Prole Bowl!
It has gone unmentioned on this humble blog, I think because I, like Jack, have been avoiding pumping all of my Steelers-related hopes and fears into it, but: Pittsburgh's going to the Super Bowl. Everybody do the Super Broker Shuffle! This provides excellent television-watching opportunities, as well as a chance to emotionally invest in dramatic events completely outside one's control.
One thing that's gotten plenty of mention already is that Super Bowl XLV's bill -- the Pittsburgh Steelers vs. the Green Bay Packers -- matches two of the NFL's oldest and most storied franchises. But I would also like to highlight, per my earlier breakdown of team name categories, that the game will feature both of the league's clubs that are named after industrial workers. Gritty, blue-collar football indeed! Will the Steelers play with the strength and resilience of the metal whose name they bear? Or will the Packers butcher them and load their carcasses into refrigerated box cars, to be shipped to larger population centers? Or, as Kyle just suggested to me, will the proletarians of each squad rise up together against the bourgeois decadence of the owners?
I expect that the latter impulse will be channeled instead into the negotiations for a new Collective Bargaining Agreement later this year; the onfield action will be rabotnik against rabotnik. Perhaps one day soon the Jacksonville Jaguars or whoever will be relocated to the L.A. market and renamed the Beverly Hills Fat Cats, providing a more natural rivalry. But the present matchup still offers a pretty good theme.
One thing that's gotten plenty of mention already is that Super Bowl XLV's bill -- the Pittsburgh Steelers vs. the Green Bay Packers -- matches two of the NFL's oldest and most storied franchises. But I would also like to highlight, per my earlier breakdown of team name categories, that the game will feature both of the league's clubs that are named after industrial workers. Gritty, blue-collar football indeed! Will the Steelers play with the strength and resilience of the metal whose name they bear? Or will the Packers butcher them and load their carcasses into refrigerated box cars, to be shipped to larger population centers? Or, as Kyle just suggested to me, will the proletarians of each squad rise up together against the bourgeois decadence of the owners?
I expect that the latter impulse will be channeled instead into the negotiations for a new Collective Bargaining Agreement later this year; the onfield action will be rabotnik against rabotnik. Perhaps one day soon the Jacksonville Jaguars or whoever will be relocated to the L.A. market and renamed the Beverly Hills Fat Cats, providing a more natural rivalry. But the present matchup still offers a pretty good theme.
3 Comments:
Note that the Packers are also the only team to be publicly owned (the practice being since formally banned by the NFL), so for them to rise up against the owners would mean 53 men in helmets and tights taking on over 100,000 persons, many of whom are, no doubt, experienced Wisconsin outdoorsmen.
You know what? Nuts to football, I want to see that showdown for three hours in prime time.
I'd forgotten about the public ownership thing; I guess when I think of "NFL owner" I just conjure up an image of Jerry Jones up in one of his posh Dallas skyboxes. The Packers really are the team to take it to the league's corporate oligarchists, then.
I'm all for the Packers and their fan/owners vs. Jerry Jones, Dan Snyder, etc... Dan Rooney can hide out in Ireland until the carnage dies down.
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