Bowled over by Cowboys’ operation

WHEN Casey Stengel was fired by the New York Yankees just days after Bill Mazeroski’s game-winning home run secured a dramatic 1961 World Series for the Pittsburgh Pirates, the legendary manager was informed he was too old to continue in the post.

It mattered little that he had overseen an astonishing period of success which had delivered seven World Series between 1949 and 1958. He had committed that most human of errors: turning 70. In so doing, he swore he would “never make the mistake of being 70 again”.

The newly-founded New York Mets didn’t see his age as being a problem, hiring Stengel who would go on to revel in the absurdity of his new ball club, telling reporters that they should come and see his “amazing Mets”: “Been in this game 100 years, but I see new ways to lose ‘em I never knew existed before.”

They continued to lose under his watch but the fanbase grew in direct proportion to their incompetence as New Yorkers, tired of the annual striving for perfection over at Yankee Stadium, sought a true successor to “Dem Bums”, the Brooklyn Dodgers.

But the Mets, like the Dodgers before them, couldn’t even get losing right and in 1969, a few years after Stengel was shooed out the door for managerial failings that saw him cross the line from comic to tragic (falling asleep during games was not a good look), the “Miracle Mets” put aside their childish imperfections and won the World Series.

This isn’t news but it bears repeating that top level sport is elevated high above us mere mortals by the superhuman efforts of the athletes we pay to shout at and cry over. So, naturally, when they err, we revel in it.

And although the Super Bowl has attained some sort of quasi-mystical grip on America and, with it, large swathes of the globe, the 45th edition showed that as long as mere humans are employed to run it, play in it and sing before it, there is, reassuringly, plenty of room for error.

After the usual plaudits landed rightly at the feet of the new champions, the Green Bay Packers, the real fun started as the knives came out on the ever powerful talk radio stations. The hosts on ESPN and WFAN clambered over each other to slam the most damning aspects of a strange week in Dallas.

Public Enemies Numbers One and Two were — in no particular order — Rashard Mendenhall of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Christina Aguilera formerly of “The Mickey Mouse Club” and currently of Hollywood movie “Burlesque”.

Having almost single-handedly dragged his Steelers through the AFC all the way to the Super Bowl, Mendenhall made the cardinal error of being pummelled by both Ryan Pickett and one of the stars of the Packers defence, Clay Matthews, leading the poor Steeler to fumble the ball. Green Bay had been on the ropes with just four points to spare, 21-17 but Mendenhall’s mistake sent the pendulum swinging back and the Packers sauntered home.

Then there was Aguilera whose job it was to sing the “Star Spangled Banner” to a record TV audience which averaged at 111 million and peaked at 162.9 million. Understandably caught up in the moment and possibly distracted by the range of octaves she could fit into “the dawn’s early light”, she committed that most unpatriotic of errors: she got the words wrong.

Instead of “O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming“, she improvised a little with “What so proudly we watched at the twilight’s last reaming”.

I didn’t notice but roughly 110 million did leading her to wake up Monday morning with sickly regret and — possibly — a yearning for an anthem like Amhrán na bhFiann where the celebrity singer can enjoy a good deal of wriggle room.

Those two poor souls capped Dallas’ flawed hosting of the Super Bowl. There had already been a lot of northern uproar over the city’s inability to deal with a few inches of snow so it didn’t at all help when 400 fans clutching $900 tickets were sent back out into the cold due to dodgy temporary seating.

Casey Stengel would have enjoyed the little kinks that brought this imperfect Super Bowl closer to a more human level. Each year the stakes get higher but here’s to hoping they find “new ways to lose ‘em” because sport is the greatest stage for all our imperfections.

Contact: [e-mail] Twitter: JohnWRiordan