Sex and the Super Bowl

Hookers love the Super Bowl. Thousands of affluent men hit town. Not just beery football fans with their faces painted, either. In January New Orleans is jammed with successful guys who feel like showing off, a city full of Charlie Sheens.

The typical ticket holder is an executive or star salesman on a company-paid holiday. After a year of corporate war he may want a cocktail. He may want to loosen his tie and his wallet, roll down his limo window, do a little shouting, maybe even do his part to help make Super Bowl week the best prostitution week of the year.

Football fans are "more likely to pay for sex" than other sports fans, says a veteran of the trade. The World Series and NBA finals also boost business, but the Super Bowl is king. Some of the most expensive sex in New Orleans will be "extended service" gigs in limousines prowling the French Quarter on Super Saturday night. Such arrangements often last well into Sunday. But not all Bowlgoers are satisfied with pregame and postgame festivities. Sunday brings a huge demand for callgirls at halftime, too.

"Pimps see the Super Bowl as a moneymaking opportunity delivered by God," ex-hooker Evelina Giobbe told the Minneapolis Star Tribune before Super Bowl XXVI. That year a local escort service offered Super Bowl fans a ten percent discount. Police handed out Just say no to Prostitutes fliers in Minneapolis hotels.

Some Bowl fans are too sleepy to say no. They are the targets of "Rolex girls," hookers who specialize in stealing men's watches and other valuables. "They ask what time it is so they can see if the watch is expensive," says Bloomington, Minnesota vice detective Rich Klingeman. Then Rolex girls sneak a few knockout drops--or perhaps a roofie--into your drink. When you wake up, there's an untanned stripe where your Rolex used to be.

Escort services always spring up in the host city. Last year in Tempe, vice cops stayed busy keeping an eye on them. There were 25 in suburban Scottsdale alone. On Van Buren Street in Phoenix, hookers openly defied the municipal plan for "Super Bowl vice suppression." San Diego had tried to limit Super hooking back in 1988, when the city swept its curbs clean of streetwalkers with a new hooker stopper: a $2000 minimum bail for suspected prostitutes. The rule expired at 12:01 A.M. on February 1, the day after the Super Bowl.

But nothing stops the sexual holiday. Just ask Los Angeles promoter Al Bowman. "Al the Limo Man" is now executive producer of the Los Angeles Music Awards, but in his days with Funtime Limousine, Bowman saw football and sex intersect in interesting ways. "I used to drive some of the Raiders. That was good duty," he says. "You're getting paid to sit in a nightclub. Later on the players come out with some girl and you wait while they hump in the backseat."

Bowman's favorite Super Sunday began at a Los Angeles Airport hotel during Super Bowl XVII. "I picked up a guy from Florida, big football fan. A big money man. Looking for fun, looking for girls." The man directed Bowman to a chic bistro where "he baited girls with cash. He would send me over to the babes and I would recruit them: 'Ladies, that gentleman over there is a very generous man.' I'd bring the girls over, he'd pull out a wad of bills, maybe $15,000, and pay for the food. Crab legs and tiger shrimp cocktails. Then it was a merry bandwagon in the limo."

The first two women called a friend to hop on the bandwagon; that made it a postgame party of five as Bowman drove from Pasadena to Palm Springs, where the fest continued. "The guy was doing two-on-ones, getting blow jobs, and he's still pissed about the money he lost on the game. I told him that he should cheer up."

The 100-yard Boner

How can a football game, even our annual multimedia kitsch nuke of a game, make American men hornier? Auto racing is macho, yet the Indy 500 is no sexual Super Bowl. Boxing is manly, but even the best heavyweight fights seldom ripple the sex trade outside Nevada. According to one sportscaster, "The Super Bowl is like a thousand Mike Tyson fights rolled into one."

Maybe football's sex effects derive from its 100 percent maleness. Women drive race cars today. Tyson has undergone sensitivity counseling. But the very notion of a "feminine side to the Super Bowl" is a contradiction, a Super oxymoron such as "inspirational breakfast" or "Vikings' chances." Pro football, wrote anthropologist William Arens, is "violence acted out in a tactical and sophisticated context. The uniforms symbolize exaggerated masculinity--wide shoulders, enlarged heads, tight pants accented by a metal codpiece."

A scholar such as Arens would be chased from the locker room, but the doctor is right. The Super Bowl, more than any other event, is the arena in which American ideas of manhood fight it out.

