Super Bowl Parties Return This Weekend

The Super Bowl returns to living rooms across the planet this Sunday and I plan to watch it at home, a tradition that I’ve enjoyed establishing the past few years.

For some reason, it took me most of my life to figure out that Super Bowl parties are not the best place to watch the biggest game of the year. Every January I would accept an invitation from a friend or coworker who decided that he or she would host a Super Bowl party. Generally it was someone who didn’t know diddly-squat about professional football, but figured Super Bowl Sunday was as good an excuse as any to throw a mid-winter bash.

The problem with this scenario is that if you are a person (like me) who is truly interested in the game, you will be treated as a pariah at the Super Bowl Party. Someone invariably wants to listen to music instead of the play-by-play of the game. And many of the party’s guests seem to think that the real lure of the event is the cavalcade of new TV commercials.

For some reason Super Bowl parties attract people who have no interest in football in the way that New Year’s Eve parties attract people who can’t hold their champagne.

I like the game more than I like the hoopla. Every Super Bowl has its share of side stories that make the big game a little bigger. This year those stories include two of the older franchises in the NFL making their return to the title game after considerable absences. The Chicago Bears last appeared in the Super Bowl in 1986 (when they beat the New England Patriots 46-10) and the Indianapolis Colts haven’t been to the big show since they were the Baltimore Colts in 1971 (when they beat the Dallas Cowboys 16-13).

There’s also the little matter of one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time (Peyton Manning) facing an adversary who is not even considered one of the best quarterbacks in the NFC North Division (Rex Grossman).

One of the side stories that has been front and center the past ten days or so is that this will be the first Super Bowl to feature an African American head coach. In fact, both head coaches of Super Bowl XLI are African American: Chicago’s Lovie Smith and Indy’s Tony Dungy.

The success of Dungy and Smith is a credit to the National Football League and its implementation of the “Rooney Rule” in 2002. Named after Pittsburgh Steeler’s owner Dan Rooney, the rule simply states that teams have to interview at least one minority candidate for each coaching position that becomes vacant. Once the rule was implemented, team owners and general managers discovered a previously untapped pool of coaching talent.

One of the reasons that pool of talent was so untapped is because the college football coaching fraternity has yet to be as integrated as it should.

In the NCAA Division I-A level of college football, minority head coaches take up only seven out of 119 such positions available. Two were added this past season—Randy Shannon at the University of Miami and Mario Cristobal, a Cuban-American, at Florida International.

It just goes to show that here, on the eve of National Black History Month, America has a long way to go in regard to race relations. You would think that with the emergence of so many prominent multi-ethnic personalities in this country, the old black/white race dialogue would have grown up a little, but it still seems to be with us.

For instance, the greatest golfer on earth, Tiger Woods is an American who has referred to his ethnic background as “Cablinasian” because of his mix of Chinese, Native American, Black and Caucasian ancestry.

CNN reporter and anchor Soledad O’Brien is the offspring of an Irish-Australian dad and an African-Cuban mom. Her parents weren’t even allowed to eat in the same restaurants in Baltimore when they were students at Johns Hopkins University in the 1950s.

“I define myself as multiracial,” said O’Brien. “Definitions are important to other people. They make no difference to my life. I think my parents were sort of like, ‘you’re a black girl. You’re a light-skinned black girl—that’s what you are.’ I don’t know if it was ever a really big issue and maybe in some ways…I kind of missed the debate of, you know, ‘what are you?’.”

Even with that kind of progress, America still continues to get mired down in the black/white issue. I have two suggestions that might help move things in the right direction.

First off, everybody has the right to use the N-word and no one should ever use it. The argument that some people have the right to use that ugly word and others don’t is ridiculous. Rappers fill their CDs with the N-word while misguided politically correct people try to rid public and school libraries of books by Mark Twain, William Faulkner and Rudyard Kipling because of the same word. It’s just gotten out of hand. I mean, I like to cuss as much as the next sailor, but my parents raised me better than to use the N-word in casual conversation. Enough said.

Secondly, people who think the Confederate flag is not offensive to a great number of Americans—black and white—are deluding themselves. I’m sure you love your Southern heritage and I’m sure you believe it when you say that the Civil War was more about states’ rights than it was about the slavery of millions of human beings. But when the rich plantation owners decided they would rather throw their young nation into civil war rather than give up their slaves, they knew exactly what they were doing. Sure, many poor white southerners who didn’t own slaves died bravely as a result, but it doesn’t change the fact that they fought for people who would today be considered corporate terrorists: Men willing to destroy their own country rather than give up the privilege of owning other humans.

That’s what the old stars ‘n’ bars represents to a lot of us. So do us all a favor and take the Confederate flag off of your cars, trucks and leather jackets. At least during Black History Month.