Going to the Super Bowl Sucks
If you’ve ever wanted to spend a lot of money watching a bunch of fleshy white guys in golf shirts drinking a ton of free booze while ignoring Stevie Nicks, have I got a trip for you! America’s corporate Mardi Gras arrives in Las Vegas one week from today. It’s the Super Bowl, and if you’ve never been to one in person, let me run down the experience for you: it kind of sucks.
Don’t get me wrong. If you ever get a chance to go, you should go, if for no other reason than to see the magnitude of the event. Each year, the NFL drops a money bomb on a city whose blast radius extends outwards from the stadium to various pop-up events, parties, concerts, and hotel banquet room hosting various former greats telling stories about their days on the gridiron. It’s the ultimate party, hosted by the ultimate corporate sports league, which means that it’s the ultimate boring party.
Just think about the guest list: picture a corporate vice president in your head. Now multiply that image by 60,000. That’s who’s at the Super Bowl. It’s just corporate vice presidents all the way down. Is that the crowd you want to hang out with for three days?
The only time I attended one in person was in Miami, 2007. Super Bowl XLI. The Indianapolis Colts defeated the Chicago Bears in a sub-exciting game whose highlight was, by far, Prince performing at the halftime show. I was a guest of PepsiCo, for whom I was performing in a series of commercials for Sierra Mist. PepsiCo had a Sky Box, which is where I watched the game. At one point, NFL analyst Rich Eisen stopped by and I was excited to hear how a professional would discuss the game. Just then, one of the players broke a tackle and picked up a first down. I looked at Rich to get his take on the play. “Nice run,” he said.
So much for penetrating analysis.
The highlight about the Sky Box should have been all the free food. They filled that suite with all the crappy, lukewarm stadium food a boy could ever wish for. Unlimited wings and nachos and fried shit and hot dogs and who knows what else. Maybe I could have gotten a little half-boner for all of that free junk food but by the time Game Day rolled around, I was already on Day 2 or 3 of eating over-salted garbage because the whole weekend is built around unlimited booze in cheap plastic cups and unlimited food on cheap paper plates.
For all the money involved, there’s a tackiness at play, which casts a distinctive “Mar-A-Lago” shadow over the festivities. It’s not that it’s done badly exactly, but nor is anything done well.
The overall aesthetic is “raffle winner.”
Or maybe it feels like the ultimate corporate retreat, which means that you find yourself at a lot of “exclusive events” like the breakfast I attended the morning of the game which featured John Elway answering the most boring imaginable questions in the most boring imaginable way while a few hundred of us ate runny scrambled eggs and fruit salad that was mostly honeydew and cantaloupe (worst fruits in fruit salad). Afterwards, we got to take home a miniature football helmet scrawled with Elway’s signature.
Another event I went to took place in a massive circus tent city spread out across the stadium parking lot which had the feeling of a country club wedding for a cousin you’ve never met but they have a lot of money so you feel like you should go in case you ever find yourself charged with a felony and you need to make bond. And is that Stevie Nicks playing “Landslide” on a side stage? It is, but most of the crowd was way more interested in the shrimp cocktail station. They treated Stevie Nicks like she was a Stevie Nicks impersonator. So then I felt like I had to go over and watch Stevie Nicks perform just as a sign of respect and thank God she only played a couple more songs after that because I don’t really like Stevie Nicks and the only thing I could think about watching her play was I wonder how much money she’s getting.
In the end, that’s the question hanging over the entire Super Bowl experience: how much money is all of this costing? Because it certainly looks like it costs a lot. All of these “corporate partners” shelling out millions to puff themselves up in front of their clients and competitors. It’s a weekend of bragging rights set around a football game that nobody really cares that much about and which is better enjoyed from the comfort of your home because you don’t have to deal with the security or the lines or the glare from a million pairs of Dockers.
The Super Bowl is about the banality of excess. It’s about having So. Much. Of. Everything! Until you want a fresh salad, that is. It’s the owner class getting together and patting themselves on the back for all the shit they own. It’s boring and it’s gross and, like I said, you should absolutely go once if you get the chance just for shits and giggles, and you should definitely do a lot of drugs and the fact that I didn’t when I went is my only real regret of the weekend.
On the other hand, I went to the NBA All-Star Weekend once and that shit was fun as hell. Here’s the difference between the two celebrations as far as I can tell: the NFL wants to make money, the NBA wants to fuuuuuuck. Given the choice between the two, I’d go with the NBA.
Cantaloupe and honeydew are to salad what carnations are to floral arrangements.
This was a fun read, but I still can’t fully back content from MIB until he and Cavanaugh come clean about the fact that Cavanaugh was eating Raisin Bran Crunch while pretending to rate Raisin Bran on MATES.