IS FEELING THE VALENTINE'S DAY LOVE
Your Eagletarian has some thoughts on the debate.
No, not that debate. The one about whether Philadelphia is "red" or "green" right now, with the Phillies in the NLCS and the Eagles taxing everyone's patience at 2-3 after a promising start.
My main thought: Let's just pretend it's Christmas and stop trying to parse the unparseable.
Christmas is when red and green coexist, much like ebony and ivory on the keyboards of Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney, lo these many years ago.
I'm not trying to rain on the Phillies' parade. Like everybody else who has lived here throughout the last quarter-century, I'm hoping there is a parade. But more popular than the Eagles? Well, to take that stance, you'd have to ignore Sunday's head-to-head TV ratings, which I believe showed the Eagles being watched in about 687,000 area households, and the Phillies in 383,000. (Who wasn't switching back and forth, if not using that picture-within-the-picture thingy? And how do the ratings account for that?)
The Daily News ran one of those unscientific "polls" today, which measures only people fired up enough to cast an online vote. The Phillies "won" despite the TV data to the contrary. This is pretty easy to explain: Fans want to indicate support for the franchise that is winning in the playoffs and moving closer and closer to that elusive championship. They want to indicate disapproval of the franchise that has seemed stuck on a treadmill of disappointment since 2005.
Phils more popular? A baseball town? Hmm. I'm not sure there is a real "baseball town" in the old-time sense, anymore, other than St. Louis. Maybe New York, which has a weird dynamic, with neither the Jets nor the Giants actually playing within the confiines of NYC.
The Eagles push deeper emotional buttons, even if the button right now is stuck on "revulsion" This has nothing to do with any sort of inherent superiority of football over baseball. It has a lot to do with the evolution of Sunday afternoon rituals, extended families gathering together and bonding over the Birds, and even more to do with gambling. Who gambles on baseball?
OK, Good point. But everybody gambles on football, and on the Eagles. It's one of our heartwarming area traditions, along with throwing up at the Mummers' Parade.
The truth is, with the Phils one of the final four Major League baseball teams still playing, everybody is a Phillies fan right now, just as everyone is a Flyers fan when the orange and black are hovering close to the Stanley Cup. In the long run, the Eagles still dominate the sporting discussion here. For the long view to change, the Eagles would have to be really, really bad over a period of several years, with little hope of improvement. You can sort of see how that might happen, from where we are right now. But it hasn't happened yet.
Les
Bowen has covered the Eagles for the Daily News
since 2002.
Before that, he spent nearly 13 years covering the Flyers. It took Les
only a few seasons after the switch to figure out that there was no
penalty box at the Linc, and that the time really wasn't his, despite
what Andy Reid kept saying. Les came to Philadelphia and the Daily News
from Charlotte in 1983. In the intervening years, he has pretty much
lost track of NASCAR, and his accent. He, his wife Barbara, and their
two sons live in Haddon Township, New Jersey.
E-mail Les at bowenl@phillynews.com
and follow
him on Twitter.
Paul
Domowitch has been with the Daily News since 1982.
He has spent most of his nearly 3 decades with the paper covering the
Eagles and pro football. For the last 10 years, he’s been a
selector for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. A native of Wilkes-Barre
and a graduate of Wilkes University, Domo started his career in Texas,
working first for the Midland Reporter-Telegram (1976-78), and then for
the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where he covered some god-awful Texas
Ranger baseball teams. His first beat at the Daily News actually was
boxing, which he covered just long enough to lose 2 sports coats to
blood spatter before moving on to football. Domo and his wife Shelley,
a University of Oklahoma grad who still hasn’t gotten over
that Fiesta Bowl loss to Boise State 5 years ago, have 2 terrific
daughters -- Allison, 28, who is an attorney in South Jersey, and Amy,
25, who works in administration for a professional baseball team.
E-mail Domo at PDomo@aol.com and follow
him on Twitter.
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