I can’t stand it any longer.
I’ve been sitting by these last few days, reading and listening and not so silently (just ask my co-workers) fuming as the media goes on and on about Super Bowl XLVIII in New York. But this headline from Saturday’s Tacoma News Tribune pushed me over the edge: “If New York can host Super Bowl, why not Seattle?”
Attention TNT staff writer Craig Hill, TNT editors and all my fellow print and broadcast journalists: MetLife Stadium, where the Hawks face the Broncos in next Sunday’s Super Bowl, is in East Rutherford, New Jersey. NEW JERSEY. (Which, ironically, the subhed on Hill’s TNT story accurately noted. Go figure.)
So, yes, despite my very long tenure in the Pacific Northwest, I was born and raised in Jersey and am state-riotic to the end. I’m also a stickler for accuracy. Maybe my colleagues who insist on talking about the “New York” Super Bowl slept through high school geography. Maybe they can’t bring themselves to associate New Jersey with anything "Super." (Though c’mon: Springsteen? Sinatra? Streep? The Shore?) Maybe they don’t actually know where MetLife Stadium is.
I grew up 5 miles south of the Met, which we used to call (and still do) Giants Stadium and which my brothers, many years ago, fondly nicknamed the “Odor Bowl,” owing to the fact that it was built in the New Jersey Meadowlands, a once vast and glorious salt marsh that in my youth became a vast and fragrant dumping ground for garbage – and the occasional snitch. Be that as it may, I can assure you that MetLife Stadium is in New Jersey. Not New York.
Just look at this map. That wide blue river on the right? The Hudson. To the right (or east) of the Hudson? New York. To the left (or west of the Hudson): Jersey. That red balloon with the A in it marks the East Rutherford home of the Meadowlands Sports Complex, MetLife Stadium and the 2014 Super Bowl between our Seattle Seahawks and the Denver Broncos. Definitely in Jersey. (Thank you Google maps.) And both teams are staying nearby in Jersey City.
It’s perfectly acceptable for the media and everyone else to situate next Sunday’s Super Bowl in the “New York metropolitan area,” or “near” New York City. Which it surely is. But let’s give Jersey and geography their due. After all, we’d hardly call an NFL Championship in Spokane the Montana Super Bowl.
I will leave you with these thoughts posted by my cousin Nancy to her Facebook page on January 19. Nancy lives in Cedar Grove, which is just a few miles west of MetLife Stadium. In New Jersey.
“Would someone please give these nitwit broadcasters a geography lesson," wrote Nancy. "The Super Bowl is not in NYC. Last I checked the stadium is still in NJ.”
Amen, cuz.
