Foolish Cat January 31st, 2008

As if there wasn’t enough hype for this Sunday’s Super Bowl, MSNBC has decided to exploit an article in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine about the dramatic increases of heart attacks in Munich during German World Cup matches.

In the typical twenty-first century style of scaring people into paying attention to things that have nothing to do with them, MSNBC headlined their Health section with the following headline: “Super Bowl excitement may hike heart attacks”.

Huh?

Okay, so the study doesn’t have anything to do with the Super Bowl, but there must be some other connection that I’ll discover if I read on, right?

Uh, no.

Literally, there is not one thing in this article that links heart attacks and the Super Bowl. Not one thing. The best MSNBC could do was to get a blunderfully vague quote from the author of the study, Dr. Gerhard Steinbeck of Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. Dr. Steinbeck says, “I know a little bit about the Super Bowl. It’s reasonable to think something quite similar might happen.”

Well I, for one, am convinced!

Seriously, that statement is hilarious! Can’t you hear the telephone interview:

MSNBC: So doctor, do you think that what happened in Germany during the World Cup could happen in America during the Super Bowl?

Dr. Steinbeck: What’s the Super Bowl?

MSNBC: It’s America’s big football game.

Dr. Steinbeck: So it’s like the World Cup, a big futbol game.

MSNBC: Uhhh, sure. So now that you know a little about the Super Bowl, could something like that happen?

Dr. Steinbeck: Yes, now that I know a little bit about the Super Bowl, it’s reasonable to think something similar might happen.

(I hope you all imagined the good doctor with a German accent - it’s crucial for the effect).

All due respect, but Dr. Gerhard Steinbeck probably knows as much about the Super Bowl as I do about heart surgery. Football is a uniquely American game, which is why it has never caught on in any other country (ok, fine, Canada); even if Europeans say they get it - they don’t.

And the Super Bowl, itself, could not be more different than the World Cup.

In 1930, Uruguay hosted and won the first World Cup, beating Brazil in the finals. Many Brazilians committed suicide because they were so devastated by the loss. Suicide! English hooligans wander the globe looting and pillaging towns during every World Cup. A lot of people around the world invest their lives in soccer; and the World Cup, if their country qualifies, is the apex of that passion.

For whatever reason, American football simply does not evoke the same emotion. Yeah, people paint their faces green and take their shirts off in below freezing temperatures, and fights even break out in the stands from time to time.

But generally speaking, people don’t die!

Dozens of people don’t get trampled to death, people don’t jump off the top of the stadium when their team loses, and people don’t travel from Cincinnati to Seattle to plunder the Northwest like ninth century vikings.

And as for the Super Bowl, it’s a national phenomenon only from a social and television standpoint; the only large groups of people that really care who wins are from the cities whose teams are involved in the game. And even in those places their is often division, as there is this year with New England, which is not anyone’s city, and New York, which also has the Jets. A large group of watchers, though most won’t admit it, watch the game for the commercials. What could be more American than that?

It’s a good try MSNBC, we all appreciate the tabloidal effort on your part to scare us away from the most uniting four hours of the year in this country; but nothing, not even the great Dr. Steinbeck, can’t make America watch NBC on Sunday.

Blunder on, fools!

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