Everything We Love and Hate About The Superbowl

What a game. I mean what a game. Doesn't matter what side you are on be you a Patriot or Seahawk fan that was a game for the books. And in that way the Superbowl was exactly what it was supposed to be. A game between the two very best teams. And it was. And of course we had to endure everything else that is the Superbowl. Take the commercials. Was it me but what happened to the funny commercials. Even GoDaddy went serious instead of bawdy.

I mean I know the NFL is remaking their image but did we have to sit through all those bad novels? What was the dad commercial all about. Or dad commercials. Be a good dad and drive a Nissan. Or the moody music commercials that went on and on and then ended up being about a truck or Budweiser. Or what about the girl commercials. Well I guess the NFL does have a domestic abuse problem. But I really felt like I was being given moral lessons between watching grown men try and destroy each other.

Katy Perry. Well she did ride around on a rocket swing. That was different. Poor Lenny Kravitz. One song that wasn't even his and you couldn't hear his guitar. But who were the rappers? They came out and took over the middle of the show. Maybe that was to give Katy time to get on her swing and sing about Fireworks. After the beach number with the singing sharks it had to get better.

And of course the fight at the end between the football players. That sure took it down a notch. You have to wonder what the rest of the world thinks about the Superbowl. Maybe they are like us. Awed. Amazed. Disgusted. Confused. Entertained. Sex and pickups and beer and commercials that strive to be art when they are very much commerce. I cant wait until next year.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

Madonna's Sunset Boulevard Show

There was a strange Gloria Swanson moment during Madonna's show right about in the middle when she was surrounded by fantastic dancing and lights and strobes and people doing flips and singing and all that activity swirling around her like Gloria Swanson walking slowly toward the camera for her final closeup with Max urging her on. "They have come for you  madame!" And it was surreal. Morphing herself into the latest hiphop rapish dancing whatever Madonna became that dated person in strange contrast to the very frenetic quality that used to be her.

And you say well she is fifty three. But it was the deliberate pumping of her new music over her old (what the Superbowl audience wanted) that really was  her undoing. She was running to keep up with herself and the careful flips and careful steps made me think of my mother at weird times. Not that my mother was a dancer but there was a certain careful quality to Madonna exacerbated by the show that could go on with or without her. The chariot bit didn't help, Cleopatra yeah sure, but all the vivacity that was her was overshadowed by the Grand Dam.

And so Gloria Swanson was suddenly there. Right in the middle of the show, moving through the waxworks, a shadow of her former self in the woman in the middle of the circus, with her careful determination to keep age at bay and like Gloria trying to impress her young man or us with her very modern songs and her show striving to be so up the minute. In the middle of it all I felt a little sorry for Madonna.

I cant help but think if she had gone out there and belted out her old songs and just reveled in who she was and is...then she could have avoided the old car and the creepy mansion of her menagerie that just made us think how unforgiving our society is with people that age. So I suppose it was fitting she disappeared in a hail of smoke, a phantom that was never really there in the first place, walking every closer, Max...Max....they have come for me at last....

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Jay Cutler and the Changing Culture of Football

When I played high school football  for Naperville Central we had two a days in August with half pads in the morning and full pad workout in the afternoon. We were given little yellow salt pills against dehydration. Salt pills! Think about that for your blood pressure. But that's the way it worked and nobody drank Gatorade or special electrolyte drinks and water was held out as a reward for a good practice. The temperatures reached one hundred on some days and I remember just collapsing in bed at night and going back the next day. I broke my little finger during practice and the trainer taped it up and put two Popsicle sticks on it and that's how I practiced every day. Then my elbow got infected from getting hit so many times and the doctor drained puss and blood out of it every few days and gave me massive antibiotics and I just kept playing.

I remember reading a book called Meat on the Hoof at the time about a player with the Dallas Cowboys. His strategy was to hit the other guy so hard that he would think twice about hitting you back. I would read this book between the morning practice and afternoon and then go back and try and kill kids on the tackling drills. And it worked. The coaches couldnt' believe how hard I could hit and no one thought about concussions or heat stroke or not playing with pain. You just played or you quit.

Now we have Jay Culter who left with a knee injury that to a lot of people didn't seem that bad. If this had occurred even five years ago they would have just taped him up and sent him back in. But times have changed and football players with scrambled brains from concussions, unable to walk from the ceaseless beating they took for years in the NFL, has the football players, the coaches, the NFL, all considering that the old blood and guts culture of football is probably not sustainable anymore.

People know too much for one thing.  They talk about the long term effect of concussions and football players are a lot big bigger, faster, stronger and hit like freight trains now. The sport has changed and all you have to do is watch these players getting knocked out cold to know that the old football culture is on life support. Nobody but Jay Cutler knows what his pain threshold was with his knee, but it is a different world now and that slight difference gave him permission to leave.

Right or wrong, he left the game and I think we will see more common sense approaches to a game that used to be play under any circumstances. My memories of two a days in high school football come down to my little finger that healed without being set. A crooked little nub of grid iron glory.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man will blast off February 15th



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