TAMPA, Fla. – We’ll get to the Boss in a second.
First, let’s start with Mike Tomlin, the coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, who the other day may have summed up better than anyone ever has the mystical sway football has over all of us – players, coaches, fans, even the curiosity seekers who watch the Super Bowl and nothing else.
“It’s the way the game makes you feel,” Tomlin said. “Those of us who coach, we got into it because we love the game so much. You want to stay around it even if you’re not good enough to play, or you’re too old to play. That’s the thing. Even when you’re old, being around football makes you feel good. It makes you feel young.”
Football does that for you, and nothing makes you feel better about football than the Super Bowl, our weeklong national tribute to the game capped by the game itself, as close as we get to a secular holy day of obligation.
Rock and roll does that, too, makes you feel better about yourself, puts you in touch with your younger self. Football players, in their prime, feel the exact way rock stars do – like they’re indestructible, like they’re bulletproof, like they will be young and hip and negotiating life’s cutting edge forever.
Then, one day, you wake up and you’re eight months shy of your 60th birthday. You’re still selling out stadiums all over the world, your band has been together so long that Mike Tomlin was all of nine months old when your first album, “Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.,” hit record stores – and yes, they still were called record stores then.
“Think about doing something you love all your life,” Bruce Springsteen said yesterday, in what was believed to be his first press conference in 22 years. “Now, think about doing that with guys you basically grew up with, went to high school with, and what we’ve done together.”
He smiled.
“We’re still together,” he said, “and we’re still alive. That’s not easy to do in this business.”
He was talking about the business of rock and roll, of course, and could just as easily have been talking about the business of football with its own casualties, its own victims of failure and (just as often) success. The dark edge of rock and roll is littered with stories of blown fortunes and boozy accidents, same as the dark edge of football has long claimed a string of concussed heads, replaced knees and cracked vertebrae. And those are sad tales, worthy of our attention.
But the greater truths of football, and of music, are something else entirely. It is the addictive rush of kickoff, the same adrenaline wave that carries you in the moments before the lights go down before a show at the Meadowlands or the Garden or Irving Plaza.
It’s what keeps all of us coming back. You want to know why Brett Favre couldn’t help himself last year, even at age 39, why he came back to get pounded and creamed by kids 15 years younger than him, why he went through another round of whirlpools and ice baths and screaming ankles and yelping knees?
For the same reason Springsteen (even at 59) and the E Street Band can’t help themselves. It’s why they’ve released three CDs in the last seven years, why they’ve been together 37 years, why they keep playing shows for kids in junior high and their parents and – God help us all – their grandparents, why they’re playing the Super Bowl Sunday, maybe the most anticipated halftime act of all time.
And for the same reason we – at 29, at 49, at 79 – lose ourselves, still, in football, and in music, and in all the things that make us feel good. And young.
“We’re still burning,” Springsteen said yesterday. “We’re still here.”
And so, for better or worse, are we.
