The Superbowl

I have seen the best minds of my generation engulfed by the madness that is Superbowlmania, and there I was in section 400, at approximately the elevation of Mount Everest, watching the contest between the Steelers and the Packers play out way down there. I can no longer say I've never been to a Football game in my life. I've been to exactly one, and it was the Superbowl. I guess if you're going to go to one Football game in you're life, this is the one to go to.

The Steelers fans were animals. Our seats were in the Steelers sections and those guys were just about barbarians. They were out for blood. They kept calling out, “Yo defense, kill somebody over here, already.” Some of these beasts poured beer and threw stuff on Packers fans in an attempt to start brawls, but the Packers fans were too easy-going to oblige. After all, people wearing cheese wedges on their heads aren’t exactly badasses. You could immediately tell the Steelers fans from the Packers fans too—the Steelers fans were usually unshaven apes, or they looked like My Cousin Vinny or cast members from the Sopranos. The Packers fans were pasty Midwesterners for the most part who peered around like they were always looking for someone in authority to ask for directions. The Steelers fans looked like if they saw someone in authority, they would either offer them a bribe or knife them down.

I suppose if I had any interest at all in football all of this might have been more exciting to me. As it was I’ve seen enough football-related activities to last the rest of my life. My wife took me to the NFL Experience for five hours the previous day and walked me to death in what has to be the biggest money-making scheme to take advantage of fan-mania in existence. You pay 425 admission to get in to spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on fan gear. Our promoters scored free VIP tickets so at least we didn’t have to pay to get in, but fan-girl wife bought a couple hundred dollars worth of stuff to bring back. I didn't have so wonderful a time however. After thirty minutes, so many morbidly-obese lumbering behemoths had lurched into me, twisting my shoulders around and jarring my hips, after a while I was in agony from my back and hip joints being wrenched from the jolts. It felt like I was stabbed with a knife. Come to think of it, with all those thugs from Pittsburgh in attendance, perhaps I had been. I swear it happened several thousands of times, these huge, lumbering mountains of land mammals slamming into me as they waddled around the NFL exhibits, goggling at the bright flashing lights and memorabilia and not paying an ounce of attention where they were going. I had to take four ibuprofens when I went to bed.

Football-related events had been scheduled for us by the promoters for almost every day. We were bussed to a Meet-and-Greet with Dion Sanders, elected into the Hall of Fame, who was a personable chap. Dallas was under the siege of an ice storm which in Indiana would have been a minor inconvenience worthy of a day’s worth of clearing, but in Dallas was a disaster. They had no way to deal with this frigid blight and freely admitted it. The ice lay untouched on the roads and parking lots; no salt, sand, bulldozers existed in the entire city to deal with it. Anyone driving on these skating rinks drove at five miles per hour. They truly didn’t know how to deal with snow and ice down there. We saw people trying to push snow around with leaf blowers, and you probably heard about the people injured when the snow and ice fell from the Dome of the Superbowl arena because the workers were standing around looking up at it. It never occurred to them that ice falls off a roof straight on your head. Up here, people know not to walk close to buildings because you can be impaled by a goddam thirty foot long ice-sickle. So the point is it took us forever to get to this event in downtown Dallas, where we were ushered into a tiny meeting room to listen to Mr. Sanders speak for a while, field questions, and sign autographs. Of more interest to me was when we drove by the grassy knoll, scene of the Kennedy assassination.

