If anyone were to ask me who I would want to win the Super Bowl, I would go all Socrates on them, and ask them, “do you remember that scene from The Dark Knight Rises where Bane detonates all the gunpowder-laced concrete, and it destroys the ground underneath the football stadium, killing two entire football teams, except for Hines Ward who outruns all of it en route to scoring a kick-return touchdown?”
And when the response is obviously yes, because I probably wouldn’t associate myself with anyone who hasn’t seen The Dark Knight Rises, then I would say that that’s precisely how I would prefer this year’s Super Bowl to end up, except I don’t want anyone to score a touchdown at all, and would prefer that the kick returner just narrowly fall short of the end zone and fall to his death a step short of scoring.
I do not like the San Francisco 49ers, nor do I like the Baltimore Ravens. The fact that both teams made it to the Super Bowl marks a complete worst-case scenario for me altogether, and I simply do not want either team to win. Which is unfortunate considering that in pro football, ties are possible, except come the playoffs and the Super Bowl. The 49ers have one of those ties too, and those happen once or twice every decade. The fact that they tied with the St. Louis Rams of all teams means they shouldn’t have been in the playoffs at all, to be perfectly honest. It should’ve been the Baltimore Ravens versus nobody, and by virtue of having no opponent, there is no winner of the Super Bowl, and everyone loses.
Seriously, I’m typically capable of finding at least a player to root for, or the smallest variable to pick one team over the other. Or even something to root for ironically, like Brad Johnson in that one year where the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were in the Super Bowl. Brad Johnson sucked, but it was still ironically funny that Brad Johnson was a starting QB for a Super Bowl winning team. I can’t do that between the 49ers and the Ravens. I don’t like or know any players on either team that I would feel remotely happy to see win.
I pretty much don’t like any sports team from San Francisco. In fact, I don’t really like San Francisco at all. My visit to the city last year, I looked forward to greatly on account that I had never been there before, but after I came back home, I realized that I could be fairly content with my life if I never went back. Actually, I take that back, because I had the greatest burrito of my entire life in South San Francisco near the airport, but other than that, there really weren’t a whole lot of redeeming factors for me to genuinely want to go back. I think the people out there are vapid and shallow, the city itself is overrated, crowded, gross and expensive, and it kind of aggravates me that San Francisco is currently riding this wave of professional sports success between the Giants and 49ers, that I don’t think the legions of fairweather fans, bandwagoners and front-runners deserve.
And the Ravens, come on. I don’t really need to say anything more than Ray Lewis. The motherfucker murdered someone for crying out loud. And got away with it by virtue of nothing other than the fact that he is a rich professional athlete, and paid his way out of it. He’s everything that’s wrong with professional athletes and at the top of the list whenever I use that statement. And to this day, he goes about his business preaching about religion and God, which in a way he should be, because it’s by the grace of god that people are so fucking greedy and selfish that they’re willing to take money over justice and not lock Ray Lewis’s murderer ass in prison.
To the Ravens’ and Lewis’s credit, Lewis has cultivated a franchise known for its stifling defense, which has required some actual talent and skill over the last decade and a half. But every member of the Ravens is a follower that drinks Ray Lewis’s kool-aid, so none of them are any better than he is, other than the fact that most of them probably haven’t murdered anyone before.
The worst part is that the media clearly wants the Ravens to win, because Ray Lewis is on his retirement tour, and ESPNis-suckers love to end the narrative with a hero riding off into the sunset as a champion. Which in itself is terribly wrong, because one of the greatest fallacies of professional sport is that winning a championship or doing something extraordinary absolves an athlete of literally anything; including rape and murder.
THE last thing I would want to see is Ray Lewis ending his career being lauded as a hero and a champion.
What it boils down to is the fact that the lesser of two evils would be the 49ers winning it, but to be perfectly honest, I’d still rather just see the world burn, and the ground collapse beneath both teams. The one good thing to come out of this worst-case scenario is that I’m traveling this weekend, and I’m going to anticipate a fairly low-populated return flight from DC to Atlanta on account of people watching this crappy Super Bowl all across the country. Not having a single fuck to give about this year’s Super Bowl is kind of liberating, and I’m looking forward to the travel for a variety of reasons that don’t include the Super Bowl.
