Catching Up

Here you will find my humble opinion on several things from Super Bowl Weekend...not necessarily all sports-related.

-"The Game" was OK...nothing all that memorable. I think John Madden was overly kind in his analysis of certain aspects of the game. I thought the officiating was tentative, and in several instances just wrong. Seattle got the worst of several key calls. Madden should have said so. He did point out that he disagreed with the call that went against Matt Hasselbeck when he was called for a penalty while making a tackle after an interception. But, I would have expected more outrage at some of the "questionable" decisions by the men in stripes. Especially from Madden.

-Neither quarterback had a good game...but Pittsburgh's Roethlisberger made plays in key situations. Hasselbeck didn't. In fact, when Hasselbeck's receivers stopped dropping passes enough to get the team in scoring position, he couldn't get the ball into the end zone. He was particularly bad at the end of the first half when he ran off way too much clock in accomplishing nothing. It looked to me like Holmgren was not happy...but wasn't going to make a big scene at the Super Bowl.

-My favorite commercial was the "Cave Man" Fed Ex spot. I actually laughed. Not many others made me even smile. I thought A-B's beer spots were just OK. Of course, the GoDaddy.com spots will certainly do a lot for visits to that website again this year. Hot Girl, plus the promise of more skin on the website...you get the idea.

-The Rolling Stones are probably still good in a concert situation where they can get the crowd wound up with their rock-and-roll classics. But, the audio was too good on TV yesterday for me to appreciate their performance. They just can't play in that situation to a live audience, and a TV audience, and do justice to both. And, they've never been pretty boys....and now they're old too. Difficult to look at. Jagger still gives it his best energy though.

-Did you understand any of what Stevie Wonder said at the end of his pre-game set? Something about embracing peace and love before being anhialated.... I think.

-Thank God Aretha rescued Aaron Neville during the national anthem. I thought Horatio Sanz did a better job immitating Neville on SNL than Neville did himself. Pathetic. Where's Jose Feliciano when you need him?

-ABC's presentation of the game was mediocre, at best. I thought there were a lot of poorly chosen shots of the game itself. The graphics used to introduce the players were supposed to look like an old time radio...I guess...and didn't work. You could hardly read the print. And, right after the kickoff there was one shot where the camera was shaking all over the place and for some reason the director couldn't get off it. It went on for what seemed like ten seconds. I was about to puke.

-The Blues won another game Saturday...and against a very good Dallas Stars team. One might start to think that they should have been playing some of these younger guys from the start. Since the Doug Weight, and Mike Sillinger trades, the team seems to be playing with a lot more energy. And guys like Lee Stempniak, Mike Glumac, Jay McClement and Dennis Wideman have a lot more talent than anybody suspected. Now there's not another Blues home game for over a month... March 7th vs. Colorado. That's right... a month! 3 games out of town...followed by the Olympic break...then 3 more out-of-towners before getting back to Savvis.

-The kid that was killed in an Arkansas shoot-out on Saturday deserved to be taken out. But, for the sake of science, I wish he had been arrested and put on trial. Maybe if we did a little psycho-analysis of kids like this we could get an understanding of what kind of twisted mentality goes into what he did. Going into a gay bar..swinging an ax... and shooting some people who did nothing to harm him. Then kidnapping a woman...killing her...shooting and killing a cop...and then a shootout with police. They say the high school dropout had studied and glorified Nazism. Figures.