You Can Kiss Away Any Sense of Entertainment Value

At one point Sunday there were hundreds and hundreds of people running around with their faces painted white and black, some of them wearing silver armor, bombs in the distance, security personnel everywhere-- making it feel very much like a Raider game.

The stadium was full of fans, however, a dead giveaway this was not a Raider game, not to mention it was the Super Bowl and they’re never invited to the big game.

But why would 74,000 people pay at least $325 a shot to have KISS yell at them? This was the NFL’s idea of a pregame show, and before the players had been introduced, they filled the sky with fireworks, an obvious attempt to down two or three of the 17 airplanes flying overhead dragging advertising banners.

Budweiser, anticipating this, had sent a blimp and two planes dragging a banner just in case one of them failed to complete their mission.

A bunch of people ran onto the field unfurling a giant picture of Denver running back Terrell Davis, and then with anticipation mounting, they unrolled the Falcon portrait . . . we will never know if it was supposed to be Eugene Robinson, because if it was, you know the NFL had half of Miami up last night putting together a giant mug of Jamal Anderson.

KISS kept screaming, the end zone caught on fire from falling fireworks and later NFL officials called the opening a rousing success, suggesting at most that maybe seven or eight fans had been torched in the process.

Cher, wearing jeans--she forget to pick up the dry-cleaning?--and showing less skin than Gene Simmons of KISS, sang the national anthem, raising her arms in field-goal fashion at the end to signal “it was good.”

Ninety minutes of boring football followed--punctuated by an animated Larry King--the worst kind of king--on the big screen. A press release explained: “For the first time ever, a live computer-generated character will entertain the Super Bowl stadium audience.”

If they were talking about King, they lied.

When it came time for halftime, they wheeled out a huge stage, had everyone in place with 19 minutes remaining on the clock and then the public-address announcer told everyone to look at the big screen.

The stadium went silent, everyone looked up to see E.T. on the screen, E.T. telling a story in subtitles, which turned out to be an advertisement for a car insurance company. Seventy thousand people waited to go to the bathroom for this?

After another car insurance ad, while you were watching first-half highlights of the game at home, the entertainment began with Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. Then Stevie Wonder came out driving a car--only at the Super Bowl, followed by Gloria Estefan singing, “O-way, o-way, o-wah,” like she has a million times before.

So much for the highlights of Super Bowl XXXIII.

L.T. MEANS LACKING TACT

Lawrence Taylor offered the following thank-you note on TV to those numskulls who voted him into the Pro Football Hall of Fame this weekend.

“These guys [media] sit around--old phonies,” Taylor told Fox’s Ronnie Lott. “Phonies, I call them. [They] sit there and blast and criticize me and say he shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame because he’s morally wrong while they sit around getting high on their third or fourth highball. . . . They hold me to a standard higher than they’ll hold themselves.

“They’ll go here to South Beach, get totally trashed and chase some little 13-year-old up and down the street--but they’re all right.”

Taylor continued his acceptance speech, saying, “In spite of everything--the bull, the hoopla, the things written, the negativity, in spite of everything--I’ve made it and I’m one of the best who ever played the game. And if you sit there dissed, take your kids to the basketball court because I’m going to be in the Hall of Fame regardless.

“I think it’s absolutely ridiculous to even have a debate over it in the first place. If they didn’t vote me in the Hall of Fame, then they need to close that place down; they need to get the hell off the committee.”