Packers on the Internet

January 20, 2008

Since the home team was playing today for the chance to go to the Super Bowl, I thought I should mention it on the blog. Emily said today that she did not realize I was such a football fan, to which I replied that checking the score online during the game is not likely to make me a real fan in the eyes of most people around here.

We have no television, so even if I had wanted to watch the game I could not have done so. For most things in life the Internet does just fine. In watching election results, for example, it works perfectly. The vote numbers come up and I can keep track of various speculations about exit polls. But football does not seem to have any kind of live Internet presence (outside of live blogs from a news service like the New York Times). It is a sport that is overwhelmingly television oriented.

The argument has been made that football is a uniquely television oriented sport. Football's explosive growth into the biggest American sport and the crowning of the Super Bowl as the most watched game in the country has coincided with the maturation of television as a medium. In fact, when historians take a long view of the development of sports in America it may very well be that the medium of television will take its place as the catalyst for the creation of football as we know it. It also strikes me that the fate of football is unusually hinged on that of television.

Baseball works nicely on the radio. "Line drive to right field" or "ground ball to the shortstop" are generic descriptions that can be easily filled in by the imagination. Line drives and ground balls tend to look pretty similar. Football trades on the unique and spectacular. It is a game that feeds on visual images of "The Catch" and other canonical visual moments. Sure someone might listen to the game on the radio out of necessity, but the true experience is visual in a way that baseball has never been.

The New York Times had an article today on "Ice Bowl II".. looking back to the 1967 game against the Dallas Cowboys.

"Frozen tundra" became part of the sporting lexicon, and images of steam rising from the heads of players were burned into the collective memory.

Then even more interesting the article catches a player thinking about those canonical images:

"This is one of those games that you usually watch on TV when you're at home, and you're like, 'Man, I wish I was at that game,'" Giants defensive end Michael Strahan said. "'I know it's cold, but I wish I were out there.' Now we have the opportunity to be out there."

Note that this is an entirely television created phenomenon. The classic Ice Bowl, along with other Green Bay games, is about a look: visible breath and snow. And then modern players get to imagine themselves in that same classic situation.. and dream of seeing themselves in those classic reels that get replayed in slow motion in pregame shows and fan videos. That is the football version of immortality.