ShareThisSome teams are great, some teams achieve greatness and some teams are the Arizona Cardinals.
This also could be true of towns, I suppose, and this one has all the required attributes of a Super Bowl city; it is warm, it has palm trees out the window and a grouper sandwich on the menu.
While the Super Bowl might wander off to outposts like Detroit or Houston or even Jacksonville (Dallas and Indianapolis await), nothing is more reassuring than a warm breeze and a cold drink, each under an umbrella.
Since last the NFL was here for its big finale -- or as one of the Steel Curtain crowd dubbed the Super Bowl, the Big Iguana -- it boasts several changes, just in case any visitor might wander too far from his hotel. Proudly, and not unneeded, the city has added new ramps to connect the airport to the interstate. While this may seem like exotic absurdity, better egress is not so diverting as to cause accidents.
Busch Gardens has added a roller coaster, the zoo now includes meerkats, and Ybor City, heretofore home of cigar makers and fine paella, is now known locally as "Gaybor.''
The limping economy promises fewer parties, and some $50 million less may be spent at Super Bowl XLIII. That still leaves $150 million to be spread around, hardly stimulus package funds but not loose change either.
Otherwise, things are pretty much the same as we left them, and the grouper, while more expensive, is just as tasty. Of course, the teams have also changed, as they will for Super Bowls, and this one has at least one wide-eyed gatecrasher.
Tampa tends to host the oddball bowl, this being the fourth. In the first, the Raiders were between Oaklands and won here as Los Angeles, then Buffalo's Scott Norwood missed wide right, establishing a losing habit that the Bills would keep through four straight Super Bowls.
And the last time, 2001, the Baltimore Ravens were nearly as impressive as a young halftime performer named Britney Spears who, oops, did it again but not yet again and again.
So it is that the Cardinals of Chicago, St. Louis, Tempe, Phoenix and Glendale should feel less off-put than they do, mere props for the week while the Steelers pass for what passes as an NFL dynasty these days.
Since it is too late to find somebody else for the Steelers to thrash in the Super Bowl -- say, a team of very nearly the same record, like the Broncos -- this will have to do. Certainly, it will get no better than this for the Cardinals, who have never been as greatly celebrated since just after wars were given Roman numerals, much as is the Super Bowl.
Insults may be Arizona's best ordnance, as it demonstrated against Philadelphia and Atlanta. It was like Rodney Dangerfield getting the girl, or George Bush a scholarship.
The Cardinals have come to depend on lack of respect, a motivational cliche but here entirely justified. Larry Fitzgerald, one the more identifiable Arizona figures (as much for his flying hair as his ability to catch the football, and, keeping with the no-respect theme, without use of an actual tape measure, Fitzgerald loses the hair battle to Pittsburgh's Troy Polamalu), likened the Cardinals to the kid who gets picked on after school. Until he stands up and stops it, he will keep getting picked on.
For now, the week is ripe with possibilities, or as a dude along Radio Row babbled, "the news, rumor and innuendo" of the coming week.
(The space provided for sports talk radio also is at least 10 times what it was the last time the Super Bowl was here. Because I was wearing a credential that made me seem important, one of that ilk, someone on a station labeled The Sports Monster, waved me over to the set as he jabbered. I declined, but I did wonder that if newspaper sports sections billed themselves as Monsters or Beasts or even, as is often assumed, Swine, more of us might stay in business.)
The week ahead is when the Cardinals, as well as the Steelers, oblige the world during the daily press opportunities, once described to me as "having the same tooth filled five days in a row."
Hype is there for anyone who will take it. And how great it would be if truth were not the inevitable casualty -- that some Steeler or another would add to the pile of low opinion about the Cardinals.
I suggest, "Pretty helmets."
No insult will likely match the one from Hollywood Henderson, a Cowboy of an earlier generation who characterized Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw as so dumb he couldn't spell cat if you spotted him the "c" and the "a."
Of course, football has little to do with the alphabet beyond the letters X and O. Even sports monsters know that.
(Contact Bernie Lincicome of the Rocky Mountain News at lincicomeb(at)RockyMountainNews.com.)
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