The SportsThink Review #101
February 9, 2024: It's Super!
Welcome new readers! The SportsThink Review highlights my favorite sport-related reading and related content. Most things I share are recently published, but some are not; the only rule is that I’ve read or encountered them recently. Some are relevant to my day job as a professor teaching courses on the business, history, and philosophy of sports. Others are just plain interesting, relevant to my lifelong obsession with the games we play. I also occasionally share articles and assorted musings on Twitter. The newsletter is free, but comes with two requests. 1. I’m always open to suggestions, so send me the good stuff that you read! 2. If you enjoy the newsletter, please share it with other folks who might enjoy it as well. Finally, I try to focus on non-paywalled writing, but if you find yourself unable to access anything, just hit reply to the email and I’ll do my best to get you a copy. Thanks for reading!
Howdy folks, hope that you are well. We’ve got a BIG GAME this weekend, so here’s a big newsletter. Let’s get to it.
The Super Bowl, and more importantly, the Super Bowl halftime show
I’m about ten years into my “I love sports but thankfully don’t live and die with my teams anymore” era, so this weekend’s Super Bowl matchup has put me in an existential funk. I find both of these teams likeable, and am very much in the milquetoast “let’s have a happy healthy baby of a good game” camp. But I am not supposed to like these teams!! I am, after all, a devotee of the Oakland Los Angeles Oakland Las Vegas Raiders. So I—in principle—hate both of these teams.
The 49ers are in the other conference, so aren’t a traditional rival of the Raiders, but have always been a spiritual one. There was (a couple times) geographic proximity, but they are really the only other relevant NFL team in-and-of California. With apologies to Rams fans (congrats on the success) and some more apologies to the 13 people who like the Chargers, the RAIDERS are still very much a California team, despite their current address. I don’t make the rules.
The Chiefs, on the other hand, are a long-standing divisional rival. They are evil, their fans are heinous, and I wish them no joy; may their existence be rife with barefoot Lego encounters. But man oh man is Patrick Mahomes a joy to watch!! And it’s awesome that he finally has a defense out there so he can catch his breath every now and then. On the other side, the Brock Purdy story is fantastic, he’s a baller, and the Niners are GOOD.
So I don’t really care. But a little partisanship is healthy. I’m going to swallow some bile and throw my support to the Chiefs. You gotta root for someone. Plus, a Chiefs win blasting the Kelce-TSwift romance into the stratosphere and further triggering the dweebs who have the energy to complain said romance…yeah, I’m here for that. I will not chop, but I will throw some mojo the Chiefs way.
On to the business at hand: let us consider the halftime show, and this year’s performer, Usher. I have some hopes here. He’s a solid entertainer. On average, the performers who dance well always put on a better show than the old rock dudes chained to their instruments. And to say that Usher dances well is a bit of an understatement. As it comes up every year at this time, we’ve been reminded that not while Apple pays the NFL $50 million to sponsor the halftime show, the performers earn exactly zero dollars. It is, somehow, still very much worth it to them. It borders on a meme to mention that a lot of people are just watching the game for the commercials or the halftime show, but it wasn’t always this way….
Looking back, the first 3-ish decades of Super Bowl halftime performances seem quaint, pastoral. Think marching bands and drill teams. That’s not to say that they were bad shows; the magnificent Grambling State University marching band was featured several times. Some vanilla theming emerged in 1969 (things like “America Thanks” and “Happiness Is”). The first celebrity performers appeared in 1970, but I’m taking it on faith that people at the time considered Marguerite Piazza and Al Hirt to be celebrities. (In fairness, Ella Fitzgerald in New Orleans in 1972 would have been epic to see.)
1991’s Super Bowl XXV, in Tampa, foreshadowed things a bit, featuring New Kids on the Block (who were MASSIVE at the time, especially with non-football demographics). NKOTB was paired with 2,000 local children and…. Warren Moon (???) for the Disney/Coca-cola sponsored “Small World/Tribute to 25 Years of the Super Bowl.” Just look at this setlist:
In 1992, for reasons I can’t quite fathom, CBS (the Super Bowl broadcast network) signed off on “Winter Magic, a Salute to the 1992 Winter Olympics.” Which makes sense timing-wise, but the Albertville games were on a rival network, NBC. Perhaps more confusing is the pairing of Gloria Estefan with winter athletes, including Brian Boitano, Dorothy Hamill, and the 1980 Miracle on Ice hockey team. I don’t know about you, but when I think of winter sports, my next thought is rarely “the Latin-Funk stylings of the Miami Sound Machine.”
In the end, CBS may not have boosted NBC’s Olympic ratings, thanks to the antics of another network: FOX. In the Sean Hannity era, it’s easy to forget that FOX at the turn of the ‘90s was as rebellious as a major TV network could be. Not yet an NFL broadcast partner, the network was the home of The Simpsons and Married… with Children and (relevant in a moment) In Living Color, the first sketch comedy show to feature a predominantly black cast and a decidedly non-mainstream brand of African-American humor.
