This adage was oh, so true last night, when Super Bowl XLVII collided with my ignorance.
As I’m sure you all know, each sport has it’s own specific terminology. To those who are uninitiated, commentary to the game’s events not only does not help, it confuses things even further. For example, to someone unfamiliar with soccer, being told that a player is “off-sides” or that he was given a “free kick” would mean about as much as “line of scrimmage” or “double reverse” or “fourth down conversion” meant to me, i.e. bupkus.
Understandably therefore, the Super Bowl was not what I was planning to watch, unable as I would have been, to follow what the hell was going on. Having said that, I confess that I did, at one point, switch to the game, but only to see how good the commercials were and to watch the much publicized half-time show. Once that was over I went back to watching Downton Abbey which I found infinitely more interesting.
At eleven pm I again switched to CBS to find out who won the game. Since I have no idea how long a traditional football game lasts, the fact that it was still on was not, to my mind, noteworthy one way or another. The score was now San Francisco 29, Baltimore 34 (or something like that). The commentators blathered on about “conversions”and “time-outs” and something called a “power outage” which I assumed was just another American football euphemism - this one coined to describe what players often experience after having, in a short period of time, exerted more than the usual amount of energy on the field in an effort to gain points and close a large (and perhaps humiliating) gap in the score (which San Francisco had indeed done).
It wasn’t till the next morning that I found out that the lights went out for thirty four minutes during the second half of the game…..
Sometimes an ass is just a farm animal….or me watching football.
A.J. Aston
