A Very Semitic Super Bowl
In which Bwog factotum and freelancer CML travels to the promised land—Hillel and AEPi—in search of the perfect Super Bowl experience.
It’s a fairly well-known fact around campus that Robert Kraft, who is apprently not America’s favorite magnate of mediocre cheeses but the largest shareholder of Israel’s biggest packaging plant (who knew?—Ed.), and generous donor to the things that really matter, is the man responsible for Hillel’s fairly newish and lavishly palatial center for Jewish life, located between Broadway and Riverside across 115th street from the less opulent Schapiro residence hall. What is less known amongst a school composed mostly of sports philistines is that Kraft is also the owner of the New England Patriots, the most dominant team in not just the NFL but all of professional sports over the last decade. Last night, in honor of his team’s ongoing quest for the NFL’s first perfect season since 1972, Kraft footed the bill for a Super Bowl party in the Kraft Center, thereby uniting two of the more incongruous parts of his empire into one: Hillel and football.
I alighted upon the fifth floor of the Kraft Center at around 5:50, about half an hour prior to kickoff. Chairs—roughly enough to seat, say, seventy—were arranged around an expansive projector, which was already tuned to FOX. As the analysts prattled away on the pre-game show, more gentlemen clad in yarmulkes and jerseys ranging from the Redskins to the Raiders filed into the space. Trailing the revelers was a smorgasbord of free food. Bags of Chips Ahoy! and Ruffles gave way to classier refreshments like kosher pizza and guacamole, but my raging fever prevented me from surfeiting my gluttony. Seeing me sipping my miso soup from a Nalgene, a random guy walked up to me and said, “Hey, I’m Harry. What’s your name?”
“I’m Chris,” I admitted.
“Chris,” he said. “Sababa.”
“Sababa indeed,” I responded, desperately wishing I knew what the word meant as I took another draught from my bakbuk.
“Which year are you?” he said, continuing the conversation in the vein of orientation week.
“Um, I write for the Current,” I answered in desperation.
—
At 6:20, the coin was flipped, the teams lined up, and the Giants received the Patriots’ kick. Ten game-minutes and maybe fifteen real-minutes later, the Giants kicked a field goal, prompting raucous cheers from the guys in the front. “JTS freshmen,” explained my chaperone. I put five bucks on the Patriots –12 to give myself a vested interest in the game; my chaperone takes the points.
Five game-minutes and maybe twenty real-minutes later, as FOX sought desperately to recoup its ad revenue, the Patriots’ juggernaut offense responded with a touchdown. More cheers from the front. “Also JTS freshmen,” said my duenna.
It seemed as if there were more or less an even distribution between Giants and Pats fans, but both factions were vastly outnumbered by the number of people that couldn’t have cared less either way. In the row behind me sat a gaggle of girls.
“Third and seven means…” intoned one of them.
“It means that you have three tries to get seven yards,” responded another.
“I don’t know much about sports,” said a third feminine voice.
This discourse propagated itself until the next commercial break, when the room was filled with a reverent silence. A stupid Pepsi ad elicited a few chuckles. Oy! What dreck. Then the game started again, and the kibitzing resumed with increased ferocity.
—
My chaperone and I vacated the premises at the end of the second quarter, with the Patriots still up 7-3. A few minutes later we arrived at the threshold of Alpha Epsilon Pi. A few hardy souls puttered around the vestibule, grazing on pizza, drinking Root Beer and Coors carbonated horse urine, and schmoozing amongst themselves. The common room was festooned with couches and chairs, splayed across which were the of AEPi and their friends, all of them transfixed by Tom Petty’s lackluster halftime show. (Whatever happened to The Artist Formerly Known As Prince?)
—
Seeing as there was nowhere to sit down at AEPi, my companion and I absquatulated after Tom Petty ceased to murder silence with a vulgar, ferocious energy, and made our way back to my suite in East Campus, a suite populated with Giants partisans. Conversation flowed as easily as the Sam Adams. Corn chips dipped in all sorts of exotic dips were downed with relentless regularity.
The Patriots received the kick and drove up the field before promptly turning the ball over on downs after failing to convert a questionable fourth-and-thirteen within field goal range. The Giants’ pressure on Tom Brady remained incessant; combined with his ailing ankle, which was clearly bothering him, throwing down the field was a complete impossibility. FOX aired a marginally racist ad featuring a panda bear, prompting a suitemate of mine to comment, “Wow, this is just the year of racist ads.” The Giants scored, the Patriots responded, and soon there were but five minutes left in the fourth quarter. Eli Manning drove up the field, and with 35 seconds left completed a 13-yard pass to sports portent Plaxico Burress for the lead.
