A mirror of America

A dispatch from the week before the Super Bowl in New Orleans

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The military helicopters thumping overhead took me by surprise. I heard them before I saw them — the low, rhythmic beating that sounds like organized doom or rich people trying to skirt traffic on the way to the Hamptons.

They looked like three Apaches to me, as I stared out of my hotel room window on Tuesday morning in New Orleans. I was getting ready to host a live show for Bleacher Report from Media Row. Media Row used to be called Radio Row; it started in 1991 when a few radio stations needed a place to broadcast from before the Super Bowl, so they set up shop at a Holiday Inn in Tampa.

The event has since grown, as has every other event that this country can squeeze money out of. Media Row is held each year in an endless convention center in the host city. This was the seventh time I’ve covered the Super Bowl in the past decade, and I’ve seen the set-up grow from mostly mic-covered folding tables to massive sets lining the perimeter of the warehouse-like room.

The point of Media Row these days is for brands to trot out either retired NFL players or current stars who aren’t in The Big Game itself. The companies allow members of the press to interview these guys in exchange for letting them plug whatever product they’re repping. I felt like I’d taken acid and entered a football funhouse, where Bounty paper towels had become sentient and were walking around in varsity jackets. The cavernous space, lit garishly with fluorescent lights, made me dizzy, and I promptly got a migraine (I also had a wonderful time hosting the show for B/R, and I got to see many good friends in the business whom I hadn’t seen in years).

Aside from all the normal pomp and circumstance, there was an eeriness to New Orleans this year. The city increased the police and military presence because of the attack here before the National Championship last month, when a man drove a pickup truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street and killed 15 people. Soldiers walked around the city holding machine guns, and checkpoints were set up to inspect people’s bags.

Trump also recently decided that he is going to attend the game. He’s the first sitting president to do so. I often think about how the NFL wouldn’t let him buy a team, so he ran for president three times and won twice. He now shows up and forces the billionaire owners who rejected him to bow down and kiss the ring. Most of them already have, now, for years — the majority donated to his campaigns.

Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images

And now, the NFL is removing the signs that said END RACISM in the end zone. The league put them there after police officers murdered George Floyd in 2020. Trump’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion is a playbook that white supremacists have been using for centuries. As Akilah Hughes writes in her newsletter Spite Stack:

It’s Black History Month, and while the Grammys and Super Bowl halftime show no doubt show the beauty of diversity, it’s not lost on me that we are in a major moment of backlash. That the “end racism” emblem in both end zones will be painted over in anticipation of Trump’s attendance speaks volumes. The NFL can’t even symbolically disagree with racism out of fear of backlash.

We are quickly QUICKLY backsliding into the Jim Crow era. And Americans fighting online today have no actual education on what that time was like. Most seem to think MLK peacefully marched and then died for their sins and racism was dead from that day forward. But they don’t know that Jim Crow was so insidious that it had Hitler taking notes.

Last weekend, Beyoncé finally won Album of the Year at the Grammys for Cowboy Carter. On it, she sings about Louisiana, where her mother’s family is from. New Orleans is a city that was built — and rebuilt — by enslaved people. Its economy blossomed because of the slave trade. It now runs on tourism. I’m willing to bet that most people who come here and stay at the Omni Royal Orleans don’t know that it is located on the exact same piece of land where slave traders auctioned off people.

“People don’t know what we do here,” my Uber driver, Nial, told me. He’s a fourth-generation New Orleanian. “They don’t understand that the things they come here for on a surface level, like Mardi Gras or Jazz Fest, are things that we celebrate for their deep roots and history.”

We chatted as he drove me back from Media Row. During a lull in conversation, I checked the news and saw that Trump and Elon Musk were rapidly dismantling government agencies.

I covered the Super Bowl in February of 2017, after Trump’s first inauguration. He banned Muslims from entering the country on a Friday. Two days later, I arrived in Houston for the week of events preceding the game. The airport was surrounded by protestors who were against Trump’s racist policy, and there was chaos as families tried to figure out the status of their loved ones. Houston is home to many refugees, many of whom were working jobs related to the Super Bowl that year. When I landed, I started reporting a story about it.

Here’s a passage from the piece that still breaks my heart:

While he’s usually the one helping refugees navigate the complex immigration system, now Mohamed has found himself at the mercy of it. His wife, who’s still in Somalia, was supposed to join him in Houston soon. But because of Trump’s executive order, the two have no idea what will happen.

"The problem is, fear comes from the unknown,” Mohamed said. “And maybe if we just had a little bit more education and awareness, we wouldn’t have that much fear. This is the land of the brave, not the land of the fearful. So hopefully things will work out."

Mohamed (I didn’t use his last name to protect his identity) understood the importance of education when it comes to increasing tolerance. It’s not a coincidence that Trump is, as I write this, actively trying to eliminate the Department of Education.

At the NFL Honors awards ceremony on Thursday night, former Patriots head coach and current UNC head coach Bill Belichick smiled for the cameras, his arm around his stunning 24-year-old girlfriend, Jordon Hudson (The Sports Gossip Show has covered this relationship extensively). Belichick is 72. Jordon wore a silver dress with a deep slit that bared her midriff. She said she chose the dress because it resembled the Lombardi Trophy, the ultimate prize that will be handed out on Sunday to the winner of the Super Bowl.

I’ve long believed that sports are a mirror for their current moment. And right now, what I’m seeing is that Media Row revolves around brands, the NFL abandons END RACISM, women are trophies, and most of the people who visit for the game have no idea who actually built this city or this country.

In “Amen”, the last song on Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé sings:

This house was built with blood and bone
And it crumbled, yes, it crumbled
The statues they made were beautiful
But, they were lies of stone, they were lies of stone

Despite our nation’s current ugly reflection, I still pray that Mohammed will one day be right for saying, “This is the land of the brave, not the land of the fearful. So hopefully things will work out."