#BradyonBuffalo
Yesterday morning, the story broke that a very mean meanie of a man-child who plays catch for a living deigned to say something critical of our fair burgh. As usually happens in these situations (e.g., hockey players who quite correctly criticize how dead our downtown is after business hours), our local media and commentariat freak the hell out, defending to the death the mistaken notion that Buffalo is a world-class city.
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/buffalopundit/status/164706823868391424″]
Seeing that Channel 2 and 4 were turning this into the top story, I started the #BradyonBuffalo meme.
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/buffalopundit/status/164729090367168513″]
The purpose of it – and most people got it – was not to mock Brady, but to mock our community sensitivity and over-reaction to what a Tom Brady thinks of Buffalo. Here’s a multi-millionaire superstar about to play in his fifth Super Bowl. He’s won three of them already. He lives in a world-class city – a Boston that just thirty years ago was a parochially-minded, predominately Catholic, faded and crumbling city with a shrinking tax base and a massive inferiority complex. Today, Boston is a world-class city, and Buffalo isn’t. It’s a simple fact that we should just accept.
Take, for instance, how Channel 4 reported on Wednesday’s meme:
Brady’s comments started a flurry of conversation on Twitter, with Buffalo Twitter users using the hashtag
#BradyonBuffalo to mock Brady’s comments.
No, we used it to mock Buffalonians’ oversensitivity to outsiders’ criticism of our region. We used it to poke fun at the predictable top-story treatment this would get in all local media, complete with angry reactions from tourism officials and political figures.
You know what? With three exceptions – the Mansion at Delaware, the Hampton Inn on Chippewa, and the Embassy Suites at the Avant, Buffalo hotels are pretty crappy. I mean, have you set foot in the last Adams Mark on Earth yet? Leave it to a concrete eyesore in Buffalo to cling to a dead chain’s trademark. Tim Graham in the Buffalo News is, so far, the only local mainstream media type to get it exactly right, pointing out the small number of local hotels that can accommodate a football team (hint: the Mansion isn’t one of them).
Here are some of my favorites. Stop being such a whiny crybaby, Buffalo. Suck it up.
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/buffalopundit/status/164749236821434368″]
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/ChrisSmithAV/status/164738559474012160″]
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/j_kruk/status/164730321735135234″]
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/buffalopundit/status/164733731523919873″]
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/DerekPunaro/status/164733931818717185″]
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/buffalopundit/status/164733607246704640″]
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/buffalopundit/status/164732215677300738″]
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/buffalopundit/status/164800859295858688″]
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