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TAHOE/TRUCKEE — Super Bowl XLVI is over. Now what are we going to do?
Obviously, thousands of so-called 99 percenters had plenty of extra dough lying around the house to cough up to cover the high cost of a ticket to the game. The seats in Lucas Oil Stadium certainly were not strictly reserved for the one percenters.
How many unemployed poor people could afford the hyper-inflated price of a ticket? The profitable mark up by the NFL was either fair or discriminatory, or both. Who the heck knows what's fair anymore? One man's economic inequality is another man's high-priced vacation, a new snowmobile with truck and loading ramp, or a second home in Tahoe.
If the ticket price means anything, apparently the Super Bowl isn't just another game, no matter how much the players have to psyche themselves up, or down, into thinking it is. According to the reports I heard, the ticket price was jacked up more than 1,000 percent compared to regular season games. Hotel costs also skyrocketed, in true capitalist fashion.
The NFL also charged football fans a $25 entrance fee for the whatever-they-called-it football fun house, which opened for business several days before the game. If I had kids, and they wanted to go, I would have sent them on their merry little pigskin way with someone much younger than I to keep watch over them. I would have stayed home, or watched the game on TV in my hotel room, just to get my money's worth.
But the Super Bowl has a lot more labor and overhead than a regular season game. Whether or not that justifies the high cost, I don't know. The halftime light show alone was highly imaginative (although Madonna can't spell Love), and at least appeared to be incredibly expensive. But I bet the NFL, and Indianapolis, used as many volunteers as possible for the multi-faceted, multi-day sports spectacular.
Maybe we should call it a coliseum, not a stadium. After all, they use roman numerals to count Super Bowls. They can't use swords, spears and lions to entertain us anymore, so we make football as brutal and as violent as is legally and humanely possible.
Football isn't the only sport in which we celebrate, worship and idolize the ultimate sacrifice of life and limb. In fact, football is one of the safer sports. I'll let the Tahoe locals figure out what sports are even more deadly than football. I'm not knocking any of them. We all have to go one way or the other. You might as well go doing what you love. But it's better to end it all in soft, deep snow. Maybe next winter!
I hope no marriages, or other socially adhesive relationships, suffered financially, or emotionally, due to the high cost of the Super Bowl, and Super Bowl paraphernalia. Fortunately it's only once a year. Still, I bet more than one family saw their kid's college fund depleted by several thousand dollars or more last week, without the wife knowing.
You could have paid me a million dollars to go and I still would have stayed home to watch the game. I love a good football game. I would have been much more enthusiastic about America's national religious display last Sunday if the 49ers had been playing, but, you still couldn't have paid me enough to make the trip, stand in line and deal with the crowds, even if you bought me a VIP lounge fully catered by Victoria's Secret models.
Well, OK, maybe, in that case, I would have given it some serious consideration.
If you like being titillated and fanatical about violence and impending doom there is one thing you can do now that there's no more football. You can watch the new TV show that premiered last night called Doomsday Preppers, on the National Geographic channel.
If it were up to me, I would make the major TV networks eliminate political coverage and broadcast all national and international ski events locally for free during prime time.
Bob Sweigert is a Sierra Sun columnist, published poet, former college instructor and ski instructor. He has a B.A. and an M.A.T. from Gonzaga University. He has lived at Lake Tahoe for almost 30 years.
Obviously, thousands of so-called 99 percenters had plenty of extra dough lying around the house to cough up to cover the high cost of a ticket to the game. The seats in Lucas Oil Stadium certainly were not strictly reserved for the one percenters.
How many unemployed poor people could afford the hyper-inflated price of a ticket? The profitable mark up by the NFL was either fair or discriminatory, or both. Who the heck knows what's fair anymore? One man's economic inequality is another man's high-priced vacation, a new snowmobile with truck and loading ramp, or a second home in Tahoe.
If the ticket price means anything, apparently the Super Bowl isn't just another game, no matter how much the players have to psyche themselves up, or down, into thinking it is. According to the reports I heard, the ticket price was jacked up more than 1,000 percent compared to regular season games. Hotel costs also skyrocketed, in true capitalist fashion.
The NFL also charged football fans a $25 entrance fee for the whatever-they-called-it football fun house, which opened for business several days before the game. If I had kids, and they wanted to go, I would have sent them on their merry little pigskin way with someone much younger than I to keep watch over them. I would have stayed home, or watched the game on TV in my hotel room, just to get my money's worth.
But the Super Bowl has a lot more labor and overhead than a regular season game. Whether or not that justifies the high cost, I don't know. The halftime light show alone was highly imaginative (although Madonna can't spell Love), and at least appeared to be incredibly expensive. But I bet the NFL, and Indianapolis, used as many volunteers as possible for the multi-faceted, multi-day sports spectacular.
Maybe we should call it a coliseum, not a stadium. After all, they use roman numerals to count Super Bowls. They can't use swords, spears and lions to entertain us anymore, so we make football as brutal and as violent as is legally and humanely possible.
Football isn't the only sport in which we celebrate, worship and idolize the ultimate sacrifice of life and limb. In fact, football is one of the safer sports. I'll let the Tahoe locals figure out what sports are even more deadly than football. I'm not knocking any of them. We all have to go one way or the other. You might as well go doing what you love. But it's better to end it all in soft, deep snow. Maybe next winter!
I hope no marriages, or other socially adhesive relationships, suffered financially, or emotionally, due to the high cost of the Super Bowl, and Super Bowl paraphernalia. Fortunately it's only once a year. Still, I bet more than one family saw their kid's college fund depleted by several thousand dollars or more last week, without the wife knowing.
You could have paid me a million dollars to go and I still would have stayed home to watch the game. I love a good football game. I would have been much more enthusiastic about America's national religious display last Sunday if the 49ers had been playing, but, you still couldn't have paid me enough to make the trip, stand in line and deal with the crowds, even if you bought me a VIP lounge fully catered by Victoria's Secret models.
Well, OK, maybe, in that case, I would have given it some serious consideration.
If you like being titillated and fanatical about violence and impending doom there is one thing you can do now that there's no more football. You can watch the new TV show that premiered last night called Doomsday Preppers, on the National Geographic channel.
If it were up to me, I would make the major TV networks eliminate political coverage and broadcast all national and international ski events locally for free during prime time.
Bob Sweigert is a Sierra Sun columnist, published poet, former college instructor and ski instructor. He has a B.A. and an M.A.T. from Gonzaga University. He has lived at Lake Tahoe for almost 30 years.
