You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Super Bowl Media Day
Imagine if you will, every reporter with a question, every putz with a microphone, every scribe with an unspoken thought.
Now imagine bad suits, and terrible hair cuts and people looking for swag.
Now imagine all of this corpulent humanity crammed inside one massive venue in New Jersey.
Thousands of disheveled reporters, bloggers, spammers and broadcasting superstars all wedged with a journalistic shoe horn into a receptacle of news gathering.
Welcome to Super Bowl Media Day.
There are no dumb questions they say.
Yes there are.
Media Day is an old-fashioned dumb fest. It’s the place where crazy and excess come to make babies.
Media Day is where sports journalists mingle with entertainment reporters and nehredewells from the fringe of communicative armaggedon.
These gatherers of information horde in front of tables where media darlings like Peyton Manning and Richard Sherman answer a rail road car of questions.
What do you think about the weather?
Are you a gangsta?
How will this affect your legacy if you lose?
Do you talk all the time?
“What does Omaha mean?”
The players are ordered to endure this hour of insipid misdirection.
Marshawn Lynch is one of the baddest men on the planet running the ball.
He’s so powerful, such a force on the field, they call his running style beast mode.
If he wasn’t on the football field, he’d be arrested for aggravated assault.
He is a wrecking ball.
Off the field, in front of the cameras, he is a nervous lamb, a stuttering butterfly.
He doesn’t talk to the media. Ever.
He hates them, loathes the cameras, stays away from the lights like a vampire avoiding the sun.
But this is media day and everyone is ordered to talk, or be fined.
So Beast Mode hides in the corner, under a scaffolding near a spider web.
He has a hoodie on top of his hoodie.
He wears dark glasses and big head phones.
He is uncomfortable, pushed to the edge of the room, barely in the venue, perhaps just enough not to be fined.
And then there is the other end of the spectrum.
Peyton Manning.
He enters the arena like a prince at his own coronation.
The NFL channel, owned and operated by the NFL, is on a massive set with 6 people at the ready.
Media day is the Superbowl before the Superbowl.
It’s talking heads talking about nothing and everything and again nothing.
It’s jive turkey banter. It’s X’s and O’s.
It’s huge deals made out of nothing, like what hotel are they staying in, what routine they will adhere to, what is the practice field turf like.
Super Bowl Media Day is excessive excess. It’s a mouth full of ham sandwich vomiting up bile.
Some players love it.
Others simply move thru their hour giving concise statements of fact that will never be aired.
It’s the NFL’s version of peasants throwing dead people and excretory juices out their windows into the street.
I don’t even know what that means.
Media Day is like cramming stinky squid and fish heads and rotting eel into one bucket. Something has got to give. Something is going to stink. Something sordid is going to slosh out.
The question is what? Who will spew the venom that energizes another news cycle.
At 10:30 am it begins.
“There is Peyton manning walking into the 3rd media day of his storied career,” the NFL host will say with reverence.
Peyton Manning is the grid iron equivalent of Pope Francis.
Manning is relaxed. He loves the white-hot glare of the cameras. He walks in, an 18 blazing across his chest, a towel draped over his shoulder.
“It’s like a prize-fight,” the fawning anchor spews. A camera follows Manning into the arena. The 6’5″ QB is surrounded by a mob, an enterouge, a group of handlers.
“And he will face a man who packs a knockout, Deion Sanders, who is staking out podium number two,” the anchor says gathering his breath as if Manning is walking on water and teaching the masses to fish to feed themselves.
“What will you ask him deion?” the anchor bellows, spittle frothing on his lip.
“I have no idea,” the Hall of Famer says. “I have to see his countenance.”
You have to see his What? Is that even legal in Jersey?
“Ask him about his cut man when he comes into the ring.”
His cut man. what’s with the boxing motif? What are these bozos talking about. And this is media day. More time to fill. More subjects to labor over.
Deion slides up to Manning, much like Joe Dimaggio once slid up to Marilyn Monroe
The two NFL superstars acknowledge one another.
“How ya feeling?” Deion asks.
And the hard hitting love affair with superfluous excess begins.
Peyton smiles.
“What is the difference between this super bowl and others?”
Peyton smirks. The question should be on “Are you smarter than a third grader.”
“It represents a different organization for me. It’s special to be here. We have worked hard to get here. We only have four guys who played in a Superbowl before. We have a lotta new guys, and they are pumped up.”
It’s a safe answer. It’s not sexy. It’s not noteworthy. It’s barely worth listening to.
But the guys on the NFL set are soiling themselves.
“Is there anything that you might do over?”
Peyton bears down for this ACT exam prep question. “No the preps for the last 2 were excellent.”
What about weather? Will it be a factor?”
“weather will be what is going to be.”
I hear a thud. I think the NFL Channel’s Milissa Starks passes out like a fan at an Elvis concert.
Weather will be what it is going to be.
Wow.
You can’t get that kind of insight just anywhere.
The wide shots show a 1000 reporters all leaning forward trying to hear, pressing forward, trying to get a question in.
Then the question of the moment. A woman, from an entertainment organization asks this.
“Will you be on Saturday Night Live?:
“This Saturday?” Peyton says with a grin that says, Did you put both your legs in the same hole in your underwear kind of look.
“Yes you were so good on it before.”
“I think I’ll be preparing for the game the next day” he says with a somewhat straight face.
“I can confirm, he won’t be on this week,” his boss John Elway says with a smile.
Meanwhile, lurking in the shadows, Beast Mode snickers.
He is wearing a hoodie on his hoodie with dark glasses and head phones.
Nobody is bothering him and he isn’t being fined.
The excess is a little noisy on the periphery of leave me alone and let me carry the rock.
Super Bowl Media Day: How do you think the weather will affect you?
Please….
Life’s Crazy™