China Snubs All American Holiday!
Trip Start
Dec 2007
1
18
41
Trip End
Aug 2008
Beijing,
China
Monday, February 4, 2008
I sit in silence after going through all 70 or so Chinese television stations, with hopes fading that I will for the first time in many years, I will miss it....
What the...? No Super Bowl in China... What a crock. I remember during every stupid Super Bowl, in the midst of the 14 boring hours of incredible pre-game BS, in between the rehashed in depth analysis and interviews with anyone who has ever heard of a Super Bowl, some ex-jock hair gelled announcer blurts out in a very "USA, USA, USA, we're number one... kind of jingoistic pat on the back way, this very line..."and this Super Bowl is being seen and enjoyed in (fill in the bloated number here) countries around the world and has over 3 billion viewers." Know what? Nah...it isn't. Nobody cares east or west of our dueling Portlands...(that's Maine and Oregon for the geographically challenged) I had this incredible imaginary, almost dream-like, expectation of having a large build up to the game, and how fun it will be to see the US coverage with Chinese announcers...nothing, nada, zilch.
I instantly flash to two personal Super Bowl memories...that reinforce my discovery. The first, it's Super Bowl (what ever roman numeral, does it matter?) I was working for ABC in San Diego. We had an executive producer who envisioned this theme that people would be watching the Super Bowl all over the world and we would have live cut-in's from various locations all across the globe to show this phenomenon. That was fine, unless you were in charge of getting these remote satellite feeds back to the United States and integrated into the show. We had feeds from an Aircraft carrier in the Middle East. We had cameras in a small town in the middle of Mexico. We had a remote from a Biergarten in Germany...you get the picture. One of the locations was a subway station in Beijing, where we were assured the ABC broadcast of the Super Bowl would be telecast. After painful negotiations and hours of toil, the feed came up...and seeing that it was 3:30 am in China at the time...there wasn't a soul in the subway station. We watched the feed for almost 3 hours, before the satellite window closed, and the only thing that passed in front the camera was a cleaning woman...who was angry the camera crews were in her way of cleaning...
The second memory is much fresher... I was interviewing for this position in China with the Olympics, and was on the telephone with two gentlemen, both of which are now my bosses, here in Beijing. I listened to their explanation of the job, and I tried to put my best foot forward as they say... They asked me some very detailed questions, which I felt I handled fairly well, and then they asked, "What is the biggest event you have done so far..." Very cocky, and full of myself, I confidently replied, "Well, I was the Telecommunications Manager for Super Bowl Forty in Detroit with ABC Sports..." There was a brief pause on the other end, and then one man said, "This Super Bowl, you speak of...what is it?" That's how much the world loves our national television sport, so NFL with your billion dollar TV deals and pay per view packages...get over yourself...the rest of the world would rather watch America's real favorite exported sport...chasing the ever deepening meltdown of Brittany Spears...
