The Sporting Life:
The Public Professor’s Sports Column
First thing first: Evil was defeated yesterday. The God Damned Patriots were laid to rest. And not only did Pretty Boy Tom Brady and Ugly Boy Bill Belichick suffer the ignominy of defeat in front of a hundred million of their best friends, but as per my blog post from last week, people can now begin endless rounds of speculation about how good this team ever really was in light of their ability to win Super Bowls when they were cheating and their propensity for losing them now that they presumably do not.
Knowing that will now forever be part of the conversation makes me smile a little bit.
However, the Super Bowl also produced a couple of things that did not make me smile, either because they were repugnant or sadly pathetic.
Let’s start with the sadly pathetic: Madonna and M.I.A.
It begins with a cardinal rule of the 21st century. If you are headlining the Super Bowl Halftime show, it means you haven’t been culturally relevant for about 20 years. It’s a litany of Has-Beens and Never Weres, and each performance is little more than a juke box of greatest hits that now only get played on oldies stations.
If you’ve been tabbed to play the Super Bowl, no one under the age of 40 could care less about you, and most people under the age of 30 only have a foggy idea of who you are. So Madonna fit the bill perfectly.
I remember catching a TV interview with Madonna in the late 1990s. It was thrilling. Because she was daring and stylish? Hardly. It’s because that was the first time I espied some crow’s feet around her eyes, which instantly told me that she would soon be going away. Finally. That this talentless shock maven would no longer be able to peddle her inane brand of sexuality, which is what her entire career was predicated on.
Of course that was naive of me. I didn’t appreciate the absolutely ubiquitous role plastic surgery would come to play in popular culture. Madonna of course has had her shar
e. And as I watched that stick of a woman stiffly prance around the stage, I swear I could see the knife scars right where her bags should have been.
No doubt Madonna is smart enough to know that her relevance is long past peak, which would explain why she surrounded herself with younger performers, including M.I.A.
Oh, M.I.A. Lynn Hirschberg’s hit piece on her in The New York Times a couple of years ago proved to be a case of two people deserving each other. Not only did it reveal the singer to be a näive brat, but follow-ups quickly exposed Hirschberg as a lazy, french-fry obsessed hack of dubious ethics.
M.I.A. has obviously been deeply influenced by Madonna and may possess even less talent. So their pairing on the stadium stage in Indianapolis was fitting. And as if passing the baton from one generation to the next, it was Madonna who played it clean and M.I.A. who tried to “shock” us by flipping the bird to the NBC camera.
What bad girl she is! Angry! Angry! Naughty!
Unoriginal. Lame. No one cared.
Not only did most people not notice when it happened, but TiVo reported no appreciable blip in people going back to watch it again. Whatever. Has Beens and Never Weres.
It makes me miss the days of Up With People.
Now onto the repugnant. Giants Quarterback Eli Manning was the game’s MVP. In a sport that features twenty-two starting players on each team, I think It’s pretty silly to pick one of them as the most important. Quarterbacks often win the award by default, and that was the case here. Eh, no big deal.
The outrage was having post-game emcee Dan Patrick award Manning a shiny, new black Corvette. This is a now on-again, off-again practice that goes back to post-WW II America, when most athletes earned middle class salaries, and many fans felt a real kinship with players who often actually lived among them. So once upon a time, rewarding a player with a new car for a doing a great job was kind of nice.
For the record, Eli Manning just finished the third year of a seven-year contract that will pay him $97,500,000.00. That was an extension granted three years into the original six-year 54,000,000.00 contract he signed as a rookie in 2004 at the age of twenty-three.
Patrick seemed embarrassed to participate in the farce, and Manning looked like he absolutely did not give a shit about receiving a new car that, when tricked out, has a price tag over $75,000 dollars.
The whole affair was insulting and repulsive, particularly amid the worst recession within the living memory of anyone under the age of seventy-five. Enough’s enough of that nonsense. Let the Hundred-Million Do
llar Man buy his own damned sports car. He probably wants a Porche anyway.
P.S.: As far as the Super Bowl commercials were concerned . . . God damn, I just don’t give a shit. I think I simply don’t have it in me to find joy in multi-national corporations pitching me their crappy wares.