Eagles Win Super Bowl LIX; Scenes from a Celebration
Photos by Brendan Murray.
Text by Jadon George.
A Philadelphia sports team’s victory presents the City of Brotherly Love with a kind of secular, uncivil holiday. Fans begin spilling from their houses and apartments into the streets as soon as the game is in hand. Police officers assigned to uphold some nebulous vision of “order” can sometimes be seen grinning at the onrushing crowds. (In some cases, they even open their shirts for the news cameras, revealing jerseys and T-shirts honoring the local victors.) The social order, frankly — and gleefully — collapses as structures not engineered to uphold human bodies slip underfoot and objects not designed to draw attention become placebo trophies.
We’ve come to expect all this on nights like Sunday, after the Eagles dismantled the Kansas City Chiefs, 40-22, at Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans. So, the food critic and TUTV presenter Brendan Murray joined his adopted city in the streets — capturing, click by click, each fleeting frame of ecstasy.
The game that delivered the Green Guys their second world championship wasn’t even that close: Led by a sharp and mobile Jalen Hurts, our beloved Birds scored 34 points before the opposition tallied even one. Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes — on the cusp of an aggressive, LeBron James-style GOAT P.R. campaign — couldn’t eclipse 30 passing yards by halftime in a performance that would make Nathan Peterman blush. After a midgame musical performance that saw Serena Williams crip-walk while Kendrick Lamar reprised a song that accused her ex-boyfriend of pedophilia, a strategic placement of fans in the stands at the Superdome raised lights spelling the words “GAME OVER.” By then, the Eagles led 24-0; no one on the field bothered to say if the luminescent sneer was directed at Aubrey Drake Graham or Andy Reid.
Sometime between their 2023 championship triumph over Philly and last night’s blowout loss, Kansas City, Mo., became home to the N.F.L.’s most polarizing franchise. Maybe that just happens when a team wins a lot. But Mahomes & Co., once the most exciting show in sports, embarked on a three-peat while bearing many of the country’s frustrations: With the thorough degradation of its politics, with the youth’s endless pursuit of virality. Heck: Thanks to Taylor Swift’s yearslong presence in N.F.L. suites, a certain segment of the fanbase even began to see K.C. as a totem for the troubling trend towards the bland, often bigoted homogeneity of modern art. (Beyonce, not for nothing, just won her first Album of the Year Grammy two weeks ago — a decade after releasing the seminal relationship-grief album “Lemonade.”)
Is any of it fair? Well. Neither, say fans and observers, are all those borderline penalty calls.
All ill will seemed to vanish, or at least melt into joy, as the big game burst open. The Eagles are neither homogenous, nor decadent, nor deleterious to the national mood: Hurts, the Super Bowl’s M.V.P., has become a leading advocate and benefactor of education in Philadelphia. He employs an all-Black, all-woman management team — and is not slow to remind audiences that he hired the very best people to oversee his contracts, endorsements and finances. (Period.) Saquon Barkley, the team’s newly-signed superstar running back, hurdled a Jacksonville Jaguars defender backwards during a first-down R.A.C. (Run After Catch) in October. For that and for his sheer dominance the rest of the year, Barkley, a Lehigh Valley native, became a one-man renaissance. And A.J. Brown, the closest thing the team has to a “diva receiver,” earned the title in large part for reading a book on the sidelines during a playoff bout with the Los Angeles Rams. (“Inner Excellence: Train Your Mind for Extraordinary Performance and the Best Possible Life,” by Jim Murphy. The fans briefly made Murphy’s self-help treatise a bestseller after that game.)
Even the less-famous half of Philadelphia’s four main defensive backs became icons of a sort. Safety Reed Blankenship, nicknamed “Ed” because he seemingly sees all and hits like a third Tylenol, shares a melanin-minimal nickname with rookie cornerback Cooper DeJean, who celebrated his birthday Sunday with a second-quarter pick-six: Fans of all colors, stripes and political persuasions have taken to calling them the Exciting Whites. There are T-shirts; Barstool Sports sells the most popular, for $32.
Yet the mother of all American sports celebrations proved bittersweet in both North and South. New Orleans suffered a horrendous terror attack on New Year’s Day when a Texas-born ISIS sympathizer plowed a rented Ford F1-50 onto the sidewalks of Bourbon Street. The ensuing outpouring of support inspired a pregame powwow involving Lady Gaga and a quartet of Louisiana maestros — Jon Batiste, Harry Connick, Jr., Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews, Lauren Daigle, and Ledisi — performing Bayoufied remixes of patriotic hymns. It also drew President Donald J. Trump, on break from assailing so-called Diversity, Equity, Inclusion initiatives and unconstitutionally skinning to guts the federal government (but not his pursuit of several controversial, likely atrocious land-grabs).
(Too important for a footnote: The N.F.L. sparked some consternation when, ahead of Trump’s arrival, it deemed the crises facing the country too vast to find encompassment in the “End Racism” wordmark that had bookended its fields for half a decade. Instead, each end zone read “Choose Love.” League commissioner Goodell actually defended the League’s diversity programs and denied the change was made to accommodate the Don. And the end of ending racism became a bit of a punchline after DeJean’s audacious, improbable pick-six.)
They still grease the polls in New Orleans. Philadelphia, meanwhile, paid an awful price for revelry after the Eagles defeated the Washington Commanders in January’s N.F.C. title game: Temple freshman Tyler Sabapathy fell from a light pole that night and died after two days in critical condition. The local public safety apparatus long ago gave up on slathering streetside lucifers with Crisco, instead simply asking fans — lovingly, politely — not to scale the everyday vertical objects that dot their environments.
A great many don’t. And Friday’s championship parade — for which most area educational institutions have cancelled classes — promises to be a less spontaneous affair, if no less raucous. But one night, every few Februarys, Philadelphia comes alive in ways not seen since Black Friday’s heyday. Families join with Gen Z strivers to cha-cha, real smooth, on the famed steps to the Art Museum. A certain kind of cartoonish local celebrity finds themselves feted in a confederation of impromptu parades. The Quaker grid that mothered America becomes a maze of barricades for an instant community, the bowling-alley gutter guards for a social contract that binds us to one another’s goodwill.
Jadon George is the assistant general manager of WHIP. Brendan Murray is a food & culture writer and the host of TUTV’s flagship cooking show.
