LA Super Bowl was a Hollywood cliche of rags and riches, cheek by jowl

Before the Super Bowl could officially kick off in Los Angeles, someone had to raise the curtain on this distinctly post-Covid festival of American glitz and glamour – so why not the biggest movie star on the planet.

In a WWE-style teaser that played over the enormous video board that hovers over SoFi Stadium like a serpentine halo, the Rock set the tone for Super Gold Sunday, TV-speak for the cosmic-like coincidence of a Super Bowl falling during the middle weekend of the Winter Olympics – a first. Over the course of a two-minute monologue the actor-wrestler also known as Dwayne Johnson valorized the gladiators here as well as the others gritting it out under our flag in the Beijing Olympics. And he made sure to justify why we should stay tuned to the exception of all else. “It’s about the idea that this game [the Super Bowl] and theseGames [the Olympics] can achieve one of the most precious feats of all – bringing us all together for a celebration of who we are.”

And as 70,000 fans at SoFi Stadium lost their minds when the Rock was revealed at midfield, a cordless mic in the grip of his anaconda-like right arm and a single eyebrow arched, you couldn’t help but wonder: Um, who are we exactly?

Set aside for a moment the fact that the Beijing Olympics have been less a celebration of human achievement than a panoply of human rights crises, free speech and press crackdowns and doping-aided cheating scandals; what’s more, the Games appear to be filling time until war breaks out in Ukraine. Here in Los Angeles, the Super Bowl followed the Hollywood cliche of a tale of two cities. Amid the star-studded confines of SoFi Stadium was a story of wretched excess. But the scene outside offered a sadder story of the city’s many