Recently in Super Bowl Category

Soup or sundae?

Actually, we had chowder: Patriots (New England clam), Giants (Manhattan clam) and Undecided (chicken/corn for those who didn’t like the swimmers). ...

Marie Callender's said they stopped making Boston Cream pie, so we settled for Banana Cream and a Chocolate Mousse cake (from Trader Joe’s) that was simply to die for. ...

With that as the foundation of the spread you’d think I would have come away with a better taste in my mouth after the Big Game. And if you like defense and hate the Patriots and love a dramatic finish and think it’s OK if the best officials in the game – supposedly – miss a few calls that 97.5 million of the rest of us saw than you are clearly among the majority who walked away gushing about it being one of best NFL championship games ever.

Not me. Sorry. Yes, even 11 days later, there remains a sour taste in my mouth about that one. ...

>> Continue reading: Belated thoughts from Super Sunday

There were probably more tears among Patriots fans than within their own ranks. With some exceptions, athletes have a way of dealing with losses better than fans. If anyone expected the Patriots to come to the interview area in emotional ruins, forget it. They felt they played hard, but got beat by another very competent team that had a very good night.
Defensive back Asante Samuel did say, "Everyone is down and heartbroken," but for the most part they sounded like they will sleep tonight.
"We'll regroup and come back and try again next season," said Tom Brady, in a Mr. Matter of Fact voice after the game.
Maybe it helps if you have Gisele Bundchen to console you.

At the end of the game, I was in the media workroom, for quicker access to postgame interviews. You don't want to be fighting through 70,000 people from the upper deck to be able to hear the Giants gloat at the end of the game, or to see the Patriots try to put a philosophical spin on the most heart-wrenching loss of their lives.
Anyway, when Burress caught the game-winning TD pass, a bunch of professional journalists cheered. Veyr unusual. There are strict "no cheering in the press box" rules and writers are very good about sticking to it. Of course there are always some less-than-professional people in press areas, including tech people, staff workers who don't know any better, and hangers-on. But at least three or 4 of the weaker cheers were from BOSTON writers! Very strange.
The Patriots have not endeared themselves with their home town media over the last few years -- Belichick being a particular unsympathetic character -- and a Pats loss seemed to be just fine with them.

Coach Bill Belichick and a large portion of his team didn't stick around to watch the official end of their season, running off the field with 0:01 showing on the clock. In the coach's abbreviated postgame interview session he ignored or didn't hear someone ask him why he left early.
Not that Belichick runs any danger of sullying his reputation. People think he's a grump and personality-challenged just because of stuff like that, and that's why a lot of people were no doubt happy to see the Patriots lose the game.

Stating the obvious, the Giants defense is handling the Patriots offense much better than anyone else has all year. The Pats have 81 total yards at half, and even the slow-poke, self-stopping New York offense has amassed 139 yards.
Hard to imagine them doing it all game, but we'll see....

There is plenty of cheering for both sides, but you'd have to call it slightly more in the Patriots favor. I'm not sure if it's really a New England crowd, or just a whole bunch of people who want to say they were at the historic 19-0 game.
It's 7-3 Pats at halftime, and they may not be watching 19-0.

One thing a Super Bowl stadium won't tolerate is quiet. Piped in music, narratives, plugs -- all at maximum volume -- make this one of the noisest places on the planet. When the the football game begins, including the cheering, it's a relief to the ears.
There are 2 reasons it's almost impossible to make a cell phone call. You can't hear, and with thousands, apparently, narrating the proceedings to someone, it's hard to get a signal out anyway.

Three and a half hours before kickoff, the stadium is already buzzing with workers and media. Just to make sure you don't go unentertained, though, the big screens are already showing past Super Bowl highlights and interviews. I went to find my seat -- I'm in an "auxiliary box" which means I'm at one of the temporary rows of tables in the corner of the upper deck -- and they were showing the Giants-Bills Super Bowl from -- hey, don't make me look it up -- like 1990 or something. I got there just in time to see Bills kicker Scott Norwood miss his 47-yard field goal to end the game, a 20-19 New York victory.
It reminds you how ridiculously indelible some Super Bowl moments become. That was Norwood's moment in history, forever.
And it could happen to someone else today. The game isn't just made for heroes.

