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Accidental SuperBowl Tourists
“A bowl thing” going on
If you’re a football fan, you couldn’t ask for a better ringside seat than the ones that Pauline and Michael Nightengale had Monday.
The English couple sat in two plush seats nestled next to a booth of SuperBowl merchandise in the lobby of the Miami Airport Hilton, where the Chicago Bears football team is staying until next weekend’s game.
And the Bears were everywhere — hulking men in the street clothes, happy to be here, happy to talk to the fans that had arrived early for the big game.
But the Nightengales, in Miami for a layover after their 10-day Caribbean cruise, didn’t quite know what to make of them and all the fuss surrounding them, including a big Bears banner hanging in the lobby that simply said “Finish.”
Finish what?
“Does this have to do with a bowl thing going on?” Pauline asked a security guard at the hotel. Pauline deduced that these big men all around them must be athletes.
“They look like healthy, powerful guys,” she said. “Big and chunky,” added her husband.
Definitely not cricket
And when the Nightengales were on their Celebrity cruise, the Americans on the cruise made a big deal of seeing some sort of American football game on the ship’s big-screen TV.
“There was a great cheer when they announced they would show the game and then two-thirds of the ship’s passengers disappeared,” Michael, a doctor from Surrey said. “Just the Brits were left on deck.”
Exporting SuperBowl fever
So, he asked me, “Is this the next round?” “This is the SuperBowl,” I said. “It’s like the World Cup in America, except it’s not for the rest of the world.”
The doctor nodded. Now, if this had been a cricket team, he said, he’d know everybody.
So as the Bears players sauntered by on their way to waiting buses in the parking lot, he was more interested in reading the instruction booklet to his new camera than taking in the passing scene.
Just don’t ask about the Roman numerals
“What does this mean?” his wife asked about the SuperBowl poster next to her chair.
The poster had a game date of 02-04-07. To her, that meant April 2 - In England, the day of the month is listed before the month - so she couldn’t figure out why people were gathering this week for a game in April.
Within 10 minutes, I had the Nightengales up to speed on the upcoming game, possibly enough to make them even care enough to watch the game from England. “We’ll have to try to watch the match,” Michael told his wife. “Maybe we can get it on the Internet.”
The woman with the gift bag in her hand
The Nightengales weren’t the only accidental tourists who found themselves in the middle of the SuperBowl hoopla.
Not far from where they sat, Karen Privett, 60, from the Chicago suburb of Naperville, was standing there holding a little Bears outfit for her one-year-old grandson. The one-piece outfit had already been signed by several of the players.
“I was hoping to get Lovie to sign it,” she said, scanning the lobby for Bears coach Lovie Smith.
When Privett and her husband, a salesman traveling on business, arrived in Miami Sunday, they had no idea that the hotel they were staying in was the same one where the Bears were. Privett isn’t much of a football fan, and her husband grew up as a Pittsburgh Steelers fan.
But this was an opportunity that shouldn’t be wasted.
“When we got here, the players were all over the lobby,” she said. “I called back to my friends and said we might not be sitting in the stands, but I’m getting their autographs.”
A group of players walked by and she scanned the faces. No Lovie. And no other players on her wish list, either.
“I don’t have the young run back guy,” she said.
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