03 February 2009

Maybe I'll like the Grey Cup more?

Once, when I was a little girl, I ran into the kitchen and yelled to my mom: "Look at me mom! I'm Doug Flutie!" Thus began and ended my affection for football.


I've never watched the Superbowl before, but I watched it on Sunday because the family members that are currently supporting me during my unemployment invited some people over and my options were a) sit alone in my room, or b) watch the Superbowl with some drunk people and have a little fun. Only one of us really even liked football, and the rest of us were just watching for no real good reason, as far as I could tell. We made quarter bets on things like first point, first touchdown, first commercial after kick-off, etc. Having no prior knowledge of football, I felt at a bit of a loss. But when I was told that the Cardinals were the underdog, I knew they would win. If a lifetime of inspirational sports movies has taught me anything, it’s that the favourite to win will do well in the first half, but the underdogs will rally in the second half and be triumphant. So, I placed all my bets based on that philosophy. For a while there, it looked like that was a great move, but then in the last few minutes, the other team pulled ahead and my underdogs lost. So sad. I’m down 50 cents.

I gotta say, football makes no sense to me, and I’ll probably never make any effort to learn anything more about it. I mean, if I watch it once every 20+ years, what’s the point? Did you know that some of what we see on the TV screen doesn’t appear on the field? Like, there are lines and signs that we see, but they aren’t there in real life. And the coach for the winning team was very young, and looked like Foreman from House. There was one really funny part, where one of the Cardinals made a leap to tackle someone (I presume) and totally missed, so he was basically just throwing himself on the ground with gusto, nowhere near the action. Oh! And NBC does this thing, when the stats for the players come up, they show little headshots of the players – but they don’t show still pictures, it’s like a film clip of the players staring into the camera and trying not to move and sometimes they blink and some of them were really freakin’ scary looking.

And the commercials sucked, but that’s because we had the Canadian feed, so there was commercials for Dartmouth Sportsplex and some local Liberal guy. Hardly entertaining. I’ve since read that the Springsteen halftime show is being called the best in Superbowl history. My ass. I haven’t seen all the Superbowl halftime shows, but there’s no way there isn't at least one more entertaining that Bruce Springsteen running crotch-first into the camera. And I’m not just saying that because U2 did the halftime show in 2002 (as a 9/11 tribute, no less). I will say that the post-bowl episode of The Office had the single funniest opening EVER in an Office episode. In fact, the first half was probably the funniest 20 minutes the Office has ever done. And that's saying something.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The funniest 20 minutes of The Office, ever?! This fact is going to make it extra hard to wait for the DVD.

-Justin

Anonymous said...

You're right. Football makes no sense. I worked on a football movie on summer (actually I worked on two of them that summer), and for about 8 weeks I sort of understood the game. Then I lost that skill...kind of like learning a language, I guess.