Sleepless in Israel
It’s 1:30 a.m.; do you know where your sports fan is? That is a question that can be asked nightly by many sports widows around Israel. The answer last Sunday night/ Monday morning was Ha Gov Sports Bar in Jerusalem. As the patrons filed in to watch the Super Bowl between The Pittsburgh Steelers and The Green Bay Packers, I thought to myself…these are real sports fans. You see, in Jerusalem we are blessed in many ways, one of them however is not watching sports during a “normal” hour. While many Americans were cooking themselves dinner and sitting down with nachos at 6pm in anticipation of the Super Bowl, we were deciding whether buffalo wings at 1:30 a.m. is the best post midnight snack or the breakfast of champions.
The Super Bowl, like game 7 of the NBA finals last year and many other great sports matchups creates quite the delima for fans outside of the US. This often turns in to a discussion with friends on the street, the casual fans who say, why do these sporting events start so late? This is a question that I thought I understood when I lived on the other side of the pond. The answer always seemed quite simple, people are getting settled in for the evening, home from work and so on. But is this necessary and more importantly, does this help promote a more global fan base.
As with all other corporations, the NFL continues to promote itself outside the continental 48. With games in Canada and England as well as the Pro Bowl in Hawaii, The NFL obviously wants to attract a worldwide audience. So why not start the game at 4pm EST and give us a break. There are currently two weeks between the conference championships and the Super Bowl. So why is there a need for a 4 hour pre-game show? What are they going to say that we haven’t heard in the two weeks prior? Pandering to corporate executives and those on the left-coast is no excuse for ruining millions of people’s sleep patterns. Maybe we should get together like the 400 displaced fans and sue the NFL for sleep deprivation. If that doesn’t work, we can sue the Steelers for not showing up until the middle of the second quarter which did not help our quest to stay up all night. The answers as you can see are not simple, but something needs to happen. I understand that all games cannot start at 1 p.m. in the East, but if a global empire is what the NFL is after, there needs to be a better time to watch these games.
I am willing to sit in on the CBA talks and iron this out for the rest of you. That is why I am a man of the people. Not to mention I have always enjoyed a good squabble between millionaires and billionaires. Until this is dealt with I guess the only thing to say is, seeya at in the middle of the night-oh and pass the hot sauce for the wings
