By Steve Rhodes
1. The Indianapolis Star‘s front page today.
2. The Indianapolis Star‘s website today.
3. It’s not just the local media on Rex Grossman’s back. The Indy Star’s “Cyber survey” today:
This year’s Super Bowl will be remembered for . . .
_ Peyton Manning and the Colts
_ The Bears’ defense
_ The halftime show
_ The commercials
_ Rex Grossman’s passing
_ The Colts’ defense
_ Other
4. Some other front pages, including “Super Bust” over a photo of Rex Grossman from the Northwest Herald and “Pey Day” from the Daily Independent of Ashland, Kentucky.
5. “What can Vegas offer at a time like this? How about 3.5 miles of silver lining.”
– VisitLasVegas.com
6. Every person named in this story needs to go away. Especially Spade and Piven.
7. “4:58: If CBS has any more technical difficulties, I might have to watch the game on Westwood One Radio.”
– Norman Chad, from the day’s best Super Bowl journal.
8. “8:20: You can take the Bears out of the NFC, but you can’t take the NFC out of the Bears.”
– Chad, ibid.
9. “At their best, [the Bears] worked like Chicago works: With a blend of industry and attitude,” the Sun-Times editorial board opines.
I thought Chicago worked with clout lists and kickbacks.
“[O]n top of the Sox’s recent World Series win, [the Bears’ Super Bowl appearance] speaks to Chicago’s ability to pursue and attain excellence even when the odds, or the critics, are against it,” the paper claims.
What qualities of the city do the continuing failures of the Cubs and Blackhawks speak to?
10. “The critics” are against pursuing excellence? Or attaining it?
11. Are those in-house critics, or just people in bars or something?
12. The Loop played “Bear Down, Chicago Bears” from kickoff to the final gun, according to the Trib’s Phil Rosenthal.
13. “Far better to lose the Super Bowl and wake up in Chicago than to live in Indianapolis and win.”
More sports wisdom from a man who doesn’t know who Peyton Manning is (fourth item) – and wakes up every morning in Northbrook.
14. I think the people of Indianapolis are just glad they don’t wake up as Neil Steinberg.
15. Steinberg has never heard of Prince either.
16. Mariotti. C’mon, you have to look.
17. For much of the last two weeks, I was under the impression there were no black Bears fans. At least that seemed to be the case judging by the fan photos in the Tribune and Sun-Times.
The ultimate irony of this backwardness was on Saturday, when Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith appeared on the Sun-Times front page with the headline “Game Faces.” At the top of the page, as the paper has been doing, the Sun-Times touted itself as having “Chicago’s Best Coverage . . . For True Bears Fans!” True Bears fans in the paper’s imagination meant 14 partying white people.
The Tribune wasn’t any better, though less aggressively stupid.
The white Superfans and Ditka remain the face of the Bears in the city’s imagination, but the team actually has black people on it and black people cheering them on. But just like the Daleys of Bridgeport and their ilk remain the media’s idea of Classic Chicago, white fans are those overwhelmingly presented as True Bears Fans by columnists, reporters, photographers, and phony baloney broadcasters.
18. Today I finally found a black Bears fan in the lower left corner of page four in the Sun-Times – receiving a pizza delivery. The story was about the pizza man.
The Tribune appears to show an African American woman – I don’t want to make assumptions, plus, in this day and age, did you know that newspapers are still almost all in black-and-white (no pun intended) – at the bottom of page 20.
19. “Bears Grit, Pride Reflection Of City They Represent,” the Trib claimed on Sunday in a story by sports editor Dan McGrath.
What a bunch of hokum. They aren’t proud and gritty in Kansas City?! Hello? This is a yuppie marketing financial condo town. The dwindling lunchpail crowd can’t afford to go to Bears games. Our team plays in a spaceship.
Journalist don’t like to let reality interfere with their cherished myths.
20. Of the 1985 Bears, McGrath writes: “They embodied the way Chicagoans like to feel about themselves: Proud. Tough. Resourceful. Successful.”
People in other cities don’t like to feel these things?!
Besides that, the 1985 team was Hollywood! It didn’t represent any notion of blue-collar Chicago – it had a punky QB for God’s sake!
What McGrath is really talking about is how he likes to view his town.
Teams don’t embody cities. Do the Colts embody Indianapolis in any way? Is Indianapolis a town filled with people who like to last-second decisions like Peyton Manning, based on the obstacles they see in front of them?
*
Game Notes:
* Billy Joel hit a lot of wrong notes. What would Simon Cowell have said?
* Couldn’t he have done “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” instead?
* A trailer for Norbit. I have the 12-inch of that MC Young song!
Kickoff: Nine months from now, a lot of kids will be named Devin if he keeps this up and the Bears win.
5:51: Good Devin/Bad Devin.
This whole team is bipolar.
5:52: Worst Super Bowl Matchup Ever.
6: 51: Worst Super Bowl Teams Ever.
Halftime:
* The world doesn’t need to hear “We Will Rock You” ever again. Plus, it’s almost always such a false promise.
