Tyler R. Tynes: Slow death in the desert. Inside Eagles fans' painful Super Bowl.
Rising with effort from the back of a glistening keg, shoulder pads blessed on his back and a midnight green mohawk lifting from the apex of his silver-brushed skull, Jamie Pagliei tells me a war story filled with delusion.
"I've been painting up for 25 years," the 50-year-old declaims, his voice building into a steady rumble. "It's been hard work; no one's ever done this before. I'm trying to make a living painting my face while not being on the Ringling Bros."
He started to get recognized at a New Orleans Saints game around 2018.
"I had a video go viral and it blew up," he says, adjusting the fine follicles of his hair. "Since then, I've done commercials and a production company said I had great energy. I was like 'The Philly Sports Guy,' they said, and I should see if that name was available."
From there, a star was born. Jamie grew out the 'hawk, gathered his finest jerseys and high school equipment, and adopted his persona as his full-time line of work. The face paint ain't an act. That jawn is his salary.
"Being the Philly Sports Guy isn't very lucrative," Jamie says.
I figured, my man.
He was no different than so many men from the place where I was made. He was as full of fantasy as he was inspiration. Misery will do that to a man. For six generations, Philadelphia, at least when it came to football, was home to a contentious sack of pugilists. The boys who threw batteries at Santa. You know the tune. Then Ol' Saint Nick delivered us from evil and shocked the world with a Super Bowl win in 2018. We've heard plenty about that one too. Denizens drove ATVs up museum steps, climbed cars and drank the city dry in a fortnight. Everyone had had enough of us, and yet wanted more all the same. Stuck between Napoleon syndrome and a newfound status of champions changed, inherently, what it meant to be Philadelphian.
But agony still drives Jamie. It drove all of us mad; my grandfather,