Super Bowl equals 31 testosterone festivals. The week proceeds through Super Friday and Super Saturday like a pagan pageant, with one major improvement: Instead of virgins we have the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. Super Week culminates in a brief, sweaty, men-only form of combat that everybody must watch.

Sound familiar? In fact, there have always been such contests. Medieval knights displayed their masculinity in jousts. American Indians ran the gantlet. Some African tribesmen still prove themselves by killing lions face-to-face.

Today, of course, our heroes kill the Lions in the regular season. And by January, with a billion people watching worldwide, there is more than any one man's masculinity at stake. For in a sense the game is about our collective masculinity, our huge national balls. It is our annual chance to update one another and the world on the state of American manhood.

Like most great developments, this Bowl-ball partnership was an accident. NFL football and TV-driven pop culture just happened to take over the world together.

In 1967, the year of the first Super Bowl, pro football was still a minor sport. Baseball was much bigger. Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers were an NFL dynasty, but many of the players were moonlighting car salesmen or insurance men. In lifestyles and earning power they resembled Army sergeants more than today's wealthy touchdown dancers. And their field leader was Bart Starr, role model of my youth. Starr was so tight-lipped it was said he opened his mouth only to call signals.

It is far more than 100 yards from Bart Starr to the media manhood of gangsta-rapping, crotch-grabbing celebrities. To see how far we've come, try picturing diamond-studded Deion Sanders and his tight leather underpants in Vince Lombardi's locker room.

The Packers would have thought Sanders was an alien. And Prime Time, who once bragged to me that he was sexually active at 11 years old, would have seen Starr, Lombardi & Co. the same way: aliens from the planet of constipated white guys.

How did male style change so much in 30 years?

The answer: Joe Namath.

I can't wait until tomorrow ... night

The first Super Bowl wasn't sexy. It wasn't even Super. Catchily called the American Football League--National Football League Championship Game, it was all anticlimax. Fans figured the big game had already happened: Green Bay over Dallas for the NFL title. Thus the national yawn greeting the Packers' January 1967 exhibition against the champs of the upstart AFL, guys called the Kansas City Chiefs.

Tickets went for six dollars. Pregame festivities featured the release of 4000 pigeons over the Los Angeles Coliseum, where there were 62,000 fans and 38,000 empty seats. With Starr starring and Lombardi cracking discipline's whip over his men's crewcut heads, Green Bay dismantled the Chiefs. Nobody was shocked when a Chiefs defender, trying to tackle a Packer, fell down unconscious.

After Bowl II, another Packer victory a year later, Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt had a brainstorm. His daughter had a Super Ball, a high-hopping fad toy of the day. "Let's call this thing the Super Bowl," Hunt said. Commissioner Pete Rozelle snickered, but the name stuck. The NFL, which would merge with the AFL in 1970, had a jazzy name for the game tens of fans loved. Now all the owners had to worry about was this horny hippie Joe Namath.

Namath was no conformist. The whip-armed New York Jets quarterback wore girlish white shoes. He talked back to coaches. He sported pantyhose in funny ads, even wore (continued on page 164)Sex and the Super Bowl(continued from page 66) them on the field under his uniform. For warmth, he said.

The Packers would have turned to ice first.

Football's Elvis, the first man to remind fans that testicles are football-shaped, could afford to tweak the game's grim macho code. He was hetero in a better way, so securely male he didn't have to act like a jerk to prove it. While baseball's mythic Yankees made a juvenile hobby of peeking up women's skirts, or "beaver shooting," the 25-year-old from Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania had grown-up pursuits. He escorted models to his own pub, Bachelors III, then home to the white llama rug in his bachelor pad. How did Broadway Joe train before games?

"With a blonde," he said.

All this was a shock to boys like me who saw Bart Starr as the national quarterback, the president of manhood. You couldn't imagine Starr having sex. The closest I could come was picturing the moment immediately after: Starr claps his hands once and bounces to his feet, and Jerry Kramer hands him a towel.

Now here came Namath, a media-hungry cock of the walk who wrote about sex in his book I Can't Wait Until Tomorrow 'Cause I Get Better Looking Every Day. Reading that book, keeping my place with a Blessed Virgin bookmark, I suspected for the first time that being a man might be fun after all.

Sunning himself poolside before Super Bowl III, Namath guaranteed victory against the NFL's heavily favored, crewcut Colts. The establishment wasn't worried.

"You've got to remember, this was a guy lying in a chaise longue," says a league insider. Translation: While Namath played Zonker Harris, the Colts were running drills that would have made Sergeant Rock throw up.

