Canzano: America loves a winner (but not as much as China)

A looming Super Bowl question.

The Chiefs and Eagles will play on Sunday.

Beijing was a trip. In 2008, I spent a few weeks there covering the Olympics. I saw all sorts of crazy and interesting things.

China was relentless that summer. It was desperate to put on a show for the world. It had worked hard to promote the event with “One World, One Dream” branding. Open arms, nothing to hide, all that. The state-sponsored propaganda was suffocating, and so I slipped outside the Olympic infrastructure to take a deep breath.

I found some fresh air in a high-rise building in downtown Beijing. A ticket-scalping company based in Texas had set up shop there. It was buying Olympic tickets from Chinese nationals and reselling them at a premium.

We’ve all seen those money-counting machines that drug dealers always have handy in the movies. The Americans had one of those sitting on a table behind the front desk. When I walked through the doors, I heard it “whirrrrrrr” and click. It was the sound of commerce, and I wrote a column about the operation.

I hadn’t considered that the Chinese authorities might frown on some old-fashioned capitalism going on. I figured they’d arranged to take a cut. But I got an angry email the following morning from one of the ticket company’s Dallas-based owners, who told me my column had jeopardized their safety.

He was annoyed. He feared they’d be arrested by the Chinese military. He said they were shuttering the doors and leaving the country. But I popped back in a week later to see what happened, and they were still there, smiling and counting bills.

Michael Phelps was the star attraction of that Olympics. On the morning he won his eighth gold medal at the Water Cube, I did something counterintuitive. I skipped it. I’d seen Phelps swim lots of times. But I wanted to see what his race and all that winning looked like through the eyes of Chinese people.

The Beijing hutongs and their narrow stone streets were laid out hundreds of years ago during the Ming and Qing dynasties. The alleys crisscross and meander in strange ways. Some of them are so narrow you can even touch walls on both sides of the street with either hand.

I took a taxi to a hutong known as “Liu Yin Jie.” The businesses there had tiny little shops, about the size of a walk-in master bedroom closet in a typical US home. The shopkeepers set stacks of cigarettes and baskets of peaches out front. A few of them had small television sets in the shop tuned into the Olympic broadcast.

The alleys were a dozen miles from the swimming venue. When the event came on at 11 a.m. local time that morning, the shop owners did the most peculiar thing — they stopped doing business, turned toward the TV, and rooted for Phelps.

The Beijing Olympics featured a fierce race at the top of the medal table. China wanted to dominate the world — and that meant beating Team USA — but when it came to the greatest swimmer in Olympic history, their allegiance wasn’t to their nation. They wanted America’s best swimmer to lap the world.

Michael Phelps won eight gold medals in Beijing in 2008.

Phelps was great. Winning was great. Phelps continuing to win gold medals at a blistering pace made the Beijing Olympics great, they argued. So China’s people did what no American citizen would have ever done — they pointed at the TV screen as Phelps swam to another gold and shouted his name.

When Chinese people translate American names, they use phonetic anchors. By my ear, Phelps became “Fay-la-poo-shee!!” during that Olympic moment. (It was later written out for me in Mandarin and translated as 菲尔普斯 or Fēi ěr pǔ sī).

It was a wondrous scene. I couldn’t fathom a bunch of red-blooded Texans and Californians rooting for an athlete from China or any other country to dominate. Wu Minxia, for example, is the most prolific Chinese diver of all time. She won seven Olympic medals, five of them gold. In the US, we’d have rooted for her to slip off the springboard and land in a bellyflop.

Phelps entered eight swimming events in Beijing in 2008. He won eight gold medals. He broke world records in seven of them. There’s no debate. It was the greatest performance in Olympic history, and China loved it.

This, naturally, brings me to Patrick Mahomes.

He’s attempting to make history on Sunday by winning back-to-back-to-back Super Bowls. Lots of fans want him to pull off a historic three-peat. Lots of other people would like very much to see someone else — anyone else, really — walk off with the Lombardi Trophy and win game MVP.

The greatest of all time?

Those barstool debates are nauseating. I’ve listened to the ESPN and FOX shoulder programming sell that hype for two weeks. If Mahomes wins a third-straight Super Bowl, he’s the best there ever was? If he loses, he’s not? What if the game is won or lost with a pivotal play on defense or special teams? What if a turnover by someone else tips the outcome? What then? Is Mahomes still the GOAT?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Super Bowl. We’re not at all like China when it comes to our desire to see greatness. (Is that good or bad?) Roughly half of us want to see history on Sunday. We want to be able to tell people that something unprecedented happened, and we were eating seven-layer dip and witnessing. The other half would much rather see Mahomes bellyflop.

Meanwhile, Super Bowl advertisers are shelling out $8 million on average for a 30-second spot, and nobody is worried the authorities will kick down the doors, arrest Tom Brady and the Fox executives, and scoop up the money-counting machines. Also, we’re all trying to figure out whether Jon Batiste’s looming rendition of the national anthem will go over/under 120.5 seconds in length.

Do we root better than the Chinese?

Or just differently?

There was simplicity in those Beijing hutongs that morning. China’s people wanted the Olympics to be the best event in history. Phelps was authentic and so skilled. China felt the need to fabricate some other things in 2008, but the scene in the Olympic pool was the real deal. During the Opening Ceremony, for example, the China’s TV feed that was shown around the world featured massive fireworks displays over Tiananmen Square.

I was in the square that night.

There were no fireworks.

They did shoot a couple of small flares over the square so the people in charge of the worldwide TV feed knew where to place the computer-generated fireworks on the screen. It’s not the biggest shenanigan ever pulled on the world, but it demonstrates how far humans will go to have everything appear to be over-the-top and amazing.

The future Super Bowl locations are set through 2028. The league has played more frequent regular-season games on foreign soil. The league is taking about one day holding a Super Bowl in an International city. I’m sure if the price is right, it will happen.

Commissioner Roger Goodell told reporters: “It wouldn’t surprise me at all if that happens one day.”

A Super Bowl in Madrid? Or London? Or Brazil?

It’s the worst idea ever.

I’m not telling you how to root on Sunday. Eat what you’d like. Do what makes you happy. Both teams are great. But I am telling you that if the NFL had decided to sell out and put this Super Bowl in China, the Eagles wouldn’t just be facing Mahomes. There would be 1.4 billion people pulling for the Chiefs.

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