Reporter
Six Ways To Sunday
With one week under the world's spotlight, Houston showed off its lust for flesh, booze, sports, and business—and took Super Bowl revelry to dizzying new heights.
EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE YOU GET the chance to see Houston reveal itself with a bracing, eager purity. Its anxious to please, we-belong-in-the-big-leagues nature was fleetingly evident during the premiere of Urban Cowboy, in 1980, when almost every socialite in town threw herself at John Travolta, and again during the global economic summit of 1990, when honchos recruited five thousand civilian volunteers to clean the streets, and yet again, during the 1992 Republican Convention, when the planting of red, white, and blue flowers reached daffy proportions. But for my money, Houston—the complete Houston—has never been so apparent as it was during the week of Super Bowl XXXVIII. The event played to Houston's natural strengths—its zeal for girls, booze, and sports—while simultaneously enabling its upwardly mobile persona: its expansiveness and its self-consciousness, as well as its ambition, its devout capitalism, and its deep but unexamined worship of undeserving demi-celebrities. During the week before the game, Houston seemed so overwhelmed by itself that it teetered on the brink of madness and almost took me down with it.
MONDAY, JANUARY 26: I feel a little like an impostor; the last time I sat through a football game was during high school, when the Vietnam War was raging, and I still know more about demilitarized zones than end zones. Still, it's seductive inside the George R. Brown Convention Center, currently ground zero for the Super Bowl elite. I pass through several layers of security, and someone hands me press credentials and an embroidered badge with eBay potential, inducing an instant case of smugness. I'm in! Then I realize that everyone around me has more badges than I do. The semiotics are easy to grasp: The more badges, the more important you are. Then there are people too important for badges, like Astros owner Drayton McLane and Texans owner Bob McNair, who stride imperially through the building, trailed by beefy, reverential sportswriters.
The status virus is in its early but virulent stage. For many weeks before, telephone lines and e-mails have been clogged with gossip about who is going to whose parties given by which corporate sponsors. I've heard several times that Denzel Washington and Halle Berry will be in town for soirees, the locations of which are as secret as the sites of Saddam's WMDs. Not everyone is buying the celebrity rumors, however. "Some parties say they've got invited guests. We've got confirmed guests," a representative for the Mercury Room, a hip Houston downtown club, assures me. I experience a twinge of high school-like desperation: It's the big game, and I don't have a place to go, much less a celebrity date.
This feeling recurs a few hours later, when I stand on the red carpet ("media access") of the Reliant Arena with about one hundred other reporters and no civilian spectators to watch Houston's sports heroes arrive for the week's opening ceremony—a Super Bowl first, thanks to Houston's penchant for innovation. The event is also characteristically self-referential: a salute to the city's greatest athletes, featuring, inexplicably, musical accompaniment provided by Yanni. Here is stocky former Oilers quarterback Dan Pastorini, looking weathered, with his wife in a fuchsia waterfall gown topped with a mink stole; there is former Rocket Calvin Murphy, jumping jauntily out of a burgundy Escalade—the car of the week, whether in burgundy, beige, or black—with three women in tow. Sheryl Swoopes is here, and so is a chipper Mary Lou Retton ("Houston is a city filled with phenomenal athletes") and a dour Moses Malone. (I think his exact words to reporters are "Ain't gonna talk about no Rockets.") A fevered, boyish nostalgia greets the retirees from some of the middle-aged men in the crowd, a reminder that even the greatest champions have fleeting careers. Warren Moon, Marcus Allen, Nolan Ryan, and Clyde Drexler stroll up the red carpet to this particular tune, and then Texans quarterback David Carr saunters in, more handsome and vital than Tom Cruise, and everyone else is forgotten in a tsunami of envy and awe.
This night isn't supposed to be about individuals, however; it's supposed to be about Houston's collective, can-do spirit. As CBS sportscaster Jim Nantz, a University of Houston graduate and tonight's impresario and MC explains, this Super Bowl is a Houston Super Bowl, meaning that it will be more fun and more egalitarian than those in years past; as proof, he references the musical events that are supposed to transform downtown into a cross between Mardi Gras and Times Square on New Year's Eve. "Until now, the Super Bowl was all about private parties," Nantz says to several mikes aimed in his direction, "but Houston has opened its doors to everyone." Having made his point, Nantz promptly departs for the VIP reception, where he rubs shoulders with all the sports greats and George and Barbara Bush, who eschew the red carpet in favor of a private entrance. They aren't wearing any badges.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 27: A cold front has come in, bringing with it the stiff winds of capitalism. Planning for the Super Bowl has been years in the making, and even though the Houston Chronicle published a cautionary tale suggesting that most of the money that comes to town never quite stays in town, the warning goes largely unheeded. As restaurant chain owner Tilman Fertitta tells Channel 2 News, "We'll always have a party week during Super Bowl week, and it has nothing to do with the game going on. This is for the Fortune One Thousand CEOs to come to this city and say, 'This is a place that I want to do business.'" Hence, local designer Vanessa Riley, asked to make several gowns for a Super Bowl week fashion show, starts sewing on spec for actresses like . . . Angela Bassett and Kim Cattrall. "It's difficult to say no," Riley tells me, anxiously assessing the silks she's bought with her own money. "I'm just putting my neck farther and farther out in order for something to pay off." She's not the only one: The alternative Houston Press, which prides itself on its outsider status, has sold its cover to Budweiser, and Fertitta opens all three floors of his downtown Aquarium restaurant to the media, who gawk at the sawfish in the tanks and the girls shivering in scanty mermaid costumes, all the while consuming, absolutely free, what looks to be every shrimp that once inhabited the Gulf of Mexico. "It's absolutely un-be-lievable!" a reporter hollers into his cell phone.
But as often happens here, the desire to make money—lots of it, in a hurry—conflicts with the desire to make a good impression on visitors, which will hopefully translate into still more money later on. With the collapse of Enron and uncertainty in the economy, Houston has stepped up its search for more convention business and for corporations that might hanker to relocate. The Super Bowl affords an opportunity to show the world how friendly and unpretentious (read: ready to deal) we are. The standard-bearer for this approach is our new mayor, Bill White. White may have busted heads as Clinton's Deputy Secretary of Energy and as CEO of a global investment firm, but the persona he has adopted with both the hoity-toities and the hoi polloi this week is that of a winning Sunday school teacher. White debuts in a commercial during the ten o'clock news that's heavy on personal responsibility. "Put your smile on," the ad counsels. "Company's coming." I pull a blanket over my head and hope that I am dreaming.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28: I'm already jaded. Another party hosted by Tilman Fertitta, this time a private fete at his gargantuan River Oaks estate to honor the Super Bowl Host Committee—largesse for the locals who made this whole thing happen. Once a mere restaurateur, Fertitta, along with his wife, Paige, has managed, in a short time, to grab and hold the social spotlight, thanks to his ever-expanding business empire (Landry's, the Rainforest Cafe, and so on) and his generosity (meaning his willingness to pony up political and charitable contributions and to lend his mansion when it counts, like now).
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