NFL “Talent”…Now And Then…

Now…

I’m not one that should ever work in the daily journalism field, for when I see a pop-culture train wreck, I initially kind of go all literary deer-in-headlights and basically cannot muster a coherent comment for the cationic shock.
I’m no different than any other red-blooded North American though, IF the NFL Super Bowl Half-Time Show is worthy of viewing, I’ll forgo the usually mandatory bathroom break and munchies refill and sacrifice the time.
But heck, the Super Bowl Producers have just GOT to find a way to warn me that what I am about to watch might make my eyes and ears bleed and cause a more-than-usual loss of brain cells. It’s bad enough I’m drinking and eating junk food, I don’t need another reason to get nauseous.
It’s not like I didn’t have some trepidation going in, I mean, Beyoncé? Of all the singing broads in the pop-rock world, this is the best the NFL could do? Man, I didn’t realize the economy hit THAT hard in the States, affecting the ability to, say, hire an entertainer with a voice and some talent…things must be way worse in Footballville, USA.
Before I even knew much about this chick, I knew the Mixer for the heavy metal band, AC/DC, and this dude travelled around the world with the band when they toured. Well, I guess they landed in LA some years back and happened to be staying at the same hotel Beyoncé was. Well, I gather, no peace could be found poolside for the verbal and body antics of this chick, stating that he had had more than enough traumatic Beyoncé visuals to last him a lifetime…I shan’t go into details for I’m too poor to be sued, but let’s just say very little “talent” was evident even then.
But hey, I’m nothing if not a believer in everyone having a Second Chance, so when the NFL gave that Press Conference with Beyoncé, I said, okay, I’ll watch and listen, she just did the Inauguration of President O, right, maybe she has come a long way, baby!
The “dress” was predictably NOT one, her hair predictably NOT black (who does she think she is fooling?) and the statements are what I expected from an entertainer who never quite knows when to stay mum or knows when the giggle has gone on just a wee bit too long. But yeah, pre Super Bowl nerves, I said (of course wondering how much more nervy the SB could be over a Presidential swear-in ceremony?) as I signed off from the Press Conference just in time to stop the coma I was entering.
Super Bowl Sunday finally arrives and yeah, I’m watching. It’s not like I have a horse in this race because there is NO WAY I can root for ANYTHING coming out of Baltimore (again, I won’t expound for fear of legal reprisals) and I’m sorry, there is NO WAY I can think of the 49ers as anything but the team on which Killer OJ played (also, as it turns out why I can no longer rent a car from Hertz…man, I need help) . But yeah, anything for an excuse to sit on my ass and drink myself into a stupor, I have brain cells a-plenty, don’t I, what’s the loss of a few more?
So I’m “rooting” for the 49ers (the lesser of two evils, and here’s me choosing Killer OJ’s team over the city King Edward-stealin’ divorcee Wallace Simpson harkened from…again, I need psychiatric help here!) and was miffed that a professional team commits an Illegal Formation on about the first play of the game…crikey, that’s High School antics there, what the heck?! So, of course, the beer was going down fast, the game was going downhill faster and all-in-all it was the day I expected, thinking the ONE thing that could pick me up before the start of the Second Half would be the saving grace of that rather big-boned Beyoncé and her “alleged” star power. I was biding my time, don’t you know, thinking her stellar voice and graceful dance moves would woo me into a blissful submission, forgetting well that the 49ers were playing like school girls.
The Announcement is made, the lights go down and WOW, yep, this light-show is grand! Oh yeah, I can feel the vibe, this will tower way over Madonna’s last year show for sure!
*sigh*
*yawn*
*Big Flip top Head yawn*
*burp…excuse me*
I was labelled “Burb” for the less-than-graceful way I play tennis, having been told I was about as talented and graceful a tennis player as a wounded bird would be on the court.
Soo…
I hereby bequeath my vested interest in the nickname “Burb” to the one more deserving than I in the genre of Song & Dance…Welcome and Give It Up for Beyoncé, the Queen of the Burbs! *handing wounded-bird trophy over to Beyoncé's P.A.*, (I wish I had a P.A.)

• Dancing non-existent for to dance would require rhythm and bodily grace
• Singing non-existent for to sing would require actual good songs that were sung in key instead of just yelled out
• Talent no where to be seen, that merely depresses far more than it entertains or arouses

