Reggie Bush’s Super Bowl and The Beauty of Collective Girl Culture
The Kardashians tricked me into caring about football way before Taylor/Travis did
I have, for as long as I can remember, hated the Super Bowl. Football in general has been a blight on all of my familial TV screens. If any of the men in my household were watching a game, it meant that I was not watching reruns of Grey’s Anatomy or whatever trashy reality show was currently airing on Vh1. In my view, that was a waste of a television set. But I harbored a special hatred for the Super Bowl. It always falls on or near my birthday (this year it is the day after, and yes, it is complicating my plans). And I’ve never been as captivated by the half-time performances as the rest of the world. It’s a seven-minute concert? Outside? Where the acoustics are not good? Beyonce’s Homecoming was of course an exception, but overall I find the whole production underwhelming.1
In all of my 28 years on this earth, I have been invested in only one Super Bowl: the 2010 game between the New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts. This was a fun event for a multitude of reasons. The charming “Who Dat?” rallying call of the Saints, images of the always saucy streets of New Orleans erupting with gold and black. Even the game itself was a good one, I’m told. The Saints were down in the first half and did some kind of unexpected maneuver at the start of the second quarter? inning? I don’t know. But it threw the Colts off and the Saints won. Their first time in the Super Bowl and they’ve never been back. This is not why I cared about this football game.
I was running around my kitchen yelling Who Dem Saints! — which was tragically incorrect and perhaps culturally appropriative — and smearing gold and black lines across my cheekbones (I may have even instructed my orthodontist to replace the aqua-colored rubber bands on my braces to black and gold but who’s to say...) all for one man: Reggie Bush.
Bush was The Saints’ running back at the time, and he was a good one (again, allegedly because who was I to know?). He was objectively handsome, with kind eyes and a megawatt smile. He wore a diamond earring on one ear which was very of-the-moment. But most importantly, he was dating Kim Kardashian.
I’ve been thinking back to this moment in my adolescence while reading article after article about the global phenomenon that is Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift’s relationship. Can Taylor feasibly make it from her last Eras show in Tokyo on Saturday night to the Philadelphia game on Sunday night? (Rohita Kadambi pointed out that The West Wing has an answer for this, although I famously trust Aaron Sorkin as far as I can throw him). Are the Swiftie’s taking over football? A recent survey found that 13 percent of Americans are more interested in football thanks to Swift. And the MAGA people think she’s working with the government to get Biden re-elected (?) which is the lamest conspiracy theory I have ever heard.
All of this to say, girl culture has infiltrated the Super Bowl, and the world is watching with keen interest, as if this is the first time. It is, in fact, not.
Thinking back to it, it’s strange that I was so influenced by the love interest of a Kardashian. I watched Keeping up with the Kardashians, but not with any kind of passion or idolization. Taylor’s fans see her as a kind of God, mother, cool older sister. They both want to be her and are also fiercely protective of her. This is a real life love story they can paint to be movie-perfect, with edits on TikTok likening the couple to Troy and Gabriella in High School Musical and Hilary Duff and Chad Michael Murray in A Cinderella Story.
Kim and Reggie had none of that going on as far as I remember. I don’t think I ever wanted to be Kim — to dress like her, maybe. She was actually a useful barometer for what kinds of clothes would look good on me because I, too, was short with a huge ass. But I’m not sure I even considered her a good person, unlike Swift’s fans for whom she can do no wrong. I judged Kim in relation to her sisters. She wasn’t as funny as Khloe, but sweeter. She was better at business than Kourtney, but not nearly as fun. Her dad was dead which made her sympathetic somehow, but like watching any person on any reality show, some weeks I liked her and some weeks I didn’t. I could be passive about her in a way I couldn’t now because she wasn’t the no-one-wants-to-fucking-work-anymore billionaire mannequin she is today. The Kardashians were on the precipice of becoming your Republican uncle’s litmus test for the decline of civilization, but in 2010, Kim Kardashian was still just a rich girl who owned a clothing store, made a sex tape and used to be best friends with Paris Hilton. She starred in Fall Out Boy music videos and learned how to pole dance with Nicole Scherzinger.
