Regular readers of this space know I don't pay much attention to football, but of course, I still wished the Chicago Bears would have stomped on the Republican Party Colts. I watched about 3 quarters of the game, but ended up grocery shopping around 8:30 pm, the store was eerily empty.
Do I disdain football because I grew up in Texas? Probably. There were obviously two classes in Texas, those who played football, and the rest of the dolts. Thinking back, even the football players who weren't stereotypical dumb jocks, such as those in my honors classes, for instance, were still asshole jocks. I played soccer in high school for 4 years, and there were Iranians, Argentineans, Brazilians, Koreans, and various Europeans. Football? Not so much. [self-censored a rambling and increasingly solipsistic anecdote about how much football players were idiots, because really who cares besides my therapist]
Anyway, I found this amusing. Seems like an excellent eBay opportunity, right?
Far Away, Super Bowl’s Losers Will Be Champs After the Super Bowl ends, shirts and caps made for the losing team will be donated to a developing nation. In some parts of the world, the Seattle Seahawks are the reigning Super Bowl champions, the Buffalo Bills are the last great football dynasty and Tom Brady is some frustrated quarterback from New England who can never win it all.So say the T-shirts and the caps worn in Niger, Uganda and Sierra Leone.
The Super Bowl will end about 10 p.m. Sunday, and by 10:01 every player on the winning team — along with coaches, executives, family members and ball boys — could be outfitted in colorful T-shirts and caps proclaiming them champions.
The other set of championship gear — the 288 T-shirts and caps made for the team that did not win — will be hidden behind a locked door at Dolphin Stadium. By order of the National Football League, those items are never to appear on television or on eBay. They are never even to be seen on American soil.
They will be shipped Monday morning to a warehouse in Sewickley, Pa., near Pittsburgh, where they will become property of World Vision, a relief organization that will package the clothing in wooden boxes and send it to a developing nation, usually in Africa.
...
For the past 20 years, the shirts and caps have become as much a part of championship games as the coaches’ Gatorade showers. At the end of the World Series, the N.B.A. finals and the Final Four, all the winners get to celebrate in fresh threads.The losers, meanwhile, trudge back to their locker room in sweaty jerseys. Major League Baseball destroys the clothing that was made for its runners-up. The N.B.A. donates it to an overseas charity. And the N.F.L. sends it to a place far away.
There, and only there, the losers get to be winners.
I'd love to get one of these. How much would Mark Cuban pay for a Dallas Maverick's world champion 2006 t-shirt? Well, maybe bad example, as the Mavs might go again this year.
