The Stoopid Bowl

(reprinted from last year...it's the same old shit, after all)

Well, here it is again. It's time for the Super Bowl, and you know what? I don't give two shits from Sheboygan about any of it.

My mission regarding the Super Bowl is that every year I try to make it through till after the game without knowing who is playing in it. I know that in my business this probably isn't right, since I am supposed to know what is going on, or at least have a vague idea. Sometimes I succeed and sometimes I fail, but at least I make the effort to remain clueless on this idiocy.

I hate the fucking Super Bowl. I hate everything about it, from the hype that begins in August to the discussions I have to endure in bars and coffee shops in which people who can't find their asses with two hands and a GPS make "predictions" on who is going to win or what the "over/under" will be.

And then there is the television hype, though I am spared that, thank Christ, because I had the good sense to get rid of my television several years ago, which has turned out to be one of the smartest things I've ever done.

I don't like sports. Actually, I take that back. I don't like pro sports. At least high school and college sports "build character" and help young idiots like I was back in the day meet girls. I especially don't like football. I played one year of it in high school, and I was made into an offensive guard, which has to be the worst position in the world. Anyone who plays offensive guard, a position in which you get the living shit beaten out of you every minute and half, has to be a fucking moron unless they are getting at least half a million dollars a year for it, and all I got out of it was a few lousy dates and a JV letter.

And I think rec sports are fine, too. I played hockey in some pretty decent rec leagues until I was 34 years old, and since I am a singular species of idiot I insisted on doing it without a helmet or a mouthguard. If you ever saw me without the seven front teeth I spat out from that nonsense, I can guarantee you that you'd be scared to death to eat corn without a mouthguard, much less play hockey without one.

But I think I started hating pro sports when the salaries got completely out of control. I had a friend who was a bit of a visionary, and way, way before salaries started going through the roof he used to say how unfair it was that players didn't make more money seeing as that they are the best in the world at what they do. I don't really buy that argument, because I bet some of the people reading this are pretty goddam good at what they do, and I bet they aren't pulling down seven figures for it.

I have a case to cite from my own family regarding pro salaries. My mother's cousin played nine years of major league baseball. This wasn't just the usual family bullshitter claiming to the young'uns that he used to be a ballplayer. I remember when he was playing, and even have a baseball card from when he was with the Phillies. His first name was Jimmie, not James, which may be a clue that I am not descended from urban sophisticates from Philadelphia's Main Line.

Anyway, he was a second-string catcher and never made shit for money, at least compared with what a second-string catcher makes today. But I imagine he was happy with it, seeing as that he got to spend all those years sitting around on the bench and signing autographs and chewing tobacco and warming up pitchers and pinch-hitting once in a while. He did actually start once in a while, I guess when the main guy had a hangover or the clap or something.

Jimmie died on his farm when he was in his early 50s. He had finished his ballplaying career and gone back to farming. Can you imagine that happening today? Guys who play nine years in the majors, even if they spend most of it playing pocket pool on the bench, are obscenely rich. In fact, most kids who sign their first big-league contract can immediately fill a railroad car with money if they for some stupid reason wanted to do so.

The one good thing I can say about the Super Bowl is that it isn't basketball, which is about 40 times worse than football. If Orwell's "1984" ever came, I would imagine that when I would be summoned to Room 101 - and you know sure as shit that I would be, and pronto -- there would be three TVs tuned to basketball games, a coffeepot just out of my reach and a few sundry asskissers hanging around asking if I needed anything (other than coffee and a change of fucking channel, of course).

So enjoy your stupid Super Bowl if you must, but just don't waste my fucking time telling me about it.

The whole thing sickens me. Here you will have millions of people having parties at which they drink shitty beer and eat mayonnaise-based crap that has been sitting out for hours, and at the end of the game half of them will be running around in their $79.99 "official" jerseys bought on $8-per-hour Crap-Mart salaries and screaming "We Won!!!"

You didn't fucking win, folks. So knock it off.