So over the whole Super Bowl hype
The best part of Super Bowl Sunday is what’s in the fridge. (mrpbody33/Flickr.com under a Creative Commons 2.0 license.)
I hung out with my Dad on Wednesday night and he subjected me to some hour-long cable special on Super Bowl XLIII. Come on now, that was last weekend. Is a commemorative prime-time feature really necessary at this point? Not to mention a production quality that reflected its three-day inception, the concept of the program was an insult to my intelligence that I might have forgotten such a game that I watched last Sunday (sidebar to film students: likely job opening at ESPN).
And what a game it was. Putting aside a heavy bias manifested from both my mother and stepfather growing up in Pittsburgh, I have to say that there was no shame in losing that game. After all, how many times do you get to see the Forrest Gump touchdown during the bowl of all bowls? How many Super Bowls end up becoming legitimate fourth quarter games? I haven’t been this engrossed in a pro football game since the early ’90s, when we actually thought the Bills had a chance.
But after a week of eating re-heated Buffalo wings and guzzling the skank-end of a quarter barrel, I think it’s time to be over the whole football thing. Although the concept dates back to the Romans, where warriors from various communities gather to fight it out for bragging rights; the spirit of the whole thing seems to have gotten lost in translation.
First of all, there’s no fighting in football. You can’t claim ultimate supremacy of toughness without throwing a few punches. Ask any hockey fan.
There’s also no holding, pushing or hitting the guy that wants to catch the ball. Isn’t it part of the defense’s job to make sure that the other team doesn’t get the ball? Now before you flood me with hate mail, I understand that most of those rules are meant to prevent player injury and maintain the flow of the game. After all, if nobody can score, then who is going to watch?
Advertising pundits have so much control over the league that they have built more time into mitigating plays than actual game play. Whenever we tune in to a game, we spend at least as much time being sold beer and pick-up trucks than actually watching sport. It’s worse than NASCAR.
After spending a week in a week in the mecca of marketing known as Orange County, I just prefer my Sunday entertainment to be ad-free. I also prefer to witness battle first-hand, but that’s beside the point.
I’m sure that ten years from now, while I’m eating cheesey-poofs in my basement apartment at one in the morning, I’ll be glad to take a stroll down memory lane and re-live Holmes’ epic catch. For now, though, I’ll put the corporate on the shelf and head down to Old Man to hit the waves.