A Fan’s Notes on the Spectacle of Super Bowl Week

The President was in the Dome. It was hard to know where. He’d visited a corner of the field earlier, to some gumbo of boos and cheers, but I’d somehow missed him. Attention was diffuse, amid the distractions and noise, the bright colors and lights, and the bombardment of commercial agitation. The only thing that could concentrate our eyes and minds, in this reverse panopticon of seventy thousand gazes, was the football itself, that precious prolate spheroid of dimpled cowhide, which had yet to be teed up or booted into play.

One row in front of me, several family members of a Chiefs starting defensive tackle remained seated for the anthem, as did, behind me, the Philadelphia 76ers great Julius Erving. In Dr. J’s case, one surmised it might be the knees. (He left his seat soon afterward, I hope for a private skybox reserved for Philly sports gods.) Still, I thought of the exiled quarterback Colin Kaepernick, and his kneeling-during-the-anthem protests, what seems like a hundred years ago. You’d have to be a fool to think that the fresh removal, the week before, of the slogan “End Racism,” from the end zones and the players’ helmets, meant that racism had been ended.

In recent days, Canadian hockey fans had taken to booing the American anthem, in response to Donald Trump’s tariffs and his threats to annex Canada. But this was America, damn it, and no one was about to boo Batiste. During the anthem, the image of Trump appeared on giant screens at both ends of the stadium, with his daughter and his grandson and his dour salute. The moment came and went; a noise rose, of indeterminate temper. There were almost definitely more cheers than boos, but also maybe just a din of collective noticing. Afterward, people would claim that it was more one way than the other—more ratio speculations—or try to advance the idea that Fox Sports had piped in cheering on its broadcast, which, if you compared it with the European feed, reposted here, maybe doctored, maybe not . . . who can say, really?

Any attempt to put the football game itself into the binary ping-pong of our current politics was equally simplistic or self-serving. The Chiefs wear red; they are Midwestern; Brittany Mahomes, the wife of the quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, had liked a MAGA Instagram post. Who owns the Chiefs? A conservative Christian, Clark Hunt, whose father, Lamar Hunt, founded the team, as well as the American Football League, the merger of which with the N.F.L., announced in 1966, was the basis for the first Super Bowl. (Lamar coined the name, too, in an offhand comment, prompted by his having seen his kids playing with a Super Ball.)

The Eagles are owned by Jeffrey Lurie, who made his money in the movie-theatre business and has donated primarily to Democrats. Philadelphia is a blue city. But who are we kidding? I saw a video, earlier this season, of an Eagles fan waving a red maga hat walking up the aisle at the Eagles’ stadium; pretty much everyone in the crowd cheered him and chanted Trump’s name. Anyone who has spent any time around athletes, especially white ones, or around Eagles fans, ditto, must know that it’s all a long way from Berkeley or the Upper West Side.

Not long after the anthem, during a TV timeout, the image of Taylor Swift, seated with a friend, flashed onscreen, and there arose a more unified response, a thick surge of boos—presumably from Eagles fans, for her connection to the Chiefs, through Travis Kelce, the Chiefs tight end and, for those who live on Mars, her boyfriend. It was ugly to see a young woman and artist derided in such a way, merely for her playful allegiance to her lover. But maybe it wasn’t just about the Eagles and the Chiefs: Swift had opposed Trump in the past, and Trump had subsequently singled her out for ridicule as a result. The moment deepened my sense of my own tacit abetment. The game, people had been saying all week, was a welcome distraction—from the American moment, let’s call it. But in the Dome it felt like the distraction was more like a mirror, a fun-house perversion of the thing itself, in the way that dreams can be animations of amorphous preoccupations.

This was Super Bowl LIX, the VIIIth one at the Superdome. There’s the contest itself, the Big Game, and then there’s the week leading up to it, a jubilee of parties and promotions, a glad-handing orgy for the sports-entertainment complex and a bucket-list indulgence for fans who can spare the time and the expense. Eagles plus the Big Easy: I had to be there. I secured a bed with friends in the Garden District and went about trying to hustle up a ticket.

The Super Bowl may well be the last great vestige of the monoculture: it’s the pop event that most Americans, whatever their beliefs, circumstances, or motivations, can gather around. It’s hard to think of anything that comes close, unless you count Christmas. Like Christmas, it is by no means immune to the culture wars, but its popularity seems to be. This year’s Super Bowl set a record for the price of a thirty-second advertising spot and was the most-watched event in the history of the United States.

My only previous Super Bowl was XXXVIII, 2004, in Houston. Patriots-Panthers. I was there on assignment, a Profile of Mike and the Mad Dog, the sports-talk-radio duo. I stayed at the home of a friend, a beer distributor, and through various connections got into a few satellite happenings, including the Playboy party, where young women in Bunny garb served drinks and flirted with corporate executives and other guests. I was the plus-one of Billy Bush, a childhood friend from New York, then a correspondent for “Access Hollywood,” whose first cousin was at that time entering the last year of his first term in the White House and the eleventh month of our occupation of Iraq. It was three months before this magazine published photographs from the military prison at Abu Ghraib, and several more before Billy Bush laughed along while a future President spilled some “locker-room talk” on a hot mike. It would cost only one of them a job.

For the game, the N.F.L. had assigned me to the stadium’s basement, with the foreign press, where the only way to watch the action was on TV. I wanted more. Bush was sitting in the box of the National Rifle Association. He sneaked me in, and so I got to watch the game in the flesh, while seated next to Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A.’s C.E.O. I ate his popcorn and drank his beer, while a sense of compromise and corruption seeped through me.