By John Branston

The Super Bowl is over. Nothing like it, eh? Actually there is, or rather there was.

Leave it to a historian/Librarian (of Congress) to put things in perspective – fifty years ago. Daniel J. Boorstin won The Pulitzer Prize for his trilogy The Americans, featuring these insights on the nation’s obsession with sports.

He gives credit to a Hungarian immigrant, Joseph Pulitzer, who took over the New York World newspaper in 1883 and increased its circulation from 15,000 to 1.5 million by emphasizing crime, sex, disaster, and sports (as well as the deep reporting by ace reporter Nellie Bly on public evils and abuses that put Pulitzer’s name on the famous prize).

“To awaken interest and keep up circulation, Pulitzer planned stunts and crusades and sought out (or invented) public scandals,” Boorstin wrote. (Fake news. Shocking!) “Along with crime and stunts, Pulitzer gave a new prominence to sports.”

Baseball was especially well suited to newspapers because it required little equipment and was easy to play (like Pickleball!). And it generated so many statistics for readers to feast on, like Babe Ruth’s incredible 29 home runs in 1919. (Gamblers took note, and rigged the 1919 World Series by bribing eight players.) So popular was the homer that the leagues redesigned (juiced) the ball, and Babe hit sixty in 1927.

But baseball became “a solemn, statistical science” in the 1960s thanks to newly invented computers and their data bank calculating every conceivable. Football and Super Bowl LXXIIIXL replaced it as “The Game” thanks to television and the forward pass transforming the primitive game of a “pushing match between linemen.” The Tush Push, you might say.

And, get this. In the early decades of the twentieth century, football was so popular that “it was not unheard of for the college football coach to be paid more than the college president” and football “scholarships” were, well, it is too unbelievable to say.

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John Branston covered Memphis as a reporter and columnist for 35 years.

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