This is what makes journalism sad!!
Posted: Tue Jan 23, 2007 4:59 pm
Love the city, mourn the football team
Published January 21, 2007
People of New Orleans, lend me your ears.
We are not your sponge.
A football is an oval hunk of leather. And large, fast and supremely violent men catch it and run with it as others try to smash them to the ground.
But a sponge is porous and soft, often pink, or yellow, belonging in a sink or the tub. There is no violence in a sponge. A sponge is designed to sop up unwanted water.
And New Orleans, please understand this: We like you guys. But we're not your sponge.
Get it?
Chicago is not your paper towel, either, or your Shop-Vac or your spaghetti mop or your squeegee.
So no matter what happens Sunday in the NFC championship game between the Bears and the Saints, it has nothing to do with that flood of yours.
We're not sopping up your water.
This is football.
"That's all anyone wants to talk about, Hurricane Katrina and the flood and how if the Saints win this game, it'll help New Orleans," said my friend Dave Kaplan, the WGN-AM sports talk show host who has been doing interviews with his counterparts in other cities about Sunday's game.
"It's Katrina this and Katrina that," Kaplan said, shrugging.
It makes me sick, I said.
"Me too," Kaplan said, who has issues with New Orleans that I'll reveal later. "What does Katrina have to do with football?"
Nothing.
All of us felt terrible about Katrina and the flood. Even Kaplan. And we hold no animosity for a great city that has endured so much.
What's drives us crazy is the blabbermouth national media, projecting their own desires in their stories, putting the Saints on the side of the angels, and the Bears on the side of Katrina. If they were political writers, they'd be card carrying Obamamaniacs.
Even our future president, Sen. Barack Obama, has the guts to publicly say he wants the Bears to whip Saint behind on Sunday.
"More Than Football," cooed Sports Illustrated on its cover last week. "Drew Brees and the Saints lift the city of New Orleans to higher ground."
Oh, I get it. If the Bears lose, New Orleans will rise above the place where it now sits, below sea level, where some ridiculous Frenchman put it, ignoring the warnings of his engineers.
It ends Sunday, unless the unthinkable happens and the Bears lose. Then Indianapolis or New England can be cast as the Great Satan. Or is that The Great Sponge?
It's so bad, it's almost like the coverage of Olympic women's figure skating, which isn't about the skating, but about the emotion.
There's always that poignant moment between the young skater and her aged mom in the black babushka, the mom's legs bowed by endless toil, working 18-hour days in the Azerbaijani Fish Cooperative, squeezing caviar out of giant sturgeons, so as to buy new skates for her daughter.
There's always some sappy music in the background--Yanni or Kenny G-- and it makes you weep with the drama of it all. It's like that with the Katrina story line around Sunday's game.
And I can't eat that cheese no more.
But before a mob of angry Bears fans strangle Yanni with a Kenny G string, there's work to do. We have to have a few pops and chips with Mrs. Grass Onion Soup Dip mix, and then cheer grown men beating the heck out of Mother Teresa.
That's right. Mother Teresa.
"[The Saints] are the sweethearts of the league. Everybody loves them and deservedly so," Baltimore Ravens coach Brian Billick told Tribune NFL writer Don Pierson before his team whipped the who-is-that out of the Saints 35-22.
"You go in and beat them, you might as well go and beat up Mother Teresa."
Which brings me back to Kaplan and his strained relationship with New Orleans, which started when he was engaged to a woman from that town.
"I was staying overnight at their place, and got up late to hit the fridge for some food, and here comes my almost future mother-in-law. She hates me. And she's silent. She doesn't say a word.
"So I figure, the heck with this, I approach her and say, `I'm a likable guy. I get along with just about everybody. What's your problem with me? Is it because I'm Jewish?
"She said `No, it's because you're taking my daughter away, you Yankee!'
"I finally had enough of her, and I tell her, `That's right. I'm a Yankee, and guess what? We kicked your butts 150 years ago and we could do it again.'
"And the next morning, I broke up with my fiance and left and that was it," Kaplan said, with a big smile.
We kicked their butts 150 years ago. And Katrina or no Katrina, the Bears will kick some again on Sunday.
I gar-on-tee.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/fo ... &track=rss
I would like a few minutes alone with this idiot journalist.
Published January 21, 2007
People of New Orleans, lend me your ears.
We are not your sponge.
A football is an oval hunk of leather. And large, fast and supremely violent men catch it and run with it as others try to smash them to the ground.
But a sponge is porous and soft, often pink, or yellow, belonging in a sink or the tub. There is no violence in a sponge. A sponge is designed to sop up unwanted water.
And New Orleans, please understand this: We like you guys. But we're not your sponge.
Get it?
Chicago is not your paper towel, either, or your Shop-Vac or your spaghetti mop or your squeegee.
So no matter what happens Sunday in the NFC championship game between the Bears and the Saints, it has nothing to do with that flood of yours.
We're not sopping up your water.
This is football.
"That's all anyone wants to talk about, Hurricane Katrina and the flood and how if the Saints win this game, it'll help New Orleans," said my friend Dave Kaplan, the WGN-AM sports talk show host who has been doing interviews with his counterparts in other cities about Sunday's game.
"It's Katrina this and Katrina that," Kaplan said, shrugging.
It makes me sick, I said.
"Me too," Kaplan said, who has issues with New Orleans that I'll reveal later. "What does Katrina have to do with football?"
Nothing.
All of us felt terrible about Katrina and the flood. Even Kaplan. And we hold no animosity for a great city that has endured so much.
What's drives us crazy is the blabbermouth national media, projecting their own desires in their stories, putting the Saints on the side of the angels, and the Bears on the side of Katrina. If they were political writers, they'd be card carrying Obamamaniacs.
Even our future president, Sen. Barack Obama, has the guts to publicly say he wants the Bears to whip Saint behind on Sunday.
"More Than Football," cooed Sports Illustrated on its cover last week. "Drew Brees and the Saints lift the city of New Orleans to higher ground."
Oh, I get it. If the Bears lose, New Orleans will rise above the place where it now sits, below sea level, where some ridiculous Frenchman put it, ignoring the warnings of his engineers.
It ends Sunday, unless the unthinkable happens and the Bears lose. Then Indianapolis or New England can be cast as the Great Satan. Or is that The Great Sponge?
It's so bad, it's almost like the coverage of Olympic women's figure skating, which isn't about the skating, but about the emotion.
There's always that poignant moment between the young skater and her aged mom in the black babushka, the mom's legs bowed by endless toil, working 18-hour days in the Azerbaijani Fish Cooperative, squeezing caviar out of giant sturgeons, so as to buy new skates for her daughter.
There's always some sappy music in the background--Yanni or Kenny G-- and it makes you weep with the drama of it all. It's like that with the Katrina story line around Sunday's game.
And I can't eat that cheese no more.
But before a mob of angry Bears fans strangle Yanni with a Kenny G string, there's work to do. We have to have a few pops and chips with Mrs. Grass Onion Soup Dip mix, and then cheer grown men beating the heck out of Mother Teresa.
That's right. Mother Teresa.
"[The Saints] are the sweethearts of the league. Everybody loves them and deservedly so," Baltimore Ravens coach Brian Billick told Tribune NFL writer Don Pierson before his team whipped the who-is-that out of the Saints 35-22.
"You go in and beat them, you might as well go and beat up Mother Teresa."
Which brings me back to Kaplan and his strained relationship with New Orleans, which started when he was engaged to a woman from that town.
"I was staying overnight at their place, and got up late to hit the fridge for some food, and here comes my almost future mother-in-law. She hates me. And she's silent. She doesn't say a word.
"So I figure, the heck with this, I approach her and say, `I'm a likable guy. I get along with just about everybody. What's your problem with me? Is it because I'm Jewish?
"She said `No, it's because you're taking my daughter away, you Yankee!'
"I finally had enough of her, and I tell her, `That's right. I'm a Yankee, and guess what? We kicked your butts 150 years ago and we could do it again.'
"And the next morning, I broke up with my fiance and left and that was it," Kaplan said, with a big smile.
We kicked their butts 150 years ago. And Katrina or no Katrina, the Bears will kick some again on Sunday.
I gar-on-tee.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/fo ... &track=rss
I would like a few minutes alone with this idiot journalist.
