Last Thoughts on the Stupor Bowl

I realize that the XXXVth annual Super Bowl is ancient history now and that everyone and his little sister have written about it, but I still have a few words.

I hear you shout that there is nothing left to say about the quintessential male ritual, but I ask you, was there anything to say about it in the first place?

Since there probably wasn’t and since everyone has said something anyhow, I will build on the premise to say something too. Think of me as the guy who comes after a battle and shoots the wounded.

I watched the Super Bowl with a friend I’ll call Harry, who looks upon the game as something of a religious experience, like the annual blessing of the animals maybe. My wife, Cinelli, found reason to leave, which she almost always does when young men weighing more than cows clash on the field of play.

She looked at me lying on the couch and at Harry slumped in a chair and said, “Well, I guess there was no need for you guys to change underwear today.”

I made the mistake of asking her what she meant and she said innocently, “Don’t men bond through their dirty underwear?”

Women, unless they have dominant male genes, don’t understand our need for conquest. “If it weren’t for sex and football,” I said, “what would men have?”

“War,” she said, then left the house.

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To say that the Super Bowl was dull is to state the obvious. Call it the Stupor Bowl. But that isn’t the point. It’s the idea of being a part of the activity that’s important, not the game itself.

One of the announcers pointed out that many who did not have tickets drove to the parking lot of the arena to barbecue their burgers and watch the encounter on television. While that may seem a pathetic substitute for actually being inside, it says something about the need to be close to, er, historic events.

They will be able to tell their grandchildren they were in the very parking lot where, like a tale out of Greek mythology, the Ravens beat the Giants in 2001.

An indication of how boring the game was came from my dog, Wilson. He’s a springer spaniel, with an IQ slightly higher than a right tackle’s, who has a habit of barking on the half-hour for no apparent reason. He found the encounter so dull that he didn’t even bother to bark out the time.

“Something is needed here,” I said to Harry, who rarely speaks during a Super Bowl game. He sits and stares as though trying to communicate with the quarterbacks telepathically.

I suggested to him that the game was better back in the days when the Oakland Raiders misunderstood the basic rules and thought that the idea of football was to eat their opponents.

“What they ought to do to make the game more exciting,” I said, “is to starve one team for, oh, a week or so and then slather members of the other team with meat sauce and let them go at it.”

Harry just kept on staring, his lips moving occasionally, communicating with the figures on the screen.

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There is no need to go over the fine points of the game because there weren’t any. The highlight of the whole thing, judging by the insane screaming of the crowd, was the appearance of Britney Spears and her Navel during halftime.

For those unfamiliar with Britney, she does something called singing and moves a lot. The big rumor in the Teen World last year was that she had undergone a breast enlargement. Britney denied it, saying she was just growing up to be a big girl and it happened overnight on its own.

She used to do a solo act, but then one day she wore a blouse too short for her, exposing her Navel. While the response to Britney had been just so-so, the response to her navel was wild. So she signed her Navel to a 3-year contract and now they’re a team.

I mentioned this to Harry, who managed to look away from the halftime festivities long enough to glare, and then returned to staring at Britney and her Navel.

I went to a Super Bowl once where Dallas was playing Buffalo. The highlight was the appearance of Michael Jackson. The singer, not the radio talk show host. Someone screamed, “There he is!” but I had glanced away and when I looked back, Jackson was gone. He earned several million dollars for walking backward once past the cameras.

When Stupor Bowl Exexexvee was over, Harry had tears in his eyes. He had been to the mountaintop. Wilson got up, stretched, looked at the clock and barked. It was exactly on the half-hour. Good boy.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com