Welcome Dr. Buc

Dear Readers:
At least for this week, Dr. Ink is Dr. Buc.

In past years, he has been skeptical if not downright cynical about the orgy of hyperbole surrounding media coverage of the Super Bowl. But no longer.

Doc’s beloved Tampa Bay Buccaneers are headed for the big game, the big dance, the big show, the big enchilada, cliché city. Through the lens of beer-soaked civic pride, no coverage seems excessive, no detail trivial, no angle unworthy of exploration. The poor we will always have with us. We may never approach football heaven again.

Ours is a sports-besotted society with terrible social consequences, Doc will admit. The fact that our newspapers commit so much coverage to sports and so little to the arts is a dreadful distortion of values. Then why do we do it?

The passion for sports, especially football, is a substitute for war and religion. You don’t need to be George Carlin to note that football is a game in which you try to conquer the enemy’s territory. The offense throws the bomb and tries to protect against the blitz. It has also become a form of gang warfare in which hooligans for the home team (Yo, are ya listenin’, Philly?) wear their colors and protect the home turf against anyone daring to bring the enemy’s colors to town.

(However degraded, such cathartic contests seem preferable to sending our young men into Iraq.)

And you don’t have to be theologian Michael Novak to see that the huge Sunday crowds are no longer headed for the cathedral. Our modern day pilgrimages are not to Canterbury or Lourdes, but to the shrines of sports.

And, at least for this week, that’s how it should be. Go Bucs!