The Stupid Bowl!

The Super Bowl is coming! Don't go!

This won’t be my funniest Substack, nor the most interesting. But it could save you three, five, even ten thousand dollars! How? By following this simple advice:

Never, EVER buy Super Bowl Tickets.

Watch it on TV, see it on your phone, but for God’s sake, do not go in person. I did, and I regret every minute of it.

Only 57,000 people had better seats than me.

My first shot at seeing the Super Bowl in person was in 1983 — the game was being played in Los Angeles, where I lived at the time. Two hours before it began, my friend Teddy called: “I’m going down to the stadium to try and buy scalper’s tickets. Wanna come?”

I said no, so Teddy went alone. And amazingly, he got in. The ticket cost him three hundred bucks. This was every cent he had in the world, money he had been saving for months to buy drugs.

After the game I asked him, “Well, Teddy, was it worth it?”

“I guess we’ll never know.”

“No, you know!” I said. “You spent your weed money on Super Bowl tickets. You saw the game! Was it worth it?”

He took a long, thoughtful pause. “I guess we’ll never know.”

Teddy’s in a cult now.

Almost forty years later, I was in LA again, and so was the Super Bowl. The Cinncinati Bengals were taking on the LA Rams.

“Maybe we should go,” my wife remarked, which is her way of saying,“We are going. Resistance is futile.”

The game began with “America the Beautiful” sung by a six-time Grammy nominee; then the National Anthem performed by a four-time nominee. These two women had ten Grammy nominations between them, and I’d never heard of either one. It made me wonder: how hard is it to actually get a Grammy nomination? And why couldn’t the Super Bowl book an actual Grammy winner? Alvin and the Chipmunks won one. And so did Zach Braff. Zach Braff! For what? I wouldn’t even give him a Grammy for Best Braff!

We climbed an endless, MC Escher-style staircase to get to our seats. We were seated in the troposphere but not the upper troposphere. Communications satellites would occasionally whiz by our heads. At this altitude, the Bengals looked like sesame seeds; the Rams looked like poppy seeds. They all seemed to vibrate randomly across the field, like the remnants of an everything bagel on a paper plate. You couldn’t see the ball and had no idea what was going on.

Sure, these were bad seats, but 20,000 other fans had seats just as bad. And there were another 15,000 spectators above us, in an even higher tier. For them, the players appeared subatomic – the LA Electrons taking on the Cincinnati Quarks.

There was a lull in the game as five enormous packing crates were wheeled onto the field. For fifteen minutes, distorted noise and feedback echoed through the arena.

I figured these crates contained audio equipment, and this was a sound check for the half-time show. It’s only when I got home that I learned this had been the half-time show. Only a handful of attendees could see the front of those crates – those were the stage sets where Dr. Dre, Eminem, and Fifty Cent were rapping their little hearts out. It was the greatest half-time show in history, but if you were there in the stadium you couldn’t see it and you couldn’t hear it.

And that’s why you should Never, EVER buy Super Bowl tickets.

Denise poses with the stars of Katy Perry’s half-time show.

There may be seventy thousand fans in attendance, but there’s one billion people watching at home. They outnumber paying customers 1400 to one. The Super Bowl is staged, produced and directed towards them. Not you.

When the game ended, the Bengals fans were, of course, very sad. Not only had they lost the game, but now they had to go back to… Cincinnati. It was 70 degrees and sunny in the City of Angels, and they were flying home to a blizzard in Porkopolis.

These two losers would become Super Bowl losers.

As for the LA fans – they had just won the Super Bowl! In their home town! In their team stadium! And yet, they were miserable too. Why? Because they were thinking about the only thing anyone ever thinks about in LA: “God, the traffic’s going to be murder getting out of here.”

It was that rare sporting event where no one went home happy – me included. And I’m not really that hard to please. On our way out of the Super Bowl, the traffic was indeed murder. We pulled off the highway and into the parking lot of a CVS pharmacy. My wife said we needed Brillo pads, so we went shopping. The store was all out of Brillo, so we bought their cheap knock-off brand: Schmillo pads.

The point is, I enjoyed this experience so much more than the Super Bowl. The store was brightly-lit, the staff was warm and friendly, and the shelves were filled with teddy bears and roses for Valentine’s Day. My bar for entertainment is not all that high.

But you’re probably wondering about the Schmillo pads. Were they worth the price?

“I guess we’ll never know.”

This Substack just saved you five grand! Can’t you pay $5 to subscribe?