Why You Don’t Want To Go To The Super Bowl

Learn from my experience...

The NFL – an organization that makes Hitler and the Nazis look disorganized and unambitious – likes to show what nice guys they are by occasionally giving some Regular Person Super Bowl tickets and the Regular Person jumps up and down like they just got invited to go on stage and sing backup for Bruce Springsteen or offered a Free Trip to Disneyland or a freebie at the Moonlight BunnyRanch Bordello, conveniently located six miles outside scenic Carson City, Nevada.

And logically enough that last exciting — and from the looks of it, slightly depressing — option makes me think of actor and game show host, Bert Convy and it’s now time for a Bert Convy anecdote:

So I’m watching one of those daytime talk shows (Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, Dinah Shore-type crap) where they’d have whatever guests they could scrounge up that day and you might see a juggler, a comedian and the Secretary of Defense.

One day Bert Convy was on one of those guests and told a story about playing minor league baseball. (Apparently Bert was a terrific athlete and got a contract from the Philadelphia Phillies.)

So Bert’s playing ball in some Podunk town and being good citizens and baseball fans, the local bordello (which is the polite word you use when you don’t want to actually say “whorehouse”) offers a freebie to any local player that hits a home run.

An ingenious motivational devise and had it been employed in the Big Leagues, Babe Ruth’s single-season record of 60 home runs wouldn’t have lasted 40 years.

But the married ballplayers who didn’t want to take advantage of a free blow job would designate a teammate to get their trip to the whorehouse, so local baseball fans would be mystified when a player hit a home run and his teammates would ignore him, but go congratulate the lucky teammate.

“Smith hit the homer, why’s everyone high-fiving Johnson?”

(See? This is just the kind of useless information permanently stored in my cranium while anniversaries, birthdays and the current location of my reading glasses won’t stick.)

Where were we?

Right, the Third Reich handing out a pair of Super Bowl tickets and why, if I were the designated charity case, I’d ask if I could have the money instead.

I have attended one Super Bowl in my life – 1980, Rams versus Steelers – and it was mainly a huge pain in the ass because way too many people were crowded into the Rose Bowl and this was before the Super Bowl got really popular.

To start at the beginning:

A friend who covered the NFL got me two tickets and this was before you had to rob Fort Knox and sell a kidney to afford one. So we go to his LA hotel to pick them and are advised to avoid driving to the Rose Bowl because the traffic and parking would be insane and the hotel had a shuttle bus we could take there and back.

Good idea.

So we’re walking across the hotel lobby and some guy asks if I have tickets and offers me what seems like a lot of money for them, but probably wasn’t because the average price of a Super Bowl ticket in 1980 was $30.

One more time:

IN 1980 SUPER BOWL TICKETS COST $30.

According to the internet – which also informs me Hot Asian Women are dying to meet elderly gentlemen with combovers, pot bellies and one foot in the grave – a 1980 dollar is now worth $3.65 so in 2024 those $30 tickets should cost $109.50.

Which is just slightly less than the $9,800 2024 Super Bowl tickets are averaging and apparently someone on Ticketmaster is trying to get $45,000 for a single ticket so there’s blood in the water and the sharks are showing up to take a bite.

I can’t remember what the guy offered me for my tickets (maybe a $100 each), but back then it seemed like a lot of money. But I figure the friend didn’t get me Super Bowl tickets so I could make money and we ignore the offer and get on the hotel shuttle bus (which is actually a yellow school bus) and ride to Pasadena.

I tell my date we’ll find our Rose Bowl seats and then I’ll go to the snack bar and get food and drinks.

But…

There are so many people jammed into the Rose Bowl, moving anywhere is a process of taking thousands of 3-inch steps and when we get to our seats they’re just numbers on a bench and the numbers are way too close together so if we leave our seats all those people with fat asses (and the Super Bowl has no shortage of them) are going to spread out and we’ll need a crow bar, riot police, tear gas and a court order to get people to move, so we sit down on our designated numbers and never leave our spot on the bench.

Also, if you did decide to use the bathroom or buy a beer you’d be gone longer than Odysseus and when you finally got back to your seats your date would have married somebody else and started a family and you’d have to string a bow and shoot an arrow through 12 axe shafts and kill a bunch of dicks who showed up hoping to bang your long-abandoned date.

(If that last paragraph was confusing, it comes straight from the Wikipedia entry on Odysseus and what happened when he got home from a road trip and now you don’t have to read it, so somebody owes somebody a thank you. )

My main memory of being at the 1980 Super Bowl is Catwoman – Julie Newmar – sitting a couple rows away and the halftime being Up With People and if they’d had our seats, they would have changed their name to Putting Up With People.

OK, so the Steelers win and the game ends and we go out to get on our yellow school bus and the parking lot is filled with dozens and dozens of yellow school buses.

So I tell my date we need to start running and find our yellow school bus before it leaves and just by luck I spot our driver and we get on the bus and ride back to the hotel, but the bus is a lot emptier than it was on the way to the game, so a whole bunch of people got stranded in Pasadena that night.

Also, a famous political cartoonist bet me $20 that the Rams would win (they didn’t) and I’d remind him he owed me $20 every time I saw him, but he never paid and eventually died and I’m pretty sure he did that to save twenty bucks.

The 2024 Super Bowl

According to the following article, a slice of pizza at the 2024 Super Bowl will cost you $13.99 and a beer will cost the same unless you want a “premium can” (which for my money is a contradiction in terms because when I drink a beer I’m not looking for “notes of aluminum”) and a “premium can” of beer that will have the same aftertaste as licking a goalpost will cost you $17.99.

But the fleecing doesn’t stop there.

Uber is adding a $10 surcharge to any ride starting or ending at the Super Bowl stadium or on the strip where it’s located or possibly in the entire state of Nevada and the New York Times suggested that fans budget $300 just for ground transportation; fares between the airport, hotel and stadium and if you’re going to visit a whorehouse throw in an extra $150. (The Times didn’t have that excellent advice about whorehouse expenses, that was my idea so once again you’re welcome.)

The airlines also got in on Our National Gougefest and they’re charging about 112% more than normal and if you want to fly on a plane whose door doesn’t fly off, there’s an Intact Landing Surcharge that includes the kidney we discussed earlier.  

And a night in a Vegas hotel that normally costs you $376 will now cost at least $750 a night unless you don’t mind “commuting in from a distance” which I think means riding a 10-speed from the Moonlight BunnyRanch Bordello, conveniently located six miles outside scenic Carson City, Nevada.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/super-bowl-2024-much-does-185228822.html

Conclusion

So we get back to my buddy’s hotel room and tell him our story and he says we’re nuts because we could have made money on the tickets, come back to his hotel room, ordered room service and watched the Super Bowl in comfort.

And that’s why you don’t want to go to the Super Bowl.

You’ll save a lot of money and hassle, see the game better on TV and won’t have to ride a 10-speed from the Moonlight BunnyRanch Bordello, conveniently located six miles outside scenic Carson City, Nevada.

In fact the only thing you’ll be missing is sitting near Catwoman and you can fix that by spending $35.78 at Walmart (the website says the suits are in stock) and getting a loved one drunk enough to try on the suit and wear it throughout the game and I’d suggest premium cans of beer.

Enjoy the game and the taste of aluminum.