Beware the Fariy Tale Ending

How could we have been so mistaken? There was the promise of making history, the sense that a victory was part of a larger, predestined plan. The tremendous momentum. The opponent with a fancy pedigree but not much to show for it. The outcome seemed inevitable. Obvious, really. And still, the journalists got it wrong – almost twenty points wrong.

Only this time, the journalists weren't political writers covering New Hampshire. They were sitting at the sports desk, covering the Super Bowl as if the New England Patriots had already beaten the New York Giants.

Of course, the means by which one predicts political victories (polling) is a different animal than by which you predict sporting outcomes (point spreads). And yet, the impulse to create a narrative based on little more than a gut feeling and some hastily assembled numbers has dominated both Super Bowl and Super Tuesday coverage over the past few weeks.

It’s no secret that a narrative arc makes for a better read than just a rote recapping of the facts as they happened. And a narrative arc requires one to tell a story with a foreshadowed outcome, even when reporters can’t even truly predict what that outcome will be. This is why we get both the elections and sports, not to mention a lot of other things, wrong. So Obama ahead in the polls after a win in Iowa is too easily turned into a larger narrative: a young icon winning over the hearts and minds of a cynical electorate, a sea change in the Democratic Machine. The Patriots heading to the Super Bowl is no longer just another Big Game; after an unbeaten season it becomes an even Bigger Game, one that will go down in the record books and make for good Monday Night trivia.

The irony is that Clinton winning in New Hampshire and The Giants winning in Arizona are better stories, specifically because the narrative favored by the press is so predictable and preordained. With Clinton’s victory, the election became a nail-biting, delegate-counting horserace; a real competition that’s lead to increased news coverage and increased interest on the part of news consumers. Had Obama won in Iowa, then New Hampshire, then in South Carolina, the story becomes one sided and predictable. The first headline would have been great (and easy to write beforehand) but the excitement would soon wear off.

Likewise, the New England Patriots winning the Super Bowl would have made for good copy – but as the coda to a story that had been building all season. It was the Hollywood ending, the final world. Now, sportswriters will keep busy analyzing what went wrong, how the Giants stopped the unstoppable, and what this means for next year. There will be off-season reports and player profiles with more color, and more interest – an “Eli as underdog made good” piece is so much more compelling than another fawning profile of Tom Brady.

The players and the politicians have it right: “I know it’s a very important game, but we cannot play it like that, like it’s history being played out,” said Tom Brady in a Sunday New York Times article. “It is a football game we want to win, and the only way to do that is to treat it like a football game.” It’s worth noting that the article began proclaiming that “New England Patriots take the field Sunday for Super Bowl XLII seeking perfection and a place in sports history,” then proceeded to seek insight history-making sports figures of years past: Nadia Comaneci, UCLA’s former basketball coach, John Wooden, and the first man to bowl three consecutive perfect 300 games.

In the end, it didn't matter what advice Glenn Allison, that legendary kegler, had to say - with less than two minutes remaining to play, the Giants rewrote what had seemed like a perfect ending to a perfect season. And in doing so - no matter how much stress it may have caused for reporters who thought they had it all figured out - created something even better.