Once again, the Super Bowl is about us, and once again, the occasion brings all the chaos, marketing, fan frenzy and insults that titanic sporting events are heir. With the Super Bowl, however, people being cranked up to 11 - and is not surprising. Professional football is unique among American sports due to its pure spectacle, oversized. It is stronger than the baseball, brasher than basketball and usually more violent sport of the phenomenally physical NHL hockey and high speed NASCAR madness. In fact, all major sports in North America, soccer is indisputably that highlights any vestiges of machismo could be lurking in even the most seemingly slight fan.
After all, football is for manly men. That said, the intensely masculine (doubt call it homosexual) energy that revolves around the event each year - and perhaps especially this year, with the male manliest of them all, Peyton Manning, in the center of the scene - made us think about this chimerical figure, the tough American. Specifically, how was he, as a subspecies of the ideal universal male, portrayed in the pages of life through the years?
There are many types of hardness, of course. Mental toughness (Jackie Robinson); quiet toughness (Gregory Peck, Gary Cooper); Sandy hardness (determined a fatigued, American Marine); crazy, spasmodic hardness (sociopath of Cagney, Cody Jarrett in White Heat); Run-right-on-your-hardness (Jim Brown); and it continues.
Here, on the eve of the 48th Super Bowl, LIFE.com offers a look back at some of the emblematic faces and personalities which, on their own time and in your own chosen pursuit, were hard enough to respond to this historical question: who is the man?
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment