By Joe Marren
Buffalo, NY – Apologies to T.S. Eliot, who was a pretty smart guy, certainly one who was good enough to win a Nobel Prize and start a poem or two, but he was also full of high sentence and sometimes a bit obtuse. At times, indeed, he was almost ridiculous almost, at times, the fool. If you believe T, then April is the cruelest month. We know better. February is the month that nightmares are made of. It begins the groundhog days of winter when our seasonal ennui mingles with the drabness of the frozen, dead sky as the days creep in their snowy, cold pace until the end of time. Metaphorically and architecturally speaking, April is getting summer cottages ready, while February reminds some of us of Cold War, Soviet-style concrete apparatchik apartment blocks.
So how do we survive?
Well, this year we tried a Super Bowl in Feb instead of a lifeless Pro Bowl. Sure, some of the commercials were super and made us laugh. But that $3 mil per 30-second-spot could have been better spent sending Buffalonians to Honolulu for a few days of hullabaloo.
Pitchers and catchers report this month. Trouble is, though, the boys of 'roids have overshadowed the boys of summer in the public mind. Rooting for any of them now is almost like rooting for General Motors. I know, I know, the original line opines that rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel. But who gets the ref anymore since all steel is seemingly made someplace else? In fact, I think it's a law.
Basketball? Sorry, the B-Lo doesn't have an N-B-A team and my passion for the college version crumpled with Bob Lanier's knee in '70.
People invent sports, but the lord gave us hockey. Stanley is his name and Don Cherry is his prophet. So I'm hoping Olympian Ryan Miller is mentally toughening up for that upcoming second season. And mentioning Miller and hockey is a God-given segue to the Olympics. (Beauty, eh?)
We watch hockey and we know those guys play at an elite level attainable by only a few. Yes, I obviously mean South Buffalonians who skated at Caz along with enough outsiders to make the games official.
We watch figure skaters and we think that no reasonable athlete should participate in a sport that respects something called a triple Salchow-cow-ow-meow. We watch the biathlon and we wonder why anyone would be crazy enough to go skiing while packing?
We don't debate whether Jamaica's favorite winter sport is bobSLED or bobSLEIGH. We just know that it's kinda like the toboggan run at Chestnut Ridge, only apparently longer and somehow harder. But we also silently think that it can't be too hard if a John Candy clone was once supposedly a medalist.
We watch the luge and the skeleton and we wonder: Like, what's the diff? There's snowboarding, but many of us forget the obligatory "dude" patois that is mandatorily inserted every eleventh word. So we're, like, hopeless, ya know. Right now there's an entire demographic crossing arms, rolling eyes, shaking heads and sighing at how unrepentantly ancient I am.
Which leads us to curling, Sam-I-Am. Every beer-bellied, 50something couch potato thinks he or she can curl in the Olympics. And fervently believing that I can still live a life that my doctor hates, and which will make me an Olympian, gets me through my Februaries.
\\ U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! Wouldn't it be easier to group it all together into U-U-U, S-S-S, A-A-A?
Listener-Commentator Joe Marren is an associate professor of communications at Buffalo State College.
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