Tiger at the Super Bowl Gates

“The Trojan War will not take place.” The noble, sensible Trojan chieftain Hector says this repeatedly throughout Jean Giraudoux’s sublime play Tiger at the Gates. With his wife, Andromache, pregnant, Hector is determined to preserve the peace between his country and Greece after the willful Helen, wife of the Spartan king Menelaus, has taken up with the Trojan Paris. Ultimately, though, Hector’s insistent plea (wishful thinking, really), spoken inside the gates of Troy, goes unheeded in an inexorable and fateful rush to battle.

As the snow fell and the temperature in the New York metropolitan area remained below freezing in late January, the day for the National Football League’s final skirmish approached. As surely everyone from Pershing Square to Persia knows by now, this Sunday will be the first time that the Super Bowl will be staged—and no sporting event is more staged than this game—outdoors (about 30 miles from New Jersey chieftain Chris Christie’s Sparta) in a cold-weather stadium.

And as I thought of the impending spectacle, and of all things bloated and self-important connected to the event, I was reminded of Hector’s futile words. Could they signify a contemporary football parallel? Where was the voice of reason during the original discussion over the site of this year’s Super Bowl? Was there no level-headed Hector in the NFL conference room when the debate took place? No one with the common sense to prevail over the lunatic consensus willing to risk leaving pro football’s championship to be determined by the vagaries of winter weather in the northeast?

Hector’s Greek counterpart Ulysses, dubious over the prospects of peaceful co-existence, is nevertheless persuaded by the steadfastness of Hector. Still, he offers a clear-eyed and damning conclusion about the inevitability of war. “One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophe from a terrace,” he tells Hector. For despite Hector’s brave insistence, because of a lie, the Greeks would eventually launch a thousand ships against Troy.

Could those words from Ulysses also help explain why and where the Super Bowl this weekend would take place? I picture NFL executives and their corporate business and media partners rolling in comfort and stylish charm in the sheltered, climate-controlled terrace of Met Life stadium’s luxury boxes, safely witnessing what could be a weather-affected catastrophe on the field.

And I wonder if the misguided decision to play the Super Bowl in a cold-weather stadium might have been different had the principals involved in the discussion been apprised that they would have to sit, Bowie Kuhn-style (sans overcoat and long underwear), among the non-privileged out in the uncomfortably bitter winter air.