Not News in Boga

Here’s what I know about the Super Bowl (of American football): the Green Bay Packers won the first two and Joe Namath and the New York Jets won the third one. There have been others, lots of others. I think this year’s edition is #49 or as the NFL so pompously loves to call it XLIX (plus sales tax?).

The biggest story right now judging from its placement and frequency in my news feed is the antics of those cheaters from Foxboro Stadium, Massachusetts. This version of the deflated balls story absolutely cracks me up.

My favorite part of the headline is "again." And, I know, when you saw ‘deflated balls’ in the body of the stories you were thinking Barry Bonds working out with A-Rod; not necessarily wrong either, I might add, just not the (d)roids we were looking for (this time).

Say it with me: It’s a sporting event. And it’s a sporting event that just about no one else on earth plays, except the Canadians and they have a wider field, more guys on it and only three downs to do stuff. 

Of course, we’ve come a considerable distance from the University of Arizona Symphonic Marching Band, Grambling State University Marching Band, Al Hirt, and the Arcadia (California) High School Drill Team and Flag Girls as the half-time entertainment at the first one.

I do remember a couple of years after that me and my brother, Kelly, sitting awkwardly in a family room many miles from our own home for Super Bowl III as our hosts, the brothers Vincent and Arthur, beat one another senseless while Joe Willie Namath and the Jets of New York easily defeated, Tom Matte and the Baltimore Colts. For purposes of this reminiscence, those two were the half-time entertainment.

The stridency and anger in all of this confounds me. I cannot begin to imagine how fevered you have to be to believe within the context of the world in which we live, that this is news. Maybe if one of the Patriots had punched a football while in an elevator and knocked it out cold, we could have skipped all of this off-week trauma and drama. Almost worked for Ray.

You would need to snort the lines on the Jersey Turnpike, from 6A to 14B (never did learn what became of exit 5. Lost in the flood maybe?) to believe any of this Deflate-gate mattered.

We have 2000 plus people slaughtered in Nigeria by relentless lunatics in the service of a God who most surely has turned His face from them by now and no one blinks once. much less twice.

Then just past the clean-up of deflated footballs brouhaha in aisle three you have others having a meltdown because they've only got the short charger cord for their cell phone. Funny the way it is....

-bill kenny