|
 |   |
|
EVENTS Fantasy Central Inside Game Video Plus Statitudes Your Turn Message Boards Email Newsletters Golf Guide Cities 
CNNSI.com GROUP
COMMERCE
|  |
Super Perversity
Updated: Wednesday January 24, 2001 1:48 PM
Do you get the feeling we just can't have a real good competition in America anymore? I mean, we are in one, long bad stretch -- going back to the World Series, when the rest of the United States had to suffer through an intramural playoff between two New York City boroughs. Next we had the banana-republic presidential election, and an unsatisfactory 50-50 tie in the senate, thanks to a dead man winning in Missouri. In college football, a bunch of nerds with computers put a team -- Florida State -- in the Orange Bowl instead of a team -- Miami -- that had beaten Florida State in a real game. So the showdown was a fraud and a bummer. The experts say movies are so rotten this year they can't even come up with five finalists for the Academy Awards. Maybe a dead movie will win the Oscar for Best Picture. And now we have a Super Bowl between two boring 50-to-1 shots. The Giants and Ravens are so weak on offense that there is considerable doubt whoever wins will be able to accurately pour a tub of Gatorade upon its coach.
No wonder the ratings for the NFL conference championships were the lowest ever. The only two players in the Super Bowl whom anybody knows about are Jason Sehorn and Ray Lewis -- and that's just because Sehorn proposed to his famous fianceé on television and Lewis was indicted for murder. Uh, football ... ? But the beauty of the Super Bowl is that it really isn't about football. It's a mid-winter American cultural carnival notable for the fact that families actually sit together before the same television set, sans clicker. It is a time of uniting, of civility, a time of compassionate congregation. To most people who watch, the teams playing are quite incidental. Why, I've already had friends tell me they're really looking forward to the game this year because they know the commercials will be so much better than last year, when there were so many insipid dot.com messages. Who knew the collapse of the Nasdaq tech stocks would lead to a more entertaining Super Bowl? And be thankful for small favors. The great thing about the Ravens is that they are so pathetic on offense you can go to the bathroom when they have the ball, confident you'll never have to miss any of the good stuff ... the commercials. But, indisputably, the two most important games in the history of pro football were played between teams from Baltimore and New York. The Colts-Giants overtime NFL championship in 1958 was proclaimed the "greatest game ever played," as Johnny Unitas became the great American hero. That one game really invented pro football as we know it -- and inspired the creation of the American Football League. Then, when Joe Namath and the Jets beat the Colts in 1969 in the most shocking upset, the merger of the two leagues was spiritually consummated, and the Super Bowl established as the prime one-day event in these United States. So despite it all, despite all the dismal predictions, perhaps Baltimore-New York will give us another thriller. The poet whose work inspired the Ravens' name once wrote a story titled The Imp of The Perverse. Aha! Maybe that devilish little scamp is preparing to surprise us with what we least anticipate, a marvelous game full of high-scoring drama. For, as Edgar Allan Poe wrote in The Black Cat: "Perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart." These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNNSI.com. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||
