Since it passed in May, Mr. Malloy has enticed national names like CIGNA, a global health services company, and TicketNetwork, an online ticket marketplace, to relocate. He also convinced ESPN to build a 93,000-square-foot building on its Bristol campus and the NBC Sports Group to set its sights on developing new offices in Stamford.

In exchange for staking claim in Connecticut, companies like ESPN receive the state’s “best” incentive and tax credit programs, provided that its owners pledge to create 200 new jobs over two years—or, if more time is needed, invest $25 million and create 200 jobs over five years. For most, such an offer couldn’t be taken lightly—especially for NBC Sports.

“I don’t know of another state with this formula,” said John Goodkind, a managing principal at Newmark Knight Frank who represented Starwood Hotels & Resorts in a blockbuster deal that will relocate the hospitality group from Westchester to Stamford next year. “Connecticut is literally like a business partner, and they’re like the tenant’s partner.”

But whether it’s precedent-shattering incentives, like those offered in Connecticut and to a lesser extent in New Jersey, or straightforward transactions like those in Westchester County and on Long Island, deals are being inked in New York’s tristate region at a positive clip, analysts said. From the deal in October to bring NBC Sports Group to Connecticut to a string of high-profile hospital transactions in Westchester, businesses are migrating to the suburbs at a reasonable rate, brokers said.

And while Manhattan remains the most alluring destination for many tenants, the suburbs managed to compete valiantly this year in the face of a sluggish economy. Below, The Commercial Observer takes a look at the tristate area’s other major markets.

CONNECTICUT

In Connecticut, NBC Sports Group, which already broadcasts games for the National Football League and the National Hockey League, agreed to bring its sports group—including NBC Sports, NBC Olympics and Versus—to a 32-acre plot in Stamford.

There, NBC plans to build several state-of-the-art studios—including one for the NHL Network—while relocating 450 employees and creating hundreds of additional positions.

In exchange, the state will give NBC a $20 million loan through its Department of Economic and Community Development.

Such a Cinderella story is a break from recent memory in Connecticut, where officials received the scare of the century this summer when UBS, a formidable financial presence, briefly considered vacating its Stamford office, famed for its 93,000-square-foot trading floor.

Losing UBS, which had been operating in Stamford for 10 years, would have cost the state $70 million in annual tax revenue, Mr. Malloy said at an August press conference.

The company eventually agreed to stay in Stamford for five additional years in a deal that will retain 2,000 jobs and hundreds of thousands of square feet in Connecticut for the foreseeable future. In return, UBS will receive $20 million in state funds from Mr. Malloy, Stamford’s former mayor.

Mr. Malloy served as mayor of Stamford when Starwood Hotels & Resorts agreed to relocate its headquarters from White Plains to a 250,000-square-foot office at the Harbor Point development, an 80-acre, $3.5 billion mixed-use site in the city’s South End.

In exchange, Starwood received $75 million in tax credits and a $9.5 million loan from the state’s Department of Economics.

“We’ve said that Connecticut’s open for business,” said Mr. Malloy at a press conference announcing the TicketNetwork deal. “And what we’re saying to the entrepreneurial community, to the technology community, to anyone who can take that technology and entrepreneurial spirit [is] put them together, come up with a product, and bring it to market in our state. That’s what we want.”

And that’s what they’ve been getting. The county’s Class A vacancy rate dropped to 23 percent, its lowest since the first quarter of 2010. On average, asking rents clocked in at $32.10 per square foot through October.

Between its aggressive incentives policy and reasonable rents, Connecticut has surfaced as one of the region’s most appealing office sectors. As such, recruiting has been bold.

“They seem to be the most aggressive in going after tenants, especially tenants that are already in Manhattan, by giving them incentives,” said Mr. Sammons.

NORTHERN NEW JERSEY

In northern New Jersey—notably in Hudson, Morris, Essex, and Middlesex counties—a litany of financial firms have renewed leases even as new tenants have rushed forward.

Earlier this year, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and other public officials convinced Panasonic to relocate from Secaucus to a new office tower on Raymond Boulevard in Newark with the help of a $102 million transit hub tax credit.
In September, Deutsche Bank inked a seven-year renewal at its 204,515-square-foot office space at 2 Gatehall Drive in Parsippany, where it has been since 2002.

Merrill Lynch, meanwhile, re-upped its 300,000-square-foot lease at 95 Greene Street in Jersey City. And after threatening to leave New Jersey altogether—an always effective threat, as aforementioned deals have evidenced—British publishing firm Pearson Education is planning a move from Upper Saddle River to a yet-to-be-built waterfront development in Hoboken. