THE CHEAP SEATS with STEVE CAMERON: A rare sports night, but the same 'ol Chiefs
It was a man cave night.
Or, yes, a lady cave night.
Anyone who enjoys sports on TV planned to do some slow dancing with that remote from Thursday afternoon onwards.
The Big Dance, of course, was the return of the NFL — with the defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs entertaining 15,895 cold and wet fans in their 76,000-seat stadium.
But hey, it was a crowd.
At a sports event.
As for the game itself, there was some grim news for the rest of the league.
The Chiefs still have Patrick Mahomes and all those weapons you saw last year — plus a phenomenal rookie running back in Clyde Edwards-Helaire from LSU.
The result was a totally one-sided 34-20 victory over Houston (it was 31-7 late in the third quarter).
In a game short of drama, the highlight might have been Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson being run out of bounds — and winding up, with a nifty spin, sitting right next to Mahomes on the Chiefs bench.
Patrick kindly patted him on the helmet.
AS FOR the telecast, well…
Honestly, I’d forgotten how many commercials you have to endure just to get through an NFL game.
They’re endless and relentless.
There was an entire barrage of sales in our mugs with 14 seconds left in the first half.
I mean…14 seconds??
Your mind tends to wander.
I wound up thinking about how much Bose pays Mahomes to model its ear buds.
With the Chiefs running riot after falling behind 7-0, there was a chance to watch every other sport you might fancy.
Jay Busbee of Yahoo called it a sports equinox.
“An event so rare it’s happened only 19 times before 2020 (only twice in the last 30 years), the sports equinox occurs when all four major sports — NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL — play on the same day,” Busbee wrote.
“Generally, it only occurs in late October or early November, when baseball’s playoffs run long enough to overlap with the opening days of the NBA season, and both line up with a Sunday, Monday or Thursday NFL game.
“It’s a Vegas buffet of sports content, games on half a dozen channels at once.”
WITH SO many events available on the tube, you’d think constant switching would be in order.
Nah.
Not here.
I watched a few minutes of U.S. Open tennis, another short stretch of the NHL playoff between Vegas and Dallas, and perhaps 15 seconds of the Lakers scrapping with Houston in the NBA playoff bubble.
But mostly, my remote got the night off.
What the Chiefs-Texans brought us — besides a strong and unified message promoting racial equality — was a sense that something, ANYTHING, could happen on schedule in this awful year.
No one is wildly celebrating, obviously.
We’re still facing and fighting this horrible coronavirus.
We’re still adjusting our lives to stay healthy — or to stay alive.
Some sports events, though, are managing to trudge along on time — and it feels kind of nice.
It was Major League Baseball that proved that, with everyone hiding out and lots of testing, you could travel and play a semi-normal schedule.
And the NFL has picked up the baton.
This one night wasn’t exactly breathtaking, but as Mahomes put it…
“It was great to do something normal.”
Email: scameron@cdapress.com
Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns appear in The Press on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. “Moments, Memories and Madness,” his reminiscences from several decades as a sports journalist, runs each Sunday.
Steve also writes Zags Tracker, a commentary on Gonzaga basketball, once per month during the offseason.