We are the champions, we are the champions

Even if you care nothing for football, this strange little feature about the shirts and hats prepared for championship teams has charm. Its main revelation is that "Super Bowl Winner" gear is prepared for the players and coaches on both teams in the big game, and the stuff with the losers' name on it is carefully hidden away, trucked to a charity warehouse, and flown to a remote African village where it is given away to people who have never heard of either football or eBay.

There's something obsessive about the lengths to which they have organized something as trivial as presenting "Super Bowl Winner" gear to the winning team. It reminds me of a New Yorker story I read many years ago, about the cutting down of a hardwood forest in the Amazon. Every detail of the political, social, economic, ecological and cultural circumstances of how the forest came to be cut down and sawn up into lumber was meticulously documented -- who profited, what happened to the indiginous people who used to live in the forest, and so on. At the very end of the story, the journalist wrote about what actually became of the wood itself. It changed hands many times as it was bought by jobbers and wholesalers and exporters and so on. Finally most of it made its way to Hong Kong and Japan. By the time it actually ended its journey at a lumber yard in Tokyo, all its value had somehow been extracted, and it wound up, not as the raw material for an executive's desk or the rich wood for a musical instrument, but as scrap lumber, hastily slapped into place on the walls of a construction elevator at a skyscraper building site, protecting the metal of the elevator from workmen's tools. The "losing" Super Bowl shirts follow the reverse path, from first world to fifth world, but their obscure fate strikes me as somehow similar.