Football and football events are LOUD. The NFL Experience and the game both had pumped-up booming sound blasting at volumes calculated to shatter quartz. I will say the stadium full of 110,000 people was awesome and spectacular. Our seats were in the upper section directly across from the Giantron so we saw everything quite clearly. I don’t quite understand the rules of football but I followed it well enough to know when touchdowns and such were made. Wife forced me to wear a Superbowl T-shirt, the first sports-themed item of clothing I ever wore in my life. Sometimes I reflect on how much different my life would have been if I hadn’t grown up asthmatic and I could have played sports as a kid. My parents chain smoked and as a kid I couldn’t breathe. I remember waking up at night feeling like I was suffocating. A doctor told mom to quit smoking because I was allergic to tobacco smoke, and I remember mom in her typical fashion saying to my dad, “What the hell do doctors know? How can our smoking hurt him?” And the condition remained untreated and got worse. I was in high school before I got treatment for it and was able to breathe near normal and was in my 30s before I was completely symptom free. Being an asthmatic kid made me weird and bookish instead of being involved in sports like the other kids.

So at the Superbowl we waited outside in line three hours, I’m not exaggerating, to get inside. It was not very well organized, and you probable heard about all the people who paid for seats and didn’t get them after travelling from all over the country. And again lumbering Frankensteins jostled and jolted me until I was on the screaming verge of insanity. To attend any of these events a person endures hours and hours of standing in lines of huge crowds getting jostled and bumped while all the time incredibly loud BOOM-BOOM Pop and Hip-Hop music played endlessly. Rational thought is impossible with such over-stimulation of the senses. And yet, most people seemed so excited to get a glimpse of these heroes, and to watch tiny figures playing the game on the field far below, and to spend hard-earned money on the fan-gear, and I found this touching.

The half-time show was more spectacular live than it appeared to be on television. There were about three to five hundred people in lighted suits on the field forming various configurations in time to the music, and from our lofty aerie it was a splendid vision. It almost made up for the awful music itself. Except for Slash, who is awesome, who provided thirty seconds or so of actual skillful performance. And it was LOUD. Jesus Christ, it was a tidal wave of sound. I wish I had that sound system at home to listen to operas with. Christ almighty, Wagner would be awesome at that volume, like Hiroshima.

The day of the game they bussed us over to the arena, dropped us off near one of the gates and said they would pick us up near same. So wife and I left our coats on the bus and went in wearing T-Shirts since the temp outside at that point had climbed to near 50ish. Around half-time we were notified via cell phone telephone, that modern technological marvel, that our bus was at Six Flags! However, no worries--we would be shuttled to it via a school bus that would be awaiting us “outside the gate.” Simple enough. However, two of our group somehow got lost, the temp had now dropped into the twenties, and it had begun to snow and sleet. And did I mention we were in T-Shirts? So our organizers had us stand in a group while they tried to find our missing sheep. Which took a long time. We huddled in this freezing rain for almost an hour before the missing chuckleheads turned up, laughing at their wacky misadventures. But then, they could afford to laugh—they were wearing winter coats. Next, we found out, our bus was several blocks away...somewhere. So we set off looking for it, yet another in an endless series of our impromptu derring -do that weekend.

To be brief, we were out in that freezing rain for over an hour and a half. After about an hour though, I was no longer cold; in fact I began to feel warm, like on a balmy spring day. It crossed my mind this probably wasn't a good sign, but oddly, the thought made me happy and I started laughing. My wife became alarmed at this point. Fortunately, it was just then we found the missing bus, got aboard, and donned our coats. I felt pins and needles all over and the happy feeling went away, replaced by exhaustion and a desire for some very strong coffee. One thing I learned from this was is I ever became homeless and on the streets in wintertime, it won’t be so bad.

So today we got up, went to the airport, flew to Indy, drove home. End of the adventure. Would I do it again? Absolutely not. Almost being crushed to death by hyper-obese fans, trampled to jelly by a crowd of 100,000 fans desperate to get inside a frozen-over dome, killed by made-men from Philly, experiencing stage-two hypothermia, and having my hearing permanently damaged in one weekend--once is more than enough. My idea of a vacation is a quiet cabin in the mountains with some good books and music for three or four days away from everyone. Which I think I will do very damn soon. But wife had a great time so I’m happy for her and this one was for her anyway. I performed my husbandly duty and I’ll have my spirit quest sometime this summer.