Actually, this might be my first post on the 2008 season. No matter. Your response, I imagine, ranges from “Huh?” to “Good.” My friends and fans, I’m well aware, predominantly lack any interest in sports, especially the organized variety, if they don’t feel active antipathy toward them. Whether they [...]]]> … at least until the preseason begins.

Actually, this might be my first post on the 2008 season. No matter. Your response, I imagine, ranges from “Huh?” to “Good.” My friends and fans, I’m well aware, predominantly lack any interest in sports, especially the organized variety, if they don’t feel active antipathy toward them. Whether they follow this blog or not.

It’s certainly furthest from my intent to antagonize my friends or fans. At the same time: occasionally I agonize over, What’s this blog about? Bloggers are always being urged, if we want to attract and keep readers, to specialize. To narrow the subject to something we can write authoritatively about.

In my more lucid moments I realize the blog’s about me. Victor’s World. As of course is my fiction. And indeed, that’s something I can write authoritatively about – a claim you might note I seldom make about anything.

Egotism? Hell, yes! Anybody who presumes to produce anything in the belief that others will wish to consume it is an egotist. Especially if the producer intends consumers to pay.

Anyway: as with me in general, if you sign on, you sign on for the whole package. And as with me in general, if any aspect here doesn’t interest you feel free to direct your attention elsewhere. That’s freedom, isn’t it?

So, given the lengthy apologia … it occurs to me that even if you hate sports you might want to read on. Because maybe it’s not all about that after all.

While I wasn’t deeply vested in the game’s outcome I kinda sorta wanted the Cardinals to win. Like Meowlin in the Comments, I like Kurt Warner.

And like many Americans I’m a sucker for underdogs. And if anybody was ever a sports underdog, it was the Arizona football team. If anybody – I mean anybody, even a member of the team – had at the beginning of the season uttered a phrase remotely construable as, “The Cardinals will play in the Super Bowl,” they’d have been laughed out of existence. If not taken under close psychiatric evaluation.

I must admit that when my boy Kurt hit Larry Fitzgerald for that beautiful 64-yard touchdown I admit I threw my arms in the air and shouted, “Ladies and gentleman, that’s your Super Bowl!” Which unseemly display seriously miffed poor Squeak, lounging beside me in her current fave hang-out-with-Daddy spot.

It also turned out to be, um, wrong. Sometimes even truisms are significant; there’s no more key truism in sports than it ain’t over ’til it’s over. It’s actually a favorite insight of mine, and I forgot it to my shame: with over two and a half minutes remaining on the clock and the game a field-goal away from being tied, and it’s the Super Bowl, buddy, the game is never over.

Which brings me to what most impressed my about the game – and which should’ve keyed me in right away that my celebration was, as history records, a trifle premature.

Because of the way Steelers quarterback Big Ben Roethlisberger, not the player I’ve had the most respect for, responded to the play that capped what’s still the greatest turnaround in Super Bowl history – putting the Cardinals ahead after being down by 13 points. He didn’t react with anger, or despair, nor yet brainless jock bravado.

He simply picked up his helmet from the bench beside him and stood up, in the businesslike manner of a professional craftsman going back to work. He had the demeanor of a man with a job to do, and who was simply going to do it.

It probably will never show up on any of the replays. Yet at that moment I should have known it was game over – Steelers win.

I have come to suspect that simple, yet complete, determination may be the most powerful force in the human universe. Not passion. Just unshakeable intent.

As I’ve gotten older, and I hope wiser, I’ve come to honor craftsmen and women pretty much above all others. That’s what I aspire to: not to be an artist or a literateur. Those things belong to the judgement of history; and anyway if you study the matter you’ll note such assessments are usually as much fad as anything else. Take a look at the way Edgar Alan Poe‘s been regarded over the years. Or even Shakespeare.

What I want is to master the craft of entertaining. Primarily through my writing.

I admire craft when I see it. So I salute Roethlisberger, not just as winner of the national football championship, but as a true craftsman.

There. That wasn’t so painful. Was it?

It’s the last. I promise. Really.

The real story was how the New York Giants defense just bulldozed the Patriots’ secret (or at least seldom-acknowledged) weapon: possibly the best offensive line in history. Sure, much as it pains me [...]]]> Okay, in response to thunderously absent popular demand, here’s one more bit on the Superbowl.

It’s the last. I promise. Really.

The real story was how the New York Giants defense just bulldozed the Patriots’ secret (or at least seldom-acknowledged) weapon: possibly the best offensive line in history. Sure, much as it pains me to admit it, Perfect Tommy is a great quarterback. Having Randy Moss (and the previously unsung Wes Welker) to throw to doesn’t hurt your offense either.

