Special Super Bowl/Atomic Bowl Edition

Plus music by Bob Marley and half-time shows by McCartney, Prince and Springsteen (and the Boss's Jeep ad to boot).

Nothing “Super” about yet another Northeast snow storm today but maybe it will put a lid on travel for risky football-and-wings parties. Will Tom Brady be goat or GOAT? And do you care? In any case, check out below the most unlikely football game ever played—on a killing field in Nagasaki, five months after we dropped an atomic bomb over that city. And much more. Press “Comment” to….comment. And maybe Subscribe, it’s free!

Politics/Media

Colin Just: “An interview with Biden will air before tomorrow’s Super Bowl between the Bucs and the Chiefs. Incidentally ‘Buc’ and ‘Chief’ are also what Biden calls his friends when he forgets their names.” Michael Che on Marjorie Taylor Greene: “Anybody who believes those crazy conspiracies has to be as blind as Stevie Wonder is pretending to be.” Full SNL report here.

And, yes, the rumors re: that Springsteen ad shot in Nebraska this week for Jeep prove true but, as I predicted, with a social issue theme, for “The Re-United States of America.” And Variety has a full piece on how it happened. See excerpt below the commercial.

When the ad man for Jeep, Oliver Francois, and longtime Bruce manager Jon Landau exchanged New Year’s pleasantries via text, Francois decided to send the manager the script. “Don’t take it as a push,” he recalls telling Landau. “I know he’s not going to do it.  But who knows?”

Landau liked it. But he downplayed any chance of something taking place. “Curb your enthusiasm,” Francois says he was told, “Calm down. We all know the outcome.” He told Francois he would suggest Springsteen consider the idea, even as he warned: “It’s beyond a long shot.” Turns out it wasn’t.

Springsteen thought the concept would be very spiritual, says Francois. “He looked at this as a prayer,” and that interpretation played a role in whether the musician would contribute one of his actual songs to the piece, an idea Francois says was indeed under consideration. “If this is a prayer, he didn’t want the music to distract from that.” Springsteen opted to contribute a score instead, with Francois requesting the music finish on an upbeat note after the artist’s voice over finished.

“Our goal was to do something surprising, relevant, immediate and artful,” says Landau in a prepared statement. “I believe that’s just what Bruce has done with ‘The Middle.'”

Super Bowl ad for Squarespace, meanwhile, updates Dolly Parton’s classic “9 to 5” but maybe not in the most progressive way.

Super Bowl halftime shows were weak for three decades—just patriotism and marching bands, then those bands plus maybe one “star” (hello, Chubby Checker). But the 1991 DisneyWorld one is often picked as #1 stinker. Even the 1998 salute to Motown with Smokey and remaining Temps was cheesy. Then a cosmic shift, starting with Michael Jackson and we were off to the races: McCartney, Stones, Madonna, Springsteen, Prince, The Who, U2, Timberlake, and on to Beyonce, Aguilera, and etc. Such a monumental production and audience so that now they are not crazy about anyone singing live without a “safety” track.

I’m old enough to remember when video of a Super Bowl party with Downton Abbey gang went viral. But, sadly, we don’t have Dick Nixon to kick (the ball) around any more:

Nick Kristof had me at the headline “The Ugly Secrets Behind the Costco Chickens.” Not that I’ve ever eaten one, mind you. But I endorse this pressure on Joe Biden to “save the bumblebee.”

Jim Hoft, the dim proprietor behind the popular right-wing Gateway Pundit site, was banned from Twitter yesterday (he has spread lies non-stop) where he had 375,000 cult followers. Or as one wag reacted, “375k people wanted to know what the dumbest man on the internet had to say. Weird.”

Mike Birbiglia: “You know what they say: if you want someone to tell the truth, sue them for 3 billion dollars.”

Food for thought, from former NY Times reporter Clyde Haberman (and father of Maggie): “The Covid vaccine is not a guarantee. My wife & I, vaccinated 17 days ago, both tested positive yesterday and are in quarantine. We think the source was a person we had contact with before the shot took full effect. Caution is in order.” And here’s a report today on “Don’t be a lab rat” anti-vaxxers in California.

