Xtra Laidback Viewing and Inspired Interactions

I seem to vaguely recall watching Super Bowl XXV at a fairly large party thrown by some friends of my parents. That was the year the New York Giants barely escaped with the Lombardi Trophy after Scott Norwood of the Buffalo Bills (now infamously) failed to convert a last-second field goal attempt. I have to imagine there are lots of people who would remember Norwood’s name, or the ignominious beginning of the Bills’ Super Bowl losing streak, without actually having committed to memory which team it was the Bills had faced. But since the Giants are my team, I’m obviously not one of those people. I’m pretty sure just about everyone at that party was a Giants fan as well, which is hardly shocking since this goes back to when we were living in New Jersey, well within the Meadowlands’ sphere of influence. Anyway, I bring that up because it’s really the last memory I have of attending a Super Bowl party and getting any kind of team-affiliation solidarity out of it, personally. Since then I’ve been in Virginia whenever the Giants have made it to the Super Bowl, and notwithstanding the implicit support of my wife or general antipathy aimed at the Patriots, I’ve been the only diehard rooting for the G-Men at the party.

And obviously the even more common occurrence has been that I haven’t had much rooting interest at all. Of course by the goose-gander principle I’ve been a Steelers booster for my wife’s sake when they’ve made it to the big game. And when my buddy Slick saw his Eagles go all the way to a showdown with the Pats in XXXIX, I was ready to be happy for him if Philly prevailed (but, alas, no). But when the championship has come down to Bucs-Raiders, or Saints-Colts? I’ve been fairly disinterested in the outcomes. Clearly, then, the whole reason to attend a Super Bowl party under those circumstances is to enjoy the crowd for its own sake, not merely because they all root for the same team as me.

And Super Bowl XLVII fell into that category as well. Despite the reasonable proximity of Baltimore, none of the guests at the party I attended were Ravens fans (well, one guy showed up in an understated Ravens t-shirt but I honestly had no idea how seriously to take that sartorial assertion, and didn’t ask). My buddy Clutch and his wife hosted, as usual, and he is an old-school Redskins fan, which means I am still waiting to see what he is even like during a Super Bowl when it’s his team on the field. (I may wait forever; some people get weirdly intense about the whole thing and if the Redskins ever do make a legit run at it, Clutch may either cancel the party or hide upstairs the whole time or something.) I think ultimately whether or not people at the party were rooting for (or against) the 49ers or the Ravens came down to whether they felt more strongly about somebody saying inflammatory homophobic things recently, or getting away with being accessory to murder quite some time ago. Thus sports passions were low, but camaraderie was high, and that was thorough enough justification for me to have made the trip.

I get the feeling this is turning into yet another one of my trademark posts where I rhetorically bend over backwards and protest too much to prove a point which may or may not be true and isn’t really that big of a deal either way anyway, but oh well, I’ve gone too far to turn back now. I’ve never even attempted to deny that my friends and I are all a bunch of geeks, but I do sometimes feel compelled to note that we are not stereotypical geeks. Yes, we indulge in hobbies from comic book collecting to tabletop mini-gaming, we’re the target demo for tv shows like Fringe and Supernatural and Smallville, all true. But we break the stereotypes by virtue of being well-rounded. None of us are athletes but we do enjoy professional sports, and we comprehend the rules and the strategies. We have our teams that we’ve been rooting for since we were kids. We’ve been in fantasy football leagues, oft times pitted against one another. We are not the one-dimensional nerds who would go to a Super Bowl party and never glance at the competition playing out on-screen, but we are capable of distracting one another on random tangents when said competition isn’t terribly gripping television.

All that said, there was a zinger lobbed at the male half of the crowd right after the Star Trek: Into Darkness trailer, when someone observed that that was the quietest moment of intense concentration witnessed all night. I don’t doubt that was the case, I’m just saying: duh, none of us were pulling for either team, and even if somebody were it still wouldn’t be all of us. But we all get just about equally geeked about Star Trek! (or in my case, J.J. Abrams!)

So this is how I’m trying to characterize my friends: none of us are so narrow in our interests that we’d ever say “Well I don’t care about the Super Bowl at all but I guess I’ll go to the Super Bowl party, the best part is the commercials anyway.” We care about the Super Bowl itself, at least a little. We also care about the commercials, whether to make fun of them or to get psyched about what we’ll be seeing in the movie theater this summer. We also care about eating buffalo wings and mozzarella sticks and chips-n-salsa and drinking beer, and we also care about getting a night to just hang out as (quasi-)grown-ups while all of our respective children amuse themselves, with the older ones keeping an eye on the younger ones. And despite having watched almost all of the last ten or twelve Super Bowls with these people, I still learn stuff about my friends all the time. Like the fact that they all have surprisingly strong opinions about Shakespeare! I wish I could remember how the subject came up, but at one point during the pre-game show there was a very animated discussion about the Bard’s comedies versus his tragedies and whether the latter were worth reading outside of high school assignments. When I’m at a gathering and somebody namechecks Titus Andronicus and it’s not me, that’s usually a sign I’m at least in the right place.

And if that weren’t enough, later in the evening I was called from the adult-zone of the big screen to the kid-zone, as my daughter needed to have her diaper changed. (Desperately needed it, to be honest; the time had gotten away from me a bit.) I took her someplace relatively out of the way and got her all cleaned up, though I should note that this out of the way place had a television showing the game as well. As I was finishing up my buddy Slick popped his head into the room and said “Dude, you missed the trailer for Iron Man 3 … BUT! We DVR’ed it and it’s queued up for you when you come back downstairs.” I laughed and told him I hadn’t missed it at all thanks to my tv-equipped choice in changing spots, but thanked him all the same for thinking of me. A small gesture, but the end result was again the same, letting me know I was in the right place.