Skipping Super Bowl Sunday In Brooklyn
Because New York is the America I believe in
My favorite time in Brooklyn is that week in between Christmas and New Year. On the 26th, I take the train up from the Jersey Shore (where my family lives) and am greeted on the other side of the two rivers by quiet streets, empty bars, and grey winter overcast. Everyone else is back home in Ohio or Florida or Albania or wherever it is people are from. The tourists tend to stick to Manhattan and they leave the Better Borough to the grateful left behind.
I always have grand plans for all the things I’ll do that week: crank out Kerouacian volumes of prose, see museum exhibitions I shied away from during the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas spike, hit the gym before the resolution crowd hogs the deadlift barbell. But what usually happens is I take long walks and sometimes pop into warm pubs where the thud of my bootheels on the wood, Brooklyn floors herald the purchase of thick, bitter pints and the halfhearted reading of whatever novel I’m trying to knock out before the end of the year.
I love it. There’s no guilt about having to be anywhere, which is a rarity in New York, where normally a weeknight in with no plans seems like a luxury, stolen in between late work sessions and the desperate plan-making of people trying to squeeze the last drop out of each twenty-four hour cycle. It’s the result of living in a city where everyone is trying to justify living here — and, moreover, emptying their checking accounts to live here — by proving that there is in fact just so much to do and that they do it on the regular.
But I resent obligations, particularly cultural ones. Since I was a kid, the justification of “Because it’s what people do” has seemed shaky as grounds to do anything. It’s why I love that Christmas week.
And it’s why I skipped Super Bowl Sunday this year.
I know. Very un-American. Just the sort of Bolshevik nonsense expected of snooty Brooklyners by the folks out in The Red Waste.
However, the truth is that I love sports. As a rickety 33-year old, pickup basketball is still my favorite pastime and I can probably beat you at it. I’ve got lots of time for the NBA and most Saturday afternoons from fall to spring I put some college basketball on the docket. I’m a lifelong Yankees fan. (I grew up in New Jersey, so I don’t want to hear your Evil Empire horseshit.) When I lived abroad, I followed the footsoccer. I get excited for tennis Grand Slams. I’m not anti-sports by any means.
But this past August, as football season was underway, I finally came to a freeing realization: I don’t give a shit about the NFL. It’s a boring league with a boring product and, worse, the whole spectacle is unbearably pompous.
I can get into a long, detailed explanation about why I feel this way — starting with the roughly ten minutes of actual action taking place during a three-hour game, the overblown, ham-fisted banalities and tough-guy truisms that pass for insightful commentary (more so than other sports), the fact that it almost always feels more like a delivery mechanism for empty nationalism and credit rating guilt than it does an actual game, but that’s just the start and it’s ultimately a subjective judgment. I don’t resent anyone for getting into it on Sundays, so long as they don’t look at me like I’m the Antichrist when I say I’m just not that into the NFL. Because what I especially resent is the sense of cultural obligation to watch every Sunday.
Two weeks ago, I saw the conference championship scores on ESPN and it occurred to me that I hadn’t gone out of my way to catch a single NFL game all season. I knew surprisingly little about the storylines and the teams playing. Sure, I caught some plays when visiting family or going to a bar, I checked the scores out of habit to see who’d won, though I rarely remembered long after perusing the boxes — and good luck not hearing about the ongoing feud between Roger Goodell and the Pats. But overall I had gone months without caring and I didn’t miss it.
Still, even people who don’t like sports gather together on Super Bowl Sunday. It’s effectively one of our holidays. Like Thanksgiving, it generates a nationwide sense of comradery. You see your friends and you get some heartburn and you have something to talk about at work on Monday.
But on January 20, I was reminded why I feel skeptical about our obligations to shared nationalist experiences. I watched a man (nominally speaking) being sworn in, a huckster who’d won on little more than the blunt exploitation of fear and ignorance — two regrettably pervasive American qualities in 2017. His voter base had carried him into office by declaring their fellow citizens less than American and many of their fellow homo sapiens less than human — and now this same base had the audacity to preach togetherness, that we should all get on board now because the election was over, because not doing so was just plain divisive.
