The 2 Week Hype (1984-esque take on the Patriots)

[Actium]

saw this by a poster on a cardinals website. it's brilliant:

[quote]It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the ESPN offices, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Weeks Hype.

The next moment a hideous, grinding of cameras moving towards a group of talking heads, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on smile and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hype had started. As usual, the face of Tom Brady, the Champion of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were wild cheers here and there among the audience. Brady was the leader and catalyst who once, long ago (how long ago nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Super Bowl wins, almost on a level with Big Bill Belichick himself, and then had engaged in completion-revolutionary activities, had been proclaimed as the greatest ever and had mysteriously escaped sacks and tossed TDs at an alarming rate.

The programmes of the Two Weeks Hype varied from day to day, but there was none in which Brady was not the principal figure. He was the primal champion, the earliest hero of the NFL's parity. All subsequent success in the NFL, all championships, acts of talent, supermodel beddings, film stealing escapades, sprang directly out of his examples. Somewhere or other he was still throwing touchdowns and hatching his conspiracies to bring Randy Moss into the fold: perhaps somewhere beyond the gridiron, under the protection of Robert Kraft, perhaps even - so it was occasionally rumoured - in some hiding-place within the heart of ESPN itself.

Bill Simmons' diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of Brady without a giddy, childlike longing. It was a lean champion's face, with a great fuzzy aureole of stubble- a clever face, and yet somehow inherently coy, with a kind of senile silliness in the nose, near the end of which a pair of Super Bowl rings were perched in a common bar trick. It resembled the face of a God, and the voice, too, had a God-like quality. Brady was delivering his usual politically correct attack upon the upcoming opponents - an attack so calm and controlled that the child-anchors at ESPN should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill the nation with an alarmed feeling that they must thank God, or Brady, that the Patriots weren't on their schedule this year.

He was praising Big Bill Belichick, he was denouncing the parity of the NFL, he was demanding the immediate start of the Super Bowl since nobody was left to challenge him, he was advocating passing more, running less, scoring like a college game and alluding to the fact that the parity has been betrayed - and all this in PR spin, and even contained ESPN words like Booyah: more ESPN words, indeed, than any NFL player would normally use in real life. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Brady's specious clap trap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there showed marched the endless touchdown passes he had thrown - catch after catch by solid-looking men with expressionless NFL faces, who ran to the goal line and danced, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the players' boots on the goalline formed the background to Brady's bleating voice.

Before the Hype had proceeded for 4 days, uncontrollable exclamations of joy were breaking out from half the people in the green room. The self-satisfied face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the WRs scoring behind it, were too much to be borne: besides the sight or even the thought of Brady produced joy and lust automatically. He was an object of reverence more constant than either the Lakers or the Yankees, since when the Patriots were winning nothing else mattered.

But what was strange was that although Brady was loved and revered by everybody at ESPN, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his accolades were embellished, replayed and gussied up with terrible computer animations that made them look more dynamic and interesting. In spite of all this, Tony Kornheiser never seemed to grow less infatuated. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by the man. A day never passed when writers and commentators acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Commissioner for not hyping up the team enough. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of journalists dedicated to the overthrow of the NFL.

In its second week the Hype rose to a frenzy. ESPN reporters were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to pull the cameras to them to show just how much they were in love with the Patriots and Brady. In a lucid moment Simmons found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair screaming "Boston Forever!!!" The wonderful thing about the Two Weeks Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to taunt, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole Patriot fanbase like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic...

The Hype rose to its climax. The voice of Brady had become an actual Lombardi Trophy being polished, and for an instant the face changed into that of a Lombardi Trophy. Then the trophy-face melted into the figure of a Patriot player who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his arms outstreched for a reception that he seemed to catch outside of the screen right in Simmons' face. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Bill Belichick...and the stories of the Patriots Super Bowl win in Arizona wrote themselves, to be shelved for a couple of months but to be talked about incessantly until that day inevitably came.[/quote]

[-GoBengals-]

ha, i missed this... brillant indeeeeeeeed.