Super Bowl Sunday

Super Bowl Sunday appears in Andy Warhol’s diary as a social proposition rather than a game report. In an entry dated January 25, 1987, he imagines the football stands as a place to meet macho men and tells Paige that, if she wants to meet men and get married, she should go to football games instead of the ballet. He offers bowling in Brooklyn as another option, describing Manhattan as too sophisticated.

A Sunday in the Diary

The entry does not recount a match, name teams, or report a result. Instead, the day’s football spectacle becomes a setting for Warhol’s practical, sharply drawn advice about where people might meet. The record also moves through subjects far beyond sports: he comments on events in the Philippines, noting that Mrs. Aquino’s guards had killed thirteen people at the palace, and speculates about why it happened. The juxtaposition places Super Bowl Sunday within the diary’s wider record of passing news, social plans, and personal observations, without turning the entry into a game narrative.

Warhol’s Advice to Paige

Warhol’s recommendation rests on a contrast between the public atmosphere of football and the ballet’s more refined social world. He frames the stands as a place to encounter the kind of men Paige might want to meet, then makes his advice concrete by suggesting Brooklyn bowling as an alternative to Manhattan sophistication. These are his judgments about social settings, not claims about the actual crowd or a particular game. The day’s sporting occasion serves as a prompt for his conversational theory of courtship and place.

Ballet as a Counterpoint

The advice lands against Paige’s own plans. She had tickets for the Joyce Theater, where Robert LaFosse was making a guest appearance in Karole Armitage’s ballet, with costumes by David Salle. She had also arranged dinner with New York City Ballet people to discuss a curtain Warhol was being asked to design. The contrast is therefore especially pointed: while Paige’s plans connected dance to her work and social life, Warhol redirected the question of meeting men toward football and bowling. Super Bowl Sunday matters in the entry chiefly through this mismatch between the day’s stadium spectacle and the evening’s ballet-centered engagements.