What is it about Super Bowl Sunday and the need to make it a religious experience? It's like when my mother made me go to church on Christmas Day, get dressed and attend the Mass, then comes the company and the big dinner. Today it is dressing in your team colors, going to the TV or computer and filling yourself up with Pizza, Chile, Chinese food, chips and dips and more reverence than going to church. Both events require watching the clock.
I recall the first three or four Super Bowls I watched. The first two were just games of interest to me, as a new football league challenged an old one and got beat. Then the third one, with the famous $400,000 signing bonus baby from the University of Alabama came on the scene and predicted his team and mine, the NY Jets were going to beat the Baltimore Colts.
Watching the game that Sunday, a Sunday that the priest on his pulpit asked us all to pray for the Jets like the Devil was pulling for Baltimore. The game was on TV around noon or 1:00 pm. And ended in my being happy! I then sat down to dinner my mother made. This was the hight of my fandom happiness for the NY Jets, now I just cry every year.
I wonder why food has become an element in the watching of the game? In fact, why is eating so important when we go to the movies? Is food that important to us? I'm sure the Asians and South Americans, as well as the Europeans, eat like we do at these events as well.
Ken Belson wrote for the New York Times in 2013 about the British experience of watching their version of ‘football':
"In soccer-mad Britain, where fans shuttle from pub to stadium to pub, and opposing fans rarely mix, there is no equivalent of tailgating, the verb of which is defined as "to eat a meal served from the back of a parked vehicle."
Sports fans from Europe, on the whole, eat at home and then go to the game, as so do Asians and South Americans. This just tells you that soccer stadiums do not provide food as an end-all for their sport as does American football/baseball does.
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