After the Bowl Is Over

It occurred to me as I stood in the rain eating a soggy hot dog and listening to 10,000 variations of a Texas accent that I probably wasn’t that interested in Super Bowl XXVII and its attendant festivities.

In fact, my idea of hell is roughly equivalent to the situation in which I found myself at the NFL Experience, a fenced-off compound of food and activities having to do with the worship of Father Football.

I was wet, I was cold and I didn’t rightly give a damn who won the football game the next day in that tortuous arena of bedlam called the Super Bowl.

It was raining, as I said, and lightning was flashing over the tens of thousands who were milling about with team jackets on their backs and hope in their wretched hearts.

Most everyone there, I’m sure, was from somewhere in Texas, because it was their Guys, the Dallas Cowboys, who were to meet the Other Guys, the Buffalo Bills, on the killing field about 21 hours hence.

Some primitive instinct told them they would feast on blood the next day and their senses were aroused. As they milled, they exploded without warning in wild YAHOOS, the way they were no doubt taught to do as children in order to communicate with cows and horses.

I was afraid, as thunder rolled across Pasadena, that at any moment they might panic and stampede, crushing me and my soggy super dog under the hand-tooled leather boots of people unable to even articulate the language.

“I heah thunder!” someone would shout, not hearing but heahing, and off they would get, I mean git, across the wild parking lot.

“You’re just not a festivity fan,” my wife Cinelli said, pulling me along. “Better you should be off shooting puppies somewhere.”

Super Bowl Weekend. The name rolls off the tongue like syrup off of tater cakes. True, I wanted to be a part of it, but I never dreamed it was so . . . well . . . gigantic and that there would be so many people around me who smelled of beer and horse manure.

I suspect that folks who could barely afford to keep their little children in grits had made their way west out of Waco and Amarillo just to watch them Cowboys eat Buffalo.

And now they are home again plowing their fields and branding their mules and thinking that if nothing else happens in their desolate lives they have at least been to the Shrine of the Football Fan, the Super Bowl.

I participated in all this because I was asked to write a piece for the Super Bowl program. What I did was interview an astrologer who predicted that it would be San Francisco and Houston in the Game of Games and that Houston would win 24-10. So much for the oracles of L.A.

Despite my bad judgment in leaving something as important as the outcome of a Super Bowl to ancient mysticism, I was invited to the game and to some of its activities.

It began with a Friday night party at a downtown restaurant called Rex, where cultured people dine. Guests in cowboy hats, for instance, are not permitted, and those who say evrawheah instead of everywhere are beaten at the door.

The party was so important that even Andy Rooney appeared for 15 minutes. He’d have stayed longer, but television people never linger and rarely chat.

That was Friday night. On Saturday there was the NFL Experience in the Rain, and on Sunday, preceding the game, the Official Tailgate Party.

You had to have tickets to get in, which once more, thank God, excluded the scruffy proletariat and their tendency to yahoo. They prowled just beyond guarded fences and waited for someone to herd them toward the Rose Bowl.

We were brought to the party in hundreds of buses with police escorts from hotels around town, which seemed somewhat excessive, but I am not one to complain about aristocratic conveniences.

The party itself thrust us into contact with more people talking sports, but as Cinelli pointed out, “This is a football game, not a seminar of astrophysicists.”

The weather Sunday was glorious, leading many to believe the NFL had somehow staged the electrical show the night before in collaboration with the Disney Studios.

The game itself was a Super Bore, except for as many as 14 aircraft circling simultaneously above us, creating the heady expectation of a midair collision. Wouldn’t that be somethin’ to take back to Crockett County?

Michael Jackson sang, grabbed his crotch (does everyone do that now?), God-blessed the children and collected about $5 million.

As we left the game, I passed a banner that said, “Your sin nature is driving you to hell.”

Actually, it was driving me back to the Biltmore Hotel and some Scotch on the rocks at a quiet cocktail lounge. In L.A., partner, we call that heaven.