I remember being interested in the Kardashians, perhaps even charmed by them in the same way that I was charmed by Tim McGraw and Sandra Bullock’s massive open concept kitchen-living-room in The Blind Side, in which their flat screen TV was mounted on top of the fireplace (an interior design feature I considered to be the height of luxury). The early 2010s were marked by casual, cozy wealth. Watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians in those early years didn’t feel like watching the Calabasas elite, it felt like going over to your richer friend’s house after school, her mom ordering you both takeout from the Cheesecake Factory. They were all funny in the way they bickered, Khloe slamming the door in Kim’s face and Kim coming back in Khloe’s notably cramped apartment, sloshing her purse in sister’s face, punctuating each blow with “Don’t. Be. Fucking. Rude.”
As entertaining as the Kardashians were, I didn’t have any kind of emotional connection to them. Most of the time, I watched to catch a glimpse of Cheetah Girl Adrienne Bailon who was dating Rob Kardashian at the time. I delighted in watching her teach him how to do laundry in their also-surprisingly-cramped apartment. Bailon I cared about. How could I not after her voice cracked cracked telling her absentee mamma that “Luke came in the picture and it seemed like my dreams didn’t matter! They didn’t matter!” She said, “The Cheetah Girls are over!” And I felt that!!! I did not have the same reaction to Kim ugly crying because her diamond earring fell in the ocean. I developed a much more intimate bond with fictional characters. These real people were for laughs, and a sprinkle of envy.
But all of this does not add up to my absolute devotion to Reggie Bush’s New Orleans football team. The Kardashians were just pieces of a wider web of culture. I don’t remember molding my perspective of the world around them like I did with something like Gilmore Girls. So how did they convince me to care about football for like… at least a week??
A couple different theories. One, I am looking up pictures of Kim Kardashian and Reggie Bush right now and they were a piping hot couple. We as a society do not speak enough on this. Kardashian was still her natural Armenian self. I want to believe this was pre-BBL. Bush is built like, well, a running back, perfectly chiseled and frequently shirtless. There is a 2009 GQ spread called “The Saint and the Sinner” in which Kardashian can be seen in a red bikini balancing on top of a scantily clad Bush as he is mid push-up. The next Voyager we send up in space to communicate with the aliens should be able to project this image. They just look good together, in the way people think Taylor and Travis look good together, except the former is rooted in facts undeniable to the human eye while the latter I fear may be an overcorrection from fans after Swift dated a man who looked like her cousin for seven years.
If GQ could see that this was certainly a moment in time, I imagine that 14-year-old me who watched E! News daily also understood the international ramifications of Kim and Reggie, even if I didn’t idolize Kim in the same way fans of our current Super Bowl couple do.
I also think, despite all my grumblings, I was not as difficult a sell on the Super Bowl as I appeared to be. There was a piece of me that was just waiting to be drawn into football, like football was the mean but cute boy at school who I pretended to hate but if one day we were reading the same book and he asked to be friends I’d immediately fold. In my heart of hearts I am a joiner. If everyone is hyped up about something, I want in. But football was such a foreign language to me, it made me feel inherently left out. I needed an invitation, something that was for me, something that I could understand. One singular player’s name, for instance.
But most of all, I think the Kardashians were more prevalent in my life than I’m allowing myself to remember. Not because they had successfully endeared themselves to me, but because they were a piece of this dialogue, this language of culture that threaded the fabric of my life as a tween.
In a lot of ways, 2010 marked the disintegration of a cohesive popular culture. YouTube was founded five years earlier and was fully out of its beta stage, surpassing all the major television networks in net views and just beginning to birth “stars,” video creators with channels you could subscribe to and keep up with their comedy, or tutorials or vlogs. They were the makings of influencers. And Facebook and Twitter had taken off, making it so conversations about culture didn’t have to just happen over the dinner table or in line at the dry cleaners, they could happen with strangers across the world at any time. And while those conversations were, in theory, more public than ever before, the internet, in its vast and diverse array of subcultures, ensured that many would be left in the dark. Your average grandmother in the 60s had to know about The Beatles whether she liked it or not. Your grandmother in 2010 did not know, nor should she have known, about Jenna Marbles.