But I think the main reason the Patriots put up record offensive numbers this year was its first-line defenders of the “skill” (or at least the headline) players. Time and again throughout the season Brady had jaw-dropping amounts of time to stand back and wait for one of his receivers to get clear. And with receivers such as he had, they did.

But for the first time all year we saw defenders running through the Patriot O-line as if they were the 2006 Raiders. Brady seemed to get knocked on his kiester every other play.

And why was that? Well, granted, the Giants defense played like gods most of the game. But the Patriots offensive line played like gods for 18 games.

Now think back to what the Patriots were known for. Not just playing the starters every game to try to ensure they never lost; there are good arguments made that those teams who obviously coast to rest their starters after they have home-field clinched for the playoffs tend to check out early during thoe selfsame playoffs. The Colts did it this year, and they’ve done it before.

But the Pats didn’t just start trot their stud horses out to start every game, or even just leave them in until victory was reasonably assured. Remember what more they did, especially early in the season? They ran up the score like a football-factory college team.

A lot of noise was made about that being unsportsmanlike conduct. Not altogether incorrectly.

Of course, we didn’t hear about it happening so much toward the end of the season. Why? Because instead of continuing to go full-bore even after they had the game hanging by its hooves from a pole, the Patriots often found themselves struggling to win. (Note: as a professional writer, I reserve the right to switch metaphors mid-race like a spider-monkey jockey on crack.) The only reason they beat the Ravens, one of the year’s crappiest teams, was an imbecilic, unnecessary time-out the Ravens themselves called, which invalidated what would’ve been the last Pats play of a game New England trailed. Game over: streak over.

Why the late-season struggles? Could it be that the hard men of the Pats’ frontline, the players with possibly the most brutally arduous job on the field, had just flat worn down? That they took such a pounding they got tenderized?

Why, yes.

Now, the Giants won. Flat out. They deserve full credit (and I don’t normally care for them any more than the Patriots.) For most of the season the Patriots have exemplified both expert play and, much rarer, smart play. In this game the Giants played hard, and they also played smart: taking advantage of the worn-out Patriots offensive line to throw Brady the beating of his career.

The Patriots, I submit, contributed to their own demise by all that grandiose score-pumping. And that doesn’t subtract a molecule of the credit due to the Giants. They clearly perceived a weakness in an opponent absolutely no one not actually employed by the Mara family thought beatable. And they exploited it intelligently and ruthlessly. What more does strategy consist of?

Then I realized it was only Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy, screaming in anguish that the Patriots just lost the Superbowl.

Heh, heh.

Those predictions: the next Sports Guy column [...]]]> Just a few moments ago it seemed to me I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror.

Then I realized it was only Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy, screaming in anguish that the Patriots just lost the Superbowl.

Heh, heh.

Those predictions: the next Sports Guy column will have the theme, “We wuz robbed.” The one after will explain in great detail why the Patriots are still the Greatest. Team. Ever.

As for me … for the first and most likely the only time in my life I rooted for the Giants. I do not like the Patriots.

Okay. On to a subject at least a couple of my readers may actually give a carp about…

Was this an epically lame year for Superbowl commercials, or what? It wasn’t until the FedEx pigeon courier ad that I laughed or even cracked much of a smile. Perhaps the most egregious was the early animated Ad Genie commercial: not simply because it was completely lacking in interest, but because for a company that purports to sell its services as marketing experts to lack so completely any sense of what makes a successful Superbowl ad – humor, wit, the moondog bizarre, anything different – would seem to be nothing short of disaster.

One of the more amusing ad series was actually Fox’s own, featuring their new football robot mascot getting the grease kicked out of him by the Terminator, to plug their new series, The Sarah Connor Chronicles. It looked toward the end as if perhaps more robot jocks (but not those robot jocks) were going to gang up on Ol’ Chromebones -

- But my cable company lost the signal. With about eleven minutes to go in the fourth. And didn’t get it back until just before the Giants’ game-winning touchdown. That meant that I would’ve missed the two earlier lead-changing touchdowns, if I hadn’t finally found the signal on my little portable telescoping-antenna TV, so that I watched some of the most amazing Superbowl action in the history of the game on a three by four inch black & white screen. Way to roll, Comcast!

Anyway, that was wild. Sorry, but you’ll have to wait a bit for an after-action report on yesterday’s Wild Cards related hijinks. Quick summary: they rocked.