The Party Is In Glendale. You Are Not Invited.

By Will Leitch
(Editor’s note: Deadspin.com’s Will Leitch will be in Arizona through Super Bowl Sunday, writing exclusive columns for Sporting News.)
On a lazy Wednesday evening a few weeks back, I rented the film Superbad. I’d seen it before, but for some reason, I decided the evening wasn’t quite scatological and prophylactic enough, and needed some jokes about adolescent anatomy. A large section of the movie is devoted to parties; the teenage drink-fest that serves as the Mecca toward which Evan and Seth bow and the more sinister, grown-up house party in which our heroes are almost pummeled.
The movie’s quiet message about parties seems to be, It’s more fun to attempt to get in a difficult party than to actually attend it. Every time Evan and Seth go to a party -- and they spend most of the movie trying to make it to one -- something goes wrong. They’re almost beaten to a pulp, they stain their clothing, they’re thrown up on and they pass out. The only time they seem happy is when they’re together trying to make it to the parties; their journey is their destination. Outside, there is normalcy and a stated goal; inside, chaos, and helplessness at the hands of others.
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And here, I go, to the Super Bowl. As you’d probably suspect, when I tell people I’m going to Glendale for the Super Bowl, nobody cares about who I think will win, whether Tom Brady’s ankle is OK, if Plaxico will be the name of the evil global corporation in the next Bond film. They all want to know what parties I’m going to.
I do not consider myself a professional sportswriter, but I’ve met a few of the savage beasts, and I can tell you this: They are not known for their partying abilities. (This is not to disparage their ability to drink, just to point out their deficiencies in doing so in a social manner.) But the Super Bowl is a nonstop barrage of parties, mostly exclusive, all bathed in more mystique than would seem befitting an event that will mostly involve middle-aged balding white men desperately trying to get a bartender’s attention all night.
Any parties actually worth going to, I’ll never hear about, and neither will you. Super Bowl parties are just the one-time-a-year excuse for sportswriters to brag about something that sounds a lot cooler in theory that it was in practice. Most of the year, having to drag your sleep-deprived carcass from Cleveland to Seattle to Jacksonville is as glamorous as your job gets. But for one week, you can tell the poor schlubs back at the office that you went to the Maxim party. Sure, the only attractive bikini-d women you saw were on the cover of the magazine you stole from somebody else’s gift bag … but hey, you went to the Maxim party! And you only had to wait in line for three hours!
Yep, this is all I am asked about. And last count, there are parties hosted by:
Maxim
Penthouse
Coors Light
Pepsi
The NFLPA. (No one over 40 allowed, presumably.)
ESPN. (Ladies get in free, to be sure.)
Dan Majerle’s Downtown End Zone Block Party. (This is without question the best one; it features Digital Underground, Tone Loc and Young MC. And Dan Majerle!)
A free concert by the Counting Crows. That’s a toupee, by the way. I mean, obviously.
And then you have Matt Leinart. The Arizona Cardinals quarterback will certainly be at all of the above parties, and he’s even hosting his own party. Leinart famously fired his agent after Peyton Manning was slated to host Saturday Night Live instead of Leinart, and there has perhaps never been a more ideally suited backup quarterback for the host city during Super Bowl Week.
Leinart sees himself as a considerably larger celebrity than he really is, which is going to make his party circuit this week that much more amusing. You can count on him being at least in the background of every paparazzi shot of a legitimate celebrity all week. Perhaps he can sneak on stage with the Counting Crows. Maybe I should try to interview him; he surely has some tips on how to help media folk actually relax and enjoy themselves at a party, were they fortunate enough to actually make it inside.
One party you can count on every media folk actually sneaking in is ... the media party, on Tuesday night. This will surely be the party that will require the most food, and the party that will have the fewest celebrities. Though Leinart will surely be there; he might even be serving the hors d’oeuvres.
The sad thing is, I don’t like going to parties either ... and yet I’m still a little offended that I’m not invited to any of these. Groucho Marx once wrote that he would never want to join any club that would have him as a member. There’s an element of truth to that ... but it’s at least nice to be asked. So I’ve decided to have my own party, and everyone’s invited. It will be Thursday night, and there will be no list or long line to get in. It will be the reject party, the place for sad, tired, lonely souls to congregate, share their sorrows and feel a kinship with other winsome outcasts. In other words, it’ll be a lot like sports journalism itself. Though I suspect Leinart will still come. I think I might ask the bouncers to make him wait outside.
Will Leitch, editor of Deadspin.com, will be filing from Glendale, Ariz. throughout Super Bowl week.↵