IT'S THE OCCASION OF THE FIFTIETH SUPER BOWL ON SUNDAY, AND I'M GIVING UP ANTIQUE HUNTING TO BE A COUCH SPUD FOR THE BIG EVENT
MY ONE LUXURY IS TO INDULGE IN THE HOURS AND HOURS OF PRE-GAME HYPE BEFORE THE MAIN EVENT
I was raised on sports. I played hockey and flag football from eight years of age. My parents watched baseball, hockey and football as if it was the most important viewing opportunity of any given week. Of course, it's obvious I was influenced this way, but I didn't know there was another way. And my character, for better or worse, was forged in ball parks, hockey rinks and on the grid iron. So you'd think I would have married a partner equally smitten by the same sports. Truth is, I have only ever had two girlfriends who could tolerate sports, and that was confined to public skating. Not skating with a hockey stick. Just skating. Well, it didn't happen, that the woman who would take a guy like me, worts and all, for a partner, would have any use for the sports I cherished, except, in Suzanne's case, golf. She was a former pro shop at the Windermere Golf and Country Club in her youth. But, Suzanne is patient with me in this regard, and has always allowed me recreational time to watch television sports, including golf. Except, I only have one option these days, thanks to fiscal restraint and cutbacks, to those stations I depended on for other programs, and yes, sports events. This has profoundly influenced my leisure time, and I've had to resort back to radio, in order to catch the Blue Jay games. Sure it bites to be cheap, but it's the way we had to live as a family of four, dating back to a past recession, when I lost three jobs in two months. I don't pay for television. I watch the advertisements in lieu of paying a monthly fee. As a result, you might say, my channel selector doesn't get much of a work out these days.
Thanks to sports networks that you have to pay to view, I have been reduced in this country, to watching the games of the National Football League, on my one station, nostalgia model television set from a bygone era, every Sunday afternoon, thanks to the generosity of CTV. I appreciate their kindness to some of us cheapskates unwilling to pay to view. When the CBC had its budget chopped, by the former Harper-ites, forcing it to cut its broadcasting signal, to poor blokes like us in the rural clime, I lost my free opportunity to view Hockey Night In Canada, each Saturday evening, a tradition our family had benefitted from, since the good old days of black and white television, and the rabbit ears to pull in the signal from outer space. I'm a Canadian, by the Jesus, and I can't receive my country's contribution to cultural re-enforcement. I didn't always like what the CBC got up to, but I liked my weekly Hockey Night in Canada broadcast. And yes, for a young fellow raised on a twice weekly diet of Hockey Night In Canada, (Saturdays and Wednesdays) during the long, cold winters, it was a tremendous blow to be denied access, due to the fact someone of high ranking on Parliament Hill, didn't particularly care for the policies and politics of the national broadcaster. Nuts to nothing. Maybe the change of governance will have the decency to juice-up the signal again so I can continued watching Canada's national sport for the price of watching the messages presented by advertisers.
Back in the recession of the early nineteen nineties, in order to have enough money to eat after mortgage and utilities were paid, we were forced to cut our cable subscription. We went from having forty channels, and a movie option, to having three stations; being CBC, CTV and TV Ontario. It wasn't much, but with a VCR we found we could get by rather well, as a young family, desiring a household culture bolstered by boob tube watching. Scorn me if you will, but I'd been born into this culture in 1955, and free television broadcasts were part of the package of being North American. I have written about this many times before, but being a latch-key kid when I was growing up in Burlington, and having parents who didn't get home until six in the evening, I depended on the kindness of the television set, and the host broadcasters, which truthfully, gave me convenient access to an electronic best friend, and non judgmental partner. When the digital age came upon us, and the signal changed from the antiquated way of connecting station to viewers, we lost both TVO and CBC. We were left with CTV and although I'm a little less enthusiastic about their fascination with science fiction these days, and comic book dramatizations for their obviously younger audience, the fact they have ten to twelve shows, I do like each week, plus the NFL games, endears them to this television addict.
Although Suzanne will engage in a day of sharp critiques about how ridiculous football is, and brutal to its players, her biggest objection, will be that the pre-game show begins at two o'clock in the afternoon, yet the game doesn't get underway until 6:30 in the early evening. It's not like this happens every week, and afterall, it is the fiftieth anniversary of the Super Bowl, and for the Currie family, it is a longstanding tradition, to attach ourselves to the television, with a literal smorgasbord of snack and food items from chicken wings and chile, to chips, dip, tacos, cheese and salsa. We can't afford ribs any more, or anything that is being sold as being beef, pork or lamb. Chicken, for the most part, is still a good value, although I suppose grocers will "up" the price for us Super Bowl fanatics looking for good deals on wings; us poor schlubs who put on tail gate parties in their residences, with football adornments, that make guests feel like they're sort of at the game but not really.
