‘Super Bore’: The Canadian Media and the Grey Cup-Super Bowl Comparison

Abstract

A closer look at football illuminates some important truths in the Can-Am experience. Central to this discovery is the notion of the Grey Cup as Canada’s anti-Super Bowl. Complete with folksy traditions and understated pageantry, the Grey Cup is emblematically Canadian and has historically served as a sharp rebuke to American cultural imperialism and excess, represented so perfectly by the Super Bowl. Like many aspects of Can-Am relations, however, the Super Bowl experience is not a simple narrative. Many Canadians have not only integrated the Super Bowl into their sporting calendars but prefer it to the domestic product. The growing cultural influence of the Super Bowl north of the border made national headlines in 2015 when ratings revealed that more Canadians, per capita, watched the Super Bowl than Americans. Traditionally the attitudes reflected in Canadian media demonstrate a clear bias that favoured the Grey Cup over the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl’s prominence in Canada was written by Canadian sports scribes as regrettable and undeserved while the virtuous Grey Cup, they asserted, went under-appreciated, not just globally but increasingly domestically. This chauvinistic rhetoric supports and adds to the existing research that focuses on Canadian reaction to American mass culture.