by Jim Miller
Wartime Super Bowls are always dismal and lame.
Hunter S. Thompson, “The Last Super Bowl”
We are being plunged into a society where Big Brother has more control over what we do than we do and is jockeying itself into a position to have more control over what we think than we do.
Raiders fan Kim Nickel on the New World Order
RAIDERS GO HOME!
Graffiti spray-painted on a billboard off Interstate 5
in San Diego during Super Bowl Week 2003
I’m a life-long Raiders fan living in San Diego, so the 2003 Super Bowl seemed like a dream come true. After traveling to Oakland to see the Raiders clinch home field advantage for the playoffs with a 24-to-0 trouncing of the Kansas City Chiefs in a grueling downpour during their last regular season game, I returned again to see the Silver and Black destroy the New York Jets 30 to 10 and blow out the Tennessee Titans 41 to 24 to earn a trip to San Diego. Once I had displayed my loyalty by enduring a hideous monsoon for four quarters while sitting atop Mt. Davis and squinting downward for both playoff games, the Raiders had rewarded me by coming to win the big one in my own backyard. It was destiny. How could they not win? All that remained was the question of how I was going to make it to the Promised Land myself. At that moment, though, a faint but persistent voice in the back of my head started nagging me. “Every product represents the hope for a ‘dramatic shortcut to the long-awaited promised land of total consumption’” it pestered. “But the fulfillment of this promise is possible only with the attainment of the totality of commodities,” it continued. “A desire which excites the accumulation of commodities but which is ultimately insatiable,” it nattered on irritatingly. I had another beer to drown the voice. Sometime in the midst of my alcohol-drenched giddy daze in the parking lot after the American Football Conference Championship game, my friends and I decided that we were going to the Super Bowl—by any means necessary.1
During that week, all of my postgraduate education and what little was left of my common sense deserted me to be replaced by an insane, self-destructive impulse to bankrupt myself and be publicly humiliated. I put off work and spent hours on the Internet and the telephone with ticket scalpers and my friends, who had also been dealing with scalpers for hours. Ranking somewhere below the amoeba on the hierarchy of living things, scalpers like to act as if they are doing you a great favor by only charging you twenty times the face value of a ticket when they could easily jack somebody else for thirty times face. Hell, if it weren’t for their golden hearts, they’d be doing that very thing right now instead of waiting for you to come to your damn senses.
After days of this scuzzy form of psy-ops, we broke down. Rick, who had been checking with Jim, who’d contacted Chuck after he spoke to me, had determined that $2000 was a hell of a deal for 40-yard-line plaza seats under the overhang. That being close to one month’s take-home pay after taxes, I checked my credit line—and bingo! Praise the Lord and pass the Visa card. Next thing we knew, Rick was blasting up the coast in his black Camaro to give $6000 to a rock star for his complimentary tickets. God Bless America, a country where state employees have enough credit to mingle with MTV executives for a few hours and supply tattooed alternative rockers with the cold hard cash for their decadent Super Bowl orgy. The imagination runs wild when pondering what use already rich rockers would put to a spare $6000. I’d like to think they gave it to charity, but something tells me those bastards were drinking a $500 bottle of champagne as they came on to ecstasy with a horde of heavily pierced but shapely naked groupies while we were suffering in Qualcomm Stadium.
Hunter S. Thompson captured the mood of that week better than any other journalist in the United States. He saw a “nervous American reality”: “The ‘war’ in Iraq is all around us, like one of those San Francisco death fogs that never goes away. Your immediate instinct is to flee, but to where? It is a lot easier to just go back to bed than to get in the car and look for a place where there may be no fog. The odds are stacked against you, so why even try?” Thus, in the face of impending doom, the Raiders were my last beacon of hope, or at least that’s how I’d framed the matter in order to justify my pathology. I know now it was just bread and circuses, but sometimes that’s all we’re left with. As Thompson proclaimed after casting aside his beloved San Francisco 49ers to jump on the Raiders bandwagon, “The Raiders will have fun. All the others will suffer.” Unlike the chalk-eating Thompson, however, this week represented redemption for me. I was a Raiders fan during the pathetic Marc Wilson era, the excruciating 4–12 Joe Bugel year, the catastrophic Gulf War playoff implosion against Buffalo, the Baltimore debacle, the “snow job” in New England, etc. The Raiders owed me one, damn it!2
While I was busy bemoaning the state of the union and getting bilked by scalpers, Operation Game Day was under way, putting fear into the hearts of San Diego’s undocumented immigrant workers. In the name of protecting freedom, my government had audited more than 15,000 foreign-born security guards and taxi drivers in preparation for the Super Bowl, most of them from Latin America. From that list, the Immigration and Naturalization Service narrowed its search down to 80 people who were targeted in the sweep. More than 50 were arrested, a smaller number of those were actually charged with immigration violations. All of those initially charged were Mexican. Although some of those arrested had criminal records, none were linked with terrorism. One man, a Nigerian with British citizenship and no criminal record who is married to an American citizen, was threatened with deportation without a hearing for having a false social security number.
