SUPER MLK SLAP
Vulgar halftime acts degrade legacy
ARE common sense and common decency dead? Hibernating? Or have both been ruled politically and commercially inappropriate?
Even a Super Bowl TV audience was not supposed to notice the NFL’s latest rank hypocrisy and pathetic pandering.
From just before kickoff of Sunday’s game in Atlanta until the halftime show began, the chosen, beyond-football theme of the game was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., his extraordinary work, legacy, messages and martyrdom.
Video appeared of Dr. King’s civil-rights marches, his monumental speeches and his singular significance. The coin toss was conducted by Dr. King’s daughter.
An insert within the game showed Commissioner Roger Goodell visiting Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King was ordained and which now is a national historic landmark.
If this seemed to attract some cynicism as an assuagement to those who have ordained radicalized NFL exploitation maestro Colin Kaepernick as a symbol of modern racial protest, so be it.
King’s legacy is too great to be eclipsed by a QB who supports the convicted police murderer Joanne Chesimard, granted exile in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and no-trials executioner Che Guevara in the name of pick-and- choose justice.
But at halftime, the NFL seemed to go out of its way — as far as possible — to degrade King and his legacy by inviting two vulgar, N-wording, women denigrating, boasting, no-upside, backward-pointed rappers, Travis Scott and Big Boi, to perform.
Both have made their fame and fortune by promoting and perpetuating every negative stereotype of black America. Don’t take my words for it; look up — or down — their lyr- ics for yourself.
The NFL invited Scott fully knowing and anticipating that his lyrics would be so objectionable that he was three times bleeped while performing. The NFL knew what it had, knew what was coming — and that still met with its certification as entertainment to over 100 million viewers.
Why were they invited? So the NFL could fill its annual quota of objectionable performers? Why, especially in Dr. King’s conspicuously revived presence, did the news media not note, let alone decry, such a slap in Dr. King’s face? Or would it be impolite to offend the offensive?
And so it passes, quietly, of course, that this year’s Super Bowl, as per Roger Goodell’s stewardship, carried two nonfootball themes: A celebration of all that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lived and died for, and the repudiation and degradation of everything he lived and died for.
IF you’re assigned to cover TV and radio sports here, how do you ignore a local, career-long, sports-radio drivetime host who is a dead-serious misanthrope and megalomaniacal fraud? Besides, I’m not bad, just weak. As can be verified via @backaftathis, WFAN’s Mike Francesa spent Super Bowl week, mostly in Atlanta, as he does every week from up here: boasting, lying, spewing bogus facts and providing touts that are colossally, laughably wrong while emphasizing to listeners that he is extremely special, far more than they.
He hit Atlanta with inside, modest word that he rented a Cadillac, has been swamped by interview requests and who-asked-him memories of great seats bestowed upon him for past Super Bowls.
He promised a week in which he would not be so desperately low as the rest on Radio Row, thus he would not include football-related guests out to shill products. His delusional superiority and popularity provides him that advantage: “That’s not what we’re going to be about.”
He then spent the next four days obsequiously indulging 10 such guests as they shilled away.
His “my picks have value” tout was the Rams, getting three, plus the over 57, as the game, he huffed and puffed, included two offenses that simply can’t be stopped. As usual, he spoke as if he has never been wrong when he rarely has been right. The Pats won by 10 in the lowest-scoring Supe among the 52.
This brought to recall his nodoubt tout of Michigan, this season, over Ohio State because the favored, visiting Wolverines have a once-perdecade defense that will render OSU road kill. Michigan lost 62-39 — the most points it had ever allowed.
Monday, he let all know that his seats for the game, again, were the best. His standard, authoritatively spoken “facts” included the 2004 PatsPanthers Super Bowl as “zero-zero at the half.” Not quite. It was 14-10.
He also saw fit to mention that he won the first quarter and halftime of a box pool because the score had remained 3-0, Pats. But when told by a caller that such was impossible — the score was 0-0 after one — he dismissed his lie as not even worth mentioning.
He’s just a bad guy.