It Takes a Big Man to Be Magnanimous in Overwhelming Victory

It Takes a Big Man to Be Magnanimous in Overwhelming Victory February 3, 2014

Unfortunately for Bronco fans, I lost 80 pounds so I think I will offer a few reflections on the crushing, humiliating defeat that the world’s most beloved championship football team–The Amazing Seattle Seahawks–inflicted on the now prostrate Broncos.

It was foretold in prophecy both mystic and scientificalistic as a Utah ape delivered the sure and certain verdict of victory for the Hawks.  I tried to warn Bronconies that only a fool would argue with a rock solid scientificalistic analysis like that.  I suggested we just go ahead and spare the feelings of the pathetic losers who insisted on putting such infallible prophecy to the test and declare victory without the formality of a game that would only heap burning shame on the Broncos.  I am, after all, a compassionate man and don’t like seeing miserable failures ground into the dirt under the spikey cleats of the peerless Titans of Sport.  I do have a soul, you know.

But no.  Denver–having once had a reputation as a rough, tough  Western town full of ruthless gunslingers, prostitutes, and drunken miners flush with gold and ready to be fleeced of their cash by card sharks and big city slickers from Philadelphia (but I digress)–gazed in spirit across the mighty Rockies to our gentle hamlet on the shores of Puget Sound and made a snap judgment (and, by the way, speaking of snapping, I must say the way the Bronco center snapped the ball right past Manning’s head on the very first play, thereby delivering the first two of our many, nigh uncountable, points into our hands was a *very* auspicious beginning).

But again, I digress.  Where was I?  Ah yes!  In Denver, minds that imagined they are to our minds as ours are to the beasts that perish, regarded this city with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

We meanwhile just went on being what we are: awesome.

Here in the land of gentle whale watchers, granola-eating earthy crunchies, metrosexual jammie clad health care discussers, soppy gay wedding sentimentalists, intense Janeane Garofalo lookalikes in hornrim glasses, passionate advocates for polymorphous perversities, fanatical recyclers, Unitarians in blocky African wooden jewelry and Birkenstocks leading bake sales to fund the library, chainsaw artists, bicyclists filled with snooty contempt for petrochemical consumers, New Age crystal gazers with 35,000 year old spirit guides helping them with their investment decisions in aromatherapy corporations, Pike Place fishmongers, gritty Indie bands, hipsters conducting their entire romances by tweeting partners of indeterminate gender from two tables away at the Starbucks on Aurora and 220th, Prius dealers offering cars with the Obama sticker pre-applied, parents placing their three year olds in high-intensity courses to groom them for executive positions at Microsoft and Nintendo, damp and dispirited Metro riders waiting patiently for winter rain to turn to spring rain like cattle waiting for nothing in particular… well, we appeared to the scions of cowpokes and painted ladies to be…. soft.

Which was, of course, EXACTLY OUR PLAN! Because all along super-genius billionaire Paul Allen, who is after all, the only super-genius billionaire on planet earth to have actually built a combination Rock and Roll/Science Fiction Museum was breeding a race of warriors, accountable only to him alone and obedient to his iron and despotic will.  You may ask where the Seahawks originated.  They were men once.  But now perfected by a genetic manipulation program into something which, while still able to pass basic tests for species conformity to bourgeois “league standards”, nonetheless display certain superhuman and preternatural abilities that are no longer of this world.

So your team–indeed all the teams of the earth–had no chance against the satisfyingly Marvel Comic nicknamed Legion of Boom.  This is why our Hawks tread down your puny insignificant team like grass.  It is why they  marched confidently into the Super Bowl (or “Super Bowel” as the charming rustics of Colorado call it)

Highly educated Seattleites (including Masters degree in Communications holder Richard Sherman, who can trash talk your loser team in iambic pentameter) found that charming.

But I digress.  Anyway, thanks to the warrior super-race bred by Paul Allen in the laboratories beneath the Science Fiction Museum and fed on a daily diet of pure Washington rain water, oysters and salmon harvested from the gently lapping waves of Puget Sound, a regimen of uprooting old growth evergreen forests and replanting them in over-logged areas, and haiku and feng shui to center the spirit, the Seahawks marched into the Super Bowl and utterly dominated as they kicked the clenched, fearful, and ultimately despondent little buttocks of the Denver Broncos.  From epic interception-to-touchdown plays, to even more epic touchdown runs the length of the field, to a defense that denied Denver a first down until sometime into that part of the second quarter when people with small bladders are thinking about their first bathroom break but reluctant to leave because the Hawks might again pull off some breathtaking coup to inflict further humilation on their prey, it was wall-to-wall humiliation.

At one point during the half-time, one of the Talking Heads asked, “What will Denver have to do to come from behind?”  To which my pal Tom shouted, “SCORE 23 POINTS!”  Alas, they only scored 8.  Meanwhile we pumped up the jam to 43–the very meaning of life plus one.  My sense of symmetry and closure thought it would have been good to bring the score up to 48 or 58–58 would have been a nice round number–but the Hawks, being kindly conquerers, decided to go ahead and leave the margin at a mere 35 points.  Still humiliating, but not enough to leave the population of Denver eating out of dribble cups.

As a Catholic, and particularly as a Catholic writer, there are certain theological aspects to this obvious sign of divine approval for My Home Town that deserve examination.  Here is one:

Of course, some–namely the weak–view my attitude as “insufferable”.  But in fact, I am stooping down from the (literally) Olympian heights of Western Washington in order to show those who have yet to win the grim Darwinian struggle of life that there is hope for even the weakest.  Why, with enough pluck and determination, you might be the next….. nahhhhh… I’m just playing with your head.  You’ve got a better chance of joining the ranks of the 85 richest people in the world than you do of defeating The Amazing Seattle Seahawks.  Your team lost for a reason: because we were not merely better and more awesome, but immeasurably better and more awesome and your puny, insignificant team sucked.  The Broncos did the very best they could–and it wasn’t nearly good enough because THE SEAHAWKS ARE THE GREATEST FOOTBALL TEAM IN THE WORLD AND PROVED IT IN OPEN COMBAT WITH THE BRONCOS!!!!  WOO HOO!

In closing, I think it only appropriate to offer a word of praise to God, who is a HUGE Seahawks fan and has chosen our team from all the nations of the earth for this, THE 2014 SUPERBOWL VICTORY!!!

I will sing unto the Lord for he has triumphed gloriously
the horse and rider has thrown into the Sea(hawks). (Exodus 15:1 – Seahawks Standard Version)

The Victory Parade, presumably featuring the Broncos being dragged in chains down Fourth Avenue behind Russell Wilson’s Triumphal Chariot, will be on Wednesday.  Meanwhile, here’s the mood in Hawksville:

Best post-game quote was from a priest in Bremerton: “Making plans to go out and burn some cars – meet at church?”


Browse Our Archives