“Playoff football hits the frozen tundra″, Ellis Henican Column, Newsday, January 9, 2011
Is football an inside game or an outside game? Is America a nation of wimps?
Just in time for Wild Card Weekend in the NFL, both those questions hang in the air like big, fat snowflakes. And the schedule isn’t warming anybody up.
The football-schedule gods brought some actual logic to Saturday’s lineup. The New Orleans Saints against the Seahawks in Seattle’s open-air Qwest Field? Well, OK. Rain’s about the worst that ever happens in Seattle. The New York Jets are facing the Indianapolis Colts at Lucas Oil Stadium indoors.
You know how rough those Indy winters are.
But then comes Sunday’s locales. The Baltimore Ravens and the Chiefs outdoors in Kansas City. Brrr! And the Green Bay Packers meeting the Philadelphia Eagles in Philly. Also outside. Also brrr!
And if that sounds dicey, next week’s games – in Pittsburgh, New England, Atlanta and Chicago – make absolutely no sense at all. Only Atlanta has a domed stadium with a roof on it, the one city of the four that certainly needs it the least.
So should we just tough it out and sing the frigid praise of winters in Wisconsin and Illinois? Or should we admit the obvious: Football’s a whole lot more comfortable when it isn’t 20-below.
Put Ed Rendell in the tough-it-out camp. Just before New Year’s, when the NFL moved the Eagles-Vikings from Sunday to Tuesday on a blizzard call, the Pennsylvanian was beside himself. “We’ve become a nation of wusses,” he thundered. “It goes against everything that football is all about.”
But a higher authority might also have weighed in.
Didn’t heavy snow just cause a roof collapse at the Minneapolis Metrodome?
Was that a sign? Maybe God prefers outdoor games.
THE SNOW — THIS TIME
2. Go-day
3. Not-much-megeddon.
4. Category ½ storm
5. Shovel-ready, snow not-so-much
ASKED AND UNANSWERED:
Snow-pocalypse? Go-away-calypse!…Now that we’ve showered one velvet-voiced homeless guy with job offers and media interviews, can we please go back to ignoring big, messy social problems like homelessness?… With Patchogue New Village, are more people finally embracing a heretical idea: In the not-so-far-off future, single-family ouses won’t be the only way to live on Long Island?…JWoww’s suddenly bashful? Can Franklin Square’s Jenni Farley call herself JWoww and also be bashful? Her photo-selling ex might have a view on that…If John Edwards didn’t just propose to baby-mama Rielle Hunter, is that love’s tragedy or love’s triumph?…Nuns? Socking Catholic nuns with illegally large commissions? Does Melville securities broker Paul George Chironis really think $350,000 settles all with the Sisters of Charity? Has he factored in the extra Purgatory time?…Now that we all agree the N-word should stay in “Huckleberry Finn,” does the same no-censorship logic apply to rap songs? Was Mark Twain the Notorious B.I.G. of his day?..What will the Holy Communion hepatitis-A scare at Our Lady of Lourdes in Massapequa Park do to Mass touchiness? Are you ready for “the Wave of Peace”? It’s an infectious idea…You catch this NYS DOT “Inform” sign: “NEW LAW IN EFFECT – MOVE OVER FOR STOPPED EMERGENCY VEHICLES.” And before this, the law was what exactly? “WHEN YOU SEE A STOPPED EMERGENCY VEHICLE, RAM IT FROM THE REAR”?
LONG ISLANDER OF THE WEEK
Ralph Kreitzman
When the restaurants went “no smoking,” that was going to kill the restaurants. When the bars went “no smoking” – well, how could a smokeless bar possibly survive? Those exaggerated fears were snuffed out quickly by reality, as will be the latest alarm in Great Neck: The new village ban on smoking outside local stores. “Except for one complaint that we’ve received, it has been uniformly good,” said Mayor Ralph Kreitzman. Now there’s a breath of fresh air!
E-mail ellis@henican.com. Follow him at twitter.com/henican