Darcy Richie: Appreciating the Super Bowl at last

Many Americans expect to watch the Super Bowl annually. This year, millions of people packed into friends' apartments, drunkenly gathered at college student unions or clicked on the tiny radios in their ears at the opera just to tune into CBS on Sunday. People organize full weeks around this game -- all for three to four hours of a Sunday afternoon.

I lived among a large but stable community of people who never watch the Super Bowl. Don't judge because my people are a proud people; we are often silent and bonded by the fact that we constantly must struggle alone. We look at Super Bowl fanatics shouting about yellow flags and defensive lines as we would look at an exploding fan with a big foam finger at a chess match -- it's all so mixed up.

We arm ourselves with a few general phrases to sound informed when people start babbling on about the game. Like, "defensive linemen have gotten too big and have to carry too much responsibility in the game. ..." Word to the wise: If they mention something like a "zone defense," I would suggest dropping something on the ground and crawling away, or chuckling and saying something like, "yeah, football is great."

Sometimes the confusion and discomfort about Super Bowl Sunday comes from a traumatizing experience around attempting to understand the game. For me, the memory is faint but frightening. I know there were spoons and forks tossed on a table, with words like "lineman yard turnover" flying all around.

A salt shaker slid around the table, then I think the "left right tackle" (the pepper shaker) bumped into the "left back lineman" and killed him (broke the salt shaker), while one of the spoons flipped pepper in my eye. I screamed, "the left right tackle hit my eye!" Booming laughter shot into my ears as I heard my so-called friends, barely able to breathe, shout, "What the hell is a left right tackle?" So the magic of the Super Bowl is lost on people like me.

Furthermore, those annual Super Bowl watchers always try and lure us in with the promise of good friends, pretty lights and flashy colors. I feel like they're judging me as simple. Yes, commercials and the halftime show are cool, but commercials rarely hold my short attention span for three hours unless a sitcom is in between.

But this time, something changed. On Sunday, my boyfriend and I walked into a bar directly off Broad Street to finish watching the game. The "NE" team (which I learned, for those who were not sure, is not Northeastern, but New England) was in the lead, and we settled in for what promised to be a slow, uneventful conclusion. He would occasionally turn to me and shout, "Oh my God!" "What happened?" I returned, as "I couldn't care less" flashed across my forehead.

My question was answered by, "the two-point conversion blah blah blah." "Wow, really?" I responded, with whatever nervous/excited/upset look the play seemed to call for. Hoping for a commercial, I looked around and noticed, for the first time, the people in the room, the happiness on their faces and the positive emotion all around. My thoughts of, "what the hell are they smiling about?" suddenly made me feel bitter and cold. There was no homogeneity among us, as it was solely the love of the game that brought our differences together. Children were bounced on their fathers' knees, and mixed couples held hands in anticipation for the next touchdown. A gay, black couple slapped five as they encouraged the quarterback, and I rose to my feet and cheered Janet Jackson's glorious breast. The unity was erotic.

The teams left the field and I could imagine a slow-motion frame taking over with symphony music filling the screen. My eyes grew wider, and I could see the coach standing above the panting players, shouting like Denzel, "This is what it's all about, gentlemen. It's what we trained for." The anticipation is almost sexy as the crowd awaits the teams' return.

Is this what it's all about? The three hours on Sunday are less about simply waiting for commercials, but may be the only three hours during the year when many of us experience pure integration and share an intense relationship with an ambiguous million. It is possible, seeing football under this light, for people like me to be seduced into the Super Bowl frenzy. Politics must be involved, but there now exists for me this shiny, untouched layer of the Super Bowl. If we can forget the confusing terminology, the 400 random men I can't relate to and foam fingers, we can bond under this pretense.

Darcy Richie is a senior urban studies major from Birmingham, Mich. Strange Fruit appears on Wednesdays.

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