The Patriots’ last-ditch effort at making history is quashed, I lose five dollars on my bet, and the joyous screams of women and men emanate up from the lower strata of EC. It’s a very cathartic and blissful conclusion to a very Semitic Super bowl.
Tags: AEPi, The Super Bowl
4 February 2008 @ 10:41 AM · 35 comments
on 
Kraft doesn’t own Kraft Foods (the makers of everyone’s favorite shitty cheese), and he hasn’t since at least 1988. Philip Morris does. Which I guess fits, because I wouldn’t be surprised if Kraft cheese causes cancer.
Kraft foods was founded in 1903, and Robert Kraft was born in 1941. So Robert Kraft probably never had anything to do with the company.
is one of Kraft’s companies’ websites:
http://www.carmelccs.com/
That’s kind of embarrassing.
Bob Kraft has never had anything to do with Kraft Foods.
Bob Kraft : Kraft Foods :: Christopher Morris : Zack Morris
Oh, how idiotic of me. Apologies for the inaccuracy.
and by ‘inaccuracy’ i mean ‘blatant fuckup caused by equal parts laziness and stupidity.’
Pretentiousness just oozes out of this post. “Coors carbonated urine”, followed by the naming of what the author must think is a classy beer: Sam Adams, the use of the word absquatulate, hating on Tom Petty and mentioning love for Prince, it goes on and on.
This is why Columbia students get stereotyped as pricks.
are why Bwog commenters get stereotyped as pricks.
Can’t we just get back to bashing Vampire Weekend?
I feel the love!
I’m a prick, you’re a prick, CML’s a prick, we’re all pricks, hey!
Not bad, Mr. Morris-Lent. You should have stopped by our party two doors down from AEPi. Indeed, it was ballin’.
agree..both bwoggers and bwog commentors are both vital parts of our gigantic columbia prick family?
also…somebody needs to teach the jooz footballs
” “Third and seven means…” intoned one of them.
“It means that you have three tries to get seven yards,” responded another.
“I don’t know much about sports,” said a third feminine voice.
”
now some poor young hillel girl will head into the world believing you have 3 opportunities to go 7 yards on 3rd and 7 when in fact its your 3rd attempt and you have to go 7 yards to get a first down.
what a travesty
It means the quarterback will hit his third read after a seven step drop.
I used to take issue with some of the CML vocabulary, but have realized that his use of “lavishly palatial” is redundantly repetitive. Kudos.
is kind of wrong, no? Why do kids of a particular religion receive perks that other paying Columbia students don’t?
It was donated for a specific cause. Many things on campus are. Everyone is welcome at the Kraft Center, but its main focus is on Jewish life.
The promotion of Jewish student life? What about everybody else? Sure, in principle everybody is welcome at the Kraft center. But in practice, don’t kid yourself. The title of the building says it all.
The Kraft Center is for Jewish student life. If any other group on campus had donors donate a building to house their group they would have the same thing. It turns out that other groups don’t have donors like that.
What about St. Paul’s? I know it’s interdenominational, but nevertheless, it’s still a church…
Sababa.
they are the chosen people!
what beer do the chosen people drink?
He-brew!
Not funny because He-brew is an actual beer and it sucks, just like this post. WANG.
Yisra-ale?
Most dominant pro sports team over the last decade? Really? What about the Spurs, who’ve won 4 titles and been in the playoffs every year from 1998-2007?
all of the Coors carbonated horse urine in the world still wouldn’t make your presence while watching the Superbowl pleasurable
who watched the Super Bowl with CML, I can tell you that that’s just not true. You have to drink a lot of the stuff, but it’s possible.
1) Chris, the Kraft Foods flub was unforgivable.
2) Kraft has been sponsoring the Hillel super bowl party each year his team has been in it.
3) Seriously, people. Stop whining and go cultivate donors. It’s what I told the hunger strikers, and it’s what I’ll tell you. If you want a Center for Whatever, go find someone to pony up 10 million.
4) You’re all pricks.
I’d watch football games with CML any time of the day or night, despite the superfluous adjectives.
actually, kraft contributed nothing to the super bowl party at the hillel. he hasn’t in several years/
AEPi Rocks!!!!!
CML Sucks!!!!
though the ads were pretty poor last night and that the game was really good…which is the converse of how it usually goes
the doritoes mouse ad was awesome in a ridiculous Don Hertzfeldt type way though
The ads were my favorite part and I enjoyed looking at them on that site. I agree, the Doritoes won was hilarious. I saw that You Tube has them posted as well here: http://www.youtube.com/adblitz