Soccer, Scotland, 1830s.
Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Hog Leg: Nothing says America like shooting guns and watching the Super Bowl. A nice sunny afternoon was the perfect time to try out my newly borrowe...
This is interesting.
The Super Bowl used to be a bigger deal in this house than it now is. Seems like a lot of things once were.
I’m not a football fan at all, and I didn't really start watching the Super Bowl until my wife and I were married. She is a football fan and will watch the season, and always watches the Super Bowl.
When we were first married, there were Super Bowl parties. We didn't have kids at first, and my wife's brothers were young at the time. Later, however, it carried on until the kids were teens. Then something changed, including the giving up of the farm (the farm, not the ranch), longer travel distances, and some residential changes at the ranch. Ultimately, the parties just sort of stopped, although I'm sure my two brothers-in-law, who live in houses at the ranch yard, still observe a party, and my father and mother-in-law, who live a few miles away, likely travel to that.
Much lower key than it used to be. No big gatherings like there once were.
Back in the day, we had a couple of them at our house.
Basically, the dining fare was always simple. Sandwiches bought at one of the local grocery stores, chips and beer. Typical football stuff.
At some parties at the farm, there were bowling pin shooting matches. For those not familiar with them, people shot bowling pins from some distance with pistols. It was fun. Frankly, I don't think a lot of people are all that interested in the Super Bowl to start with, and at least at the Super Bowl parties with bowling pin matches people went out to the match, and it ran into the game, which says something.
The other day also, I wrote on community.
I note this because, at one time, Schuetzen matches were big deals in German American communities. And while they involved rifles, and indeed very specialized rifles, they were also big community events.
And such things aren't unique to just those mentioned. In parts of the country, men participating in "turkey shoots" were pretty common.
Of course, shooting clubs and matches still exist nearly everywhere, and lots of men, and women, participate in matches.
Less common, however, are the rural informal matches.
All sorts of rural activities were once associated with holidays, and events. I guess that the Super Bowl is some sort of large-scale informal civil holiday, even though of course it always occurs on a Sunday. Indeed, the playing of the game on a Sunday is curious. I put a little (very little) time looking into that, and found this CBS Sports comment on it, which it must be first noted explained that football really started being popular in the 1920s.
Sunday was a free day during a decade where it was common to work on Saturdays, so the APFA played most of their games on that day. Fast forward 30 years to the advent of television networks, who were desperately looking for programming on Sundays in the 1950s.
That makes some sense to me, as I still work on Saturdays.
I'd note, however, that is this makes sense, it doesn't quite explain why baseball games occur all throughout the week, and I think there are Monday night professional football games as well, albeit televised ones.
I wonder, however, if it has deeper roots than that. American football is the successor to Rugby, and Rugby and Soccer were hugely popular in the United Kingdom. Prior to major league fun sucker Oliver Cromwell taking over the English government, in the United Kingdom, Sunday had been a day for church and then games.
This went back to Medieval times, before the Reformation. People worked, and worked hard, six days out of seven, but on the seventh, they rested. And resting meant going to Mass, and then having fun, and fun often meant games and beer, as well as other activities. In spite of their best efforts, major Protestant reformers weren't really able to make a dent in village observance of tradition until Cromwell came in and really started ruining things. To Calvinist of the day like Cromwell, Sunday was a day for church and nothing else, although contrary to what some may suspect they were not opposed to alcohol. Cromwell's Puritan government banned sports.
It's no wonder he was posthumously beheaded.
Cromwell and his ilk did a lot of damage to the Christian religion in the Untied Kingdom, and if you really want to track the decline in religious observance in the UK to something, you can lay it somewhat at the bottom of his severed head. Indeed, while hardly noted, what we're seeing going on today, in some ways, is the final stages of the Reformation playing out, and playing out badly.
Anyhow, after Cromwell was gone and the Crown restored, games came back, and they came back on Sunday. Not just proto-football, but all sorts of games. And games became hugely associated with certain religious holidays in the United Kingdom. The day after Christmas, Boxing Day, is one such example, as is New Years, the latter of which is a religious holiday in and of itself.
I suspect, however, that this had a lasting influence. I don't know for sure, but I think football is on Sunday as Sunday was the day of rest, and watching the village football game and having a tankard of ale was all part of that, after church. I also suspect that this is the reason that some American holidays are associated with football, such as Thanksgiving, which had its origin as a religious holiday, and New Years, which as noted also is.
Now, of course, with the corrupting influence of money, it's become nearly a religion to some people in and of itself. People who dare not miss a single football game never step foot in a church.
Also lost, however, is the remaining communal part of that. Watching a game played that's actually local, rather than corporate national, to a large extent. And one free of advertising. Indeed, the Super Bowl has become the number one premiere venue for innovative advertising, some of which isn't bad.
Anyhow, maybe the Super Bowl Party, in some form if properly done, is a step back in time to when the game was more a vehicle than an end in and of itself, and when it wasn't such a show that a big freakish half-time performance was expected.
We can hope so.
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