;There is no conceivable outcome of this Super Bowl that would allow it to qualify as a satisfying viewing experience. It could go into fifty overtimes and have half of the players devoured by bats, and what you'd be left with would still be the Ravens and the Giants. The winning coach could die from a heart attack after being soaked with Gatorade, and you still wouldn't be compensated for the loss caused by his very presence in the game to begin with. You wouldn't even feel like laughing. We here at the eXile would have laughed out loud if Jimmy Johnson had ever died of an aneurism on the field, but... Brian Billick? Jim Fassel? Who gives a fuck? These guys could be our own fathers and we wouldn't recognize them.
The only real thing to hope for, as we watch this game- and we will watch it, unfortunately-is that an act of God will interrupt not the game itself, but the entire geographical area, or the nation of America, during the live Super Bowl broadcast. There is a precedent which makes this kind of hope not entirely unreasonable. There was the Giants-A's World Series of 1989, when an earthquake nearly swallowed San Francisco in the middle of Al Michaels's color call. Something like that, only on a much larger scale, could rescue this upcoming Giants-Ravens game. A thermonuclear attack on the United States would be the best case scenario: given the relative strategic unimportance of Tampa Bay (the location of the game), there would probably be time to hear the reports of the destruction of New York, Washington, Los Angeles and the Bay area before the skies darkened over Fassel's Òthunder and lightning" running attack and a single flash of light vaporized the entire crowd. Archeologists would later find the radioactive shadows of 300-pound Floridian fans-and their ÒJohn 3.16" inspiration placards-burned into the walls of Raymond James stadium...the ump cam would be found, minus the hat, buried under 40 meters of sand and worms two miles away... Now that would be a game: that would be worth the price of admission.
But that's not going to happen, in all probability, and so we're left now to try to look at the bright side of not only this game, but the whole 2000 NFL season. It was not without its bright spots. We'll try to list them all briefly here, in our final comments on this dreadful season past:
1. The Washington Redskins sucked.
The bad thing about being a football fan is that there are 31 teams, and 30 of them have to end in hideous disappointment. If you were a Cleveland Browns fan, a New England Patriots fan, or a San Diego Chargers fan, you were doomed to suffer from the very first kickoff; if you were a St. Louis Rams or Indianapolis Colts fan, you were fated to suffer even worse. Whether you root for a bad team that makes you ashamed to reveal the name of your home city in public, or for a good team that under-performs and eventually loses in a wretched bitch-slapping to the disgusting Saints or Dolphins, your entire experience of being a fan is bound to leave you with a bad taste in your mouth for the entire off-season. The only guaranteed way to win is to not be a fan, which is to say to not watch the games and devote your time to more profitable activities: investing in Raytheon and General Electric, supporting Vladimir Putin, etc.
The 2000 season was different, however. This season, you could be a fan and have an almost guaranteed chance of success. All you had to do was be like most of America and root against the Washington Redskins. Their owner, the arresting Daniel Snyder (who keeps a red phone line open from his stadium box to a table near the coach on the field), made us all anti-Redskins fans before the season by dropping $100 million on the biggest, most overpriced collection of ass-hole free agents in sports history. He all but guaranteed a victory in the Super Bowl, going so far as to invite opposing scouts to attend the team's practices during training camp.
dennThe Redskins didn't come close. Not only did they not make the big game, not only did they not make the playoffs, they were crushed like bugs by bad teams all year long. Awful quarterbacks like Charlie Batch tormented Òunstoppable" Deion Sanders throughout the season, throwing at him time and again, making him look like not the fastest DB in the world, but the absurdity he is: a aging black born-again Christian in a pimp hat with his own rap label. Who could you want to see lose more? No one, that's who. The Redskins failure by itself made up for at least two Cowboys-49ers Bowl victories in the last decade.
2. Dennis Miller will be buried under a polar ice cap by the next season.
ABC's experiment with rearranging the crew of "Monday Night Football" resulted in a spectacular failure, which may end up sinking the network's whole sports department. Miller as a color commentator might just have been the unfunniest phenomenon in the history of the human race. Monday Night Football even had a special joint web-site with britannica.com, for God's sake, to explain Miller's atrocious jokes. You can look it up yourself at: http://espn.go.com/abcsports/mnf/sights_s ounds/dmiller/, and in fact you probably should, because all traces of Miller himself will be probably soon be erased, a la Lev Trotsky, from the collective memory. Here's an example of the Encyclopedia Britannica dissection of a Miller joke, or a ÒMiller moment", as ABC insisted on calling them. This one came in week 14, during the Chiefs-Patriots game.
Referring to: A kick return by Chiefs running back Mike Cloud.
Miller said: ÒA cirrus runback!"
The reference: To the wispy tendrils of high clouds usually found between 20,000 and 40,000 feet above sea level. Composed exclusively of supercooled ice crystals, cirrus (Latin for Òcurl of hair") clouds may produce snow that generally evaporates before reaching the earth. The first International Cloud Atlas was published in 1896, and the study of clouds became more important during World War I when the rise of aviation required short-range weather forecasting.
During that same game Miller commented over a blimp shot of Boston harbor: ÒThere's the U.S.S. Constitution, otherwise known as "Old Raymond Burr.'" A man capable of making such jokes should be thown down a salt mine. He will be. Good riddance.
3. Troy Aikman's head exploded.
Cowboy haters have been waiting for this for years.
People say they don't like to root
for any player to get injured, but this is
different. This is Troy Aikman. He is impossible not to hate, just as it's been
impossible not to enjoy these last five years or so of his team's decline, when
DL after DL kept landing on his head, wearing away his skull to the point
where his brains were separated from the air by helmet alone. The one saving
grace of football is that the sheer violence of it can force even the dullest of
minds of the rails of the endless cliche. After his last concussion, Aikman,
the ultimate cliche merchant, looked like a man who'd been impaled on a parking
meter. He couldn't even bring himself to say anything about Òwanting to get
back out there" or being determined to Òhelp the team out any way I can." All he
could do was stare off into the distance. You could see that he would have
traded just about anything - all the money, the championships, the private
audiences with Republican party chairmen-just to be able to remember his name
again. These are small consolations, but in life we all have to be thankful for the little things. See you at the Giants-Ravens game, and then...next season...