Super Bowl Field of Dreams

By John Skow

Outlined against a blue-gray October sky (in storage since 1924, trucked in to New Orleans for the occasion and fixed to the underside of the Superdome roof with 17,432 twist ties), the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse watch the Broncos and the 49ers prepare for Super Bowl XXIV. Joe Montana lazily solves the Savings and Loan Crisis. At half speed, without pads, John Elway construes Greek.

1,260 reporters in red tutus dance right; 1,720 photographers in blue tutus dance left.

Montana helps a crippled child engineer a hostile takeover of IBM. Sweating lightly, Elway confounds Manuel Noriega's lawyers. In the locker rooms, impartial observers from the National Bureau of Standards watch all the other players put on their pants, one leg at a time. Reporters dance left; photographers dance right.

Montana does card tricks, and the Four Horsemen -- Miller, Stuhldreher, Crowley and Layden -- are baffled. Elway conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which has been trucked in for the occasion. The Four Horsemen start to applaud between movements of Debussy's L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune and are embarrassed. Stuhldreher frowns, then whispers something to Crowley. From two rows back, Fielding Yost shushes him. Nearby, Knute Rockne is worried he will not have enough money to pay his hotel bill. New Orleans seems a lot fancier than South Bend.

Rockne is uneasy. Last night at a party he met Brent Musburger, who seemed to be a nice fellow. But Rockne's suit was afraid of Musburger's suit, and kept trying to bend the wrong way at the knees and elbows. Rockne's suit is wrinkled and brown. Musburger's is the finest in town, but others nearly as rich and dark trap the light of distant stars in the lobbies of the Hilton and the Hyatt Regency.

Not only are all the sachems of the nation's football tribes, living and dead, on hand for the Super Bowl, but bull corpocrats, not-yet indicted politicians and assorted overweeners from every power nexus in the nation have massed here, drawn to sport's most relentless weeklong party by forces they do not understand. They wear suits that are the worsted equivalent of stretch limos. Around these grandees, trophy wives orbit glossily. Some of them know the names of the teams ("The Denver, uh, Cowboys?"). Lacquered geishas trucked in for the occasion balance vaselike on bar stools.

An observer learns all this by interviewing a plate of superior grilled snapper at an amiable neighborhood restaurant called La Riviera, out in the 'burbs of Jefferson Parish. The snapper is the liveliest football interview in a town that has other important matters, such as the onrush of Mardi Gras, on its mind. "Joe Billy," the observer asked, "how will Elway do against the nickel, three pennies, car keys and a couple pieces of pocket-lint defense?"

"He'll pick apart the seams," said the snapper, "unless the lint gets too bad."

"Then how come Joe Montana is America's sweetheart?"

"Well, first, he's named for the right state. Joe North Dakota, he'd probably be a bus driver. Then he's got those gunfighter's eyes. Deadly in publicity stills. Blam, blam, you're haddock pate." The observer wanted to ask this fine fish why this year everyone, even the players, seemed more bored with football than is usual at Super Bowl time. But the last of the snapper was gone.

A bartender in the French Quarter says the wrong teams are in town. San Francisco fans are so cool they're hypothermic, and Denver fans try hard to act as if they were from San Francisco. Now if the Steelers had made it, you would have naked Pittsburghers whooping through the streets in body paint and feathers, yes sir you would.

Then again, maybe John Madden, the rumpled gent who whoops the game for CBS, is right about mud. Why not haul a few dozen tons of good, dirty dirt into the Superdome, the way they do for those tractor pulls that ESPN broadcasts at 3 a.m.?

If football has become a slick, indoor imitation of itself, jazzy old New & Slightly Used Orleans somehow remains the real thing, or nearly. On Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, a minicam crew stalks tourists, trying to find someone wearing a Broncos feed cap. The visitor ducks around the corner into Preservation Hall, a magnificently funky storefront that looks as if it has been flooded and drained a few times, where a $2 donation lets you stand and listen to some grand old Dixielanders wail the stuffing out of St. James Infirmary and Muskrat Ramble.

Munch lunch, Italian sausage and hot pickled onions, at the Home Plate Inn out on Tulane Avenue. Some retired cops there say, nah, they're not interested in the game, too much hype, but they've got two cards of a hefty betting pool filled anyway. Head for the big N.F.L. pregame monster rally at the Convention Center. Then on to Pat O'Brien's, where they serve a drink called the Hurricane. Note the immediate lowering of atmospheric pressure. Try a cheer: "Go, Pittsburgh!" "Joe Billy, the Steelers are a lock."