Super Bowl 2007: Pre-Game Warmup
Category: Sports (Pro/College/HS)...
Posted Sunday, February 04, 2007 at 03:59 PM [GMT-6]

Hello and welcome to the Gazette's coverage of Super Bowl MCXXLMVIX, aka Super Bowl 2007. The actual game doesn't start for a couple of hours, but we're going to join the pre-game show which began last Wednesday and bring you quickly up-to-speed on some important and fascinating details that will make our coverage more meaningful and enjoyable.

If you haven't been paying attention, today's game pits the Chicago Cubs against the Baltimore Colts in an epic match-up that will captivate the citizens of at least twelve midwestern counties. Both teams have storied pasts, but I'm not Wikipedia so go look that up on your own time.

Here's some little known trivia about today's participants:

• The Cubs (hereafter referred to as "the Bears" for marketing purposes) are the first team in NFL history to reach the championship game without a quarterback. This is a pretty amazing story. It turns out that the guy they've been snapping the ball to all year was actually the winner of a "retrieve the kicking tee" contest sponsored by a local car dealership. He was supposed to run onto the field after the opening kickoff of the first pre-season game, grab the tee, and run off the field, thereby achieving 25 seconds of his alloted 15 minutes of fame. Instead, he kept going back onto the field and calling plays, and it wasn't until the Bears were reviewing game films last week did they realize it.


• The Colts, on the other hand, have won something like 87 straight games and are led by a player with the unlikely name of "Peyton," and he's not even a girl. His story is just as fascinating, in that he was raised in the wild by hippies who named him for a 60s TV show. He has a brother, Eli, named for a Three Dog Night song. Eli is also a quarterback, but he plays for a New York team so he's not in the same league. <rimshot>.


• As always, there's a lot of buzz around the singing of the National Anthem just before kick-off. This year, the SSB will be professionally mangled by none other than the legendary Billy Jor-El, best known as Superman's dad. Jor-El was once married to supermodel and physician's attendant Christie Brinkley, for whom he sacrificed his career by writing and singing maudlin songs about Brooklyn in order to help put her through nursing school. Brinkley dumped him as soon as she got a cap, citing "irreconcilable discontent with his weird googly eyes."

I hope this little primer will help you better understand the significance of this year's edition of The Ultimate Game. Be sure to check back here for full coverage of the often pathetic attempts by the game's sponsors to get a meaningful return for their advertising dollars, said attempts being periodically punctuated by a football game. And, by all means, please do feel free to weigh in with your own insights and opinions.

Oh, and for the record, Baltimore will hereafter be referred to as Indianapolis, for marketing purposes.

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