On most Sundays through the year, we are travelling to antique venues across the region, in hunt of elusive treasure for our shop here in Gravenhurst. We haven't had a full day home since Christmas and New Years, and let me tell you, it's going to feel nice sitting in my armchair, covered in barbecue sauce and salsa, with a dog on my lap, and a cat on my shoulders, cheering for the Denver Broncos, and my favorite quarterback, Peyton Manning. He's boss! I'm not even going to mention the other team. It's a karma thing. I'm betting my stash of pennies, loaded to the rim in a Crown sealer jar, which could add up to a whopping ten bucks, on the Broncos, but Suzanne doesn't want to wager a nickel on a sport as foolish as football. She can think, and can say it, but she's not going to make me feel bad, because I take one full day out of the whole year, to satisfy my football cravings. I should note, that because we get back late from antique hunting, on other Sundays, I usually only get to see one quarter (or period in American terms) of play. So I feel quite justified to enjoy the pre-game show on top of the actual game. Suzanne doesn't see it this way, and will run interference all day long, to make her point, that Super Bowl Sunday is just an excuse for old farts like me, to slack off and dream back upon their own glory days marching the grid-iron; a point which she delights in reminding me, was of a recreational nature. That's right. I didn't make it to the professional level. But, and this is a big one; as a keen, inches from the tube, football watcher, since I was a kid, I have become an exceptional in-livingroom commentator. I may have screwed up my vision in the process, but I know my stuff when it comes to reading the defensive line-up a scrimmage, and whether they'll be a blitz or not. I'm just following up the work of both my mother Merle, and Father, Ed, who treated the NFL as a sort of athletic religion, and she could recite the names of almost all the quarterbacks of any merit, and all star running backs, playing at that specific time; even knowing their stats for the year. For most of the week she listened to her classical record and CD collection, until football Sundays. I never really understood her unfaltering passion for the pigskin, and the brave souls who carried it through a line of very big fellows trying to rip the ball out of their arms; and attempting to tear their respective heads off their shoulders, just to entertain us rank and file sports fans. She passed it on to her son but I couldn't pass it down to my boys who have zero interest in sports today; and as a vegetarian, Robert's against the whole idea of pig-skin being used to play a game. Gosh, do they still use pig skin? I miss having them part of Super Bowl Sunday, but to each their own, as they say. I don't watch rock concerts, so we're even.
I really just like something different in my week, which one day long ago, used to be Hockey Night In Canada on the CBC. Now hockey has been replaced by the National Football League, in my competitive hard-wired heart, courtesy those kind souls from CTV who still provide me with the old analogue signal I was raised-on from childhood. I used to be ten times the sports enthusiast when I could watch the hockey games on the television, because frankly, I couldn't afford the cost of going to the games in person. Or, better stated, I like the home comforts of my own livingroom, where I don't have to line up at a concession for a ten dollar hot dog and six dollar pop, and the line-up for the bathroom doesn't stretch down the hall. But I hate, and I meant that, paying for the right to view a hockey game, or the Canadian Football League. The way I look at it, as I have for my entire life, hooked on the television signal, I am willing to watch and suffer through all the crappy commercials sent my way, as payment, to get the games for free. I might even buy some of the products advertised. But I will never pay cable fees or subscribe to any of the movie and program services available, for an assortment of charges, because I grew up in the era of free television. Next they'll try to charge me for the radio stations I listen to each day.
I don't have a fake Super Bowl trophy in the house, and there are no team sweaters to don, or NFL approved footballs to toss around the room, and there are no special game programs to buy. It is my low key day, to sit back, and watch my new favorite sport (I've given up on the NHL because the CBC doesn't reach my television any longer), and carry on a family tradition that goes back to my early teens, when my parents began a serious fan relationship with American football. There won't be a drop of alcohol in the house, unless there is some Suzanne uses for the wounds I receive opening cat food tins, and for when I've scraped my knees, tumbling down the back stairs. I will fall asleep two or three times during the pre-game show, and Suzanne will delight in reminding me of my infraction, each time she passes my chair. I've learned to take it all in stride, even the part where she mocks me for having food on my shirt and stuck in my beard. I tell her it's my reserve stock of provisions, in case we run out.
Suzanne is a pretty good sport about my NFL Sundays, truth be known, and she has a long list of projects she had been unable to get to, through the week-days, when we leave home early and get back late, that will get done this Sunday, to her satisfaction; regardless how much she would like me to be more gainfully employed by some of the other chores, that are also on the back burner. I offer my sincere apology in advance, and suggest we could cuddle through the game, and when she scorns me for such an one sided strategy to pacify her, I remind the good woman, that she at least, was in my thoughts at that moment of benevolence; and that she should thusly, accept the fact, nothing is going to haul me away from the television set and my favorite chair, except an undertaker, and by that point, I wouldn't have much of an argument against. For those football lovers out there, Broncos by fourteen points.
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