Site of Super Bowl is not the problem.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

Byline: Edwin Pope

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. _ To be honest, and this seems to be the place for it, I hardly ever expected that dateline to be joined with a Super Bowl. At the same time, I hereby disassociate myself from pundits who swung into bash-Jacksonville mode almost before Super Bowl XXIX week started.

These spoiled blabbermouths are threatening to ruin the Patriots-Eagles match before it kicks off. Hedonistic doesn't begin to describe them. Many of these Jax-killers are people who automatically hate any town whose every block fails to house a restaurant where you can spend $75 eating a meal in 20 minutes.

I happen to be a Waffle House man, and one of my main interests just now includes trying to find the closest one among the total of seven in Jacksonville.

Another complaint from all those sissies with the computers involves the weather.

Yes, Jacksonville can drop into the low 30s, but anyone who grouses about that could not possibly have been at one of those earliest Super Bowls played at New Orleans' all-outdoors Tulane Stadium before the Superdome finally rescued us.

They must not have stayed in the ``main'' hotel, then called the Roosevelt. Its windows wouldn't close even when it was freezing outside, and its heating apparatus worked about two hours a day while all the customers were in the French Quarter.