Does This Mean That I Have To Watch the Super Bowl?

Does This Mean That I Have To Watch the Super Bowl?

Until yesterday I had always thought that Seattle was oriented more towards baseball than football. I’m not much of a football fan. I haven’t paid attention to the game for a long time. I won’t go into my reasons for ignoring football over the years, let me just say that it is impossible for me to tune it out now. After yesterday’s victory over Carolina, the Seattle Seahawks were finally able to cross their name off the list of teams who have never made it to the Super bowl. I won’t go so far as to say that I have jumped on the bandwagon, but I’ll watch it drive by.

Yesterday was the first football game that I actually planned to watch in many years. This is not to say that I haven’t watched a game or two by accident here and there, but I set my day’s schedule around the Seahawks’ game. I watched the first three quarters while working out at my gym. The Seahawks dominated the game from the start and they were well on their way to victory as I showered and walked to a local sports bar near my apartment.

The place was completely packed with the loudest, drunkest crowd I had ever seen anywhere in Seattle. I had watched a few important baseball games here and none of them compare with the rowdiness of these football fans. It was fun and exciting to experience this big crowd celebrating the penultimate win to a national championship. I’m glad that I wasn’t at the bar for the entire game. To many “High Fives” (Hi-5)for this fair weather fan.

Two guys sitting at the bar in front of me gave each other the Hi-5 at least a dozen times in the last ten minutes of the game. Everyone in the bar was giving each other Hi-5s every time just about anything happened on the TV. I took some notes on the phenomena and came up with this very incomplete list of reasons football fans have for giving Hi-5s: your team scores, your team almost scores, your team gets a first down, there is a commercial on that is funny, your team wins, and you feel that it is not socially acceptable to make out with your buddy in a sports bar. I saw some Hi-5s that were every bit as passionate as any Bogart-Bacall kiss. You could have cut the sexual tension in the air last night with a broken beer bottle.

I suppose that Hi-5s are kind of like doing the wave: it’s just not done at baseball games. I can think of only a couple of occasions in baseball in which Hi-5s are appropriate. Say your team hits a walk-off home run in the last game of the World Series to win it all, or how about when Randy Johnson unleashes one of his radar-defying fastballs and hits a bird. If you are feeling sorry for the seagull, I heard that it just took a very fishy dump on a baby and so deserved his fate.

Towards the end of the game the camera panned the sidelines. Team owner, Paul Allen, was looking satisfied with the game. He was wearing one of those dorky ID lanyards around his neck. Dude, you are like the world’s 3rd richest man, you don’t need to wear a fucking ID lanyard. If anyone has a problem with you not wearing it you can have them killed. If Paul Allen took a dump in the ladies’ room at Seahawk Stadium with the stall door open I guarantee that no one would say anything.

Woman #1 walks into ladies’ room at Seahawk Stadium and sees Paul Allen taking a dump with the stall door open.

Woman #1: Yikes!
Woman #2: Relax, it’s Paul Allen.
Woman #1: Silly me.

So it looks like there will be two games that I make an effort to watch this season. Go Hawks!