I was watching the NBA on ESPN when I heard something peculiar. The game went from the end of the second quarter to halftime and I heard the announcer proclaim in a seventy year old fratty smoker’s growl that it was:
The Toyota Halftime.
Did I miss something? Isn’t it supposed to be The Toyota Halftime Show or The NBA on ESPN Halftime Show brought to you by Toyota. It is now an eerily blunt The Toyota Halftime.
It’s not The Toyota Halftime.
It’s the player’s and coach’s halftime, and the people in attendance at the arena. In the most technical sense it is the game’s halftime. They aren’t doing halftime so Toyota can slap a plug on it. If the league decided the length of halftime would be cut in half Toyota wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.
Also, several different companies sponsor halftime. They can’t all own halftime. Pensoil and Toyota can’t divide it up and sell shares of it to Goldman Sachs clients. That’s why they used to say Brought to you By, which was still a stretch because the sponsor wasn’t actively doing anything to bring the viewer the halftime show except kicking down some dollars. It’s not like they had an attachment to halftime. It’s not like the people who run Toyota especially love halftime as if it’s their favorite part of the game. It’s not like if that sponsor dropped out someone else wouldn’t be directly in line to bring you halftime. Its not like ESPN wouldn’t be able to produce a halftime show if there weren’t any sponsors. For those reasons I think the whole thing is a bunch of malarky.
Quicken Loans Arena. The Wells Fargo Center. Sleep Train Arena. Those companies put their brands on a building. Claiming to own halftime doesn’t even make sense. How can you own a time? It’s a stretch to say it is even grammatically correct.
If you can own a time why couldn’t you own a free throw or a player’s facial expression after missing a shot? If you can own a time why couldn’t you own a mathematical equation or a temperature or a degree of latitude? If you could own those things why couldn’t you own a thought?
Its part of a growing brazen corporatization of America which threatens our very fiber. The cost of living rises. The middle class disappears. The .1 percent gets richer. The banks make tax payers pay off their gambling debts and rub it in your face by making you watch a game in the Wells Fargo Center. They go in on loans to build the shopping center outside the arena. They pay off who needs to be paid off to get done what they want to get done. They win. You lose.
You don’t own halftime motherfuckers. I was fine with you pretending you had something to do with it. It’s not The Toyota Halftime. It’s The People’s Halftime. We need to get it back.