2008 Woodie Awards
Inside the Lines: Super Bowl Sunday or Super Tuesday?
J. Andrew Horvath
Issue date: 1/31/08 Section: Sports
It may seem impossible for all eight of you that read this column regularly to imagine, but I wasn't born a sharp-witted and provocative sportswriter. In fact, there was once a time, when I was first getting into journalism, that I was more interested in writing on things as trivial and childish as politics, law, and economics.
That all changed in the 2004 Presidential Election, when I saw a photograph of Presidential hopeful John Kerry trying to catch a football.
It looked like he had been told as a youngster that the best body part to use when catching something was the collarbone rather than the hands. It was a disappointment, an embarrassment, and it cost him the election. Who wants a President that's a total wimp? I was so shaken that such a man even got a party nomination that I could no longer believe in the electoral system or even government on the whole. That's when I decided to get my priorities back and donate my brilliant mind and unrivaled talent to the sports world where they belonged, and haven't looked back.
This past Monday, rather than watching First Take, I found myself drawn to MSNBC, where Barack Obama stole away the Kennedy endorsement from the Clinton political machine. On a side note, does anyone else find it funny that the Kennedys, a fixture in Washington politics for over forty years, talk about change as much as they do? Regardless, I was surprised at myself for neglecting what is clearly the bigger issue for Americans: can the Patriots finish unblemished?
So, this begs the question: which day next week is in fact more "Super," Tuesday or Sunday? The answer should be obvious; Super Bowl Sunday is a holiday in this country. More people watched the 2006 Super Bowl (over 90 million) than participated in the 2006 mid-term elections (80 million). To give you a hint, voter turnout in primaries is not usually as large as mid-term elections (which in turn is usually smaller than Presidential elections).
That all changed in the 2004 Presidential Election, when I saw a photograph of Presidential hopeful John Kerry trying to catch a football.
It looked like he had been told as a youngster that the best body part to use when catching something was the collarbone rather than the hands. It was a disappointment, an embarrassment, and it cost him the election. Who wants a President that's a total wimp? I was so shaken that such a man even got a party nomination that I could no longer believe in the electoral system or even government on the whole. That's when I decided to get my priorities back and donate my brilliant mind and unrivaled talent to the sports world where they belonged, and haven't looked back.
This past Monday, rather than watching First Take, I found myself drawn to MSNBC, where Barack Obama stole away the Kennedy endorsement from the Clinton political machine. On a side note, does anyone else find it funny that the Kennedys, a fixture in Washington politics for over forty years, talk about change as much as they do? Regardless, I was surprised at myself for neglecting what is clearly the bigger issue for Americans: can the Patriots finish unblemished?
So, this begs the question: which day next week is in fact more "Super," Tuesday or Sunday? The answer should be obvious; Super Bowl Sunday is a holiday in this country. More people watched the 2006 Super Bowl (over 90 million) than participated in the 2006 mid-term elections (80 million). To give you a hint, voter turnout in primaries is not usually as large as mid-term elections (which in turn is usually smaller than Presidential elections).
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