In a move typical of FOX’s approach at the time, they greenlit a special episode of In Living Color to air at the same time as the halftime show on CBS. To the best of my knowledge, this was the first deliberate counterprogramming of the Super Bowl. FOX went aggressive with the promotion, promising football themed sketches and a $1 million giveaway to be announced during the broadcast. Frio-Lay chipped in $2 million for all national advertising. There would be a countdown clock, so fans wouldn’t miss a second of the football. As those with infinite wisdom do, CBS execs were dismissive of the stunt, which was absolutely a success for FOX. Poor Boitano never saw it coming: 25 million people flipped the channel. Per Wikipedia: Nielsen estimated that CBS lost 10 ratings points and more than a fifth of its total viewership during halftime as a result of the special.
The NFL is not necessarily the most proactive outfit, but the league does learn and adapt well. Burned in ‘92, they rolled out the biggest gun possible in 1993: Michael Jackson. And we know the rest of the story. So yeah, thank the Wayans brothers if you’re into the spectacular halftime shows.
For what it’s worth: Prince was the best halftime show ever. Ever. Lady Gaga was awesome. I’m not sure the Most American of all sporting events should ever feature foreign performers, but McCartney was pretty cool. Maroon 5 easily the worst of the bunch. As I have previously ranted, Dr. Dre and friends the most cringeworthy.
Some good related videos at the bottom of the newsletter.
And now for a bit of recent non-Super Bowl content…
On the massive year women’s sports had in 2023 (Katie Lever, Awful Anouncing)
Here’s a really nice recap–with a ton of data–of a historic year in women’s sports. As Katie Lever demonstrates here, the important numbers (e.g., viewership, dollars) all suggest that female athletes are beginning to get their due.
Key paragraph:
It’s no wonder Deloitte projects women’s elite sports to generate $1.28 billion worldwide in 2024–over 300% higher than their projections in 2020. And this is all happening as 2023 reports indicated that college and professional women’s sports receive a paltry 15% of total coverage across popular sports networks, nearly triple the coverage they’ve historically received according to longitudinal data from 1989-2019.
And that there is the biggest number: 15% of media coverage is a MASSIVE increase. In past years, it’s ranged from about 2% to 5%, with that higher end only coming in Olympic or Women’s World Cup years. Here’s to more growth for women’s sports in 2024!
An Endorsement For and Some Background on The Iron Claw
We caught Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw about a month ago: totally good movie, do recommend! The film tells the (relatively) historically accurate story of the Von Erich family of professional wrestlers, a clan who had great success and suffered much greater tragedy. It’s a heavy, well-made film, perhaps most notable for elevating Zac Efron into Serious Actor territory (he’s beyond good). Some critics bemoaned a lack of character development, but I give it a pass in this regard: there’s too many characters to develop in a sufficient manner. I would have enjoyed some more historical nerdery on the early days of professional wrestling, some context on how the sport worked before the big WWF consolidation in the 1980s, but I can’t really make a case that the film (or the average viewer) needed this element.
I came home wanting a bit more…I’d known a very basic version of the family story before going to the theatre, but I needed to dig deeper. Enter this absolutely wonderful article from Dallas Magazine, by Skip Hollandsworth. It’s from 1988, so there would somehow be more tragedy to come for the family, but it’s some good journalism. Read it before or after the movie, read it apart from the movie, but probably just read it. Worth it.
As promised, Super Bowl Halftime videos
Here’s the 1975 Duke Ellington tribute featuring the Grambling Band with Duke’s son Mercer. Wish the quality was better, but this is cool!
Here’s Gaga, killing it. Same deal, you gotta click.
1992’s fateful Winter Magic. It’s actually a good show, but it feels like late Vaudeville clinging on for dear life as Hollywood comes into its own.
Gloria: “Come on Minnesota!”
And finally, here’s the In Living Color special. I haven’t watched it since it aired (I was 8!), so no idea if or how it has held up.
As always, thanks for reading. I remain optimistic for a return to more regular publishing, but I appreciate you reading when I can get these to your inbox. Please continue to share the newsletter with folks and keep sending me the good stuff you stumble upon.
Until next time,
Tolga
The 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville were actually broadcast on CBS, which makes that 1992 Super Bowl halftime show more logical. I know I watched Super Bowls XXV and XXVI but I have absolutely no memory of watching either halftime show. I was nine in early 1992 and had just started becoming a sports nut in the year or two before that, and the 1992 Olympics were the first games that I was old enough pay attention to. CBS had broadcast the Olympics at several points, but by the late 1980s NBC became the traditional network for the Summer Games and ABC broadcast the 1988 Winter games. CBS got the broadcast rights for the Winter games in 1992, 1994, and 1998, while NBC broadcast every Summer games during that period, and since 1998 NBC has broadcast every Olympic games, both winter and summer. When CBS had the winter games they used a different theme than the familiar John Williams-penned fanfare so prominently used in NBC's coverage. Tamara Kline composed the CBS Olympic theme, and I became familiar with it before I ever had a conscious memory of hearing the far better John Williams Olympic fanfare. It's pretty good, but also sounds like it was created by a CBS Sports music theme generator. You can here it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP2kkwMlpiM