Randy Horick

Even people who have read Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas generally must be reminded of the subtitle: A Savage Journey Into the Heart of the American Dream. The subtitle still works beautifully for Viva. But it may be even better suited for the Super Bowl—a gaudy, nothing-exceeds-like-excess spectacular that has become an irresistible attraction of American life and repellant revelation of what our life has become.

I couldn’t help thinking of Dr. Thompson last weekend as my friend Dee and I went through Super Bowl weekend in Houston. The very aorta of the American Dream was every bit as compellingly beautiful, addictively stimulating and surpassingly strange as anything Thompson might have experienced courtesy of his portable pharmacy. In fact, the Super Bowl may be the one event where the USO tour scene from Apocalypse Now, or the even more surreal surfing scene, could be dropped into the show without raising nary an eyebrow.

This year’s experience had all the surrealism of Super Bowls past, and then some. And yet, in its way, it was defiantly rebellious against the carefully choreographed arrangements of the Geniuses—and, therefore, unusually satisfying. It embodied both the dream and the nightmare.

Even on a normal weekend, Houston is a pretty surreal place. That, of course, makes it the ideal venue for Super Sunday. Besides being the hub of Halliburton, it is the Capital of Concrete, the Prince of Power Lines, the Sultan of Sprawl. The city is built on new money, kind of like the Super Bowl itself. And, like the whole Super affair, you’re apt to see virtually anything anywhere, because Houston has no real zoning laws; as all Texans know, zoning laws put you on a slippery slope toward communism.

The lavish ESPN gala at Houston’s downtown aquarium, where Dee’s connections landed us on Saturday afternoon, captured the spirit of the weekend every bit as much as the game itself. Even more than the ultimate experience for the fans, the Super Bowl is about corporate entertainment, business writeoffs and the value of pull in our land of opportunity. With pull, I discovered, the Super weekend could be like Mardi Gras: one big, ongoing party punctuated by a host of highfalutin private ones.

The right pull at the right time could get you on the exclusive guest list, which got you a laminated badge to wear around your neck, which got you past the security checkpoint where you got a green wristband, which got you opportunities to hobnob with George Foreman, Dick Butkus and Warren Moon (among others), make dents in a continually replenished mountain of boiled shrimp (as we did), and walk away with an ESPN gym bag loaded with even more free Super Bowl swag.

Each party also became a nexus for negotiating entrée into other parties, like the Maxim or Playboy affairs, or the even more exclusive “do,” upstairs from the ESPN event, thrown by superagent gazillionaire Leigh Steinberg. Our green wristbands wouldn’t get us past the added layers of security needed to hang with Leigh’s people. (We tried.)

If Steinberg’s party was like the Bacchus ball, downtown Houston was the French Quarter on Fat Tuesday. More than 100,000 people jammed the city’s revitalizing club district. At least 70,000 of them, it seemed, were cruising the one-way streets in their cars, creating gridlock that was epic even by Houston’s standards. For at least an hour, we crept along those streets before finding a garage with an available parking spot (only $20). Just as they removed the barbecue, we arrived at the FOX party—complete with an all-girl Nashville band, a Texas Hold-’Em tournament, and cowgirl hostesses whose low-slung jeans could not possibly have revealed more without surpassing Janet Jackson’s show.

Outside, the street party continued until around 3:30 a.m., when unruly revelers, perhaps driven mad by the traffic jams, began brawling and cops mounted on horses and bicycles (their usual vehicles rendered useless) began imposing a curfew with their nightsticks. Only one person got killed, which is pretty good by Super Bowl standards.

If everything’s big in Texas, it’s huge in Houston. That’s especially true of Reliant Stadium, a massive palace that dwarfs its neighbor, the Astrodome, the former eighth wonder of the world. Since Houston willingly invested $500 million in the kind of pleasure dome it should have built for Bud Adams’ team, the NFL awarded it a Super Bowl (just as the league did to godforsaken Detroit for 2006).

The stadium was worth every cent. With its retractable roof (which needs a mere seven minutes to close), towering decks and broad, covered concourses, Reliant makes Nashville’s Coliseum look like it belongs in a trailer park. The Patriot fans we met, who are enjoying a brand-new stadium of their own, all remarked that theirs was nothing like this.

The extreme size alone made Reliant the ideal setting for one of the most memorable Super Bowls ever played and one of the most garish halftime shows ever witnessed.

Even before Jackson lost containment in her instantly infamous, premeditated flashdance with “Justin” Innocent Bystander, the halftime entertainment was so over the top it reached a new Super Bowl low. A billion people worldwide were treated to the crotch-grabbing artistry of Nelly and P. Diddy and the inexplicably popular Kid Rock. Just for emphasis, the dweezils from MTV, entrusted by the weasels from CBS with producing the show, threw in two marching bands, an imported teenage mosh pit, some nearly nekkid dancers and enough popping firecrackers to unnerve fans who had already passed through security checkpoints, seen hovering helicopters and heard about a cancelled flight from DC.

Honestly, if your knowledge of America was limited to watching the Super Bowl show, you might fairly wonder whether a fundamentalist Islamic culture like Saudi Arabia’s could be any weirder than ours.

The show is a constant; like water, it continually seeks the lowest level. Every once in a while, though, the game—the nominal main event—manages to transcend the hype. Super Bowl XXXVIII did it massively. The contest, like the whole event, ran to wild extremes. In the first half, it set a precedent for offensive futility; by the end, when the Pats and Panthers had become like two reeling, punchdrunk heavyweights, it became one of the highest scoring, seesaw Super Bowls ever played.

In more ways than one, it was pleasantly surreal. A linebacker caught a TD pass. When have you seen that in a Super Bowl? The Pats ran a trick play for a two-point conversion. A lineman’s butt, technically speaking, was penalized. (Tom Brady hit him with an errant pass, constituting illegal contact.)

Best of all, the game defied expectations. The defenses didn’t dominate, as the Geniuses had foreordained. The heavily favored Patriots almost lost. Carolina’s young QB, Jake Delhomme, didn’t fall apart. Amid so much calculated choreography, the two teams fought it out like dogs, old-school, and the one that touched the ball last won.

Unfortunately, TV viewers missed the most refreshing, ironically wholesome bit of all: the thong-clad streaker who appeared on the field just as the Pats and Panthers lined up for the second-half kickoff. More tastefully dressed than Jackson’s dancers (or, for that matter, than many prime-time characters on the programs of the “shocked, shocked!” TV networks), he performed a nifty Irish stepdance routine as agog players and officials watched in apparent paralysis.

A lot of fans wondered, a little nervously, how a lone joker had managed to breach the Super Bowl’s wall of security. But, to me, the guy’s run was a brief breath of fresh air in the closed, smoke-filled dome. Fans cheered. We booed the jack-booted cops. It was surreal, and it was perfect. It was positively Super.