A light show and pyrotechnics can only do so much.
It’s not that I’m against a supposed sexy broad wearing a supposed sexy outfit, supposedly sexily dancing as if we all were in an astro-turf laden strip club watching her wreck her career. Heck, watching young chickies like that keeps me abreast (sorry, I could have used another word but, well, no, I couldn’t, the pun makes me giggle so!) of how I should look and act...I think. I won’t end up in the Super Bowl Half Time Show nor climb a poll at a strip club but it doesn’t hurt to look like I could, right? Am I right guys? Am I right?
No, how she looked, her outfit, all of that could have been arousing but for the awful train wreck that was her utter lack of talent. If the SB people wanted a black songstress this time, to counter-balance oh so Whitey Madonna, what, they couldn’t have asked Rihanna to do the show instead? That chick actually happens to have a voice and is very feminine looking, graceful in her movements, and talent oozing from her X Gen pop-rock fingertips, and that’s saying allot for it takes a great deal to find talent in today’s music industry, lemme tell ya!
But no, sadly, we instead had to watch Beyoncé strutting around that gorgeous stage like a rutting elk or a railway lineman, hurting my eyes and bleeding my ears from the dumpy dance moves and the vocal attempts that became sheer lunacy (and that’s me toning DOWN the criticism, I don’t want to be sued…oh, sorry, you knew that already, huh?). IF the New Orleans Superdome Stadium power outage was caused by anything, it was God saying, “Make this travesty of Super Bowl XLVII STOP!” (FYI: Poll taken days after the game showed that 27% of Americans thought God had a direct hand in who won that game, so my theory of God having had way too much Beyoncé, way too soon, is viable as well!)
Nope, after that “show”, all it did was make me drink more, and not in a good way. Sure, I sobered up enough to root for the drive attempt the 49ers made in the Second Half (a drive that should have showed up in the First, I’m just sayin’…) only to be shattered again at the lack of talent in the Red Zone when it counted.
Yep, all-in-all, a very depressing and bad-drunk day was had by MsBurb.
I never thought I’d EVER say this but I want Madonna back.
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Then…
To heal the wounds that was this year’s Super Bowl, I then watched a documentary on my all-time favourite NFL Quarterback, “Broadway Joe” Willie Namath, the saviour of the NY Jets, the man who put, for me, that team on the map when I was just a kiddie.

Of course the “youngins” of today will probably not even know his name or if they do, they might site his sexy cameo as Farrah Fawcett’s cohort in the 1973 Super Bowl Noxzema commercial, now as iconic as Farrah’s bathing-suit poster. He did a very short stint as a Talking Head for Monday Night Football back in the day but you could have easily blinked and missed that, his age and the lack of broadcaster confidence squelched that après-football career path.

No, if you know him and appreciate him at all, you have to go back to the land of the 70s, where no quarterback then, or heck, not even today, could jettison that ball faster out of the pocket, with such pinpoint accuracy, and with such lightening speed (the Receivers would have chest bruises after the games from catching Joe’s long-bomb passes) better than Broadway Joe.
I wish the QBs of today could study this man’s plays, for if Namath could do what he did back then, the physical agility of the QBs now should be able to do it in spades. But, along with the arm, Joe had also in buckets a kind of almost over-positive, reckless confidence, that made him think, “Hey, I’m a small-town boy from Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania and to have reached such stellar heights as to head an NFL team, why not just celebrate each day and go for broke with every move I make, on and off the field!” (MY quote for him he never said but I’m sure he thought).
And boy, did he ever!
Of course, as a wee girlie, I’m not sure which came first in the Shock & Awe category: his deadly-accurate explosive throws only a second out of the pocket OR how his buff bod seemed explosively sexy in those 70s “high-fashion” (and I use that term VERY loosely, for everything in the 70s was anything but fashionable) fur coats and bell-bottom pants. Hey, sue me (No! Please don’t! Poor here!) I was a girlie then and we girlies cover both sides of the field, ya know, football playing talent isn’t everything.
Of course, like many a great player Namath had what can only be described as a career-ending knee injury; yet, that injury occurred BEFORE he hit the NFL Big Time. He played his entire professional career through nothing but pain, utter chronic debilitating pain, the type and degree of which led him down the path of surgeries, endless pre-game leg wraps from Hell, pain killers and booze, the latter being what finally did him in, I think.
Like Brent Favre, some football dinosaurs just don’t know when to say When because frankly they just love the game THAT much and Namath was no different. Joe ended his ball-playing career playing for the LA rams – a sea-to-sea team swap that was like watching a dinosaur stuck in mud up to his broken and battered bones, knowing full well he would die where he stood. Joe, finally, after getting sacked just too many times, taking now a years’ worth of seconds to just back up into the pocket with his oh so shattered legs, walked off the field for the last time and walked away with our hearts…very much saddened.
He was a man’s-man, yet gentle and very caring, a looker with a stand-out personality on and off the field and the first Quarterback in NFL history that invented what I’d like to coin here the “Atomic Fall Back & Shotgun Throw”.
For the lack of talent and grace in the NFL Half Time Show Now, to the over-flowing talent and grace in an NFL player Then, times-they-are-a-changin’ and from where I’m sitting not for the better.
B-Bye Beyoncé, I will see you in my Super Bowl songster nightmares.
B-Bye Joe…even with your knees and your age, and the fact that we have dearly missed you on the field now for more than 35 years, have you considered doing next years Super Bowl Half Time Show? Heck, you made Hollywood movies, were in several TV commercials, and even did Broadway to legitimize your nickname, it’s not like you don’t have star power, right? And besides, you know you can’t do any worse than the chick who made us all cry this year. Think about it, will ya?