Puppy Bowl V recap
I've been watching the Puppy Bowl since its inaugural year, transfixed by the fuzzy image coming through the Tex Mode TV, an ancient 15" television decorated with weird wrestling-related Sharpee drawings that I took with me to my Greenwich Village dorm room my freshman year of college. It was a rare reprieve from the comedians on BET that one of my roommates would watch until the wee small hours of every night.
A couple years later, I received a Facebook message from an incoming freshman while I was studying abroad in Vienna. We hadn't met, and she acknowledged that it was weird to send Facebook friend requests to people you don't know, but she said she saw that we were the only people with the Puppy Bowl listed as our favorite TV shows and decided that we had to be friends. When I returned to Da States, she became one of my best friends. Adorabs, right?
Anyway, the point is that the Puppy Bowl occupies a special place in my heart, the garden apartment of a cardiac three-flat. I've watched approvingly as Animal Planet has introduced new innovations annually - the kitten half-time show, the tail-gaters...all wonderful. What could they have left up their sleeve?
They did not disappoint. Pepper the Parrot kicked off the event with a heartfelt rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner," which, to be perfectly honest, was a lot better than the performance by that woman at the Obamapalooza election night rally in Grant Park.
Then the game began. Madeline the Beagle quickly established herself as my favorite, as I'm a sucker for both beagles and girls with names beginning with "M." She was a particularly pretty pup, too, and had a good amount of spunk:
Eli was the jerk of the bunch, you could tell pretty quickly. Just by looking at him, really:
It was a pretty clean game, light on penalties. The penalties were for relatively innocuous things like "excessive barking," and not for accidents on the field, which was a relief. I had had high hopes for Schroder, but ultimately I think he let his fans down by napping the entire time he was on the field:
In the third quarter, another beagle, Matilda (presumably Madeline's sister) really stepped up her game. Grabbing a football between her teeth, she ran back and forth across the field, scoring multiple touchdowns for both sides. Matilda was justly rewarded with the honor of Most Valuable Puppy:
Something totally unexpected happened in the fourth quarter, however, though I suppose we should have seen it as inevitable, considering how rowdy crowds get these days. A streaker invaded the field, stopping play! From Animal Planet's website, I've learned that her name is Sarah Jessica Barker.
All in all, an excellent game. High fives all around.
Tags: puppy bowl, television