It’s Footblah Season
Todd: I love autumn. The weather cools down, the leaves begin turning into living paintings, girls begin wearing cute winter hats, and football season begins. Yes, you heard me right, football. I know what you are thinking: “Bah, Todd Natti, Pulse Editor, he doesn’t like football, he’s a music geek.” And to you I say bah in return, I do like football. There is something about it I can’t explain, perhaps it ties into my love of the Olympic Games. We all know what football is, no need to explain that. And most of us like the sport, no need denying it. I mean, come on, you live in Buffalo, you have to be a Bills fan no matter what.
Penn: Oh, posh. The Olympic Games have little to do with overpaid athletes that hardly register as hunks of meat with brains grafted on. And some of those brains aren’t taking. Now there is definitely a special place in my heart for football, right there next to zubaz pants and bratwurst. And speaking of sausages, I find the phenomenon of the football game gathering rather fascinating. A bunch of guys (although not always exclusively) get together, drink their particular beverage and eat their particular bean dip of choice. Sure, it’s all-American, and sure it’s a male-dominated fan base. It’s all so interesting. I think that football fanaticism has become a cultural statement, and dare I say revolution, in our great nation today. Please, let me clarify. By cultural revolution, I actually mean devolution. It’s hard not to feel elitist while saying this, but come on, people, there’s life beyond football.
Todd: What?! More to life than football? Foolish thoughts should not come from your mind so easily, Penn. What is better than football in the fall? Picking pumpkins with your lover? “Oh, honey, come on, let’s get the big one, then we can cuddle up with a glass of warm cider and listen to opera.” Hogswallop! On Sunday you are supposed to be reeling from the UB Bulls game the day before and ordering pizza to accompany your beer while you watch the game at home since you could not score tickets to the Bills game.
Penn: What, pray tell, is wrong with a little pumpkin pickin’? I’ll have you know that that statement is offensive to gourds and gourd-lovers alike. Furthermore, what I want to do with my gourd and my lover is none of your business. But come now, there’s more to a Sunday than tailgating and shouting obscenities at a referee. While I have always maintained a certain respect for contact sports, my general feelings are that some people take it too far and fanaticism ensues. Just think of all the people that spend hours of their lives sitting in front of a TV watching sports. If half of those people would change the channel, then maybe we would have a more engaged, aware, and less detested national and international culture. Just a thought. Try it on for size, right over your zubaz.
Todd: Ooh, look at us, we change to Comedy Central and suddenly we are more in tune with the world and other countries will like us more? I have said it before and I will say it again: hogswallop. Football is our national sport (sorry baseball, but I hate you) and we should worship it with unchecked reverie that will continue until someone tells us to knock it off. As the writer Oliver Langston Daniels Chestnut once said: “Sport, in any form, shows us who we are beneath, it is the true measure of a person. To know ourselves through sport is to know our true selves, and nothing could ever rise above that fact.”
Penn: It’s not that I am knocking sports. Believe me, I enjoy all sorts of individual and organized team sports competitions, but I simply feel that too many people place far too much emphasis on a more or less trivial form of entertainment; one that enables athletes to make more money per game than a dedicated civil servant makes in a year. Sure, these athletes are good, but are they that good? It leads me to the question of why no one will contract or draft me for being the fantastic wiseass that I am.
Todd: That’s why there are college sports, Penn, my dear. College sports for we collegians. Go Bulls, indeed.