Most San Diegans happily ignored these suspect roundups and focused their attention on Super Bowl hype, but some civil libertarians noticed. Jordan Budd of the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego observed, “This is being done in the name of national security. That’s a farce. They’re simply scapegoating the immigrant community while doing nothing to make us safer.” Sam Hamod of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in San Diego noted that “many of these people have been working hard and living in this country for years. Now suddenly, they’re considered dangerous. It doesn’t make sense.” The lawyer for one of those caught up in the sweep put it more harshly: “He’s only a cabdriver. To protect the Super Bowl, the INS is destroying the lives of working people.” Unfazed by such barbs, Edward Bell spoke for INS agents by crowing, “This is something we should be doing all the time.” The shortage of cabs was not an issue for the NFL bigs and the corporate elite who sucked up the lion’s share of Super Bowl tickets and leaving the real fans on the street. Why? Two words: stretch limo.3
Super Bowl week was not a good one for San Diego activists either. When peace groups pondered taking advantage of the huge national spectacle to get their message out, they found they were now on a par with terrorists in the eyes of local and federal law enforcement officials. Rent a plane to fly a peace banner over the stadium? No-fly zone. Pass out flyers in the parking lot? No public parking for fans, let alone undesirable peaceniks. Come on the trolley to protest in front of the stadium? Yes, maybe, but only if you stay in a tiny, fenced-off “free speech zone” under the trolley tracks that looked more like a holding pen for prisoners on their way to Auschwitz than a good place for a rally. Anyone wandering around in this little prison of democracy would look more like a zoo animal on display than a person with a serious political message. If that wasn’t bad enough, free speech would be allowed only during certain allocated time slots—first come, first serve. If you got there after the Jehovah’s Witnesses, it was tough luck. Even the streets in the vicinity of the stadium were restricted. It was a brave new world. Given this grim set of options, the Veterans for Peace decided to hold a vigil in Horton Plaza Park near the Gaslamp Quarter in downtown San Diego among the big Super Bowl parties. It was an ugly scene with men, one of them a friend and colleague of mine, who had served their country in combat in Vietnam being flipped off and cursed out by football partiers. It seemed during that grim week that even havi
ng put one’s life on the line for one’s country was not enough to buy officialdom’s respect for the right to dissent. Quietly, amid the parties, ships loaded with sailors and troops cruised out of the harbor toward the Persian Gulf.
Having shelled out enough money already, I skipped the expensive Raider blowout at the beach and decided to walk through the Gaslamp and take in the spectacle for free on the night before the game. A bunch of us, all Raiders fans, headed toward downtown after eating dinner a few blocks away in Little Italy. On the way up Broadway, a cute kid who looked about ten years old leaned out of the window of a city bus and yelled, “Hey, fuck you! Raiders suck!”
Once we hit Fifth Avenue and turned right, we were in the heart of Super Bowl madness. The street was blocked off and jammed full of people, most of them in silver and black, with a smaller number of Tampa Bay fans and a large contingent of neutrals just there for the beer and carousing. People were very, very drunk. A pack of Raiders fans were screaming “Ray-duz! Ray-duz!” in a full throated frenzy at the corner of G Street, and we joined in as we passed. I high-fived a few more of my Silver and Black brothers who were standing in line outside a bar with an exorbitant cover charge. All the bars had exorbitant cover charges—$25 to $50 for the privilege of being crammed inside like a sardine with no live music and no place to sit: not a deal made in heaven.
