If you oppose Bad Bunny for the Super Bowl halftime show, that's okay — he's not performing for you

The line appears in the last verse of the final song on Bad Bunny’s Grammy Award-winning album Debí Tomar Mas Fotos. Like the whole record, the rhyme is intentional and well-weighted and aimed at an audience that doesn’t need it explained.

“A mi me quieren como a Tito,” raps Bad Bunny, whose government name is Benito Martinez. “Y soy serio como Cotto.”

Listeners back home in Puerto Rico understand it the way Canadians would a stanza about legendary hockey players, but I’ll spell it out for the rest of you.

“Tito,” is Felix “Tito” Trinidad, the Hall of Fame boxer from Puerto Rico – a three-division world champ whose 12th-round knockout over Fernando Vargas remains one of the most thrilling title fights of the 21st century. And “Cotto” refers to Miguel Cotto, Puerto Rican world champ who was known for a sinister left hook and a stoic demeanour.

He’s also the Mario Lemieux to Tito’s Wayne Gretzky, arriving half a generation after an all-time great and then joining him as a national icon.

Martinez spends his 17-track opus peeling back layers of his personality, and that boxing-centric parting shot reveals one more. Yes, he's a hit maker and a patriot, a custodian and defender of his island’s history and culture, but he’s also a sports fan.

In a different era, those details might mark him as the ideal Super Bowl halftime performer. He does huge numbers online, where he’s been Spotify’s most-streamed artist four of the last six years, and in real life, where the first 12 shows of his current world tour have reportedly averaged $14.2 million US in ticket sales. He performs in Spanish, an asset as the NFL seeks to expand internationally, but he also speaks the language of sport.

NFL shot-callers understand, which explains why