Fuck that.
As much as the next four years will be about mitigating harm and fighting to salvage democracy and equality, it is also going to be about the simple act of living with yourself. Or, as former Obama social media strategist Laura Olin put it, “Inauguration Day was the start of us doing and trying whatever the fuck we want in order to do it.”
So when emails and texts started popping up last week about Super Bowl parties, I politely declined all of them. Or at least meant to before I forgot to respond to some. (Sorry, Mark and Hillary!) I do what I want.
Much like during Christmas week, I had grand plans for my completely free Super Bowl Sunday. I was going to crank out a few more pages on the novel. I was going to cook a short rib jjigae. I was going to try out the indoor basketball court at the YMCA near my place and see how out of shape I’d become this winter. I was going to finish up some reading on the upcoming gubernatorial election in New Jersey.
I did none of those things. Instead, I did some work on the website, puttered around the apartment, read a book I’m not that into, and, finally, as the sun made its final descent, threw on my overcoat and went for a walk.
I needed to think. The first weeks of the Trump regime had been so much worse than I’d thought they’d be and I needed a reboot on any false sense of purpose I might have gleaned from the New Year. Walks are good for this. The ideas start coming. Not all of them are great, but they show up to the dance and that’s what’s important.
I started up the street. Inside people’s living rooms, 45- and 60-inch flatscreens flashed highlight reels and men in suits presumably arguing about which team wants it more.
I live on the Clinton Hill side of Classon Avenue. It is a strange zone, with several waves of gentrification taking place on the same block. Public assistance housing next to long-time renters and owners next to first- and second-wavers next to people shelling out nearly four grand a month in rent for a conspicuous space in some slapdash new-build — from what I can tell, mostly wealthy couples with their living room lights on and blinds open late into the night. (There is a direct correlation between the cost of rent and how much one leaves one’s blinds open.)
My friends in Williamsburg and Greenpoint wonder why I stay down here, especially since I’m frequently taking the G up to meet them. I don’t have a specific answer except for that maybe here you feel that life is more than being an extra in the background of a 24 year-old’s big cokey night out. That and I love the brownstones from Bed-Stuy to Fort Greene. They aren’t quite so precious as those in Park Slope. They show their age as they hunch over you. If they had faces they wouldn’t smile like the ones in Cobble Hill. They’d stare a little suspiciously and they’d speak somber lines in reserved tones. They remind you in their stark, stony dignity, that you are small and this city is more than you and your aspirations and your security. The city will always be bigger than any person in it. You just don’t get that Puritan’s sense of unworthiness in North Brooklyn or Carroll Gardens.
(Though I freely admit that all of this may be in my head and your subjective experience may differ.)
I weaved my path north and there was hardly anyone out, even though it wasn’t even six o’clock yet. A few scurried past with armfuls of cookie boxes and bags of chips. Some clutched sixers of craft ale in their cold, numbing hands. They were late to the pregame show.
I was eager for them to leave me alone with my borough. At Myrtle Avenue, I turned west. You could hear the echos of traffic blocks away on the BQE. My goal, which I hadn’t realized until then, was to get to Fort Greene Park before nightfall.
Fort Greene Park is a modest greenspace on a hill in the middle of, you guessed it, Fort Greene. It stands not far from the nexus of Brooklyn — and in my opinion New York — the Atlantic Center and the adjacent Barclays Center where the Nets play, as well as, evidenced by the periodic presence of drunk, stumbling bros in blue hockey jerseys, the Islanders.
You can see the park coming before you get there. You’ll see the top of the Prison Ship Martyr’s Monument above the roofs of shops and brownstones around Fort Greene. You’d be forgiven for not realizing it’s a monument at first. A single, 149-foot Doric column, with a brass urn on top, it’s quite ugly and can easily be mistaken for some kind of water tower or broadcasting beacon. But it memorializes the 11,500 prisoners-of-war who died aboard British prison ships during the Revolution, and beneath the monument is a crypt holding what remains still exist of the martyrs.