I forgot about the dogs. At the media security area, all of us reporter schlepps were frisked and our bags laid out in a pen for a black lab to sniff. I don 't even want to think what they were checking for, and I'm sure there were a few people a little nervous about what they had included in their things.
This procedure is a few years old, and a little disconcerting. Or amusing. Said one reporter waiting for his bag, "I knew I shouldn't have packed a hamburger."
I think he was kidding.

I forgot about the dogs. At the media security area, all of us reporter schlepps were frisked and our bags laid out in a pen for a black lab to sniff. I don 't even want to think what they were checking for, and I'm sure there were a few people a little nervous about what they had included in their things.
This procedure is a few years old, and a little disconcerting. Or amusing. Said one reporter waiting for his bag, "I knew I shouldn't have packed a hamburger."
I think he was kidding.

The Super Bowl has become such a corporate orgy, the week marked by major private parties, it can feel like the average person gets squeezed out here. We won't even talk about game tickets, the face value starting at $750. They're being scalped for the price of a small car.
But Saturday night, the NFL arranged a free concert at Tempe Beach Park, featuring Counting Crows and Boys Like Girls, concluding with a major fireworks show. "Free" goes a long way, especially in a college town. Thousands took advantage of the night, not surprisingly a large portion of it in the high-school-to-mid-20s age. But there were plenty of 30s, 40s, too.
There was serious security getting in -- I saw toddlers in strollers being searched -- but these days, that seems to be the routine.

The University of Phoenix Stadium -- home of the Arizona Cardinals -- was designed to be both modern and reflective of its envirnoment. Thus it became a bulging silver structure inspired by the shape of a barrel cactus.
Some think it looks more like a UFO, ready to spin and zoom away.
To me it looks more like a flattened silver pumpkin. Whatever, it's just another in a series of new NFL stadiums that get built and -- surprise! -- get to host a Super Bowl.
The next in that genre will be Dallas, in 2011. The Cowboys are retiring Texas Stadium after 37 years. Florida gets the next two, Tampa and Miami, but those are repeat venues.
Just think, if every NFL city builds a new stadium once every 32 years, the Super Bowl would never have to use the same stadium twice.

Eli Manning may have reached the Super Bowl before Chargers quarterback Philip Rivers -- the two were swapped on draft day 2004 -- and we can all debate which of them has been the better quarterback since then. But another guy who (kind of) got away that day was Giants defensive end Osi Umenyiora, who the Chargers wanted as part of the deal. New York said, "Uh-uh."
This week, not surprisingly, the two-time Pro Bowl player said he was glad he didn't go to the Chargers.
"I don't believe I'd be the player I am today if I'd gone to San Diego," he said. "That's nothing against San Diego, but they run a different scheme and they might have put me at outside linebacker and it might not have been a good fit. I love San Diego. I would have loved to play there, but I'm a New Yorker. I'm a New York guy."
With a shot at a Super Bowl ring.

Commissioner Roger Goodell did the usual thing at his state-of-the-NFL address today, answering a question about the possibility of LA re-entering the league with a positive spin.
He said the NFL wants to get back to the city, but had absolutely nothing else to say about it. No news, no nothing.
He said that the large TV ratings in LA for the NFL indicated the city's "passion." Sure, we love the TV show, but that doesn't mean we care about getting a team back.
Later, when someone asked him about Toronto and possible expansion, though, he said expansion was "off the table" for now, meaning any team that shows up in LA in the near future will be an existing franchise that moves there.
So LA will simply continue to serve as a "threat" for any team that wants a new stadium. It's actually a good deal for the NFL to have such a big city that serves as a red herring in negotiations between teams and cities.
Anyway, don't hold your breath.

