The Bengals are in the Super Bowl but their owner remains reviled

An elderly gentleman wearing a raincoat and a crumpled tan golf cap ambled across a makeshift stage at dusk on Sunday in Kansas City to accept a trophy that many fans of him have it.

Twitter and Facebook did not exist the last time his Cincinnati Bengals won the AFC title and earned a trip to the Super Bowl, but 86-year-old Mike Brown has been a target for years, for running his football team on the cheap.

The Twitter wisecracks kept it up: “My man spoke at the podium like he was wondering how much the Super Bowl was going to cost,” one read. Another read: “You know how much cheaper the flights in are the next day? Let’s just show up the 14th and play then.”

That was a good one. The Bengals are to play the Los Angeles Rams in Super Bowl LVI on 13 February at the Rams’ beautiful new home stadium. The Rams, the designated visiting team in the game, won’t even have to make a road trip.

The Bengals’ journey, on the other hand, has taken 33 years. The fans are thrilled to see their team in the Super Bowl, but they are not quite ready to let go of the lean years, which included footing the bill for a new stadium so Brown would not move the team.

Days after the Bengals upended Tennessee on 15 January for their first playoff victory in 31 years, an op-ed appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer with the headline: Yes Cincinnati, you owe Bengals owner an apology. Many of those who commented were not kind to the author.

“An apology?! I don’t think so,” one reader wrote. “I’m old enough to remember Mike Brown blackmailing the taxpayers of this county to get a new stadium and including an implied warranty that the Bengals would field a more competitive team if one were provided to him. It took the Bengals a quarter of a century to