My Super Sunday. A diary of thoughts from Kyle Bauer.

By Kyle Bauer

Yesterday was a fantastic day for sport.  True there was Ovechkin showing up Crosby and I guess the Superbowl, but what I’m referring to is the celebrity sports challenges.

Yesterday was the Chris Paul Bowling Tournament, which featured Lamarr Woodley, Hines Ward, Jack DelRio, Ludacris and of course Paul himself. I didnt watch much of this but from what I did see it was the most horribly awkward event. Watching Ludacris being interviewed by bowling announcers was so off.  Of course they tried to drop some ‘SLANG’ on Luda and he wasnt having it. On top of that, they asked him the origins of his name. Is that hard to figure? Couldnt he just want to be called Ludacris for the sake of being called Ludacris? I wish he would had answered that.

The juxtaposition of NFL players and pro bowlers is always fun. Pro bowlers are by far the dorkiest bunch of schmucks on television. They all wear those stupid sponsored shirts, try to be ‘edgy’ (like Pete Weber) but at the end of the day, we know what pro bowlers are and that is a group of out of shape hacks who have mastered a hobbiest skill. To see their pressure and discomfort of trying to mingle with NFL and NBA players was near nerve racking.

www.hornetshype.com has the best coverage of this event.

Then there was litany of celebrity skiing and….uh poker playing….events on ABC following the Magic vs. Celtics game. I can’t tell you much about this because I can find no fallow up coverage online and I only watched like 10 minutes of it because I was busy getting ready for the party.

From what I did see, it was produced in the classic celebrity athletics event fashion. Similar to the Steve Garvey charity classics that I lol’d over so often on episodes of Cheap Seats (miss u Randy & Jay), there was an awful narration of the events by a guy who sounded similar to Buzz Brainard from This Week in Baseball, but sounded just different enough to where I knew it wasnt him. The delivery was slow and forced as he described Kathy Bates cross-country skiing, which I guess this was appropriate because obviously Kathy Bates doing is anything is slow and forced.

Then the cheap plugs began. Instead of running a commercial for the airline that transported celebrities the likes of Joe Pantoliano to Aspen and Calgary, they actually took about two minutes of the show, talking about how great the airline is and showing footage of the celebrities on the plane. Rather shameless but understandable.

I checked out when suddenly Alec Baldwin was playing poker. This left me confused on how they jumped from skiing to poker, so I shut it off in anger.

Despite my displeasure with something that had the potential to be beautifully cheesy, I still found more entertainment out of that than the Orlando-Boston game.

A couple other things that bothered me about yesterday was the predictable grandstanding by non-football fans using social websites to declare how they are better than you because they are not watching the Superbowl. Well….uh ok…..good the Superbowl doesn’t need your viewership anyways, they’re going to be fine.

There are multiple factions of people who carry on about this. In 2004 it was Livejournal. In 2005 and ’06 it was Myspace and over the past three years it has been these groups of people who have used Facebook to annoy me.

The first group that bitches about the Superbowl is the wannabe counter-culture revolutionary, who believes that the Superbowl is the worlds biggest display of capitalism, greed, corruption and american excess. Hmmmm, theyre actually right. But what gets me about their stance is that they are so passionate about it. By posting a Facebook status about how you hate the Superbowl and anyone who watches it is an idiot, what are you accomplishing? Listen, I know you need another cheap thrill to go along with you trying to ruin your families Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving and Christmas every year, and I know you’re different, but you and your cynical, brat-ass status updates are going to do nothing except display what a douche you are to your 326 friends. You’re not going to stop the Superbowl, your drum circle is not going to stop the Superbowl, if anything the Superbowl will one day stop you. And when you’re 36 and trying to make friends at the office, you’ll find yourself at a party pretending that you know the slightest about football while bandwagoning for some team and social acceptance.

The second group doesn’t bother me too much because I find genuine innocence behind their stance and that is women. If they want to watch the Puppy Bowl and post about how they are watching Puppy Bowl, that is fine with me. I am not going to lie, I have watched a little bit of the Puppy Bowl in the past, finding hilarious and adorable. To me the Puppy Bowl bears equivalence to the Superbowl in these peoples minds, so I do not have a problem with that. It’s honest passion, not trying to be different for the sake of being different and garner attention to yourself like the kids in the first group.

The third group irks me more than the first because of how hypocritical they are and that is soccer snob. This group will post about how they are not watching the Superbowl because they watch “real futbol”. Now I respect soccer and watch it when I can and I have said many times before, the ideal of soccer actually being called football makes a ton more sense than american football. That does not mean you need to turn up your nose and get on your soapbox about stupid american culture and the fanfare behind the event that is the Superbowl and how you’re proudly watching Inter Milan play Palermo to a 0-0 tie. I call their stance hypocritical because they pretend they’re above the riff-raff of NFL hype. Well soccer fan, you definitely are not. Remember that while you bitch about the Superbowl somehow getting in the way of your day-to-day life, the fucking World Cup is on the horizon and that is like six Superbowls rolled into one. Also there is the EURO which is like three Superbowls rolled into one. Then there is also the EUFA title match which doubles the ratings of the Superbowl. When these events occur, I watch, but if I didnt, I wouldn’t go on Facebook and declare that I am not watching a boring soccer game and anyone who watches is wasting their time, and then wait for the hate mail to pile in with a grin on my face. Worldwide, soccer dwarfs the NFL in ratings and also riots, to quote my co-host Neal Ruhl “that’s a fact.” So soccer fan should just calm the fuck down while they wrap on their celebratory scarves and rock some jersey with a corporation plastered all over it.

Those are the three groups who always put a crimp in my Superbowl Sunday, but ultimately it is all good. Another NFL season has passed and now I can wait until next year when I can bitch about more unwarranted hype, have to hear about another Favre return and the Lions will continue to hit new depths of futility.

Good riddance to all of this.