I’m either a poop or a foop. Depends on your accent. But I’m not planning on watching SuperBowl 50. I’ll be thinking about Kenny Stabler and Roman Gabriel instead.
For all you far-flung Filipinos envious of your California cousins who are close to the epicenter of capitalistic megasport supremacy, relax.
It’s only super if you buy into the whole barbaric corporate nature of the event. And if you do, then you’re lost in a sea of merch, hats, T-shirts and the obligations of the consumerist hype.
But bait the hook all you want. I am steadfast in fighting the allure.
The weeklong amusement park spectacle of Super Bowl City is in San Francisco itself, but the game will be played about an hour away in another stadium.
Days before the game, the whole process is just a disruptive annoyance that has inconvenienced the lives of normal folks, from residents, to commuters, to the homeless people who don’t have room in their shopping cart for a big screen TV.
Sorry, Super Bowl50. I’m just not into you.
It’s not even my two teams.
But it’s in my home town, where my love of football was instilled.
I recall buying cartons of Christopher Milk (later Berkeley Farms), dumping it out for the free admission coupon to the Forty-Niners first home, Golden Gate Park’s Kezar Stadium.
We’d cheer for quarterback John Brodie, the real No.12 of the day. One of my buddies got his chin strap one game.
We’d even cheer for the first Filipino quarterback ever, the son of a Filipino immigrant Roman Gabriel, who was 6-foot-5-inches and quarterbacked the team Niner fans all hated—the Los Angeles Rams, where he was MVP in the whole league in 1969.
And he was an American Filipino, just like me and my buddies. Only taller.
He kept us interested in the game.
On the very first Super Bowl in 1967, I think I ended up in my buddy Frankie Veracruz’s house on 18th St. by Dolores Park. No one had Super Bowl parties back then. No one had TVs as big as their house.
We just watched and rooted for Bart Starr and the Packers as they beat the Kansas City Chiefs, 35-10.
They had a guy named Jim Taylor as running back. And other guy named Elijah Pitts. I always liked that name.
I had to Google all that, such is my memory these days.
You see, I actually played football.
I didn’t play in the NFL, but I did actually play hard-hitting, full-contact football. Let the Kennedy’s play Touch. I played tackle.
Starting from a young age from Pop Warner to high school.
It was organized, but still very primitive. And even with a helmet, it didn’t matter. Your brain gets rocked. Either from direct hits to the head, or from falling and having your head naturally snap back with a slam to the ground, the brain gets rocked.
I know, my detractors will say, “So that’s why you write the @>X*** you write.”
Only in part. I write what I do from the heart.
But every now and then, my head hurts. And then I read stories that make me cry.
The New York Times just reported that one of my boyhood heroes, Ken Stabler, the Oakland Raider quarterback who died at age 69 last July of severe C.T.E.
That stands for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head.
Of course, it wasn’t mentioned in July. That’s when they said it was colon cancer.
But Stabler had seen what was happening to veteran players struggling with physical and mental disabilities. Before he ultimately passed, he consented to have his brain matter tested by scientists at Boston University to be dissected. It weighed just under three pounds, according to the New York Times report.
After months of dissection and testing, the results confirmed the worst.
Stabler had Stage 3 C.T.E., a step below the highest stage.
“He had moderately severe disease,” said Dr. Ann McKee, chief of neuropathology at the V.A. Boston Healthcare System, and a professor of neurology and pathology at Boston University School of Medicine, and the person conducting the examination, according to the New York Times story. “Pretty classic. It may be surprising since he was a quarterback, but certainly the lesions were widespread, and they were quite severe, affecting many regions of the brain.”
That’s what football does.
Now Stabler’s name is on a list of more than 100 players, some of whom are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, like Junior Seau, Mike Webster, Frank Gifford.
As I moved on from Super Bowl 1, and the Niners floundered, I moved on to rooting for the Oakland Raiders and their QB stars. First Daryl Lamonica, then the ageless George Blanda. But of course, the star of them all was Stabler.
“The Snake.”
Stabler was won the league MVP in 1974, and won the Super Bowl in 1976. He had his flaws off the field, sure. But Stabler was the guy who could take a team from far back and drag them across the finish line.
He was a winner.
And now, as we come on to Super Bowl 50, Stabler’s diagnosis shows it all came at a price.
This weekend, the game can come and go. If I watch it, it will be by accident. But I’m not Super Bowl partying. And I’m not reveling in the Super City B.S. being staged in San Francisco for a game being played an hour from the city.
But I am rooting for my hero Ken Stabler’s election to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, where he’s on the ballot. He better get in.
The game has become so much a corporate spectacle and so establishment, that stories like Stabler’s remind us of that missing human element in the game. It’s an element that has purposefully been lost as the game has pursued it’s goal of achieving it’s status as the crass, heartless, business mega-enterprise it has become.
The NFL has taken a simple game and made it a phenomenon, which of course, must be protected at all costs.
That’s why it’s heartbreaking to know Stabler’s circumstances.
He’s part of a class action suit brought by the players against the NFL seeking damages from concussions. The suit was settled last year and is under appeal.
Will Stabler’s family see any compensation?
No, because his C.T.E. was diagnosed after the April 2015 cutoff date.
Someone needs to throw a red flag at Big Football. Now.
Emil Guillermo is a veteran journalist and commentator, who won an American Book Award for “Amok: Perspectives from an Asian American Perspective.” Contact: www.amok.com
Like us on Facebook