Of Balls, And Super Bowls!
Lots of reasons to go to the Super Bowl. And honestly, football is the least of them.
Who among us can forget, of Super Bowls past, Eugene Robinson, the one who is not me, getting arrested for solicitation the night before the Falcons played the Super Bowl? Shocking not the least of which was because Robinson, a publicly proclaimed Christian, thought that taking it to the streets was the best way to go about this.
But yeah: Christian.
The rest of us though might actually understand that the tension and worry that goes with getting on one of the world’s biggest stages might get to you, and you might actually need to blow off a little steam. Emphasis on “blow” and “steam”. We might even understand getting arrested for it. I mean undercover cops come in all sizes.
But if you’ve ever been to the Super Bowl you might know a few things about a few things and one of the things you might have known and figured out is that the Super Bowl is not just for football fans. I’m not a football fan in any way, shape or form. As luck would have it though I MC’d and co-sponsored a fashion show at the Super Bowl.
Me and the late sports newscaster Stuart Scott were on-camera talent and the conceit was, as planned by the men’s fashion mag I used to helm, that the players who didn’t make it to the Super Bowl, but were in attendance, would be free to model clothing. So I found myself in Tampa, Florida, in the midst of a frenzy for a game I knew about as well as I do, quantum mechanics.
I became the straight world porn whisperer for my articles on Mr. Marcus, Vince Vouyer, Erik Everhard, and reluctantly Max Hardcore.
The event itself, and all of the hubbub surrounding it, were full on Day of the Locusts style hysteria. Picture a roomful of men over 40 all calling each other “coach”. If you were under 40 and also under 200 pounds, you might be mistaken for support staff. But if you were under 40 and well over 200 pounds (or in my case 245 pounds, and almost 40 years old), there was ample confusion: was I a “coach” or a fashion-suited player?
Working the room the excitement was contagious and though I have no feeling for the game itself, this kind of voltage could not be ignored.
“Who you got Coach?”
The speaker, like everyone here, looked vaguely familiar and I guess I did too, enough so that a stranger sought to drag me into the deep water of trying to figure out which teams were playing and, for the win, which one of them I thought would actually be winning the “Bowl”.
Before I could answer though, my pager, if those can be remembered pre-smartphones, started buzzing. My, at the time, top of the line pager had messaging as well.
“Hey E!”
It was Olivia, 90’s pornstar of note, one of the first big names at Vixen, and a friend found when I became the straight world porn whisperer for my articles on Mr. Marcus, Vince Vouyer, Erik Everhard, and reluctantly Max Hardcore. Her story was wild in and of itself and I had been making noises about doing a wider feature on her on the occasion of her lawsuit against the aforementioned Max Hardcore.
“Yo! Where are you?”
“Look up!”
Tampa is a long way from San Fernando Valley and so my confusion might have been evident.
“In the balcony!”
“What?!?! You’re HERE?”
“Yeah, I can see you!”
So I start dervishing, mid-dance floor, I see no one, that is no one that doesn’t look like a coach or a player. And Olivia would have been hard to miss. With pneumatic implants, de rigueur at the time, she looked neither to be a coach or a player.
“Can you wave?”
“No.”
Which I thought was a strange response, especially as waving your arm is really the least that you could do. “I’m with someone.” Which was something I understood. But I guess I didn’t really understand and in a spurt of messages she spelled it out for me, I guess when her date was not gladhanding coaches and players.
[E]nough money was made during the days of the big game, in direct bookings, as well as follow on business from other players who spotted you, that those two days paid more than a month of eight hour days filming fuck flicks.
The Super Bowl was like Christmas for pornstars, many of whom took side work as high-end escorts. For roundtrip airfare, plus $10,000 you got yourself a girlfriend for the game and pre-party gatherings, and one that looked like the kind of girl you’d imagine you’d be there with when you were, like, 12 years old.
They flew separately and either checked in with their players or, if said players were married, checked into pre-arranged rooms so if the player wanted to dip and “go out for cigarettes” they’d be well placed for a quickie. The claim was made that enough money was made during the days of the big game, in direct bookings, as well as follow on business from other players who spotted you, that those two days paid more than a month of eight hour days filming fuck flicks.
If she had been close enough to hear she’d have heard me issue a long, low whistle of admiration. Mostly as I’ve always signed on to the old Chinese dictum: “don’t laugh at the prostitute. Laugh at the poor person.” Imagine making enough in two days of doing what most of us did for free so that you didn’t have to do it again, if you didn’t want, for months afterward.
The fashion show itself went off without a hitch and post-it, I bullshit with Scott, mostly about his burgeoning interest in Mixed Martial Arts at the time. He had to disappear to some booth somewhere to cover the game though and I was now watching from the sidelines.
Watching the plays unfold with my eyes, I was not at all impressed. It was like watching a high school football game and not at all as high voltage as I’d been led to expect on the basis of having seen it on TV before. The grass on the field seemed a little threadbare too, and I guess I just expected more.
But then I glanced at the Jumbo-Tron and there it was. All of the magic. They say TV adds 10 pounds but it seemed that it added much more than that and the idea that image projection was a kind of witchcraft settled in my head as I watched commentators drawing on screens and cameras wired over the field flying back and forth for a television viewing experience that was clearly the kind of crazy that had even the losers showing up and dropping $10k for a sex partner.
Later, after the game with a win by g-d knows who, Olivia had a break as her client got busy with the business of the day.
“Meet me.” Sponsored parties covered every available square inch of Tampa and I was working too, needing to cover them and meet players that my staff had to tell me who they were and why they were important. But between meets and greets, and needing to change outfits (the economics of sponsored clothing meant if I wore it on camera I got to keep it for free), I had a minute and so rushed over to one of the parties where the DJ for reasons that baffled, interrupted his mix at odd intervals with an air raid siren blast.
“Did you like the game?” For my part, despite being on the sidelines for the entirety of the game I had not watched, with any understanding, even a minute of it. But I thought to ask her since most of the women I had met here knew way more about football than I did.
“Game?” She kind of smiled. She was one of the first people I knew who had gotten botox injections and these left her face largely inexpressive. “I liked the money.”
“So you can buy me a drink?”
“I will buy you a drink.”
And she did. She then got a page and had to head back to work right around the time that I got a page calling me back to do the same.
“Back to the salt mines,” I said.
She made a sound that sounded like laughter, even though that wasn’t what was playing on her face. “Speak for yourself,” she said. And I guess I was. She had just made $10,000. I just got paid nothing but my salary to be here. We are not the same, it seems.
So if you wanted a Super Bowl story but hate the football played at the Super Bowl itself, here you are. Thousands of stories in the naked Super Bowl city. This is just one of them.
Go Niners…whoever they are!
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Haha. Best superbowl story ever.