By Randy Horick

When the phone rang Sunday night around 10 p.m., I should have known it would be my friend Dee from Atlanta—though he was calling from San Diego. Through some contacts (and his own preternatural finagling) he had wangled three upper-deck seats at the Super Bowl, which he had traded for two on the club level. He had also managed to preserve his streak of having security personnel called to his general seat location whenever he attends a sporting event.

Apparently there’d been some kind of scuffle with some Raiders fans (which they started, according to Dee), but given the overall level of inebriation of the participants, it probably would have taken most of the U.N. inspection team to figure out whose version of events was true. Dee, who wore a Tampa Bay cap into QualComm Stadium, maintained that he’d been taunted mercilessly, to the end of his patience, in fact. But he did allow that he had not contributed to the general goodwill. Early in the third quarter, he turned to these citizens of the Raider Nation, seated several rows above him, and remarked, “I don’t know about the view from up there, but from down here this looks like a butt-whuppin’.”

Even with the aid of a Telestrator, I’m not sure John Madden could have broken it down any more succinctly than that.

The Raiders’ brief rally in the fourth period, fueled by a blocked punt that became a TD, served merely to make the 48-21 whuppin’ a little less raw. Super Bowl XXXVII had been billed as a match between the irresistible force of Oakland’s offense and the immovable object of Tampa Bay’s defense. But the object was so solid that the force began misfiring and ultimately self-destructed.

Rich Gannon, the year’s most valuable player, threw five interceptions. Three were returned for touchdowns. You didn’t require a record book to know that was a Super Bowl record.

Really, the Raiders were in the game for just one period—and only then because they intercepted a pass on the third play from scrimmage and managed a field goal from it. Once the Bucs’ offense settled into a rhythm, and the defense began taking everything but short passes away from Oakland’s offense, the outcome was never seriously in doubt.

By halftime, not much was left but the commercials and the nothing-exceeds-like-excess halftime extravaganza—neither of which exceeded quite as much this year as we’ve come to expect.

As usual, the NFL’s halftime show was painfully obvious in its attempt to hit a range of advertising demographics. For country/pop fans and male oglers, there was Shania Twain. No Doubt, along with a cast of thousands in an imported mosh pit, aimed at the critical 18-35 market, while Sting was a concession to oldsters who think they can still be cool. (For sheer loopy outrageousness, this show didn’t come close to the one a couple of years ago that put Britney Spears, N’Sync and Aerosmith together on one stage, harmonizing on that old feel-good tune, “Walk This Way.”)

For all the gazillions spent on producing and airing ads, only a couple seemed worth all that whipout. Willie Nelson as a pitchman for H&R Block was an inspired idea. At our party, the biggest laugh-getter was the Bud Lite spot in which a man in an upside-down clown costume enters a bar and appears to ingest his beer through the wrong opening. (Afterward he tries to order a hot dog from the bartender.) The ballyhooed Pepsi commercial, meanwhile, wasted Ozzy Ozbourne and the Osmonds on a concept that was only watchable last time around because it offered Halle Berry.

The one commercial we didn’t see was banned by the NFL: an ad promoting tourism in Las Vegas. That’s right. Banned.

It couldn’t have been because the league doesn’t want to be associated with gambling (which wasn’t even shown in the rejected spot). Otherwise, the NFL would not permit the TV networks to put sports betting links just a couple of clicks away on their Web sites. No, no—that would be hypocritical.

There also must be a non-hypocritical reason—but for the life of me I can’t think what it is—why the NFL sanctions video games like Madden 2003 to depict hits and random violence that are illegal under the league’s own rules. Or why, for the sake of its wholesome image, players can’t let their socks droop or jerseys come untucked while the league allows commercials where fulsome women come almost fully undressed.

The ban must be for a different and purely logical reason. Perhaps it’s that the NFL doesn’t want everyone to realize that Vegas should be the permanent home for the Super Bowl. All the other host cities—including future sites Houston and, if you thought it couldn’t get worse, Detroit—would have a hissy if they were deprived of this plum.

When you think about it, though, Vegas is the natural place for the Super Bowl—the only place that boasts the right ambience to stage this show. No other spot combines such unabashed faux-ness with exhilaration and risk in quite the same way. As a bonus, when the Raiders play, they can even bring their own Elvis impersonator: team owner Al Davis!

In a way, the NFL is promoting the ultimate version of fantasy football. They show us Sting and Santana—neither of whose CDs are likely to be heard in any NFL locker rooms—to obscure the fact that Eminem and P-Diddy come closer to reality for most players. They present us with dress codes so we’re less likely to notice all the mayhem that occurs beyond the refs’ sightlines and all the hits that seem aimed not just to knock opponents down but out of games. They prohibit ads for Vegas while packaging their biggest event in a smarmy spectacular that looks like it belongs at Caesar’s or Mandalay Bay.

I say quit pretending. We can handle it. In fact, we love it.

It’s time to face facts: Las Vegas, not New York or even L.A., is the tone-setting cultural capital of America. You could even make a case that, to be true to the nature of our society, we should move the ceremonial functions of our government from Washington to The Strip and make Wayne Newton our Poet Laureate. At the very least, we should move our National Game there. Sure, the Puritans wouldn’t have approved. But they’re dead.

I was musing about all this, half-dozing, when my phone rang once more. It was Dee again, on his cell, still protesting that he had been behaving himself at the game. The trouble started, he maintained, when a couple of drunken Raider fans falsely accused him of being in their seats.

“How could you have been in both of their seats?” I asked.

“See?!” he said. “That’s what I told them! I was trying to have a reasonable discussion.”

“All I know,” said his friend Alex from Tampa, who snatched the phone from Dee’s hand, “is that I’m gone for a few minutes, and when I come back, I have to talk the security people out of ejecting us from the stadium.”

We agreed that the Raider Nation, Mad Max outfits and all, got a well-deserved smackdown on the field if not in the stands. (What kind of fans, after all, torch cars in their town when they lose the big game?)

Dee, who normally roots for Tennessee and Atlanta, was proud to be an honorary Tampan for one night. When his cell phone cut out, he was headed up the coast from San Diego to Torrey Pines, where, somehow, Alex had managed to scrounge VIP passes to the Buccaneers’ team party. I went to bed imagining the prospect of Dee greeting Warren Sapp with a celebratory chest bump, and thinking how great it is to be an American.

Dee, who normally roots for Tennessee and Atlanta, was proud to be an honorary Tampan for one night. When his cell phone cut out, he was headed up the coast from San Diego to Torrey Pines, where, somehow, Alex had managed to scrounge VIP passes to the Buccaneers’ team party. I went to bed imagining the prospect of Dee greeting Warren Sapp with a celebratory chest bump, and thinking how great it is to be an American.