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20 Below Zero Ain't No Nice Place to Be 1/17/2015 11:03:43 AM
Yes, you read right, believe it or not! 20 below zero ain’t no nice, which rhymes with ice, place to be, unless maybe you’re an Eskimo or just into that kind of thing. And neither is 15 below zero for that matter, which is the temperature I woke up to on Wednesday morning.
Of course I’ve seen worse (and felt it too, to the point where I didn’t feel anything at all), and worked outside in it for hours and days and weeks at a clip even, but enough about how cool I used to be, I’m here to talk about how cool I am now, and that’s pretty damn cold I mean to tell ya.
Some parts of the region had it easy and the lucky folks in those tropical-like settings were running around outside in their birthday suits in celebration of it being a lofty 12 below zero. The coldest report I heard tell was 23 below zero. The folks of the town which achieved this most extraordinary feat took the trophy but we all reaped the rewards, some more so than others, and trust me I didn’t escape collecting mine. Dead car batteries and frozen water (in some cases resulting in broken pipes) and worked to death furnaces littered the landscape, and that’s not even the whole of it. All kinds of things crack and break and become slippery enough to cause for some folks, particularly those of a certain age, to fall and crack and break all kinds of things in such sub goose egg conditions.
On a brighter note, I’d like to think that on such an opportune day at least one kid somewhere around took the tongue to the flagpole challenge. That one never gets old.
It is to laugh that in last Sunday’s Daily News I had read the retelling of the Ice Bowl saga, which brings me to my next segment – Any excuse to talk about football.
The date was December 31th, 1967. The location was a frozen mud-pit known as Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The characters were the mighty Coach Vince Lombardi and the Green Bay Packers and Coach Tom Landry and the Dallas Cowboys, who had forgot to pack their winter gear that they didn’t own. An Arctic front had set in overnight and the town that never knew warm as it was got a lot less so very quickly. The crack of dawn saw 13 below zero and the temperature only went down from there. There are those who claimed and some who still do (to include Coach Landry) that Vince Lombardi was in league with the devil, and when his little corner of paradise froze over it was only the beginning and great suffering soon followed. Come game time there was a wind chill factor of almost 40 below zero and everything from the metal benches in the stands to the interior of the press box was frozen. The members of the press were famously eating their coffee and couldn’t even see the damn game through the frozen windows. The referee, like a kid to a flagpole, blew the first play dead and then removed part of his lip and a bit of frozen blood with his whistle and threw the lot away and that was the end of that. Players left parts of themselves all over the field and never knew it before it was too late as they played more so simply to get off of the field than to get to the other end of it and at least some of them were left disfigured and generally scared for life and everyone on either side of the field and in the press box and in the stands got their share of frostbite to be assured and Vince and his boys limped away with a 21 to 17
victory over the Cowboys, who gladly went home to where the sun still shined.
Ain’t football wonderful!? The Ice Bowl is a perfect example of why it rules and deserves to be the king of the American sports scene. Seriously, what has baseball ever done to even remotely compare to this title game from Hel-, a, Lambeau? They won’t even play baseball in the rain!
Keep Warm and dry – watch baseball! Oh, wait – you can’t. Sorry is a word.
