Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
Let’s start by wishing Keaton Anderson, the Voice of the Tiger Den, a successful later afternoon, and evening while PA announcing IHSAA regional championship action beginning this afternoon at 4 p.m. in the Tiger Den.
There’s a bit of a twist in Anderson’s plans. The Warsaw Lady Tigers, eliminated seven evenings ago in their sectional title clash, will not be on the marquee in local hoops action.
Anderson’s consolation, however, is still a sweet one, with the privilege of calling action for his high school alma mater, Whitko High School, whose Lady Wildcats reached the Class 2A regional final in tonight’s 7 p.m. nightcap matchup.
Enjoy the evening, Keaton!
The Super Bowl weekend had me thinking of my two favorite sports-related Saturday Night Live sketches and pre-recorded spots.
Peyton Manning’s United Way pre-recorded spot added a dark-but-humorous side to the Hall-of-Famer spending a day with “the kids” teaching them how to break into an SUV, deriding an elementary school-aged kid who couldn’t run a pass route very well (relegating him to a nearby port-a-pot), and tattooing a youngster’s calf.
The tag line was, “Spend time with your kids so Peyton manning doesn’t.”
If you’ve had at least one colonoscopy in the last ten years, you’ll recall John Belushi, one of the original cast members, starred in a commercial parody of Bruce Jenner’s Wheaties cereal in 1976 after the latter’s world record-setting Olympic decathlon performance.
In the real commercial, Jenner begins his pitch with, “I put in a lot of years, and I put away a lot of Wheaties,” next to a Wheaties box with Jenner’s arms raised triumphantly.
Belushi, with a lit cigarette in his hand during his pitch, said, “I logged a lotta miles training for that day, and I downed a lotta’ donuts,” in his pitch for “Little Chocolate Donuts” as an essential part of his training table.
The polarization of the Super Bowl halftime entertainment notwithstanding, the NFL, who slated Bad Bunny for its halftime show, establishes its programming and entertainment strategy for each Super Bowl fully realizing it’s as much a television show as it is a professional football league.
From a business standpoint, the halftime entertainer, also the world’s current music streaming leader, appealed to the NFL’s global reach. Ratings estimates reached 128.2 million viewers of the halftime show while the game itself drew a record 137 million viewers. The league conducted business based on research like a business, well aware of the biggest ratings week for its “television show” to boot.
The ratings were the fourth-most-watched halftime show behind Kendrick Lamar (133.5 million, 2025), Michael Jackson (133.5 million, 1993), and Usher (129.3 million, 2024), with Rhianna in the fifth spot (121 million, 2023).
Rhianna’s Super Bowl halftime show actually exceeded 115 million in-game viewers.
Jackson’s 1993 halftime show is the only one among the top five not among the other most recent Super Bowls.
Super Bowl X was the first Super Bowl I watched in its entirety - 50 years ago - and Up With People was the halftime entertainment. While tastes in entertainment past and present have always varied among the big game’s viewers, the halftime show has arguably come a long way.
The Shield knows, furthermore, there is an even bigger ratings giant, FIFA’s World Cup (soccer), whose viewership dwarfs the Super Bowl by nearly 1.4 billion sets of eyes, and it wants a piece of that worldwide action.
There will be nine regular season games played beyond U.S. boundaries including Mexico, Brazil (Central and South America, respectively). European venues include Spain, France, and Germany, three contests across the English Channel in London, and down under in Melbourne, Australia.
In recent years among some folks, “global” anything has a negative connotation, but I recall during the last handful of my years of U.S. Air Force service, “Global Reach – Global Power” punctuated a beautifully written U.S. Air Force vision statement.
