(The Imp Of The Perverse is either a) ignoring a request to play Wicked Witch’s “Y Wood U Call It Rock?”, b) denying he’s stolen Dead Meadow’s amps or c) considering Tony Kornheisher’s assessment that “Prince is the most sexual of all rock performers”)
Media week is just about over, which means that the Super Bowl is about to transition from its current state — in which it has done its annual bloat into some sort of world-historic event periodically interrupted by Bud Light ads in which comical things happen to animals — into an actual football game. In this case, one in which both teams are solid, both possessed of some very obvious flaws, and both more-or-less bereft of players with interesting personalities. The exception being the Bears stacked-wit-sociopaths defense, but Ricky Manning, Jr. getting on some “we must protect this house” shit at his Denny’s (his! hear that, Jew faggots?) and Tank Johnson’s burgeoning RPG collection aren’t the sort of stories most papers like to run before The Big Game. If this clumsy media buildup went on a week longer, though, who knows. We could be seeing “where are they now” stories on Kordell Stewart and Lindy Infante.
Jeff Johnson is as tired of all this as anyone else, but the man’s got a job to do:
Two weeks is way too much time for hundreds of idiosyncratic dissections of geographic coincidences, chats with bitter veterans, and puzzling ruminations about how sports bring us all together when really the Super Bowl is mainly about gambling and wacky, expensive commercials.
So having said that, this Super Bowl post will not be about America, bootstraps, or any other bullshit, while feebly trying to suppress my real sportswriterly desires:
¢ To propose to Tom Brady in a classy restaurant with an indoor waterfall while Simon and Garfunkel™s œBridge Over Troubled Water plays softly in the background.
¢ To be one of Michael Vaccaro of the NY Post™s best buddies, skating around with him, wearing immaculate Montreal Canadiens jerseys, then getting a milkshake, and pretending our lives were the basis of the movie Diner.
¢ To watch Donald Trump and George Steinbrenner and Rudy Giuliani watch Derek Jeter make love to the most beautiful woman in the world on the pitcher™s mound at Yankee Stadium as John Fogerty™s œCenterfield blasts from the P.A.
¢ To play checkers with Bob Costas in the window of a Howard Johnson™s in St. Louis.
¢ To trick Boomer Esiason out of at least $5,000.
¢ To sack Sean Salisbury on a subway platform.
¢ To watch Colts™ fan Jared Fogle gain back most of his weight after his team gets crushed by the Bears.
There’s more good stuff in the piece, but the comments section is pretty rich, too. About an even split between people who found the piece “unreadable” (why does Vice have a football column, anyway? and did these people think the article was actually going to be about MSTRKRFT or something?), with a star turn by some guy who spent much of a day trying to find an opportunity to puke on Skip Bayless, who was in Miami for Cold Pizza. Didn’t see Skip’s appearance, but I bet he gave T.O. both barrels!