The Kardashians toed this line. They were frequently in the news, and fueled the last gasp of the tabloids, which were inherently more wholesale and pedestrian than internet discourse. But they represented a new breed of celebrity, one that took some adjusting to and could go unnoticed by the most stubborn of eyes. Although, born in this transitory period, the Kardashians might actually be the newest and final additions to a cultural monolith. Few people in this country can claim ignorance to at least one member of the clan. As Deux Moi would put it, they’re A List.
This could be heavily debated but what can’t is that Keeping Up With The Kardashians was a piece of the eighth grade collective girl culture at my small Catholic middle school in Nashville, Tennessee. I think often (and more or less fondly, which can’t be said for almost anything else I experienced in that plaid skirt) about the way we experienced pop culture and media in those days. I can see myself in the girl’s bathroom in 2008, the day after Britney Spears shaved her head and targeted paparazzi with an umbrella. All the girls had seen it, all the girls had opinions. And so, in between classes, we held court in that dark, damp tiled room, alive, connected with the outside world through our excitement. When Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech was interrupted at the 2009 VMAs, I didn’t talk with strangers about it on Twitter. I chatted with wide-eyed fervor about it in that same girl’s bathroom. Our vocabulary, our clothes, even our dreams, expectations for the world were all shaped around specific, although seemingly random, nuggets of pop culture.
Because of the MadTV skit “Can I get your number” in 2008, we bought Mike and Ike’s when we went to the movie theater. We’d shout at each other, “Work that ponytail! Own that updo!” When Moneymaker by Ludacris came out, it reoriented our brain chemistry collectively. Jersey Shore, 16 and Pregnant, Rob Dyrdek’s Fantasy Factory and The Hills all made their way into not just our conversations but our school projects. We played Snookie and Mike the Situation in theater class skits. When it came time to take care of our “flour babies” — flour sacks we had to dress up, take care of and make a spreadsheet for all the potential costs of a child so we’d stay abstinent — I named my flour son Bentley, after the real life son of the red-headed eyebrow-pierced Maci on Teen Mom.
This was an exciting period for me because, prior to junior high, I largely experienced pop culture alone. And not by choice; I was no gatekeeper. I begged my friends to watch Star Wars: Attack of the Clones so that they too could know the melodramatic longing between Natalie Portman and Hayden Christiansen’s skinny little side braid. But for most of my childhood, my interests didn’t match up with my peers. I watched some Disney Channel, but I was exposed early on to young adult television I found far more exciting, from Dawson’s Creek to Saved by the Bell to my beloved Gilmore Girls and Charmed. I was living in the adult world, impatiently waiting for everyone else to cross over. When it finally happened, it wasn’t with the shows I held near and dear, but I had also been watching hours of Vh1 and MTV since way before I should have ever known who Flava Flav was. So if Tila Tequila, Shot at Love was going to be the first connective tissue between me and the rest of my classmates, so be it.
And that’s undoubtedly how I made it to The Saints. Keeping Up with the Kardashians also informed my friends and my vocabulary. We’d say “Bible” before blurting out something that was undeniably true, which all the sisters coined in the early seasons. We’d have debates over whether Scott Disick was really a good partner for Kourtney, or whether Khloe did perhaps have a different father than the others. And we thought Reggie Bush was hot, rightfully so. We read up on The Saints, we chose sides in football for the first time in probably ever, because we had accepted that the Kardashians, and therefore Reggie Bush, were a part of our world now, like accepting a son-in-law into the family. These pieces of culture expanded our footprint outside of Nashville. If we let our lord and savior Kim Kardashian into our hearts, we got to live in California, we got to take selfies in the back seat of a big black escalade. Our collective boyfriend was going to the Super Bowl and we were all in! And we got to do it all together.
