Monday, February 02, 2009

Lost In Super Bowl


Last year it was the New York Giants. This year it's the Pittsburg Steelers. All hail to them and a big congrats - they played a good tough game. But then, there is always that other side of me that just doesn't understand. Twice I've watched the Super Bowl. Twice I've failed to understand the rules of the game. Not that I ever understood rugby back in England, even though I was forced to play it for a brief while with all the other moaning teenagers in my first year of secondary school. I say I've seen the Super Bowl "twice" now, in the loosest sense because this year I followed most of the 3rd and 4th quarter via online live blogs - I don't have a TV. Incidentally, in the USA, live internet video streaming can be done for Presidential Inaugurations and Election Night speeches, but not for watching 11 overgrown gorillas run around punching each other trying to get a giant egg!

I don't have a TV because I'm not a REAL American. It just so happens that I don't subscribe to nutcase programming (e.g. FOX News and MSNBC) with adverts every 5 minutes between very repetitive nonsense commentary by old-timers about how this year's catch by Larry Fitzgerald, or how that pass by Ben Roethlisberger will go down in history as the greatest ever ever. Even if I were to watch it all live on TV (as I did last year in a youth hostel travel lodge), I'm not going to be enthused about buying Pepsi-Max, Budweiser, or watch Hulu programmes advertised by a seriously facetious Alec Baldwin with alien tentacles. People actually sit through and watch the Super Bowl for that??? Anyway - despite the shamelessly contemptable advertisement and the general all-round stupidity of US TV, a sports game is a sports game and the teams who win the NFL championships are surely very worthy champions considering what they have to go through.