A Different Kind of Super Bowl

Just in case you’re visiting from Mongolia, or Mars, and don’t know (you’d be about the only ones who don’t), tomorrow (3 February 2008) is Super Bowl Sunday. Everybody will be glued to the tube, watching the endless pregame shows, and the million-dollar-a-minute commercials, and maybe even the football game. Everybody.

Well, almost everybody.

I won’t.

But don’t tell Quilly, who’s planned the game-time menu.

And don’t tell anybody in Maine, who, like the rest of New England USA, is gloating over the unbeaten Patriots. Along with the World Series-winning Red Sox. The top-of-the-league Celtics. The one-goal-away-from-the-championship Revolution. Hell, even the Bruins are in contention for the Stanley Cup. In the year 2008 of the Common Era, Nirvana is being a follower of professional sports cheating in Boston.

You heard me.

Oh? You didn’t read today’s story about the former Patriots assistant who hints that illegal videotaping of opposing coaches has been part of the New England modus operandi since 1998? And why was the National Football League in so much of a hurry to claim authority over the cheating allegations, and then to destroy the evidence of the Belichek-led surreptitious surveillance?

And yes, it would be nice if Our Elected Representatives would care to pay attention to the minor issues before them, like passing a national budget, and bringing the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. etc. etc. to some sort of positive conclusion. Rather than sticking its sandstone-and-marble edifice into the National [sigh] Football League’s business.

But on the other hand, Congress doesn’t usually go where there aren’t stories to be told that might win them votes. Sports fans are a minority in these Untied States, Super Bowl statistics notwithstanding. You can hack them all off and still prosper on the second Tuesday in November if the story’s juicy enough. So what is the NFL hiding?

Besides steroids, that is. Remember them, Boston sports fans? What? No real Red Sox were implicated in the Mitchell Report? We wrote off Roger Clemens in 1996, you say; all that needle stuff happened while Roger was a Yankee? And Eric Gagne was a rent-a-player, and a failed one to boot, he doesn’t count? Eh? OK. So who wrote the Mitchell Report, again? George Mitchell? A once and future Red Sox employee?!? Hmmm …

And meanwhile, the NFL and NBA are heeding the advice of their lawyers (which baseball did not) and refusing to investigate performance-enhancing drugs in their leagues until told to. After all, they have drug screening in place. To catch those who are least informed, least wary. Like [ahem] Rodney Harrison. The heart and soul of his team’s defense.

The New England Patriot defense.

Bill Belichek is famous for his ability to say nothing. And to get his players to say nothing. They have that kind of discipline in the Cosa Nostra. Hmmm ….

You know how New England sports fans are going to feel when they discover that all their new-found success is about as real, about as authentic, as professional wrestling?!?

We used to ask that question in the playground all the time, when one of us got trapped in something terminally embarrassing.

“How do you feel?”

“Cheap.”

Which is how your wallet feels after you’ve shelled out – if you can – for a seat in the arena for a major league game.

Or paid enough in satellite dishes, and high-definition screens that take up half of your house, and speakers that will blow down half the neighborhood, to justify the gall of television networks to charge a million dollars a minute for advertising time. And for the advertisers to pay it.

The gall that permits the sports networks, like certain computer software providers that shall go nameless, Bill, to rack in billions of dollars for shoddy, corrupt, dishonest products.

While half of Waianae lives in a shoe, or on the beach. To say nothing of New Orleans, New York, the entire state of Michigan …

Some of whom might count themselves fortunate to have access to the bowl I do expect to be visiting sometime during Super Bowl Sunday. Considering its importance to the modern middle-class American household, I guess I could call it Super.

Flush.

  – O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2008 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.