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Is it just me, or do other people think the Super Bowl has a moral obligation to take place in a warm climate?
On Sunday they will hold the Super Bowl in Indianapolis. The weather forecast is for a high of 42 degrees, with showers predicted. That sounds about right for February in central Indiana. When I lived in Louisville, I could always count on the temperature warming up a few degrees as I headed south on I-65. This is no region for the Super Bowl. I know, the game is going to be held in a dome. And I have no stake in personal comfort, since I am not going. But still, doesn’t the National Football League have a responsibility to present a warm, sunny spectacle, all week, to the millions of winter-bound fans in the United States and Europe and the rest of the Northern Hemisphere? The N.F.L. is trying to spread the game and the riches, but this is a grim, limited vision. They’ve got the Super Bowl coming to New Jersey in 2014. The weather has been gorgeous this winter – I was working out in shorts the other day – but a blizzard is guaranteed for 2014. Homebound Super Bowl viewers deserve to turn on the game and see fans in comfortable outfits, outdoors, enjoying themselves. This sight warms the soul, makes us realize that spring will be arriving. What’s the best bowl of all – the granddaddy of them all, as Keith Jackson put it? The Rose Bowl, of course. Even if it’s chilly in Pasadena, it’s still southern California; it makes us feel good. As it happens, I covered three of the coldest Super Bowls ever. Super Bowl XVI in a dome in Pontiac, Mich., in 1982 was marked by Vice President George H.W. Bush choosing to arrive near game time, snarling traffic. The media bus driver had to let us off, to scramble across a frozen field to get to the dome. Super Bowl XXVI in Minneapolis in 1992 was not terribly inconvenient, since the dome is right downtown. My vivid memory of extracurricular activity that week was watching people carve ice sculptures with power saws at a winter carnival in St. Paul. Super Bowl XXXIV in Atlanta in 2000 was a farce. The roads were icy, and our friends had to cancel a house party because nobody could drive to the suburbs. We spent one day before the game sitting by the window in our hotel room, watching Southerners try to drive on ice – they would go too slow up the hill, then accelerate coming off the hill, and crash into light stanchions and fences along the interstate. This, too, is spectator sport, probably no more dangerous than the brain-bashing that goes on in the actual game. Nasty weather at Super Bowl sites is inconvenient for the people in the Super Bowl town, and for fans who spend fortunes to attend. Who really cares about the travails of visiting sportswriters? But the N.F.L. should think of the people back home. In the yawning time before the actual game, the TV audience deserves to see shots of warm and happy fans, strolling the streets, giving us hope that one day soon we, too, can wear shorts outdoors. The N.F.L. needs to go back to a southern strategy – Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Arizona and California – not so much for the people attending but for the people watching. Do you agree? Comments welcome.
Hansen Alexander
2/1/2012 06:42:29 am
George,
George Vecsey
2/2/2012 04:08:37 am
Hansen, quite right. I remember watching the Jan. 1, 1971, Rose Bowl on television in a gas station in Hyden, Kentucky, where I had just covered the funeral of a guy who had blown up a mine, killing 38. It was pretty grim, a big snowfall being cleared. And over our heads was Ohio State vs. Stanford -- parade, cheerleaders, Santa Anita mountains. That is the responsbility of post-season FB. None of this dreary dome stuff. I've been in Indy in Jan-Feb. GV Comments are closed.
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QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online. The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal…. After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. The progress stems mostly from three factors: First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot. Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.) Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year. “Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.” That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.” That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data. One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines. Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks. Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths. The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions. Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately Republican and white. Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.) *** From the great Maureen Dowd: As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels." --- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing. *** "Putting out the paper," we called it. Much more than nostalgia. ---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html Categories
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