SAN FRANCISCO -- With Brock Purdy shattering his elbow into a million pieces just before the Superbowl, it looks like the Eagles are going to the Superbowl this year. In the seminal article of 2023, we sit down with a Philadelphia city municipal worker who is in charge of greasing up those poles for a serious chat on the materials they've experimented with.
Welcome to the 5thQuarterSports pre-Superbowl interview, thanks for participating.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
So it must have been a busy Friday evening, right?
Don't even get me started, man. There are over 23,000 lightposts in the city. Did you know that? It costs millions of dollars to make this city safe during any sporting event. It's insane.
Sounds like a large effort. Do you grease the horses, too?
Don't even fucking talk to me about the horses.
...
Can I swear in this interview?
Ok, so moving on, what materials have been tested? What are the absolute worst?
Alright, straight to business. I've been greasing up poles since 2009, and let me tell you I was scraping brain off the concrete before then from 1993. It was gnarly in the early years before this was a science. We've gone through SO many iterations.
Sets start at that 2009 year. What did you first try out
Right, so that was the Naive Year, as I called it. We started out small, we tried literal KY Jelly at first. Big mistake. It gets wicked cold during the winter here, so when the first round of Eagles fans started to slide down it activated the jelly. Unfortunately this really warmed their hands up. That turned out to be the WORST year on record, it really encouraged many people to give it a try. It was awful, we lost many elderly folks who just couldn't afford gloves that winter. On top of that, it was outrageously expensive.
...is this forreal?
Yeah. It really is. We thought we learned our lesson for the next year.
Did you?
We did NOT. That year we decided to set the city up into two parts, one half with peanut butter and one half with motor oil. Two huge mistakes. The peanut butter half of the city was very quickly consumed by the local homeless for the first 8 feet, I guess they stood on each other's shoulders or something? Hard to say, but the number of deaths before the celebrations topped the celebration deaths just from unknown peanut allergies alone.
The motor oil had a similar problem. We made the crucial mistake of using new oil and not used oil. Folks who lived near the poles just used an ice scraper and filled their leaky ass winter cars. Insanity, we really were clueless in those early years.
I have a hard time believing any of this.
Let me tell you, this is no joking matter. We've lost over 600 lives to the poles.
Okay. Right. I am getting dizzy. What were the best solutions so far?
WELL we really nailed it last year. We split the city into 8 divisions for a double-blind test. The most successful of that run was using Vasaline. That was GREAT, it stuck to the poles all night and didn't slide off. It preventing gripping while moisturizing. It actually ended up healing people.
The runner up was, oddly enough, was just coving them with water. Those froze over night, but made the poles extremely dangerous. Kids kept licking each other to lick them. People reached terminal velocity if they slipped near the top. Not good.
Well, I thin that wraps things up. Thank you for your time.
No, thank you.
