Yes, yes, I promise to shut up about the Super Bowl after this post. I’m not a football fan and didn’t watch the game. But all the big and small, natural and man-made disasters that bedeviled Sunday’s event and the week leading up to it are fascinating.
So far, the best piece I’ve read was posted in today’s online edition of the Washington Post by sports columnist Sally Jenkins. (She’s a native Fort Worther, by the way). She pretty much skirts the icy weather issue and nicely sums up the unpleasant aftertaste that the whole bacchanalia left in her mouth: “Luxury can actually be debasing.”
One group she doesn’t take to task, though, are working-class football fans who spent $2,200 on a single ticket and then sobbed like they’d just received a cancer diagnosis when their Super Bowl plans were thwarted by some combination of fire codes and Jerry Jones’s hubris. The best lessons in life are often the priciest, although it’s hard to know if these people learned anything from their experience. Sports commentators, in general, are coddling them too much.
