Forget about halftime, Super Bowl wasn’t half bad

This is being written mere days after the Super Bowl. It was fairly typical: Good ads, bad ads, a stinker of a halftime show, politics and an unruly mob made up of the losing team’s fans.

MIKE TASOS Columnist

Maybe I’m a sentimental sap, but the Amazon commercial where they tease the feisty family dog’s apparent banishment to a crate only to reveal there was no cell, just a four-legged pal. Maybe next year, they’ll show both pets wreaking havoc on hardwood floors and carpets.

For the most part, the ads were, well, normal. I am still giggling at Bradley Cooper trying to keep a straight face while he and his mom pitch T-Mobile. Ditto for J’Lo catching hubby Ben Affleck moonlighting at Dunkin’ Donuts. Ol’ Ben loves getting his donut/coffee fix at Dunkin’ in Boston and the commercial tickled me.

I guess the best part was that weirdness was kept to a minimum.

For the most part.

I can’t criticize the halftime show. The two minutes of Rihanna’s lip-synching was inspiring. It inspired me to make a beeline upstairs and make a sandwich.

Not sure there is any necessity for two national anthems. Personally, I think the one played by Chris Stapleton covered things nicely.

Oh yeah, about that unruly mob, otherwise known as Philadelphia Eagles fans. They outdid themselves, booing Dallas quarterback Dak Prescott winning the ultra-humanitarian Walter Payton award.

I would have expected nothing less. After all, the late Jay Johnstone, who played for the Phillies, once told me when asked about playing in the cheesesteak city: “The fans are ridiculous. They go to the airport and boo the good landings.”

They boo philanthropic, civic-minded Cowboy quarterbacks, too.

Do you reckon whoever came up with that city’s “Brotherly Love” moniker is laughing somewhere, knowing he played “pull my finger” while selling us a Whoopee Cushion of a slogan.

You know there had to be brawls at Independence Hall, a monstrous scrap where they make Scrapple, a broken hand when an “over-served” fan took out his frustrations by taking a swing at the Rocky statue.

And connecting.

Everyone got their money’s worth it would seem. And Philadelphia fans aren’t the only ones who lost.

We have to wait until September for any football.

Having attended a few Super Bowls, I’ll never forget Gramps showing up at our house in Bakersfield and telling me to take ride with him on a mid-January Sunday in 1967.

“You’re not going to make me dig in that riverbed again, are you?”

“Nope,” he replied. “We’re going on an adventure.”

Now my Grandpa might have been a tad nuts. This was the guy who hit golf balls in the neighborhood trying to cure a slice. Broken windows and flowerpots were evidence that his game needed lots of work,

I also once spied him firing live .22 rounds into a blanket, somehow reasoning he was fashioning some type of hayseed silencer.

What Gramps had planned was way better than a lighter and a can of hairspray. That decrepit Ford station wagon barely made it over the mountains to Los Angeles. JL Stone, the grandpa who really cared, took his oldest grandson to the half-empty Coliseum to watch the Green Bay Packers wallop the Kansas City Chiefs in the first AFC-NFC Championship.

Those marketing geniuses hadn’t come up with the “Super Bowl” name yet.

They were probably busy inventing Pringles.

Mike Tasos has lived in Forsyth County for more than 30 years. He’s an American by birth and considers himself a Southerner by the grace of God. He can be reached at miketasos55@gmail.com.

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