* Prince opens with a couple songs from 1984. It’s a good song as far as it goes, but it’s a bit lame for Prince to ask us to “go crazy.” Yeah, man, we’re gonna get nuts!
* Are we gonna let the elevator break us down? Um, do we have a choice?
* “Proud Mary”? Why not a James Brown tribute?
* “All Along the Watchtower”? Why? A Foo Fighters song? It’s the Prince Vegas Revue!
* Although it’s nice for the world to see what a scorching guitar player he is. His actual musical chops are often overlooked. The man can play.
* Yeah, yeah, Purple Rain. I saw that tour 20 years ago. One long version of this song with a James Brown medley in the middle would have been nice.
Second Half:
* A total lack of memorable commercials so far, though the combover beard thing was weirdly compelling and this bank robbery eTrade ad isn’t bad. It’s the bank robbing you!
7:48 Right now the Bears are who the Colts thought they were, but let’s see if they let them off the hook.
7:49: “Bear Down, Brian Griese.”
– E-mail from Eric Emery
7:49: “Am I imagining it or is this about the fifth Super Bowl commercial with talking animals?”
– E-mail from Don Jacobson, who has already suggested The Pained Expressions as a good band name
* The K-Fed commercial isn’t bad.
* The Beer commercials are really bad this year. Thought the hitchhiker one works once you get to the chainsaw guy.
* What was the Over/Under on Grossman fumbles?
* Thomas Jones has been the Bears best player.
* If you look at the stats, this is a total spanking.
* This game is now three hours old.
* World Chumps? Trying to predict tomorrow’s headlines. Probably something sappy about how we love them anyway. Rex Hex? Orange and Blue? Blue Bears?
8:42: How long until the next Grossman INT? I say three more plays.
4th and 9: Nope. That’s it.
So the Bears are the fifth or sixth best team in NFL. The Colts, Patriots, Chargers and Ravens all have to rate above them, and I’m still not convinced the Saints aren’t better too.
Post-game:
* Tony Dungy says that he and Lovie are both Christian coaches, and their accomplishments show that you can succeed doing things the Lord’s way. Whose way would a Jewish coach use to succeed?
*
21. Maybe the Bears should refund taxpayers.
22. “All Together Now: Think, ‘Bears Win!‘” Then after that, think “End Hunger!” and “Get Out of Iraq!” and “Get Warmer!”
23. Jewel-Osco newspaper ad: “GET BEER! Stock Up on ALL Our ‘Super’ Selections!” Pictured: Miller Lite, Bud Light, Samuel Adams, Heineken. Sale prices effective through Wednesday.
24. Smart Jewelers’ newspaper ad used a photo of the old Soldier Field.
25. The line was Colts by seven, but six of eight Sun-Times staffers picked the Bears. Fifteen of 23 Tribune staffers picked the Bears. So much for no cheering in the press box.
26. The first two of four parts of America Beyond the Color Line With Henry Louis Gates Jr. was on somewhere on cable on Sunday afternoon, I didn’t note the channel, and it was excellent. The installments will be rebroadcast at 2:30 a.m. and 3:30 a.m. tonight on WTTW if you want to set your VCR.
Part One is “South: The Black Belt.” “Gates travels to Memphis, Birmingham and Atlanta – once the battlegrounds on which civil rights were won for black southerners in the 1950s and 60s. The very cities from which African Americans fled during the era of legal segregation are today drawing them back by the tens of thousands. But how much have these cities really changed since the civil rights era? Interviewees include Morgan Freeman and Maya Angelou.”
* The interview with the man who founded the Church of the Reconciler was fascinating; he was a racist who read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” cried for three days, and realized his position had been in opposition to God.
27. The Church of the Reconciler has a blog and is known for its Radical Hospitality.
28. Part Two: “Chicago: Streets of Heaven. “Gates goes inside the notorious housing projects in Chicago’s South Side – the Robert Taylor and the Ida B. Wells – to find out from the people who live there what life is like for America’s underclass. What happened to the city of refuge my father’s generation sought in the North; North where ‘the streets of Heaven were paved with gold’? wonders Gates. Caught up in a culture of criminality, poverty and despair, is there any hope for the fifth of black Americans who have been left behind?”
Part Three is about black influence in the corridors of power on the East Coast; Part Four looks at black success in Hollywood.
29. “Eric Klinenberg talking about media consolidation on BookTV? Or Dodge trucks on the Super Bowl? YOU make the TV call.”
– Don Jacobson on his pre-game viewing
30. “As the author of Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media was on C-SPAN2 talking about how and why the nation’s media have come under the thrall of a handful of giant corporations devoted to dumbing down American culture and profoundly misusing the public airwaves for the benefit of small cadre of elites, the Super Bowl broadcast – perhaps the ultimate example of media ‘bigness’ – was going on on CBS. Ironic juxtapositon . . . or just another TV Sunday?”
– Don
31. “The Bears have won more NFL championships at Wrigley Field than the Cubs have won World Series,” The New York Times noted on Saturday.
32. Hype week.
Posted on February 5, 2007