In the United States, sports figures hold a degree of celebrity that approaches movie stars. In some cases, it eclipses it almost completely. There was a time when Michael Jordan was the most recognizable man in the country. And in the world of American sports, football has become the most popular of them all.
There are those who say that car racing is bigger, but what you see just doesn't seem to back it up. If you compare football on all levels with any other sport anywhere in the country there is just no way that more people spend anywhere near as much time watching and cheering and buying licensed goop from anything else. If NASCAR was so big, then why do you still see 10 times as many window stickers, antenna windsocks, t-shirts, coats, hats and everything else you can imagine with NFL logos on them. There are a few race car numbers around, but not as many as you would think if it really is the biggest spectator sport.
When you combine high school, peewee, college and pro football in all league, you end up with millions of people watching football 4 or five days every week for half of the weeks out of the year. If racing or basketball were more popular wouldn't the NBA finals or the Indy 500 be the most watched television events of the year? They aren't, not by a long shot. No TV program on the face of the planet even comes close to matching the Super Bowl.
Part of the reason football is so huge has to do with the way the game is played. Of all the major sports it is the most violent. It's more like gladiatorial combat than anything else out there. You might call upon boxing or cage matches or even wrestling (gag me), but people don't really want to see folks try to actually kill each other. In football you aren't really trying to harm your opponent, just knock them down as hard as you can. The difference is subtle, but remains nevertheless.
Football is harsh but relatively safe. Most of the injuries are not caused directly by the seemingly bone-crushing contact, but rather from freakish incidentals. A guy running full speed catches a toe in the turf and tears a rare ligature in the leg. Another fellow pulls a muscle. About the only injury directly associated with the brute force in the game is the odd head injury. And it normally happens when the helmet comes into accidental contact with a knee or something bizarre.
Football is also a game of rules and coordination. Even to the untrained eye, the complexity of a single play is one of the things people love. An elite basketball player can absolutely dominate a game - thereby rendering the whole thing as boring as watching paint dry. One dude waxing the floor with all the other dudes, yawn. But even the most dominating player in the game can only do so much by himself against 11 other highly muscled and determined guys.
Those are just a few of the reasons that football has become a sort of religion in certain parts of the country, and only slightly less than that in all the other bits. You might not be one of the followers, but you probably still watch the Super Bowl - even if just for the commercials.
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