A lot has changed since 2010. I’m exactly twice as old this weekend as I was when I watched that Super Bowl. But the connective tissue, for me at least, hasn’t. My friends and I still have a vocabulary entirely informed by the pop culture we share. We rob from Seek Treatment and Love Island and White Lotus. And yes, unavoidably, we care about the Super Bowl because Taylor Swift is dating the quarterback.
B Plot
Question: (Inspired by a recent Instagram trend) You can only keep two of these shows, which ones have to go? Grey’s Anatomy, Scrubs, Glee, Mad Men, Sex and the City, Gossip Girl, Sopranos, Stranger Things.
Mallika: Scrubs is out. Sorry, but that show always felt like none of my business. But now I’m in a pickle. I will obviously keep Gossip Girl. Would I be better had I never experienced that show? Maybe! But that’s not the question. And if we’re here to talk about girl culture, I’m going to keep Grey’s too.
Rachel: I made this question intentionally challenging and now I am at a loss… I want to say I’d easily ditch Stranger Things because of the Noah Schnapp/Brett Gelman of it all, but unfortunately I rewatched it this fall and re-fell in love with all its 80s magic so I have a harder time letting go. But with a heavy heart, I think I will make the sacrifice. Scrubs is good, but also not really my culture, so that’s an easy drop. Grey’s is the source of all my anxiety so despite so many iconic episodes of television I think I’d happily drop it. Glee gave almost too much power to the twinks (and Lea Michelle and Ryan Murphy) so, although it brought me my beloved Jonothan Groff and Darren Criss (and Gwenyth Paltrow singing CeLo Green), I am going to forgo saving it. I feel that Sex and the City is not just essential to my past, but also my future, so I must keep it. Sopranos is a relatively new love for me, as is Mad Men. But Man Men is soooo so good. Who would I be without an introspective Sally Draper constantly in the back of my mind? Then there’s Gossip Girl, which was formative in my teen years. Save Sally or Blair? Fuck, I’ll save Sally.
C Plot
Since we’re apparently addicted to reality TV lately… to this season’s ‘Bachelor’ Joey Graziadei, Gypsy Rose Blanchard and Ruth Bader Ginsberg are one in the same. We love a himbo who obviously does not acknowledge the United States Supreme Court. He said, “Jinsburg? Ginsburg?”
And as this newsletter is on the topic of sports, Brenda Song, The Other Two’s Drew Carver and Righteous Gemstones’ Scott MacArthur have been tapped to star alongside Kate Hudson in Mindy Kaling’s new Netflix show about pro-basketball of all things. The premise is giving Ted Lasso meets The Bear kind of? And also Succession if just one thing had gone right for Shiv. Kate Hudson must take over for her brother as president of fictional basketball team the Los Angeles Waves and prove herself amid all the sexist skeptics. Kaling might be projecting there, as she has a lot to prove after her R-rated Scooby Doo revamp mega-flopped, and Sex Lives of College Girls has been taking a nose dive. Feels like this could go either way for Kaling, but we’re rooting for its success if only because Brenda Song deserves a good role and a paycheck to support those adorable Culkin babies.
Biggest and best news! The trailer for docuseries ‘Quiet on Set’ dropped this week, revealing even more accusations against infamous Nickelodean creator Dan Schneider. We’ve known about this for a while now (yes, we kind of cheated with that 2024 TV prediction… sue us) and we cannot wait to watch on Max March 17. And stay tuned because we will have some exciting behind-the-scenes content coming your way soon…
And finally, we’re bravely celebrating Valentine’s Day this year and we want to hear from YOU. Who is your favorite TV boyfriend? This an all encompassing term. Doesn’t have to be a boy, doesn’t have to be a literal boyfriend, just a boyfriend in our hearts. From Derek Shepherd in Grey’s Anatomy to Ilana Glazer in Broad City to (according to Rachel) Reggie Bush, who do you watch on TV and just swoon over. Ask yourself the question that evil Swede asks Florence Pugh in Midsommar, “do you feel held by him? Does he feel like home to you?” Send us your submissions by responding to this email by early Tuesday and we’ll include them in our roundup!
Ok, I know Rihanna’s last year was a feat, but I was too distracted by the disappointing news that she was popping out baby #2 instead of a new album.