Super Bowl XXXVII

The Super Bowl can be overblown, obnoxious, notorious, shameless, desperate, pompous, and mindless, and still be compelling. We've certainly seen enough evidence of that, what with last year's hyperpatriotic five-hour pregame attempting to establish the championship of a sport in which enormous people run into each other as the ultimate expression of national unity. Or the previous year, in which the best player present, Ray Lewis, rebutted charges that he was a murderer by saying that he just hung out with murderers. Or...okay, pretty much all the Super Bowls. They were still fun, because the spectacle was big enough that you still had to watch and be amazed at least at the scale and breadth of entertainment being offered by the pregame, the national anthem, the military flyover, the multi-million dollar ads, the halftime show, the special post-Super Bowl network promotion, and of course the aforementioned enormous people running into each other.

But this year's Super Bowl, despite being the prime number XXXVII, lacked that nth degree of spectacle, settling instead for the mth, or even the lth. The best commercial let an enormous man named Office Linebacker Terry Tate loose among rows of cubes to put the smack on people who don't put cover sheets on their TPS reports. This produced copious laughter among the people I watched the Super Bowl with, but it didn't have that spectacular Super Bowl air that can only come from a Britney Spears-Bob Dole type Axis of Embarrassing Overspending. In the second-best commercial, a zebra reviewed what apparently was a questionable call in a game played by the Budweiser Clydesdales. This also produced copious laughter, but the employment of livestock, again, is a bit pedestrian and inexpensive. Willie Nelson appeared, in tax trouble and forced by penury to advertise a shaving cream that led him to plead "My face is burning!" in a funny voice, to show the advantges of H&R Block. In all honesty, there were no other commercials worthy of note.

(Okay, except that Nissan commercial in which the driver of a pickup performs the Heimlich maneuver on his buddy with only the acceleration and braking power of his vehicle, forcing the food his buddy was choking on out of his buddy's windpipe and onto the windshield. The unmistakable message: "Buy a Nissan pickup and gobs of partially chewed food will be hocked all over its interior." Also I refuse to acknowledge that Pepsi commercial with the Osbournes, because I have watched about two hours of TV since the Super Bowl aired and I have seen it seventy million times.)

The pregame festivities featured an astonishingly voluptuous and exceedingly enthusiastic Beyoncé Knowles (of Destiny's Child and "Austin Powers in Goldmember"), who walked around stage a lot wearing rather little. She may or may not have sang and she may or may not have had people performing with her. All I remember is this feeling of desperate loss when she departed. Celine Dion then performed "God Bless America," which was not only an aesthetic dropoff but a logical one as well. Celine Dion is French Canadian and was singing, "God bless America, my home sweet home!" Unh-unh, O bony one. The Dixie Chicks harmonized the national anthem liberally but did not screw around with soulful scales or long-held high notes, which is the way to do it.

The way not to do something was immediately illustrated by the Oakland Raiders offensive line, which was playing without starting center Barret Robbins, who has a history of mental illness and may have been hospitalized due to an eruption of such. A side note to water-cooler idiots who insisted Monday morning that Barret had quit on his team: mental illness can be just as debilitating and just as hard to rehabilitate as a torn ACL, with the added difficulty that water-cooler idiots are constantly telling you you're not actually sick.

In any case, the rest of the Raiders OL could not pull together, or pulled together too much as the case may be, and the Tampa Bay pass rush made Rich Gannon look more like the quarterback the Redskins cut in 1994 than the MVP of the whole darn league, as he was this year. Since Tampa Bay looked able and willing to run the ball at will against Oakland's listless defense, enabling the Buccaneers to sit on their early lead, it looked like it was going to be a long game indeed. The only entertainment was coming from some Glamour Shots of various Buccaneers with the Super Bowl trophy, gray-scale strongmen looking soulfully into the camera or at the trophy, which damn near caused me to fall out of my chair laughing, safety John Lynch's grinning half-leer especially.

But the experience took a turn, at least for me. At halftime, the ladies and gentlemen present collectively decided that any celebration featuring Shania Twain, No Doubt and Sting was not worth watching, and we instead watched MTV Cribs' "Whips, Dubs and Rides Edition" while our host took us on a listening tour of the lowlights of the new Common album (it sounds horrible). And, as the soggy hooks of the Soulquarian played and Xzibit showed us his Bentley on the big screen, I began to realize that the Super Bowl is sometimes about more than football. It's also about getting together with a whole bunch of ladies and gentlemen who are blessed with copious knowledge of football, advertising, junk food, and invective, and simply laying back and letting the latter fly with regard to the first three.

So, even though the Raiders only came close to making it close and even though Bon Jovi was for some reason allowed to perform in between the game and the presentation of the Super Bowl trophy, it was a truly fun evening, especially when punctuated with these Actual Post-Game Quotes from Tampa Bay defensive end Simeon Rice: "We represented who we are and who we was. We played at a classic level," and from MVP Dexter Jackson: "I told somebody I was going to win the MVP, and here I am." Almost as funny as Glamour Shots! If, for some reason, you did not enjoy the same caliber company I did in your Bowling, well, there's always the XXXVIIIth year.

If you missed the game, you can watch Office Linebacker Terry Tate for yourself here.

Super Bowl Home

The Sport-Watching Life Home

Spam-O-Matic Home