Out of My Mind
Page 35
If you don’t care who wins, it isn’t any fun to watch a football game, so what you have to do in order to enjoy the game is to transfer your allegiance to another team. When Pittsburgh plays Seattle I root for Seattle because I like the sound of their city’s name and I don’t care for the color of the Pittsburgh uniforms.
I hope this explanation will help non-fans enjoy the Super Bowl. This is one of the most important events of the year—the results of which don’t matter one bit to our lives.
TOO MANY GAMES
One trouble with sports now is that their seasons overlap. It used to be that football was played in the fall. Baseball was spring and summer. Basketball was a winter sport.
Hockey was played in the winter because that’s when the lakes and ponds it was played on froze. Now hockey starts in September and ends in February.
Baseball starts in April and keeps going until they play the World Series during the football season in September. The basketball season overlaps both football and baseball. Professional basketball starts in November and doesn’t end until June.
Basketball is a flawed game now because it depends too much on the height of the players. Maybe it’s because I’m only five-foot-nine myself, but I object to a sport in which it’s so important to be seven feet tall.
Basketball doesn’t depend much on the marks the players get in the classroom—if they go at all. When I see two college teams playing basketball, I always wish all the players had to take an exam to make sure they can count. Any player who couldn’t count to ten or spell C-A-T wouldn’t be allowed to play.
I also think there’s too much scoring in basketball. One pro team will often beat another by 116 to 112, and the report in the newspaper will refer to the winner’s “dominance.”
The fact is, in a basketball game these days, the team with the ball almost always scores. A player drives to a point under the basket and simply reaches up and drops the ball through the net.
Maybe they ought to figure out a handicap system. Officials would measure all the players, and if twelve players from one team had a cumulative height of 72 feet (six feet each), and the other team’s total height was 70 feet, the shorter team would start with something like a two-point advantage on the scoreboard.
Sometimes, when there’s nothing else on I want to watch, I’ve looked at some of the NCAA tournament games. I haven’t enjoyed watching these games because half the time I’ve never heard of the colleges playing. I was looking though the names of the sixty-five colleges entered in the NCAA tournament this year and I never heard of seven of them. I suppose it will make someone mad, but the mystery colleges to me are: Belmont, Murray State, Northern Iowa, Pacific, Southern Alabama, Southern and Winthrop. I have just barely ever heard of the early favorite to win the tournament: Memphis. I hardly know George Mason College or University, and that was an early favorite.
I suspect some of the colleges are nothing more than basketball teams attached to something that calls itself an educational institution to get into the tournament.
I’ve often dreamed of going back to college. I’d appreciate learning more now than I did then. It would be fun to register in one of these basketball colleges just to see whether I could pass any of their courses. I certainly couldn’t make their basketball team.
A high school basketball game between two local rivals is healthy fun for a community, but too often, one of the teams with an overly ambitious coach starts cheating. Maybe he encourages a six-foot-eight-inch kid from a town fifty miles away to move to town in exchange for a place to live, or perhaps a car. Maybe he talks a couple of players into repeating their senior year.
There’s often a conflict in a school between the serious teachers who believe that education is of primary importance and the boosters who want to see their team beat the team from the adjoining town. Too often, the teachers lose. If Belmont, Winthrop or Northern Iowa wins the NCAA tournament, I’ll apologize.
IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN SUPER
One regular ticket for the Super Bowl costs about $600. If someone offers you a ticket for $I0, don’t buy it if you want to see the game. In the stadium, the game is an afterthought. It’s treated as though it was an intrusion on the mindless noise flowing endlessly from the stadium speakers.
I have been to all but two Super Bowl games since 1967, and this year may be my last. Going to the game should be a good experience for a football fan but it’s not. Everything about going to the game is unpleasant. The game of football is the last thing the people at the National Football League think of. I realize that I’m probably not the audience they’re aiming at, but I talked to a dozen people at the game and in the bus going back to the hotel who were as offended by the production as I was.
Last year I stayed at the NFL headquarters hotel, the Marriott at the Renaissance Center, and it is in a complex of buildings so confusing to get around that only a master architect like John Portman could have designed it. General Motors uses part of it for executive offices. I was in an elevator with several reporters Saturday, and one of them said maybe the reason GM’s business was in such trouble was that none of the executives could find their way to their offices.
Detroit desperately wanted to have people like their city. It was sad. I was asked a hundred times how I liked Detroit. It amused me because when there’s a big event in New York like a political convention, New Yorkers don’t give a damn whether out-of-towners who come like the city or not.
There were people in red vests who’d been assigned to help strangers find their way around the maze, but they appeared to have been shipped in from Toledo. They had no answers to such basic questions as, “Where is the newsstand?” “Which floor is the newsroom on?” or “Where are the buses to the stadium?”
I arrived at Ford Field more than two hours before kickoff and by the time the game started, I was numb from the noise they were passing off as music. I would have been willing to pay for silence. I kept hoping some disgruntled fan would cut the power line.
The half-time extravaganza took forty-three minutes. I wasn’t interested in watching the half-time show, so I went out back to get some $5 popcorn and a $2.50 bottle of water. I just wandered around, noting, for instance, that Tropicana was “the official grape juice of Super Bowl XL.”
I didn’t want to miss the second half kickoff so, after twenty minutes I went back to my seat. The half-time show wasn’t over. I was shocked to find it hadn’t even started yet. Stagehands were still dragging large pieces of the stage into place on the field. Mick Jagger and his entourage finally came out and performed for about twelve minutes with an inadequate sound system, then workers started the long process of breaking down the stage and dragging the pieces back where they came from.
The blaring from the loud speakers was unremitting throughout the game. During any break in the action—even between plays—the huge screens at either end of the field showed one highlight after another from previous games. No one in the stadium had time to savor the action, anticipate the next play, or exchange a comment with someone sitting near him. Noise was the dominant element in the stadium.
The NFL ought to start putting more emphasis on the football game and less on making money, or it’s going to kill this golden egg-laying goose.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rooney, Andrew A.
Out of my mind / Andy Rooney. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-586-48530-6
814’.54—dc22
2006023497
Andy Rooney, Out of My Mind