The Ultimate American Heresy: 'I Am a Super Bowl Refusnik.'

Like so much in my life, I blame it on Richard Nixon.

If Nixon had not purported to be such a fanatic football fan that he designed a special play for Washington Redskins coach George Allen... If, at the height of the Vietnam War, official Washington had not embraced the Redskins and pro football with a bipartisan bellicose frenzy unmatched since the Roman Senate worshipped at the Temple of Mars... If the Redskins under Allen, reflecting the theocratic excess of the sport, did not get down on their knees in the locker room to offer a prayer of gratitude after defeating the Dallas Cowboys...

Nah, it probably would not have made any difference.

No matter what, I would still be clinging with perverse pride to my unbeatable record of never, ever having watched the Super Bowl. In fact, I have not seen any football game (college or pro) since around 1969, even though I boast sterling Big Ten credentials as a graduate of the University of Michigan. Maybe my feelings might be different if they still played with leather helmets.

All this makes me part of an oddball (non-pigskin) demographic group. More than 80 percent of American adult men and roughly two thirds of adult women plan to watch the Super Bowl, according to a national poll sponsored by the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association. If you count those who will be comatose at kickoff in bars or intend to get hammered by halftime in restaurants, more than 40 percent of America will be attending a football-themed party.

In fact, everybody except me is treating Super Bowl XLIV as the biggest event in history since the invention of Arabic numerals. Even "Face the Nation" will feature NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and three TV football commentators in a broadcast from the game site in Miami. The presumed round-table topic: Would the Democrats gain political yardage by using reconciliation to jam through the health care bill against the die-hard GOP defense?

It may seem puzzling why I am still a conscientious objector to the Super Bowl 35 years after Nixon left the White House in disgrace. Why am I so hidebound in my Old Testament defiance of the gods of pro football? In answering, I feel like Tevya in "Fiddler on the Roof" explaining the devout customs of his village of Anatevka: "How did this tradition start? I'll tell you – I don't know. But it's a tradition."

Once I would have explained my refusal to partake in the national religion of the Super Bowl on freedom-of-conscience grounds, saying that I preferred to worship at the Church of Baseball. Baseball was the people's sport, free of crass commercialization, exuberant prices, gimmicks like wild-card teams and, most of all, artificially bulked-up athletes who looked like they belonged on a circus midway. Of course, back in those days, I also believed in the Tooth Fairy.

It would be one thing if I resisted all forms of spectacle, preferring to spend quiet evenings at home listening to Bartok concertos, immersed in the well-thumbed pages of "Middlemarch," and pausing occasionally to take a decadent swallow of Ovaltine.

But I cover politics. If you want an over-hyped empty spectacle devoid of meaning -- the sort of syncopated ritual that H.L. Mencken would have denounced as fit for the booboisie -- try a national political convention. At least at a Super Bowl, adults wearing funny hats are under no illusion that their bizarre headgear has any connection with electing the next Leader of the Free World.

In other realms, I like to think of myself as a sporting man based on my quarter century playing in a survival-of-the-fittest Rotisserie baseball league, my late-in-life appreciation of the kind of football the rest of the world plays, and my last-minute determination to master the rules and strategies of curling before the Winter Olympics. I even saw the Oscar-nominated "The Blind Side," although I had never heard of Michael Oher and still have no memory of his current NFL team.

It is a strange thing, actually, to define yourself by what you refuse to do. I think about those 1950s intellectuals who would accost total strangers at parties to smugly announce, "I refuse to buy a television." Even the Ten Commandments with all its thundering "Thou shalt nots" combines them with a positive injunction to "Honor thy father and thy mother." In a sense, my stubborn position as a Super Bowl refusnik is about as well-grounded as that of a fifth-grader who races home from school to announce to his baffled parents, "I am now a vegan."

But I will not go gentle onto the gridiron this Super Bowl Sunday. I will not join the best minds of my generation searching for a mellow, not angry, Super Bowl party in high-def. I will not waste my dwindling brain cells wondering what the Baltimore Colts (last seen in the movie "Diner") are doing washed up inland in Indianapolis.

Authenticity matters in life -- and, for better or worse, I am stuck being the guy who hates pro football. So proudly taking the path less traveled, I intend to spend Super Bowl Sunday at the movies finally seeing "Avatar."

That will show Richard Nixon.