The significance of Bad Bunny’s Halftime show

Bad Bunny is a straight but gay-friendly Puerto Rican megastar, whose jumping and hips-and-butt gyrations would have made Elvis look arthritic. He’s also loudly pro-immigrant rights and will do his halftime Super Bowl show in Spanish—a combination that has already set the MAGA crowd’s hair on fire.

Sports have never been at the top of my agenda, particularly football. Like a lot of gay high school boys I developed a repertoire of excuses to get out of gym class. Yet when I volunteered as the photographer for the school newspaper I got roped into shooting sports. I had come from Cuba just a few years before, a country enthralled by béisbol and básketbol, but mystified by American football. Even today it looks to me like a graceless spectacle of armored guys who tackle each other to the ground, only to get up and do it over and over again until one manages to carry the oddly-shaped ball to one of the end zones. Touchdown!

The faculty advisor of the school newspaper at the Catholic school I attended was Sister Malachy, a large Dominican nun with a stern exterior but a marshmallow-soft interior—love really—for the students under her tutelage, which in my case involved getting me through my initial jitters as a sports photog. I remember her fondly.

She recognized my disinterest in sports and just gave me brief piece of advice: “Alfredo, put the telephoto lens on the camera and just follow the ball.” So I did, and by junior year had unwittingly become quite the good sports photographer simply by pressing the shutter at the right time, to capture players in midair or some other heroic maneuver, often without a clue what was going on. Indeed, if you saw me officiously running up and down the sidelines chasing the ball with my camera you’d have have thought I was a sports junkie.

Notwithstanding my ignorance of sports, particularly football, by junior year my buddying photo skills landed me on the cover of the August 15, 1966 cover of Sports Illustrated not as a photographer, but as a “model.” Thanks to a serendipitous chain of events, Sr. Malachy knew George J. Bloodgood, the photo editor at the magazine, who was looking for some kid to take part in a staged photo shoot of the legendary University of Alabama coach Paul “Bear” Bryant. Sr. Malachy gave him my name, and with her recommendation I got a peek at the world of professional magazine photography and a tiny piece of the SI cover—and a hundred bucks, a serious bounty for a seventeen-year-old.

So I showed up one morning at a cavernous Time Magazine studio in midtown Manhattan that was rigged up with slide projections, scaffolding, dozens of lights and props designed to recreate a football stadium, and photo assistants scurrying about. The concept was for Bryant to stand in the middle of the cover with his usual checker porkpie hat, and look like he was talking to one of his players. My role was to wear shoulder pads and a helmet, and pose as a Crimson Tide player despite my beanpole physique of six-foot-three and 160 pounds.

I had no clue who the legendary Bryant was and must have had a deer-in-the headlights expression plastered on my face throughout the shoot. Much to his credit, Bryant noticed my cluelessness under a football helmet that dangled on my head like lampshade, and the equally ill-fitting shoulder pads, and jokingly kept reassuring me “Don’t worry moose.” I remember him as a really nice guy. The cover is for sale on the internet for $350 and I’m tempted to buy it.

My disinterest in football survived my date with Bear Bryant. Today, twenty-four hours before the Super Bowl, I still don’t know which teams are playing or the names of the star players—but this year look forward to the Bad Bunny halftime show.

I saw the video clips of him at the Grammys, wearing a sober tuxedo and bowtie, and walking off with two armfuls of awards. Months before, when the NFL announced that Bad Bunny would be the halftime star, the MAGA crowd had lost their comida.

Kristi Noem, the witless Barbie Doll in charge of the hundreds of millions of dollars of the Department of Homeland Security, promised that immigration gendarmes would be “all over” the Super Bowl, as if hordes of undocumented immigrants might jump out of the bushes around Levy Stadium. Corey Lewandowski, her assistant, slammed the NFL for selecting a performer “that seems to hate America so much.”

To my ears, the hand-wringing about illegal immigration, performers speaking Spanish and this year’s Latin vibe of the premier American sports event, has an anti-Latino stench to it. Even more alarming to the nativists in the Trump administration must be the statistics that sixty-eight million, or almost twenty percent of the total U.S. population, are Latino. Four out of five Latinos are U.S. citizens, too—including the Puerto Rican Bad Bunny.

Bad Bunny’s acceptance speech at the Grammys, greeted by a standing ovation, alluded to many of these right-wing tropes: “We’re not savages. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We’re humans and we’re Americans,” he said. “The only thing that is more powerful than hate is love. So, please. we need to be different.”

Stew and I certainly will be different, by watching the Super Bowl for the first time, if not for the football but to await Bad Bunny’s performance— and maybe pick up some footballese along the way to impress our straight friends on Monday.

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