Baltimore was the team of Johnny Unitas. Stone-faced like Starr but a better passer, Unitas was efficiency incarnate, the gray-flannel quarterback. But he had a bum elbow. His understudy, burr-headed Earl Morrall, was the league MVP. So Namath dissed Earl, saying there were five better QBs in the AFL, "including me."

Then he proved it.

Born-on date of modern sports: January 12, 1969.

Score: Jets 16, Colts 7.

Unitas made a final fling or two, but his era was over. Namath, jogging off the field with his index finger raised, was America's new alpha male.

On that day Starr, Unitas and the Eisenhower world they represented receded like my father's hairline. A paradigm shift occurred, a redefinition of cool. Before 1969 the word meant calm, unflappable: Unitas kept his cool. Now it was a personal style: Namath is cool.

With SB III American cowboys, war heroes and presidents all stepped down a rung. Pro football men were to be our primary heroes. The following year, more Americans watched the Super Bowl than saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. In the Seventies and Eighties the game came to mirror and occasionally even shape our idea of what it means to be a man. The greatest figures of all were Super Bowl quarterbacks, men so stellar that it took a new word to describe them: They were superstars.

There was Roger Staubach, a clean-living military man out of the U.S. Naval Academy, the Namath antidote. Staubach was the hero of the million boys who sold toothbrushes for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

There was Terry Bradshaw, punkin-head savant. As a rookie, Bradshaw lamely tried to impress his Steeler elders, standing up at meetings and telling dirty jokes. An opponent said he would need a two-letter head start to spell cat. But he won four Super Bowls, blazing a trail for sly rubes from William Jefferson Clinton to another mythic male: the "I love you, man!" guy in the beer ads.

Jim McMahon, the punk QB, won his Super Bowl despite a bum gluteus ("Pulled my butt"). McMahon, male hero as junkyard dog, livened up huddles by spitting at teammates. When a news helicopter buzzed the field, he mooned it.

Even the Alda era had its Super Bowl hero, the fey Fran Tarkenton, always skittering away from conflict.

At last the game begot the greatest Bowl hero of all, a man who jogged, passed and triumphed so coolly it seemed he lived on a slower clock than the rest of us. Joe Montana combined Namath's casual air and Starr's efficiency. Leading the Nielsen as well as the quarterback ratings, he became one of the most famous men in world history by starring in two of the top ten sports shows of all time--Super Bowl XVI and Super Bowl XIX.

Montana called 122 Super Bowl pass plays to Richard Nixon's one. (President Nixon phoned the play to Dolphin coach Don Shula in 1972.) By now the Bowl had already eclipsed politics and other sorts of potency. Even religion had lost ground. Church attendance tumbled on Super Sunday. Pop philosopher Norman Vincent Peale knew why: "If Jesus were here today," Peale said, "he would be at the Super Bowl."

But somebody else wouldn't. For in the 30 years in which the male envelope was pushed, stretched and twisted beyond recognition--enough to contain Namath, McMahon and Tarkenton as well as golden boy Troy Aikman and partyman Michael Irvin, the reputed cokehead and strip-searcher of hookers--almost every possible male role has been explored for hero potential. With only one casualty: the role we started with.

There are no more Bart Starrs. Even in the military the grimly efficient Starr role is on its way out. Scandals such as Tailhook show how unnatural it always was. Try stamping out man's wild oaty exuberance--the Namathness of maleness--and it reasserts itself in grab-ass games and worse. That is one lesson of the Super Bowl era: Expression beats repression.

But evolution never ends. The Starr-type star was replaced first by Namath, then by Montana and finally by a variety of self-expressionists who never set foot on the field.

The Coca-Cola Orgasm

The game remains a test of testicles. Just ask the losers. The Cowboys will "test a person's manhood until someone knocks them off the pedestal," one victim grumbles.

A frisson of macho sex still attends the Super Bowl. In Tampa, before SB XXV, opponents Lawrence Taylor and Jim Kelly embraced as they left a strip club where they had co-judged a topless beauty pageant.

But another game, a metacontest, is played every year among corporate cowboys. Ever since Pete Rozelle (note the initials) adapted the NFL schedule to suit Bud, Coke et al., his corporate clients have sprayed money like cheap champagne all over the game. In 1986 Ford Motors spent $1 million entertaining its top salesmen at SB XIX. Today that sum is pocket change.

"The game today is corporate-driven. The Visa people, the Coca-Cola people and the Sherwin-Williams paint people, they're more a part of the Super Bowl than us football people," says longtime Cowboy executive Gil Brandt. He has seen every Super Bowl and applauds the game's growth, but still feels a bit outnumbered at today's corpfests. "Some teams in the league might send six or seven people," Brandt says, "while Coca-Cola sends 200." Corporate Super junkets are called "Attaboys." You earn one by kicking business butt.

