That Time That Superman Scored the Winning Touchdown
It’s 1986, and Clark Kent is running across the end zone carrying two opposing football players on his back. His teammates, his own teammates, scowl at the sight as they sit on the sidelines. For whatever reason, Jonathan Kent stands on the sidelines talking to the unnamed coach, who can’t hide his ebullience. He talks about how Clark just won them another game. Lana Lang walks up to him, saying, “Oh, Clarkie, you were magnificent again! The best yet!”
“I do keep getting better and better. Don’t I, Lana?” It gets worse from there.
Today we’re going to talk about That Time That Superman Scored the Winning Touchdown and how, paradoxically, humanizing Superman made him less relatable to people and ultimately less relevant.
Let’s get past that dialogue, and get to what’s really bizarre with this moment.
His father, who seemed more in line with Clark’s teammates, finally has had enough. He pulls Clark off the field and tells him that he’s disappointed in him for winning the football game. He’s disappointed with his son for succeeding beyond anyone’s loftiest expectations in a sport that he allowed him to play for years, despite knowing that he had powers like super strength, invulnerability, and flight. Then he tells him about his alien origins. Why he didn’t do that countless other games before, or even before he thought about taking the field in this odd inversion of the Clark as the team manager in Superman: the Movie is actually moot. The whole lead up to this was to show that Clark lived an ideal life before being shown that he wasn’t from Earth.
This scene is supposed to be the turning point in Clark’s life. The Kents kept trying to teach Clark to never use his powers “to make (himself) better than other people, to make other people feel useless.” But that’s exactly what they sent him out to do when they signed off on him wearing football cleats. Kids can’t just join sports without parental approval, and they couldn’t do it in 1986, either. The Kents knowingly sent an alien who was already strong enough to throw barns at people out on the field to wreck other kids. That’s not Clark’s fault, even though he knew he had super powers. It's their fault. They did this to other kids.
To what end?
We find out why almost immediately. After the Kents find him in the rocket, instead of being that awkward shy kid, who hid what he was from everyone else, Clark fit in right away. He was popular. Lana Lang likes him, and she decides he’s going to be her boyfriend. And he is. The Kents let him join the football team, knowing what they did about him because they wanted him to have the happiest experience possible. In other words, they were spoiling him, and they were letting other kids suffer for their kid’s happiness. Clark Kent’s life was charmed. He never faced any real personal challenges or issues, at least in the Byrne origin.
It stays that way, even after the reveal of Clark’s alien origins. What happens after this? He moves to Metropolis, gets a job as a reporter. Along the way, he writes a novel that doesn’t sell poorly. He marries the woman he wants to marry, and they have a kid who doesn’t turn out so bad.
What was the purpose of all of this? It was to humanize Superman. From 1938 until 1986, Clark Kent was mostly a disguise that Superman used to live a daily life. Clark Kent was milquestoast. Steve Lombard (the football player turned Sports Anchor) relentlessly pranked and insulted him. Lois Lane wanted nothing to do with him. He got pushed around constantly. He wasn’t entirely happy about it, either, but he accepted it as part of the price he had to pay to be Superman. Who would want that life? What person who could do something about it wouldn’t?
The answer to that last question was to make Clark Kent the person, and it was to make Clark Kent someone people wanted to be. He was a football star. He had a life completely worth living. The problem was that this life wasn’t interesting. Clark was a football star because he was an alien with superpowers. He didn’t work for it. We never got to see him bang his head against the wall writing a novel. One day he was a novelist. The next he was married to a functional Lois.
He’s physically the strongest hero in the DCU Universe, and he won the lottery of superpowers. He has a great marriage, living parents full of love and great advice, a solid job, a side gig, a nice apartment, and a childhood full of great memories and (dubiously earned) trophies. It’s a life most people would want.
Does anyone see the problem with this? Where’s the tension? Where’s the pain? Where’s the challenge? Where’s the interest? Where’s the story? Who relates to this guy?
Before Crisis, Clark resembled the character Christopher Reeve played in Superman: the Movie. He was this bumbling mess of neuroses, and he wanted to win over Lois Lane. He didn’t fit in because he couldn’t. He was an alien, and he knew it all his life. He never had that moment where he could be just like every other kid. He simply wasn’t. This played out beautifully in the Reeve’s first Superman movie, where Clark is on the sideline managing the uniforms of the football team. Everyone looks down on him, and he couldn’t show them what he could do. They knock down all of his work because they can. They did it because they knew Clark Kent won’t do anything about it.
Finally, he breaks. He does show off, at least a little. He runs at super-speed, passing a train, and he arrives back at home before the rest of the kids, who were riding in cars He has one moment, one little victory after what obviously was years of pain. He talks to his Pa Kent about football, and he said that he could score a touchdown every time he got the ball. His dad said that he knew, but that’s not what he was put on earth to do. He could never show the world what he could do. He was constantly hiding who he was, and he was supposed to keep hiding.
That’s relatable. We do that. We hide ourselves because we’re afraid we won’t be accepted. Then his dad dies right in front of his eyes. With all of his powers, he couldn’t do a thing about it. That’s pain. That’s loss. That’s a story.
Then he becomes Superman. His life starts to work. He and Lois actually do hit it off, and he tells his Kryptonian father (at least a holographic version of him) that he met a woman. He’s immediately told that he was forbidden to be with her as a Kryptonian. He decides to renounce his powers, and become human. He gets beat up by a sucker punching bully. Then the Earth gets taken over by villains from his planet, while he can do nothing about it. What does he have to do? He had to give up the woman he loved because there was a greater good. Maybe it wasn’t Casablanca, but that’s a pain that while we can at least understand.
What was it that made Superman more relatable? The fact that he was an alien. He didn’t fit in. He was too powerful to get people as Superman, and when he tried to be a person, he was a complete disguise. He was nerdy. He was cowardly. He was everything that wasn’t sexy or charismatic. He had good jobs as a reporter, but he didn’t live in a glamorous apartment. He didn’t have the sexy wife. He was just a guy who wanted to find a place where he could fit in, and he said that numerous times in the comics.
That’s something we can all understand, wanting to fit in, and his alienation came from him literally being an alien. Without that, he became bland and hard for people to get into. Clark Kent isn't supposed to be cool. He's supposed to be us.
We don’t go from being the star of our football team to the world’s greatest superhero. We don’t get to live life without a doubt. We worry about what others think and do. We feel loss and pain. Shouldn’t our heroes? Shouldn’t the brightest, shiniest hero of them all know what it’s like to feel what we feel? Wouldn’t that humanize him? Ironically, in emphasizing the human in Superman, writers lost the real humanity in him.
Since 1986, Superman’s star has faded in the comics world, and Batman’s has risen. I’m not going to say that all of it is because of the change in Superman. After all, the Dark Knight made Batman this hyper cool terror to all. Still, looking back at football jock Superman, wouldn’t a guy we could all sympathize with have a little more staying power?