I enjoy sports but only pay attention to those teams that are close to where I live. In Boston, we watched every Celtics game on the local Fox affiliate during the early 1990s. In Cleveland, we watched the Indians go to the World Series, and the Browns go to Baltimore. In Utah, we cheered the home team during the 2002 Olympics. And in Connecticut, without a single major league professional team, we follow UConn. The end of 2010 and the start of 2011 has been rough on our 3 biggest programs: the women’s basketball team ended an amazing winning streak, the men’s basketball team were proven to not deserve their No. 4 ranking, and our football team lost badly in its first BCS game. Somebody is bound to suggest that there is some connection to the revelation that we are hiring our first woman as president. Cause and effect or another sign of a loss for the institution -- I’ll let others weigh in.
The Fiesta Bowl is sponsored by Frito-Lay and features their Tostios chips. We compromised and munched on nacho cheese Doritos until we were queasy.
(Not many know that the name of the chip comes from the Spanish “Doritos” which roughly translates as “salty, orange, triangles of cocaine-like goodness”). When I was a youth, college bowl games were named after naturally-occurring foods: Orange, Peach, Sugar, Rose, etc. Naming rights for a bowl have long been determined by who wanted to shell out the crazy amount of money. The same is true with stadiums and fields as the owners often have first crack at having their names over the entrance. Corporations can also spend enough to have that right. When the new Cleveland baseball park opened, it was named Jacobs Field after the owners. Now it is Progressive Field, named after the insurance company that also supports NORML legislation. What startled me while watching the Fiesta Bowl, besides the fact that no one had turned the facility into a giant bowl of chips with salsa in midfield, was the name of the place.
University of Phoenix offers online education for adults. Somehow they can issue education degrees which lead to certification. That doesn’t trouble me because I believe it’s on the schools themselves to decide whether they want to hire someone to teach children who earned their bachelor’s while at home, in their pajamas, and eating Doritos. Instead, I cannot quite wrap my head around that fact that the Fiesta Bowl was played at the University of Phoenix Stadium, an institution which has no intercollegiate athletic programs. Truly, my mind is so jolted by this that I am unable to think of a parallel that is equally incongruous. Okay, how about Freedom Mortgage Company’s name on a prison? Or BP’s name on a water park? Just goes to show about anything is possible in 2011.
