All about the Super Bowl – the good, the bad, and the lists

Alan Bairner
Loughborough University

Let me begin with a confession. I have no interest whatsoever in American football. I would even go so far as to say I dislike it, albeit with the not insignificant qualification that I simply don’t understand it. Nevertheless, I agreed to review Celebrating the Super Bowl with enthusiasm safe in the knowledge (or so I thought on the basis of Professor Fuller’s impressive body of work on gender) that the book would provide its readers with a savage critique in the Super Bowl and the NFL. However, little did I know that I would be so pleasantly surprised as early as page 3 when I found a recipe for Heart-Healthy Lasagna.

Fuller highlights immediately the significance of the Super Bowl. She writes. ‘Variously referred to as the biggest sporting event in the world, America’s de facto national holiday and/or “the most over-hyped event in human history” (Albom 2008, 6), the Super Bowl has become one of the most widely celebrated entertainment events of the year – and not just in the United States’ (p. 5). She further claims, ‘our celebration of this iconic sports event is a bacchanalian combination of American commercial culture and inequities, along with balloons, buffalo chicken wings, betting, and beer’ (pp. 5–6). So, what’s not to hate about that, with the exception of the beer, I think to myself, and not even the beer if all that is on offer is Bud.

Having enjoyed this book immensely, I regret to say that I have not been persuaded to develop an interest in, far less a liking for, American football, not even the Super Bowl.

However, I quickly realised that, although Fuller knows that there is much about the Super Bowl and its attendant trappings that deserve to be criticised, her overall approach is that of a critical friend and, as a  consequence, a voice for so many team sports fans throughout the world who know that there is a lot about their favourite sport and even their favourite team that sucks but there is also so much to love.

Referring to the work for which she is better known, Fuller uses Gendered Critical Discourse Analysis to discuss what she terms as the Wartalk and Sextalk associated with American football in general and the Super Bowl specifically. She reflects, ’My gendered sporting rhetorical analyses, always performed with inter-coder reliability, continue to help explain the wider sociocultural implications of sport’ and then adds ’although the Super Bowl appeals to a wide public, it fulfils private needs for entertainment’ (p.18). Much of the book is a celebration of the myriad ways in which these private needs, despite some misgivings about aspects of the event, are satisfied by the Super Bowl. Hence, her role as a ‘critical viewer/celebrator’ (p. 129).

The book consists of a Preface and six chapters followed by a list of references and a number of appendices. As early as the Preface, Fuller repeats a declaration that she made previously in the wake of Super Bowl/XXV/1991, ‘The game itself is oftentimes hardly the point, it is the parties, the people and, most importantly, the products surrounding it’. She adds, ‘It is tough for our family to remember when we did not either throw or go to a Super Bowl party. (p. 2).

Although the book contains copious information about the Super Bowl through the years – the teams that contested it, the players who shone most brightly, the controversies, the elation and the despair, even more space is devoted to the things that might be regarded as peripheral to other sporting events but which are, in fact, central to the almost mythic status of the Super Bowl – not only the parties (p. 95) but also the food (pp. 99–104), the TV ads (p. 41), the half time shows (p. 46), the decorations (pp.11–113) and the mascots (pp. 75–77). Much of this will be familiar to American football fans. For someone as uninitiated as I am, there was plenty to savour and to learn from.  Super Bowl Bingo looks like a game I could enjoy or at least finesse in such a way that it could be used for a sports event in which I would have more interest. I am pleased that I now know that the Baltimore Ravens’ mascots are a raven named Poe in honour of Edgar Allen Poe and two live ravens, Rise and Conquer, in Baltimore Zoo.

Fuller does not avoid the controversial issues – the evolving role of the cheerleaders (pp. 64–65), violence (pp. 79–81), race (pp. 72–74), masculinity (pp. 71–72), and the relationship between woman and American football (pp. 66–68) (see, for example, the number of books aimed at explaining the sport to women).  Nevertheless, at no point does she go down the cul de sac misdirected to by the ideological certainty so prevalent among many sport sociologists that, because there are things wrong with the Super Bowl and, indeed, with sport in general, both are by implication without any redeeming features.

Following an extensive bibliography, the book closes with seven appendices – lists of Super Bowl-Related Acronyms, Super Bowl Related Websites, Super Bowl Championships, Super Bowl MVPs, Super Bowl Team Wins, Super Bowl Host Cities, and Super Bowl costs for 30-second commercials. As any true sports fan knows, what’s not to like about lists.

Having enjoyed this book immensely, I regret to say that I have not been persuaded to develop an interest in, far less a liking for, American football, not even the Super Bowl. However, Fuller has inspired me to think about what sport means to me as a lifelong fan.  For over sixty years prior to the lockdown prompted by the coronavirus epidemic, I attended live football/soccer games at least once a week during the season which for most of that time took place during part of the year rather than what now seems like all twelve months simply to satisfy FIFA’s ambitions.  Increasingly I began to wonder when this habit would come to an end given the aches and pains that come with old age. Since the enforced furlough, I have only occasionally returned. What do I miss, if anything? Certainly not the matches themselves, most of which are long forgotten with only of a few exceptions which can never be replicated. What I do miss, however, are the pre-match cheeseburgers, reading the matchday programme, conversations with the variety of people I have stood with or sat beside over the years, the journeys to away games, the post-match beers in the company of happy or sad fellow drinkers depending upon the result. To paraphrase Fuller, the game itself was seldom the point. It was going to and coming away from the game that satisfied my needs. Sports fans will love this book. Members of the anti-commercial sport brigade might learn a lot about sports fans and what sport gives them by reading it.

Copyright © Alan Bairner, 2025