Snowbound, out of touch and longing for a bit more news . . .
Dave Kindred |
Feb. 11, 2010 8:01 a.m.
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I’ve cleared the lane with my John Deere tractor. I’ve walked with the frolicking dogs. There is snow everywhere, the most snow around here since 1884. Suddenly, Virginia is the new Montana.
The power went out Saturday morning. Trees had fallen across the electric lines. That night it was 9 degrees. I wore two of everything to bed and slept under five blankets. I said to My Queen, "I haven’t had this much fun since Dad
pulled me on my sled around the block with his ’49 Ford pickup that had the oogah-oogha horn."
"Shut up," she explained.
No electricity, no TV, no computer, no newspaper delivery.
Then I realized the Super Bowl was the next day.
We found a restaurant with big-screen television showings of what my pal Charlie Pierce calls The Big Honking Football Game.
The crowd was distinguished by one Saints’ fan whose single bit of encouragement for her heroes was to shout, every time a Colt had the ball, "Get him!" Sometimes it was enunciated as a screech, "Geeeeeettt him!" Sometimes directed to a specific Colt, as if a Saint defender hearing her from a thousand miles away would then, and only then, wake up and chase a ball carrier, "Get HIM!"
For reasons that don’t matter here, though proximity to screaming Jezebels often causes me to lose faith in humankind, we left the restaurant after three quarters with the Colts ahead, 17-16. I had great faith that Peyton Manning would close in style.
No electricity, no TV, no radio, no nothing.
Suddenly, it was the 19th century.
So I mushed through the snowbanks the next morning to find out who won.
Bought a Washington Post. Looked at the front page. Nothing there. Must’ve been an early edition. Above the masthead — ABOVE the masthead, in screaming-Jezebel red ink — a skyline reported that the Capitals had won their
14th sgtraight NHL game. Yep, early edition. No Super Bowl score in sight.
But then I noticed, in a two-column hole, maybe four inches deep, below the fold, a headline: "Swinging to the rhythm of the Saints."
It turned out to be the great newspaper’s front-page report of Super Bowl XLIV.
Les Carpenter’s story began, "At the moment the Saints won the Super Bowl . . ."
What???
Peyton had failed?
What could have happened?
" . . . and they shouted to the night," the story went on, alluding to celebrants at Sidney’s Saloon in New Orleans, "’Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?’"
What was the freakin’ score, anyway?
The score, 31-17, appeared as an adjective in the jump, page A9.
I am not here to grouse. Carpenter did a beautiful little deadline piece about a star-crossed city’s moment of life-affirming joy. And he dropped in just enough of the game to inform the front-page reader who might be bored with
down-and-distance details. And that nitty-gritty sports reporting was inside the paper, done completely.
And, I know, I may have been the only person in America — besides My Queen — who didn’t know the score before bedtime. So my reaction to the Post’s front-page story is statistically insignifcant. Stlll, I wanted more of what happened. They play the game, as a Super Bowl hero once said, "To see who’s the baddest." Not to see which city’s saloons have the most fun.
Newspapers, groping, confused, have convinced themselves that real news doesn’t matter all that much anymore.
And while it didn’t take historic snowstorms to convince me that news matters — I am dinosaur, hear me roar — a morning when I’m hungry for news is a powerful reminder that newspapers should not give up just yet.
Dave Kindred’s next book will be "Morning Miracle," an inside-the-newsroom account of two years in the life of The Washington Post. Now a contributing writer at Golf Digest, Kindred is a Red Smith Award winner and member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame. He can be reached at inkstained1@aol.com. He can be followed at Twitter.com/DaveKindred and facebook.com/people/Dave-Kindred/509353295
