Bowling, Porn, and Phelps

President Obama telephoned the coach of the Arizona cardinals after the Super Bowl to congratulate him on his team’s performance, a classy thing for the president to do, even though he had picked the Steelers to win. What a heartbreaking loss it was too! When I saw replays of Santonio Holmes’ catch in the corner of the end zone with less than a minute remaining in the game, a play that has come to be the archetypal single play to symbolize the victory for Pittsburgh, I couldn’t help but think that if the Cardinal defense hadn’t run out of gas at the end of that final drive led by Big Ben, the play they would be showing would be Larry Fitzgerald’s catch and run for a 64 yard touchdown, and the QB they would be talking about would be Kurt Warner whose spot in the football Hall of Fame would be a cinch, for his magnificent performance in his third Super Bowl. The truth is there is a thin red line between winning and losing. In the final analysis, it was a great game, with lots of big plays, on defense as well as offense, and it rehabilitated the Arizona Franchise.
It will also be remembered, at least in Tucson, for the porn intervention shortly after Fitzgerald’s TD. At its beginning I thought it was a lead in to another bizarre ad, so I switched to the golf channel to check some tournament scores and missed the show and tell 90 seconds provided apparently by somebody asleep at the switch. 80,000 Tucson households received the signal; the rest of the country did not see it. There was a great flurry across the nation about the incident, and then the young woman in the clip called the local Comcast office; she gave her name and her partner’s, who she said had made over 600 adult films. She said she had two young children, but not if she was married or unmarried. Her age was 23. It’s a story that tells you something about the times we live in. The woman works full or part time as a porn star, and she wanted her 15 minutes of fame. Hey, there are all kinds of work out there and in a deepening recession who can say what someone might do to survive. The great Spanish filmmaker, Luis Bunel, made a movie in the late sixties, “Belle du Jour,” starring Catherine Deneuve in her prime, about a French housewife stuck in a boring marriage who moonlighted as a hooker in afternoons.
Then there is the case of Michael Phelps and the already infamous photograph of him sucking on a bong at a party last November in South Carolina. I heard on the radio yesterday that some crisis interventionist suggested that the Olympic swim star go on Oprah and submit to a drug test. That’s bad advice. Rather than try to prolong the story, go hide, for the public has a short memory and surely other stories will come along, like Barry Bonds trial, to eclipse his minor bump in the road. And why take a drug test when we already know he smoked pot. Underlining that fact makes no sense. Don’t prolong, say so long.