Standing on the top of the hill by the monument, I watched the sun abandoning the coast. On the dusk side of the park you could see the red lighted hour and minute hands of the clock on the Williamsburgh Savings Bank, a tower that is neither in Williamsburg nor any longer a bank, which Jonathan Ames once declared the most phallic building in the world. To the west, the high rises were going up in Downtown Brooklyn. In the afternoons, contra jour, they reminded me of downtown Dubai or Doha. Cranes reaching out over the street life and orange light piercing the empty upper floors.
The first weeks of the Trump regime had been so much worse than I’d thought they’d be and I needed a reboot on any false sense of purpose I might have gleaned from the New Year.
But it wasn’t time for the orange light anymore. The western sky was deep, dark blue. And, I believed, if I could concentrate hard enough, that I could hear the sound of thousands of TVs playing the FOX football theme.
As America celebrated a version of itself idealized in its supposed national game— boastful, overblown, muscular, gaudy —, I tried to think of what version I would ideally want to celebrate.
Seeing the downtown construction, it was impossible not to think about what this city will look like in ten years, fifty years, in a century if it isn’t underwater. In an America where people want to put up walls and ban immigrants in order to freeze a definition of what the country is, I figured the US could learn this much from New York: the best definition of a place is simply one that defies definition.
The closest definition I have yet found for what New York is has to be Kenneth Goldsmith’s recent book Capital, 913 thin pages of small type: all quotations about the city in the 20th century from history and literature and an array of written and verbal artifacts, all organized thematically. It is, of course, insufficient, but in its interconnected, wild mix of impressionism and particularity, it hints at the truth of the city, that the only definition that matters is the process of becoming, that the overall picture doesn’t matter nearly so much as the myriad constituent parts that come and pass and leave their modest contributions. A place is a process.
New York is obviously not without its flaws. (This, by the way, absolutely comes across in Capital.) Socioeconomic injustices are real here. Wealth inequality is real. Infrastructure is decades behind where it should be. For now, thanks in part to geography, Manhattan is not quite as close to becoming an isolate of ossified wealth as San Francisco, but the list of problems stemming from these underlying malignancies is long.
Which is why I find it funny that people in the heartland complain about the coastal elites in the New York metro area. People here struggle to get by, same as anywhere else. They’re getting squeezed, same as anywhere else. Worse in a lot of cases. (I can go on at length about the inaccuracy of the loaded portrayal of Hilary voters as elites and the racism at the heart of what constitutes the so-called working class in popular rhetoric.)
No, the New York metro area is like anywhere else. Only it’s crowded. And the buildings are taller. And the pizza is better. And there’s the tacit knowledge that New York isn’t anything at all but the people who come here and will continue to come here. The names change and the buildings get demolished and new ones go up — this is inevitable in a city that is never finished —, but New York is a place where people are from somewhere else. Not always, obviously; many people are of course born here, while others make a big deal out of living here for ten years as an arbitrary (and bullshit) marker of real-New Yorker-ness, but there are also more foreign-born residents in New York than there are overall populations in pretty much any other American city. And New York, for the most part, takes pride in that.
Similarly, America is just people in a place. Sometimes this country has secured freedom and opportunity for them, but often not. As an idea, America is as varied as the number of people who call it home. And there are a lot of admirable ideas underpinning the whole project — and there are a lot of moronic and fucked-up ones as well — , but if you tell yourself it’s anything more sacred or ideal than that you’re just lying to yourself.
Even in and around New York, not everyone will agree with that. I have family and friends who will send me pissed-off texts later. But that’s fine. Unlike a lot of places, we’re fine with dissent in New York. The idea of America has always been a negotiation, from the Articles of Confederation to the pseudo-democratic election of 2016.
And standing on top of Fort Greene Park on Super Bowl Sunday, I had a reinvigorated sense of hope and, god help me, something like patriotism. But for me, it has nothing to do with eagles and pigskins and ranch dressing and a hollow sense of exceptionalism.
It is this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this Cosmopolis.
Dane A. Wisher is based in Brooklyn.