I'm sorry, but anyone who thinks sports reporters are the bubble-brained lightweights of the media, just spend a little time around TV reporters, especially the entertainment goofs. Thursday at a press conference for pre-game singer Alicia Keys and anthem singer Jordin Sparks, the empty-headed questions piled up like too much eye-shadow. After Keys made an opening statement about her upcoming tour and how it would end in her hometown -- the home of the future Super Bowl champion Giants, as she put it, someone asked her who she would be rooting for.Duh
Someone else asked Sparks if she would be "rooting for the Knicks," too. Another asked Keys to explain this "duet thing," thinking they were harmonizing the anthem.
Later, a local Phoenix TV reporter asked halftime frontman Tom Petty if he was planning to attend any parties this week, and invited herself to be his escort. Petty calmly replied that she would have to take it up with his wife.

I must admit that I was duped before I even got to Phoenix. I thought this would be a heavy duty New York versus Boston grudge-fest. It may as well be Cleveland against New Orleans. The subject never seems to come up. I figured the Yankees-Red Sox thing was symptomatic of deeper, underlying animosities between the two cities -- a San Francisco-LA thing. Apparently not. The Red Sox-Yankees grew venom and needles pretty much on its own.
The Patriots and Giants certainly don't have any kind of rivalry, beyond the fact that they played a hard-fought, emotional regular season game against each other in December.
But, no, there won't be any "Giants (stink)" chants, and New Yorkers won't be taunting New Englanders over their lack of championship banners. For obvious reasons.

Yesterday I wrote about the old-school coaches Bill Belichick and Tom Coughlin, so naturally at Thursday's interviews, I heard Giants WR Armani Toomer say something I wish I had a day earlier.
Instead, I get to add it here: He was talking about some of Coughlin's rules, including one he still has called the 5-minute Rule. Players have to be five minutes early to every meeting, or they are considered late and will be fined. Toomer said Coughlin lightened up on some of his nitpicking: "This year he's less worried about us breaking rules and getting over on his system, because he understood that the players wanted to win just as much as he did."

It's always a short-lived "romance," this Monday through Thursday dance between the players and the media. Players and reporters are forced together for four days, a more-than-enough chance to ask Randy Moss 1,000 times if he expected this kind of success when he joined the Patriots, and to ask Eli Manning how he's matured over the course of this season.
By Thursday, you can actually feel sorry for guys, having to answer the same question over and over. When someone asked the obvious, the Giants Antonio Pierce said dryly, "I'll miss the media. This is what we looked forward to when we came here," before getting serious: "Now we can just play football and not worry about silly questions." It's OK, we were tired of asking them, too.

There's a Super Bowl being hyped this week in the Phoenix area but don't go by downtown. The city center has been asleep, as I suppose it usually is, after dark. The media center in the convention center is the only place with a pulse at night time. Step outside and the streets are empty.
We left the building about 9 pm and had trouble finding a place to eat. Majerles -- the downtown bar and grill of former Sun Dan Majerle -- had lights on and a few customers, but we walked by looking for something else. Within a three block area we found about four or five restaurants, all but one of them just closing up. We had some Mexican food, got on an NFL shuttle bus and called it a night.
Rumor has it that there are some lively areas in Scottsdale -- partly because the popular PGA golf tourney is going on there Thursday thru Sunday. The NFL Experience should attract people, but that's adjacent to the stadium in Glendale, about 12 miles west of Phoenix. As for the "big city," it woke up a little bit Thursday night -- the Suns were playing the Spurs.

Looking around the media work room, and taking cursory inventory on buses, it's safe to say that the vast majority of print reporters covering the Super Bowl are middle-aged and white -- just like me. It also occurs to me that our music always catches up to us at these games. This year, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are the halftime entertainment. The last few years it has been Prince, the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney.
On Saturday night, Cheap Trick shows up at an event called Taste of NFL -- a food fest.
Those a decade or so younger than me got the Gin Blossoms at the media party last night, and can go listen to Counting Crows at a public event Saturday night.
Once upon a time, the NFL and its host cities seemed to be skewing younger with its musical choices, which would seem to be the correct marketing direction.
But what do I know? Or care?