It's Super Sunday again, but for how long more?

On Sunday, I’ll be headed to a friend’s place to eat well (barbecue) or not (chips, peanuts), drink something cold (I’m thinking a nice stout), buy a couple of $5 squares, sit through this year’s overblown pop act (hoping for a Left Shark reprise), and finally, perhaps, though this always seems an afterthought (and almost always, less than promised), watch a bit of football – because you don’t just watch the Super Bowl. You consume it, as if on vacation from midwinter, a one-day-into-the-night binge that at this downtown Toronto house I'm headed to will be shown on a screen that at 80 inches across sits against the basement wall looking like the arse end of the Titanic come to rest.

Stay with that metaphor. If the NFL is the unsinkable luxury liner, there be icebergs about, and as the Super Bowl hits 50 I wonder not so much at how it got here as for how much longer it will reign as, at least in North America, one of the last places of communal sharing in front of a TV. Sure, there are big games that come up from time to time and attract huge audiences, but the year-in, year-out rituals of the Super Bowl, the Grey Cup here in Canada, and the Oscars (though it too has faced rough waters of late) put them among the few remaining bankable live broadcast “events.”

Given that kind of cache, the NFL appears in rude health, able to sail by any of a number of scandals and demi-scandals (Ray Rice, leaving one town for another, Adrian Peterson, inflation rates) and still slice the house salami a little thinner, somehow adding another $150 million to the stupid-rich oligarchs who own this $12.4-billion a year money-making machine.

But there’s a human cost to the corporate success story. In Bill Pennington's New York Times story that exposes some familiar faultlines in the NFL and American society, inaugural Super Bowl hero Willie Wood is shown today living in an assisted-care facility in Washington, dementia denying him a chance to watch this golden anniversary game, or even remember the play he made to turn that January 1967 game around.

In the report, doctors can make no judgment on the role football played in Wood's condition – CTE, the disease caused by head trauma, can only be found posthumously; a WUSA report notes more than a dozen concussions suffered – but what’s clearer is that the NFL, and in his particular case its longtime bar on coaches of colour, robbed Wood of the same privileges afforded others in his post-playing career (one of Wood’s predecessors in Toronto, where he was the first head coach of colour in CFL history, was his Green Bay teammate Forrest Gregg. Unlike Wood, Gregg was able to parlay it into an NFL head coaching career.)

Wood is one of 30 still alive from among the 44 who started that first Super Bowl. But with his name now among the likes of Ken Stabler, Tyler Sash, Junior Seau and more of confirmed cases on the growing list of struck-down, CTE-affected gladiators, this is the gravest and most threatening iceberg of all. It makes us all watching this Sunday something of a latter-day Roman Colosseum cheering on carnage, and therein lies the challenge for this NFL at late middle age – for how long it can last, given all the gathering evidence, and whether this is the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end, is the real question.

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