Word: chicago
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After the Indianapolis Colts' Super Bowl victory over the Chicago Bears last night, all the talk today is about Peyton Manning finally slapping the can't-win-the-big-one monkey off his back. But in their revelry, Indianapolis residents - Hoosiers, as everyone in Indiana is called - seem to be throwing off their own ape: their city's image as a small, sleepy backyard cabin to Chicago's cosmopolitan, big-shouldered big house just three hours away...
...should know. I watched this particular Super Bowl drama from a unique perspective: I grew up in Indianapolis, spent some of my favorite career years in Chicago and now live in Miami, where this past week I could watch the Interstate 65 complexes of superiority and inferiority play out on South Beach. Bears fans were the in-your-face, we're-a-real-city crowd whenever they spotted the softer, royal blue clusters of Colts backers. I even heard one Chicagoan hurl the "redneck" epithet. (Miamians, meanwhile, just got a good laugh watching pale, overweight Midwesterners trying to swagger...
...Some of the heckling was just good-natured football fun. But the mean-spirited stuff was downright unseemly for a city with Chicago's supposed reputation for Heartland amiability - perhaps a frustrated sign that Chicagoans knew deep down their football team wasn't as good as the Colts? - and it sounded even hypocritical coming from folks whose town carries its own Second City angst...
...Sports movies like Hoosiers and Breaking Away tend to emphasize a parochial amateurness that keeps the state from being taken seriously as a pro player setting - although Indianapolis, in fact, bills itself as the world's amateur sports capital - while films like Brian's Song and The Natural showcase Chicago as an Elysian field of major-league legends...
...even mention how other genres have glorified Chicago at Indiana's expense - like Alfred Hitchcock's thriller North By Northwest, in which Cary Grant gets chased between Chicago and Indianapolis. In Chicago, Cary does suave, urbane things like thwart the bad guys at a high-rent art auction; in Indiana he gets attacked by a crop duster in a scene that makes the rural fields I used to run in look like a benighted dust bowl. Frank Sinatra sang about Chicago's Union Stockyards - but never about the Indianapolis stockyards I worked at in the summers with my grandfather...