players, 70% of whom are Black,” his lawsuit reads. “The owners watch the games from atop NFL stadiums in their luxury boxes, while their majority-Black workforce put their bodies on the line every Sunday, taking vicious hits and suffering debilitating injuries to their bodies and their brains while the NFL and its owners reap billions of dollars.”
And yet, about 100 million Americans are expected to tune into Fox on Sunday night to get their fix. St. Valentine might say football has broken America’s heart. In the case of the Super Bowl and Americans, I’d say love is blind.
John Paradis, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, lives in Florence and writes a monthly column.