"Not only are the players on the field the best in their business, but the people in the stands are also the best," crows Bill Cullom, president of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce, in The Sacramento Bee. But they aren't necessarily football fans. In fact, they may care less about seeing the game than about being seen.

Question: What's the chic thing to say in a Super Bowl skybox?

Answer: "Who's playing?"

"The game isn't for the fans. It's for the NFL to pay back all those sponsors and corporations that buy in," one SB party planner told writer John Underwood in The New York Times. Tickets are the chips the league uses "to reward politicians, civic leaders, media."

"The Super Bowl has nothing to do with football fans. It's a party for corporate America," says another NFL insider.

Brokers working for major corporations now hunt up scalped tickets, paying $500 to $3500 for admittance to "the greatest indulgence in the world."

Dave Meggysey, a former NFL player, calls Super Bowl week "the corporations' orgasms of self-congratulation."

Limousines are no longer good enough. Alpha males helicopter to the game while schmucks sit in traffic in their limos. Like the Academy Awards, each Super Bowl features the postmodern spectacle of limo gridlock: tuxedoed drivers yelling at one another; fuming CEOs forced to watch the kickoff on backseat TVs.

Jim Steeg, executive director of special events for the NFL, has a helipad crisis to solve this year. "We may not get the pad site we planned on," Steeg tells me. Super Bowl chopper traffic has gotten so dense that chief executives may spend half an hour waiting their turn at the official Super Bowl helipad, wherever Steeg puts it. Which leads us to a super irony, a small but sweet revenge for the managerial underclass: Steeg says limo travel may actually be better these days. "Last year a guy in a limo beat a guy in a helicopter home by 20 minutes," he says.

At the best parties, hosted by the likes of Anheuser-Busch and Sports Illustrated, the best things in life are comped. "There's free champagne, beautiful girls, shrimp as big as your foot," says one fan.

Hottest ticket of all: admission to private parties such as the annual bash thrown by Barron Hilton, former part-owner of the San Diego Chargers. Even the annual Commissioner's Party pales in comparison. Invitations to Hilton's bash are actually scalped by whispering ticket brokers. Oddsmaker Danny Sheridan, a CBS football analyst and Playboy contributor, was among a select few media members invited to Hilton's Super Bowl shindig in 1996. "It's hard to believe if you haven't been there. This is a party where, if you said, 'I want plutonium on my omelette,' you'd get it," Sheridan says. Aside from roast beef and seafood tables 50 yards long, Hilton's ultraexclusive game-day brunch features belly dancers, fortune-tellers, jugglers, a string quartet and the requisite bit of sex: Amid the seafood, reclining on an ice sculpture, lolls a bathing beauty in a barely-there bikini. The oysters are behind her. You have to lean way over if you want some.

In the suites at the Riverside Hilton, in limos moving through the mists of the French Quarter and past a relic streetcar labeled Desire, Super Bowl week revolves around sex, money and what Henry Kissinger called the ultimate aphrodisiac: power.

Politicians love the Super Bowl. Did you know that members of Congress have easy access to Super Bowl tickets? They become precious chips in the power poker game that makes America go. According to one source, "Our government takes care of the NFL with favorable legislation, and the NFL reciprocates. Super Bowl tickets are a way to pay back the politicians for their help, but it's bigger than that. Five years ago, Congress banned sports betting in every state where it didn't already exist. The NFL wanted that bill to pass. Do you know who got it through the Senate? Dennis DeConcini of Arizona. And who got the Super Bowl last year?"

Super Bowl XXX brought an estimated $150 million to the local economy. It was held in Tempe.

What it all Means

Dallas won. Partymen Deion Sanders and the alleged Michael Irvin shimmied their packages postgame as Vince Lombardi shimmied in his grave. But for one brief moment the most macho man in the world was a fiftyish fellow named Barry Switzer. After his team's 27--17 win, Switzer jokingly called for a post-game quaff, Jack Daniel's and Percodan. In his suite, two women waited for hugs--Switzer's ex-wife Kay and his girlfriend Becky.

Does it get any better?

The Cowboy coach thrust his hands in the air. It was, is, the essential male gesture, unchanged since we were ape-men dancing bloody-fisted over bloody lions. Fists overhead means dominance, victory, butt-kicking masculinity.

"Now let's win the party!" he said.