The Super What?

Let me make the disclaimer up front; this is a blog about nothing.

This is a story about how I almost watched the Super Bowl in Istanbul early Monday morning.  About how I almost had a dozen amusing anecdotes about a stranger in a strange land, watching a strange game at a strange time with strange people doing strange things.   It was to be a story about love, deception, greed, lust, unbridled enthusiasm, and possibly the high stakes game of world diplomacy and international intrigue.

This would be a story with something for everyone, dripping with irony and dried off with a fluffy towel of brilliant cross-cultural insight.  A puckish satire of contemporary mores, aimed more at the heart than at the head.

To quote the great American philosopher and 1960s fictional television character Maxwell Smart ...

Look, I'll be honest.  Normally I am a pretty big sports fan.  But this year I didn't really care who would win the Super Bowl.  I wasn't really that interested in watching the game.  I had been completely out of touch with any American sports since October. For the first time in my life I had to double check to figure out which teams were actually playing. 

But as you know, the Super Bowl is not really a football game any more.  For better and for worse, it has become America's biggest cultural touchstone.  If the numbers are to be believed, more than one-third of everyone in the country watches it.  People in America who don't watch the Super Bowl have to really, really work at it,  either by running out into the middle of a dark forest somewhere, or by desperately surfing the cable channels to locate The Puppy Bowl on Animal Planet or a Who's the Boss? marathon. 

Think about the diabolical brilliance of this.  You start with football, roping in about 90 percent of American men (and a large percentage of women) without even trying.  Roll in the hype of newly released commercials, and that pulls in another big chunk of people who otherwise care nothing about sports.  By the time you throw in Madonna for a halftime show, you now have almost every TV in the country dialed in -- including those in every gay bar in America.  Now that's marketing genius.

So even though I was 5,000 miles and numerous time zones away from the nearest football not actually shaped like a soccer ball,  I decided it was my duty as an American to watch the Super Bowl in Turkey.   Missing Christmas and Thanksgiving is one thing.  Miss Christmas, Thanksgiving and the Super Bowl and I suspect they might not let me back in the country.

Watching the Super Bowl in Istanbul, however, is not as easy as it might sound.

Let's start with the time difference.  For reasons understood only by television programmers who figured out how to get Madonna into a cheerleader costume, the Super Bowl would start Sunday evening at 6:15 p.m. EST -- just in time for everyone from Boston to Miami to eat green onion and sour cream potato-chip dip for dinner.   With a seven-hour time difference,  that meant that the game would be starting in Istanbul at 1:15, and ending about 5:00.  That's 5:00 a.m., as in 5:00 Monday morning.   

I can't remember the last time I pulled an all-nighter to watch a sporting event.  But as long as I don't have a test on it the next day, I figure I'll be fine.

The next challenge would be where to watch the Super Bowl.  The television in my little basement apartment would be useless for this purpose.  There are literally hundreds of channels on my bizarre cable system, from dozens of different countries in dozens of different languages. Music videos from Balochistan.  News programs from Bulgaria.  Prayer readings from Tehran and porn channels from Italy.  But after months of surfing through all the flotsam and jetsam of Turkish cable programming, I have been able to locate exactly one English-language channel.  It is BBC News.

Oddly enough, BBC News would not be providing live coverage of the Super Bowl this year.  Apparently it had been preempted by the European debt crisis.

Still, there are just as many bars with television sets in Istanbul as there are channels on the cable system.  And Istanbul, more than any place I've ever been to (including New York), is open pretty much 24 hours a day.  Plus, I know there are Americans living here; I've heard them in the Starbucks, impatiently demanding low-fat half-caf Frappuccinos.  Surely there would be a bar with a television, somewhere in a city of 15 million people, open at 1 a.m. on a Monday morning, showing an American football game to accommodate these people.  Right?

The most promising possible venue I can think of is a bar I'd walked by a few times called The North Shield.  The bar obviously has an English-language name, a big-screen TV over the bar, a large selection of Scotch whiskey, and lots of walnut wood paneling.  True, there is nothing here that necessarily screams "American Sports Bar."  But encouragingly, a placard in the entryway announces that The North Shield proudly serves Brooklyn Lager beer.  I can't think of anything much more American than that.

On a reconnaissance mission to The North Shield a few nights before the game, I find there is indeed a television above the bar. On this particular night, however, the programming they are offering is a snooker match, which I can't take as a particularly good sign.  I ask the bartender in Turkish if they will be showing the Super Bowl at the bar on Sunday night.   He seems confused by the question.

"The what?" he asks in Turkish.

"The Super Bowl."

"Su-per Bowl," he repeats slowly in English, as if it might make more sense if he sounds it out it phonetically. 

"Amerikalı futbolu şampiyonluk maçı," I manage to get out.

"When?" he asks again in Turkish.
"Sunday," I tell him.  "Well, early Monday morning."

He looks at me as if I'm delirious, and/or possibly confused as to how to say times of the day in Turkish. ("Monday morning?")  To my surprise, he nods his head and says, "Yes, maybe," before going back to washing glasses behind the bar. 

Still, this is not really the answer I'm looking for. Are you showing the game or aren't you?  If I'm walking out into the cold at 1:00 in the morning,  I'm going to need a little more certainty than that.  "Yes, we're stocked with Bud Light and the chicken wings have been ordered."  That kind of certainty.  So far I'm not really buying it.

