This Was the Super Bowl for Haters

WOP WOP WOP WOP - Stop! Stop! He's already dead

He didn’t say “pedophile.” They wouldn’t let him do that on the biggest stage. But we all know where the word was supposed to be, and plenty of the people in the room said it for him.

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Much has been written on the Philadelphia Sports Fan, both by supporters and detractors. They’re referenced almost like animals in a nature documentary. They have their natural states, their inherent traits that can’t be domesticated. They are wild, they are territorial, they are uncouth and fun as hell.

One of the running themes of the Philadelphia Sports Fan – be it baseball, hockey, basketball or football (or the All of the Above “Four for Four Fan” neglecting the MLS) – is this concept of “deserving” something. The teams and outcomes that Philadelphia deserves and thinks it deserves. It changes season to season. Is the Philadelphia Sports Fan a fatalistic self-hater who is only happy in its perceived natural state of despair? Does the Philadelphia Sports Fan feel they deserve a perennial also-ran, a tragicomic loser who talks a big game and gets his pants pulled down on the national stage? Does it feel like it deserves an easy, undisputed champion?

It’s hard to say.

Ray Ratto over at Defector put it nicely in his post-game wrap-up, describing Philadelphia as “a town that hates its own with crystalline brilliance.” Also on that same site, Dan McQuade wrote a whole piece about how Philadelphia as a whole is happiest – or at least most comfortable – on the brink of agony. That narrative fits nicely with the fact that the city has immortalized Rocky, a guy who famously got the shit kicked out of him after hyping you up for two hours on the prospect of him doing the impossible. He isn’t even the winner in his own movie, and his city has deified that feat, rather than him. The idea of Rocky is falling short — the outcome the Philadelphia Sports Fan thinks it deserves, and thus the reputation the city believes it deserves is the overlooked and underappreciated.

So to get a win, a decisive win, with very little scrappy underdog energy on display in favor of absolute dominance and, dare I say, competence, is foreign to the Philadelphia Sports Fan.

Because the Philadelphia Sports Fan is, at its core, a hater, as Ratto said. It hates itself, it hates others. It hates to lose and it hates whoever it just beat. That is the long and short of it.

There are few opportunities for unbridled hate like a blowout win, a “dance on the grave of the losers” opportunity for the biggest winners on the planet.

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Kendrick Lamar said it himself that he’s the biggest hater. He said it in the diss track aimed at Drake before he even unleashed the war crime-level diss track “Not Like Us,” which was so merciless in its execution and so bouncy in its production that it ended up as a No. 1 hit song calling Drake and his close associates pedophiles.

Just terrific. The kind of thing you’d hate to watch as someone without a clear conscience as a supporter of the Chiefs, Drake, Taylor Swift or the government.

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We knew due to the “family friendly” mandate over the halftime show that Kendrick wasn’t going to be allowed to say the word “pedophile” into the mic. But he didn’t have to. We knew the song. We knew what was coming. And after baiting us and teasing us with the song while he ran through some other hits from his catalog because we all knew what was going to be the grand finale, he still found a way to surprise us. Lock-step with the smooth camera pan, gliding across stage in bellbottom pants staring right into the lens, eyes of everyone in America and hopefully one guy in Canada, he addressed the audience, the target, by name.

There had even been minimal screen time for the alleged Philadelphia Fan singer dating the tight end — one of the prime hater targets with subreddits devoted to picking apart every minute detail or perceived detail of her (and sometimes the tight end’s) life and public appearances, and to project all sorts of accusations and assumptions based on outfit choices, posture, facial expression, not wholly unlike the “cult” of fans they regularly call out on thinking every movement of Taylor Swift’s eyebrows is actually an illuminati signal for something greater to come. Deeply weird people on both sides, fun to hate them both.

By the point Kendrick was grinning into the camera during his victory lap in New Orleans, the Eagles had unexpectedly run the score up against the best team in football, giving Eagles fans a rare opportunity to relax their shoulders a little and fully embrace a song whose energy is pure unmitigated hating and, larger than that, winning. Winning because you were better, more prepared, more talented, cooler, smarter, surrounded by better people.

It was so much fun. It’s fun to see the good guys win as much as it is fun to watch the bad guys lose.

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I don’t care for the “Philly vs. Everybody” T-shirts. It’s cliche and I just find it annoying. But it did feel a bit like the Eagles, and The Philadelphia Sports Fan and Philadelphia the city, were some sort of opposition party. Against quarterbacks, tight ends, pop stars and presidents alike. It felt good to have absolutely no chill in victory. History has proven that decorum is loser shit and doesn’t actually do anything. Hating on your enemies and turning them into losers is awesome.

Philadelphia, and the Philadelphia Sports Fan, was tailor made for this moment because it thinks it deserves this moment.

And now, much like it had claimed Meek Mill’s “Dreams and Nightmares” during the last run, the Philadelphia Sports Fan will no doubt claim “Not Like Us,” because it thinks it deserves that, too.

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Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Squid.