Super Bowl Realizes the Party’s Over

The Super Bowl, a hallowed national institution which for more than three decades provided Americans with entertainment, proposition gambling and occasionally watchable football, died Sunday, in New Jersey and in Oakland, of unnatural causes.

Funeral services will be held on Sunday, Jan. 28, in Tampa.

A spokesman for the National Football League said the Super Bowl, 35, had been in failing health for months, deeply depressed since it turned Georgia Frontiere into a folk hero, even if it was only for one day. According to a close friend, the Super Bowl “could no longer live with itself.”

Doctors held out hope that the Super Bowl might be saved by a new blood transfusion, but when Peyton Manning and Donovan McNabb were deemed unsuitable donors, the Super Bowl took a turn for the worse. Emergency phone calls were made to Minnesota and Oakland in search of a possible organ transplant, but the Vikings have no heart, and the Raiders had no stomach for getting their hands dirty once they fell behind Baltimore, 10-0.

So at approximately 4:30 p.m. PST Sunday, shortly after the Giants and the Ravens overwhelmed the last remaining defense systems, the Super Bowl lost its will to live. Bedside witnesses said the great game’s last words were: “Bet the under.”

Sources said the Super Bowl spent its final hours watching the AFC and NFC championship games before it became bored to tears and asked someone in the room to brighten the mood. So Paul Tabliabue read a few poems by Edgar Allan Poe, followed by the entire contents of a slim volume, “The Collected Wit of Jim Fassel.” Later, hospital workers found two other books, “Commitment To Excellence” and “Dennis Green: Mr. Clutch,” in the wastebasket next to the bed.

Born in 1967, named after a popular “super ball” toy of the era by then-NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle, the Super Bowl grew quickly into a cultural phenomenon, its every move watched by millions around the world--”bigger than the Beatles,” as the Super Bowl famously described itself. It coveted the spotlight and relished the high life, rubbing elbows with Johnny Unitas, swigging champagne with Joe Namath and sharing limousines with Joe Montana.

Those who remembered the glory days would have been saddened to see the Super Bowl at the end, destitute and despondent, pitching pennies on the street corner with Trent Dilfer and Kerry Collins.

Today, a nation mourns the Super Bowl. In Las Vegas, bookmakers have lowered their odds, out of respect, to unprecedented levels. For the first time in the history of the Super Bowl, the point spread and the over/under are exactly the same: 2 1/2 points.

“A safety should win it,” one bookie said. “If it doesn’t rain, we could even see a field goal.”

Bettors, however, have been slow to put money either way. In the words of one sports book manager, “15% are betting Baltimore, 12% are betting New York and 73% don’t know Baltimore has an NFL team.”

At CBS offices in New York, executives have scrapped plans for sensitive feel-good profiles on Daunte Culpepper, Cris Carter and the muggings that go on in The Black Hole, and are now brain-storming how to build story lines around Greg Comella, Joe Jurevicius, Brandon Stokley and Duane Starks.

And what to do with the “star” personalities on the Ravens’ roster.

Linebacker Ray Lewis, the Ravens’ best player, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in a double-murder case.

Owner Art Modell betrayed the most loyal fans in the NFL by flushing a half-century of tradition and ripping the Browns out of Cleveland in 1996.

Dilfer, the Ravens’ quarterback because NFL rules require that one play, spent six seasons in Tampa, where his chief contribution to Buccaneer football was to spawn a new glossary term for an otherwise indescribably strange-looking pass. As in, “Ooh, he really dilfered that one.”

Coach Brian Billick once was a well-respected, well-liked offensive coordinator in Minnesota, but that was before he bailed on Randy Moss because, as Moss put it Sunday, the Vikings never will win a Super Bowl and Moss, too, probably will have to move on before he gets his ring. Now Billick is a not-so-gracious winner in Baltimore, gloating and goading the media with such pearls as, “The thing that no one picked us, that’s kind of fun. I keep reminding you all, you don’t know what you’re talking about. But no one ever believes me.” Not much to feel good about there.

As filler, the network is said to be contemplating a commemorative piece on the 1958 NFL championship game between Baltimore and New York, often called “the greatest football game ever played”--to be juxtaposed, in ironic fashion, against the backdrop of the worst football game ever played, also featuring teams from Baltimore and New York.

“Either that,” said a network spokesman, “or we’ll just replay the entire ’58 game instead.”

Advertisers who traditionally spend millions to buy coveted commercial time during Super Bowl broadcasts are rumored to be rethinking their investment. Many are believed to be considering cutting back or pulling their ads altogether--with the notable exception of the XFL, which plans for buy time for 48 commercials to run immediately after every incompletion, and Sherwin-Williams, which has developed a campaign based around the slogan: “Instead Of This Swill, You Could Be Watching Our Paint Dry.”

The Super Bowl is survived by the World Series, which died in 1994 before being recast, to great success, as a bonus episode to the summer series that replaced major-league baseball in 1998, “Home Run Derby.”

In lieu of flowers, the National Football League has requested that fans trust in the concept of reincarnation--and to root next season for the Colts and the Packers.

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