Enough already

Last Wednesday, I said good-bye to the cold, the icy sidewalks, and the snow-mounds sprayed with dog pee, and headed to Tucson, where my sister Kath and my brother-in-law Rick had rented an escape house for a couple of weeks.

Even though, until last week, we’ve had a pretty gentle winter, it was still good to get away to a place where it’s warm and sunny, and where the only ice is in your drink.

But the real benefit of this getaway was that, for the five days I was gone, I was free of the 24/7 bombardment that is the build up to the Super Bowl.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy, in a non-rabid fan kind of way, that the New England Patriots (and our Tom) are once again heading there, with luck to make up for the debacle that was last year’s defeat.

I don’t lose any sleep when the Pats lose, but I’m a homer. It’s exciting when your team makes the playoffs, and, along with all the other citizens of Patriots Nation – even us half-hearted ones - I was glued to the TV having heart palpitations watching the AFC Championship Game, which the Patriots won in overtime a week ago yesterday.

If the Pats had lost, there were have been a day or two of ‘what went wrong’ coverage. Are the Pats too old? Has our Tom lost it? Is Gronk retiring? And then there would have been the usual occasional news about the upcoming Super Bowl which, without “us” in it, becomes something of a Who Cares Bowl.

But the Pats won, and let the floodgates open on Stupor Bowl coverage.

Morning, noon and night on the local news stations. Headlines in the local papers. The conversation everywhere. More TB12 shirts and Pats knit pom-pom hats on the locals’ backs and heads. Signs of support in shop windows.

This is all kind of fun the first, say, five or six times it happens to your team. But this is the ninth appearance the Patriots will be making in Super Bowl since 2002 when they Won. It. All. for the first time.

You want to read and hear about the team. But not incessantly.

Since the wondrous year of 2002, the Pats have earned themselves four additional Super Bowl rings (and squandered chances to pick up another three).  A few teams have been there two or three times. But with the Patriots, we’re talking dynasty here.

But enough is enough.

Admittedly, there are some good story lines.

The LA Rams (the team playing the Pats in next Sunday’s game) have the youngest coach in the league; the Pats, the second oldest.

Last fall, the Red Sox beat the LA Dodgers to win the World Series. Historically (but not so much lately) the Celtics and the LA Lakers have had quite the rivalry. So the Beat LA theme is a reasonably interesting one. (The Beat LA chant has a good backstory. In 1982, the Celtics were at the old Boston Garden playing the Sixers in the seventh game of the Eastern Division NBA Championship series. Whoever won was going to take on the LA Lakers for the NBA title. Late in the game, when it became apparent that the Celtics were going to lose, the Garden crowd burst into an overwhelming chant of Beat LA. We might not have liked the Sixers, but we really hated the Lakers.)

And the when will Brady really start to deteriorate never gets old, even as Tom does – at least on paper.

But, seriously, how much is there to say that hasn’t been said a kabillion times before?

I don’t care that Tom Brady doesn’t eat nightshades, that actress Bridget Moynihan is a Baby Mama to one of his sons, that his wife Gisele Bundchen makes more money than he does.

And how many times and ways can you state was is pretty damned obvious to even the most casual of football fans, even those of us who do not worship at the altar of TB12: Tom Brady really and truly is the GOAT (Greatest of All Time).

I find Bill Belichick’s monosyllable, grim-faced responses to reporters’ questions as predictable and boring as the questions. Pure and simple, performance art, schtick.

I don’t want to hear about Gronk’s brothers, Julian Edelman’s beard, or Patrick Chung’s background (as interesting as it is that he’s the Chinese-Jamaican son of a reggae singer).

Let’s all agree that the refereeing is god-awful, and that refs should probably be replaced by technology, and then stop pissing and moaning about it.  

Sure, there’ll be a few crumbs of airtime, of newspaper column inches, of online pixels allocated for things I might find more compelling: traumatic brain injury, and whatever-happened-to-taking-a-knee-during-the-anthem. Even some more in depth psychoanalysis of why the New England Patriots (and New England as a whole) are so near-universally despised.

And although I’m not enough of a fan to care, people who follow the sport closely do like to learn about matchups between the Pats and the Rams, especially since they’re a team that the Pats haven’t played in a while.

But there is just not enough that is newsworthy to satisfy the wide and hungry maw that is 24/7 pre-Super Bowl coverage. So that maw gets filled with the boring and the repetitive. And if you live in Boston, and you plan on turning on your TV or picking up a newspaper (physical or virtual) during the run-up to the Big Game, there is no escaping it.

I’m sure if I were a fan living in one of the cities that hadn’t played in many/any Super Bowls, I’d be delighted with all the focus on it. But I’m not. I’m just another Masshole sports fan living through the Golden Age of New England Sports. (Since 2002: 5 Super Bowl wins, 4 World Series wins, plus one NBA Title and one Stanley Cup win.)

Don’t get me wrong. The wins – while never as exciting as, say, the Red Sox beating the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS and going on to win their first World Series in 86 years – really never do get old. I don’t go to all of them, but I generally try to get a glimpse of every duck boat parade. (Doesn’t require much effort, as they pass by a few minutes walk from my home.)

Since 2002 on up to next week’s game, when the Pats won their first SB, there have been 18 other cities represented in the big game. And then there are the cities that have teams that have never made it. I’m quite sure that most of the fans in those cities would relish the opportunity to go through two solid weeks of hyper-hoopla. So it probably sounds privileged and snotty to sit here saying ‘basta.’

But the damn 24/7 coverage sure does get old. And I’m just as happy that I was away for a slug of it. Guess I’ll have to hunker down and figure out how to ignore it for the remainder of this week.ed