Music

Sad to consider that Bob Marley would have turned just 76 yesterday. Met him, in a cloud of smoke, upstairs outside dressing room at Max’s in NYC in 1974 when he was part of one of the greatest double bills of all-time: Springsteen and the Wailers. They took turns opening over several nights. Proud to say we did the first ever Marley cover story in USA at Crawdaddy, after Tim White went to Jamaica. One of my favorite live performances, below. (Saw him do it that year at the Beacon in NYC.) So hit me with music. Brutalize me, even.

Books

New piece at The New Yorker on the great novelist Don Delillo’s long involvement (in fiction) with football.

In his second novel, “End Zone” (1972), a blackly comic tale of a West Texas college football team (which Plimpton admitted he admired), DeLillo describes the “exemplary spectator” of the sport as someone who watches not to playact fantasies of warfare but to be immersed in its polyphony of “impressions, colors, statistics, patterns, mysteries, numbers, idioms, symbols.” Football “is the one sport guided by language, by the word signal, the snap number, the color code, the play name.” It’s a seductive game for the verbal detective, not least because sometimes the only things differentiating one team’s playbook from another’s are the names given to the plays.

Also note: His fine early novel White Noise finally coming to screens soon.

Not So Super: The Atomic Bowl, 1946

The famed biologist Jacob Bronowski revealed in 1964 that his classic study Science and Human Values was born at the moment he arrived in Nagasaki in November 1945, three months after the atomic bombing (which killed at least 75,000 civilians) with a British military mission sent to study the effects of the new weapon.  Arriving by jeep after dark, he found a landscape as desolate as the craters of the moon. That moment, he wrote, “is present to me as I write, as vividly as when I lived it.” It was “a universal moment…civilization face to face with its own implications.” The power of science to produce good or evil had troubled other societies. “Nothing happened in 1945,” he observed, “except that we changed the scale of our indifference to man….“

One of the most bizarre episodes in the entire occupation of Japan took place less than two months later, on January 1, 1946, in Nagasaki.  (For more on this critical period, and my own experiences in Nagasaki, see my book Atomic Cover-up or my upcoming film of the same name.) Back in the States, the Rose Bowl and other major college football bowl games, with the Great War over, were played as usual on New Year’s Day. To mark the day in Japan, and raise morale (at least for the Americans), two Marine divisions faced off in the so-called Atom Bowl, played on a killing field in Nagasaki that had been cleared of debris.

It had been “carved out of dust and rubble,” as one wire service report put it--without mentioning that it was the former site of a high school where hundreds of students perished on August 9--and was soon dubbed "Atomic Athletic Field No. 2."

Both teams had enlisted former college or pro stars serving in Japan for their squads. The “Bears” were led by quarterback Angelo Bertelli of Notre Dame, who won the Heisman Trophy in 1943, while the “Tigers” featured Bullet Bill Osmanski of the Chicago Bears, who topped pro football in rushing in 1939 (and then became a Navy dentist). Marines fashioned goal posts and bleachers out of scrap wood that had been blasted by the A-bomb. Nature helped provide more of a feel of America back home, as the day turned unusually chilly for Nagasaki and snow swirled.

A band played the fight song, “On Wisconsin!” The rules were changed from tackle to two-hand touch because of all the irradiated glass shards from the atomic blast remaining on the turf.  A referee watched for infractions.  Each quarter lasted ten minutes. 

Press reports the next day claimed Japanese locals observed the game—from the shells of blasted-out buildings nearby.  The two stars, Bertelli and Osmanski, had agreed to end the game in a tie so that both sides would be happy but Osmanski, after leading a second-half comeback, could not resist kicking the extra point that gave his team the win, 14-13. A commemorative booklet produced for the game included this line:  "In the rubble of the atomic bomb, we made a gridiron.”

When the servicemen returned to the US, many of them suffered from strange rashes and sores. Years later some were afflicted with disease (such as thyroid problems and leukemia) or cancer (such as multiple myeloma or forms of lymphoma) associated with radiation exposure.

Song Picks of the Day

McCartney’s full halftime set, minus his “Hey, Jude” close. And then Bruce’s (bet you can’t remember or predict more than two of the four songs he played) ….Finally, of course, Prince, purple in the rain.

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and now has written and directed his first feature, Atomic Cover-up, which will have its American premiere at a festival this spring.