Super Bowl may be worth staying up for

TIPPING POINT: Unlike so much around us now, sport can still come up trumps; even overhyped sport of the American variety

THE 46th Super Bowl takes place next Sunday. No, I hadn’t realised either. It’s not like we hear or see much about American football, and funnily enough, now that we all have information at our fingertips, we hear and see even less. In fact, given that the New England Patriots are about to play the New York Giants, there would have been more chance of coverage in those antiquated, pre-digital media days of yore than there is now.

You see, the Patriots’ quarterback is a gentleman called Tom Brady. No, I don’t know him either. But everyone knows his wife. She is Gisele, the Brazilian supermodel who is in possession of a body that makes middle-aged men all over the globe burst into spontaneous rounds of applause.

Fadó, fadó, in the days when Irish audiences briefly experimented with the idea of getting interested in American football, Mrs Brady would have been manna from heaven in newspaper terms. Those were the days when newspapers were still put together manually, when Irish Presssub-editors would delve into cupboards, pull out actual hard-copy photographs and inform a reporter: "We have a picture of x. Get a story on him".

Now in that sort of “resourceful” environment, can you imagine the mileage that could be got out of a picture of Gisele? Sure, the link to gridiron would have been tenuous but that never stopped us. And it wouldn’t have been like one famous occasion when a story about the rather austere English horse trainer Tom Jones was topped off by a picture of his hairy, medallion-clad Welsh namesake. There would at least have been some connection. But now, with pictures of Mr and Mrs Brady’s postman’s cat taking a squirt readily available to everyone with a touchpad, there’s going to be hardly any mention of this weekend’s big event in Indianapolis.

We’re not alone in that however. The belief that the Super Bowl is watched by a billion people worldwide still exists out there, but the reality is more prosaic. What the NFL say is that the game will be available to a billion people globally. It’s just that most of us can’t be bothered. One estimate is that up to 93 million in total will watch the game. Only a fraction is expected to be from outside North America.

Ordinarily that would be a cue to indulge in some Yankee bashing, point out the arrogance of that uniquely American predilection for describing the winners of their indigenous sports as world champions when the rest of the world barely bothers to participate in them.

Football of the American variety is wide open to such sniping. Behemoth players whose sole requirement is to collide forcefully into their opposite number clearly haven’t got to their present size and circumference from mother’s apple pie alone.

Pimple pills are obviously being flung around the locker room like tic-tacs: not like our rugby behemoths, obviously, whose bulk is solely due to a devotion to the gym and an expensive private education.

Then there’s the mind-numbing tedium of a game that continues for hours, even excluding ad breaks, and which seems to fundamentally exist for the purpose of allowing American couch potatoes to continue their metamorphosis into farm animals by eating their meals out of ever-expanding buckets.

And then there’s the moronic exchange of trite clichés that passes for commentary, a never-ceasing torrent of irrelevance in which information is mistaken for enlightenment.

But why then does it look so good? It’s those negatives to a non-American sporting eye that can make the game so alluring cinematically. All that stop-start stuff is perfect for a camera. That’s why Denis Quaid looks right as a veteran quarterback in Oliver Stone’s bombastically brilliant Any Given Sunday.

The action looks realistic because the nature of the game is so defined, and everything is so fitfully crash-bang-wallop. American football fits into a camera. Soccer doesn’t. Neither does rugby or most other fast-action field games. Their elasticity is what’s so hard to film. American football gets Quaid and George Clooney. Real football got Escape To Victory, a movie so memorably dire it makes one wonder if John Huston was drunk for the entire duration and one in which the only cinematic elasticity employed was the one holding in Michael Caine’s gut.

So with the can-do spirit of a sporting frontiersman, this corner is gearing up to give American football another go. It starts on BBC1 just before 11pm on Sunday night and goes on until four in the morning. That’s a big ask, sitting on your backside until the darkest hour before the light, staring at something strange and incomprehensible. But it’s gotta beat watching The Late Late Show.

The trick is to eliminate all the statistical nonsense from your mind. That’s not going to be easy. American football relies on statistics the way a drunk relies on a lamppost.

Everything is measured. Measurement of talent comes in yards: how many yards the ball covers when the quarterback throws it; how many yards one man-mountain pushes another one back: how many times some knee-pumping wide receiver avoids getting mangled to a pulp by a predatory linebacker. The pitch itself is a monument to geekdom, covered as it is in trigonometrical detail. Cricket has the same wheezy devotion to figures but at least manages to keep the field uncluttered.

It’s all bogus anyway. Never forget that 97 per cent of statistics are made up on the spot. And more importantly stats can never substitute for judgment. That’s a fact in any sport, even gridiron. If you doubt that go back four years to the 2008 Super Bowl, the impact of which will continue to reverberate throughout this week’s build-up.

The Patriots were on a roll of Super Bowl appearances, the established kings of the game, Brady the Beckham of his era. But the Giants stubbornly stuck with them and in the dying minutes, their own quarterback Eli Manning exhibited a sporting temperament that even the most ignorant among us can appreciate.

First of all he wriggled out of the clutches of half a dozen Patriots aiming to dislocate his spine and shot a pass to David Tyree whose one-handed overhead catch shames most anything you’ll see in Croke Park. A couple of plays later, and with the clock ticking down, Manning shot a match-winning pass in the corner to Plaxico Burress.

The names are exotic and the surroundings different but check it out on YouTube and try to scoff at the athleticism, nerve and sheer drama of it all.

Manning is back again. So is Brady. Maybe Gisele will be there too. Hopefully she is. The half-time entertainment is going to be Madonna. And maybe amidst the corporate, pom-pom shaking sheen we could be treated to the same sort of core humanity which lit up the game four years ago. The wait could be fruitless as well as interminable. But unlike so much around us now, sport can still come up trumps; even sport of the American variety.