Somewhere in Wyoming
So, how are things in Phoenix? See, I wouldn’t know, because, for the past 10 days, I’ve been about as far away from Phoenix and the Super Bowl as a guy can get. Well, actually, I’m closer to Phoenix than you are but only geographically.
While the 3,000 media who are covering the Super Bowl were being herded into a stadium on Wednesday to record the 3,000,000 clich?s that would be spewed on Media Day, I was cruising along the semi-frozen Grey’s River in Western Wyoming, looking at some of the most excruciatingly beautiful scenery available for human eyes. It was 15 degrees and it was snowing and I was sitting on a snowmobile that was sitting on top of about five feet of hard packed snow.
As I was watching four moose-two males and two females-cavorting in the river, I have to admit I wasn’t wondering what Plaxico Burress was telling the media about how the Giants were going to beat the Patriots.
When I decided to ignore the scenery for a few seconds and get the snowmobile up over 60 mph, it wasn’t Wes Welker’s quickness that I was thinking about.
Most sane people who have the time and the money to spend on a 10-day vacation in late January would head for a beach somewhere. A lot of the sane people who don’t have the time or the money to get out of the kind of weather we’ve been having in Western Pennsylvania lately (mostly drizzling) envy the lucky sportswriters and sportscasters who got to spend a week in sunny Phoenix.
I must be insane.
There’s not a beach or a desert on the planet where I would rather be. Last Sunday, when my media brethren and sistren were arriving in Phoenix and checking into their hotels, I was 9,000 feet up in Togwotee Pass, just north of Yellowstone Park, sitting on a snowmobile, looking at the Grand Tetons poking through the few clouds in a ridiculously blue sky.
I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about Randy Moss’ reach.
When I cranked up the 800 c.c. Arctic Cat to over 75 mph on the straightaways, I wasn’t thinking of Moss’s speed.
There’s not a lot of Super Bowl buzz in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. For people who choose to live or visit here, sports are more about doing than watching. While you’re watching the Steelers on Sundays, they’re skiing, snowboarding or snowmobiling. Western Pennsylvanians may think that tailgating at Heinz Field on a snowy day in December qualifies as roughing it. Out here they wonder why so many people would waste a good day spending so much time standing around in a parking lot.
This is my sixth trip to Jackson Hole in the last 10 years. There would have been seven if I hadn’t had to cancel in 2002 because of the Steelers unexpected appearance in the 2001 AFC Championship game.
I had to be talked into my first trip in 1999 by my friend Tom Bauman, a Mt. Lebanon guy who moved out here in 1997. I joined another Mt. Lebanon guy, Pete Stringi, on that first trip. It was Pete’s second time. Tom had done a good selling job on him the year before. Fifteen minutes into my first snowmobile trip into Yellowstone Park, I told both Tom and Pete that they had done a bad selling job on me. They didn’t come close to describing the feeling produced by the combination of the scenery and the power of the snowmobile.
The next year Tom, Pete and I convinced five other Western Pennsylvania guys to use a week’s vacation to go looking for snow instead of sunshine and all five had the same reaction that I had. They said that we had done a bad selling job. We all know now that the feeling is indescribable.
Tom Bauman didn’t make the trip this year. He died in June. Cancer got him. He would have been 59 next week. Guys who are fit enough to climb the Grand Teton, which Tom did when he was in his late forties, or who run the stairs in the USX tower and watch what they eat and don’t smoke or drink aren’t supposed to get cancer and die at 58, but multiple myeloma got Tom. It’s one of those cancers that has nothing to do with your lifestyle.
So this year it’s been a two-man expedition. Pete, who never liked snow much until Tom convinced him to come out here, retired and moved to Boulder, Colorado in August. He and I made the drive from his home.
We’ll be back next year, too. At least we hope so.
Neither of us has read a word of Super Bowl coverage or heard a sound bite from Phoenix and we couldn’t care less. We’re still ready for the kickoff.
There has been one major drawback for me, though.
I missed Piratesfest.