Well, we’re halfway through the two-week Super Bowl hype orgy, with media from around the world grinding away so hard they ought to be administered lube.
As of today the Bears and Colts are ensconced in Miami along with thousands of members of print and televised media. No stat is unturned, no story angle overlooked. And that means nobody can resist trotting out “The Super Bowl Shuffle,” a dead horse that should have been turned into glue years ago.
I love my Bears, and I loved “The Super Bowl Shuffle” as a grade-schooler . . . two decades ago. But these days I cringe upon seeing the grainy video of uniformed athletes singing insipid lyrics and dancing like goons.
It’s embarrassing. Whenever the Bears play well, you can count on the networks broadcasting the ghostly superimposed images of Walter Payton and Jim McMahon and the silly shots of Calvin Thomas blowing the sax. And you can bet on the Internet being clouded with the clip–last week on YouTube the video was getting 43,000 daily views.
If it were an obscure cultural oddity dusted off for public display once in a while, the shuffle would retain some novelty. But Bears fans have been bludgeoned with the past whenever the current team has shown playoff potential.
A novelty song is meant to be short-lived–a passing fancy that disappears as soon as the novelty fades. So in a (surely futile) attempt to prevent “The Super Bowl Shuffle” from being aired during next Sunday’s broadcast of Super Bowl XLI, I present the following fantasy:
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The “Super Bowl Shuffle” Eulogy
Place: Holy Name Cathedral
In attendance: Thousands of mourners dressed in somber formal attire and mournfully painted bare chests
Friends, family and fans,
Thank you for joining us as we bid farewell to an old friend. “The Super Bowl Shuffle” lived a long, colorful life, carrying on years longer than anyone thought it would.
It was a delightfully brash youngster that took a nation of football fans by storm. But as the years passed, it became clear that time was catching up to it.
So let us today celebrate the good times, like the Grammy nomination for Best Rhythm & Blues Vocal Performance, as we bury the past. At the request of fans of the 49ers, Raiders and Jaguars, we are also today burying the songs “We’re the 49ers,” “The Silver and Black Attack” and “Uh Oh, The Jaguars Super Bowl Song.”
We are thankful to all who have come to pay their respects, many arriving hours before the start of this funeral mass to grill sausages and guzzle whiskey in the church parking lot.
While it may not have come here to start no trouble, “The Super Bowl Shuffle” encountered a troublesome end at the hands of an overeager media throng. Let us now send it off to a better place to rest, forever undisturbed and unseen, in the bosom of Abraham.
Please join me in singing “Amazing Grace” as our pallbearers, The Shufflin’ Crew, carry the VHS-tape-size casket to the hearse, where it will be driven to an undisclosed location to be buried alongside the records blown up during Disco Demolition.
Amen.
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