Another tremendous comeback victory by Eli Manning and the New York Giants over the New England Patriots in yesterday’s Superbowl. I didn’t really care about either team, but was going for the Giants (despite being a Redskins and Broncos fan — drifting more toward the Broncos with each year I live in Colorado) just because I was born in NYC.
Mario Manningham’s fourth-quarter catch was one of the greatest in Super Bowl history. Like David Tyree’s catch in Super Bowl 42, it was another incredible passing play by the Giants during yet another late fourth quarter drive to beat Tom Brady and Bill Belichick.
Denver must be a fairly happy place, at least considering the Broncos aren’t in the game, based on what I heard on my show and other radio shows in the past few days: the city (and probably the state) was cheering for the Giants, not because Coloradoans like the G-Men, but because the Patriots seems to be widely despised around here. Callers were tired of Tom Brady, over Bill Belichick whose stand-offish attitude doesn’t play well in the Rocky Mountain west, and still angry with Josh McDaniels who came to the Broncos from the Patriots in 2009, and as head coach engineered a .500 season followed by a disastrous 3-9 start to the 2010 season before being fired — and returning eventually to the Patriots. Congratulations to the Giants and their embattled coach Tom Coughlin who some people thought might be fired mid-season. It’s been a long time since I’ve been happy about a New York team winning anything…
The other “did you see that” moment came during the half-time show. I’ve never been a big Madonna fan but I was really impressed with and enjoyed the show. Her singing was good and the show itself was great. Pretty impressive all around for a woman in her 50s. I wonder how much Vogue magazine paid for that “product placement.”
But during Madonna’s new song, “Give Me All Your Luvin'” (she also played 3 old songs). one of her lead supporting singer-dancers — a Grammy-nominated British singer who goes by the name M.I.A. — had an anatomy malfunction: she flipped the audience the bird. It was brief, but when my wife and I were watching the halftime show (on DVR so I could rewind/replay it) I immediately said to her “Did you see that?” We played it again, and sure enough there was the extended middle finger. It’s getting almost as much attention as the game.
It also sounded like the lyrics M.I.A. sang were “I don’t give a sh*t” though not as many news outlets are mentioning that. So much for “proper” British manners.
NBC apologized, and the NFL attributed the fact that the middle finger gesture escaped through the system to the game’s roughly 115 million viewers around the world to “a failure in NBC’s delay system.” I bet someone’s not looking forward to showing up at the office today.
Meanwhile, M.I.A. is now known to millions of people who never heard of her before. How’s that for product placement?
