The year began, as sports years tend to do, with college bowl games, and a massacre at the Orange Bowl. But the lasting memory from that National Championship Game wasn’t Southern Cal toying with Oklahoma on the way to a 55-19 smithereening. It was Ashlee Simpson getting booed off the stage at halftime.
It was as if sports fans were serving notice that this was a new day. Keep in mind this was the Orange Bowl, which is to impossibly cheesy halftime entertainment what Siberia is to ice. The assembled crowd had only moments earlier had no problem with Kelly Clarkson, a minimally talented, manufactured product of the instant-celebrity hype machinery.
And now they rose up as one to say no — they pronounced it “Boo!” — to the amateurish keening of Simpson, who isn’t even a minimally talented, manufactured product of the instant-celebrity hype machinery. She’s the untalented sister of one. “That’s where we draw the line,” the people declared: “Boo!”
—King Kaufmann, sports columnist, Salon.com[1]