Dubious about The North Shield, I decide to put a call out on one of the Istanbul ex-pat website forums, asking if anyone knows of a bar in Beyoğlu that will be showing the Super Bowl.   There is no response for a day or so.  Then finally, a fellow American identified as Jeffrey ("Istanbul/Self Employed") posts the answer I've been waiting for.

"James Joyce on Balo Sk.," Jeffrey's post reads,  "(alhtough [sic] dank n dark and beer not cold)."

Jeffrey, this is perfect.  I am going to go to an Irish bar called the James Joyce Pub, located in the heart of Turkish Istanbul, at 1:00 in the morning to watch the world's greatest display of American excess?  The potential cultural train wreck is just too wonderful to contemplate.  (Dank n dark and beer not cold? Who cares! Come on, Jeffrey.  It's an Irish bar.)



Who will be there, I wonder?  Will there be Turkish contingents of face-painted Giants and Patriot fans, taunting each other across the bar?   Will I be sitting next to an Irish ex-pat who wandered in for a shot of Jameson, only to be thrust into this early morning orgy of American sports culture?  Will I find someone to explain Ulysses or Turkish grammar to me, in exchange for a demonstration of an illegal horse collar tackle?

I drool at the possibilities.  This blog entry, I am absolutely certain, is simply going to write itself.

The streets are as empty as you might imagine they would be when I walk out my door at 1 a.m. Monday morning.  It's cold as hell, and remarkably quiet, as the throbbing non-stop techno-beat of the disco on the hill above my street probably won't be cranked up for another hour or so.  It's so late that even the neighborhood cats are asleep, or perhaps simply frozen into silence.

It's about a 15-minute walk from my apartment to the James Joyce Pub, located just off Istanbul's main pedestrian street, Istiklal Ceddesi.  This should get me there just in time for the 1:15 a.m. kickoff.  I start to think it might have been a mistake not to go earlier, to make sure I could get a place at the bar with a good view of the television.  But I rationalize that it will be better to mix among the crowd, observing the cultural irony from as many angles as possible.

Look! Is that an Irishman with a copy of The Dubliners drinking rakı through a tube out of a New York Giants beer helmet?  Wait; I think that table singing all six verses of Molly Malone is dipping Doritos into the patlican salata!  Who do I talk to first?

When I arrive at the James Joyce, through the window I can see the big-screen TV on the back wall of the bar.  The game is indeed on and about to start, as I recognize the pre-game commentators.  The screen is so large you can almost see Chris Collinsworth's nose hair from 5,000 miles away.

But as I walk into the bar, I have the sense that something is not ... quite ... right.  What is it, exactly?  I'm trying to put my finger on it ... something odd ... OK, yes, I see the problem now.

The Super Bowl broadcast at this moment is being watched by more than 100 million people all over the world.  Not a single one of those people, however, is currently located in the James Joyce Pub.

Yes, the bar is entirely empty.  It's as if a neutron bomb had been set off, vaporizing every American football fan within a 20-mile radius.  If tumbleweeds existed in Turkey, I'm sure they would have been rolling out of the men's room and across the floor at that moment.

With the sound on the big-screen television muted, there is complete silence, like I have walked into not the James Joyce Pub, but instead the James Joyce Reading Room.  I am about to say something out loud, but I'm afraid I might be shushed.

Finally a lone bartender pops up from behind the bar.  He seems startled to see me.   
"The bar is closed," he says to me in Turkish.  "Bar kapılı."

I respond by pointing at the game on the big-screen TV and stammering in bad Turkish. "But ... but ... Super Bowl ... Amerikalı futbolu şampiyonluk maçı ... televizyonda şimdi ..." 

"I know," the bartender cuts me off in Turkish.  "But," he gestures to the room, "there are no people.  Opportunity yok."

I believe "Opportunity yok" roughly translates as "I stayed open until one in the morning on a Sunday expecting a bunch of Americans to come and to watch their stupid little football game, you're the only one who showed up, and I'm not staying up all night to serve drinks to one single idiot sitting by himself in front of my giant television screen, so, you know, get the hell out of here."

Roughly.

Making one last desperate attempt to find irony, I walk 15 minutes farther away from home to The North Shield, hoping that the bartenders' earlier "yes, maybe we'll have the Super Bowl on" had turned into reality.   But of course the story at The North Shield is much the same.   No one is in the bar, other than a couple of guys cleaning up and stacking chairs on the table.

On the plus side, the televised snooker match has finally ended.

Opportunity yok.

Now it's almost two in the morning, I'm facing a half hour walk home, and it's so cold I already can't feel my toes.  And, oh yeah: I won't be seeing the Super Bowl, or finding any great stories about how hilarious it is to watch it in Turkey.   Other than that, this has all worked out perfectly. 

Living in America you might be shocked to learn that the world does not stop rotating on Super Sunday.  In Istanbul at least, nobody gives a crap.  At least nobody gives enough of a crap to stay up drinking in a bar in the middle of the night at the beginning of a work week.

 I turn around and walk back home in the cold.  On the way there, absolutely positively nothing happens. 

See? I tried to warn you.  But you went ahead and read this whole thing anyway.

Finally there's some irony for you.