We passed by a young man in a Tampa Bay jersey engaged in a three-way French kissing session with two girls. Eventually one of them staggered and fell. I looked around in vain for the Elimidate camera crew. On the next block, some Bucs fans were sitting on a patio outside a bar surrounded by a chain-link fence. Chain-link fences seemed to be emerging as a theme. The Buckos were surrounded by Raiders fans who were heckling them from the outside. Beer-bottle fire was exchanged, but there were no casualties. We moved on.
Die Hard
We went in and out of the ad hoc Super Bowl gear shops without buying anything. There were Raiders fans from L.A., the East Bay, and all around the continental United States. We had friendly chats with some of them. It was like a big street party. People were happy just to be in the same town as the soon-tobe Super Bowl Champion Raiders. Most of them didn’t have tickets. A guy in silver face paint drinking a beer out of a paper bag asked me if I knew where to get some. I told him my story and his face dropped. We watched the fireworks display, had a few beers, and listened to the free music inside yet another area behind a chain-link fence. Some kids ran through a crowd of Raiders fans with a Chargers flag chanting “Raiders suck!” and no carnage ensued. Outside of a few fistfights like you’d see at any big event filled with revelers, nothing happened, no riots developed. I saw a cab at the end of the blocked-off street and thought of the drivers being arrested to keep me “safe.” Tonight, it appeared, San Diego was safe from both menacing cab drivers and evil Raiders fans.
I kept hoping, secretly, against the better angels of my nature that the paranoid Union-Tribune stories would be right and that barbarous Raiders fans would go positively medieval on the chi-chi tourist district. They could run the maitre d’s through with their swords and raid the kitchens for raw meat. Then they could swing through the windows of wine bars on ropes tied to quaint balconies and chug all the best vintages like the real pirates of old. But alas, the avenging barbarians had been priced out.
The next morning I woke up ready to win the Super Bowl. My partners in crime and I met at San Diego’s oldest tavern, the Waterfront, for machaca and Bloody Marys. Established just after the end of Prohibition, the Waterfront is not only the oldest, but also the greatest of San Diego bars. During the heyday of San Diego’s fishing industry, the bar was a hangout for the Italian and Portuguese fishermen who worked the tuna boats. Its walls are covered with pictures of the lost world of blue-collar San Diego. Still a workingman’s hangout despite its “discovery” by the community at large, the Waterfront has all the makings of a good Raiders hangout, except for the picture of former Chargers star Junior Seau hanging behind the bar. Other than that, it would seem to be relatively neutral territory. But, much to my dismay, upon entering my favorite local watering hole I was rudely greeted by “Raiders Still Suck” and “Stop Gangbanging for Uncle Al” signs. Then there was my favorite—a “Bin Laden is a Raider fan” sticker posted next to the beer taps. I should have taken this as a bad omen, but I entered nonetheless, proudly sporting my number 12 Stabler/Gannon jersey and Raiders cap.
The waitress, who should have recognized my face from serving me numerous times before, gave me no quarter and waited on our table efficiently but coolly. After checking my food for hidden objects, I concluded that the signs and the chilly reception were nothing more than harmless razzing, but the worst was lurking in the latter part of the day, waiting to pounce once I left the relatively safe confines of the Waterfront. At the time, I tipped generously while thinking to myself, “I’ll come back and gloat later.”
The rumor reached us on the trolley on the way to the stadium—Robbins was out. Was the Raiders’ starting center hurt? No, word filtered back through the trolley. He was sent back to the hotel or kicked off the team or put in the hospital for an undisclosed condition. Others said that he’d been out all night drinking in the Gaslamp. Some had spotted him in Ocean Beach, others in Tijuana. I half expected it all to be lies and wild speculation. Another part of me wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that Robbins had been kidnapped by G. Gordon Liddy and held in an anonymous Rosarito Beach hotel. It was all surreal. I should have taken it as yet another bad omen. A Raiders fan would later tell me that he suspects that the inability of a group of Raiders fans to perform a voodoo ritual at a Saints game a few years ago led to a shitload of bad mojo and possibly the entire Super Bowl nightmare. A plausible explanation, I suppose, but at the time I was still full of bravado. “We don’t need Robbins,” I said to my friend Chuck. “We’ve got it locked. Treu’s a great backup.” Chuck looked concerned.
Once the trolley pulled into the stadium, I expected our arrival four hours before game time to lead to a quick trip through security into the party zone. Instead, after we made our way through a baffling maze of switchbacks on the way to the main entrance area we were penned up like cattle for two solid hours. The crowd blindly swayed this way and that way, trying to find an opening in the security fence until the grim truth revealed itself: we were trapped. There were only a handful of entrances open and it seemed to be taking five minutes per person to enter the stadium. The longer it took, the bigger the crowd jamming its way toward the gates became. It appeared that the protectors of the homeland were banking on the fact that no terrorist would be smart enough to try to kill a couple of trolley loads of fans jettisoned between the station and the stadium rather than inside the stadium. Was the sense of drama of a halftime slaughter on a global television broadcast so important to the terrorists that it precluded going after a large group of sitting ducks like ourselves? Couldn’t the bad guys throw us a curve? Or were we just expendable if the game itself was protected? I remembered the “Bin Laden is a Raider fan” sticker on the wall at the Waterfront. Could it be that Raider Nation had secretly been put on the list of twenty-five countries suspected by the Justice Department of harboring or sponsoring terrorists? If this was their plan, they were going to have to sacrifice a lot of “innocents” to get the few genuine Raiders fanatics who’d managed to crash the party. It was an inefficient strategy, but who knows?
It was a surprisingly hot sunny day for January, which was great when one was not pinned up against rich, slimy football fans. As the realization of the absurdity of our fate struck the crowd, people became angry, muttering under their breath or cursing security out loud. Men who looked like solid Republicans began to reconsider whether the tax cut was worth this absurd nightmare. As it approached midday, people began to pass out from the heat. An elderly man to my right managed to sneak his way in with this crafty dodge. I was surprised the police didn’t search his unconscious body for weapons of mass destruction or ties to Al Qaeda. Lat
er that night, only one local news station reported the two dozen or so people who had to be carted off in the name of national security. Such a negative observation might have gotten in the way of the booster pabulum official San Diego spits up every time anyone pays attention to it. I considered making a break for the free-speech zone to unleash a bitter tirade about the danger of voluntarily surrendering liberty for comfort or freedom from fear, but that might have meant trading in my piece of Raiders glory for a night in the slammer, so I held tight.
The mood became more profane and people began to heckle the security guards. A loud speaker was playing the song “Tequila” too loud and going over the blandly totalitarian security regulations over and over again in a closed feedback loop. The draconian security regimen seemed to be comprised of several stages: a visual appraisal as you obeyed orders and stood behind a line, a pat down with your arms out as if under arrest, a bag and pocket search, a walk through a metal detector, and some undisclosed activity rumored to be an X-ray or a cavity search. Did I love the Raiders enough to endure a cavity search? I began to feel delirious from the heat. I thought I heard a wild rumor about a more thorough anal probe that resembled something from the X Files. This was not the utopian parking lot at the Oakland Coliseum where everybody is welcome and all is shared. It was a barren asphalt internment camp, a fascist military-prison-entertainment complex. We were at the breaking point, like a herd of nasty sweaty pigs on the way to the slaughterhouse. Where were the imaginary hoards of brutal Raider gangsters ready to mow down the Nazis with their handy Uzis and get this party started when you needed them?
Finally, we broke through the gauntlet, sneering our way through security and mercifully avoiding being pulled aside to room 101 in the Ministry of Love. As we made our way around the stadium, we noticed that there was no crush of humanity at the gate where the limos were dropping off the beautiful people. One world for the denizens of mass transit, another for the folks who brought you Reality TV and criminal tax shelters, I thought. We briefly engaged in the prerequisite bitter sniping at the errand boys for homeland security before performing the proper mental readjustments to prepare for the corporate tailgate. The rock stars had so back-handedly thrown in the tailgate tickets that none of us realized what a beggar’s banquet awaited us. It was like entering another country, not the America where most of us live but the upper reaches of Corporate America where people are so blasé about luxury and abundance that it verges on terminal ennui.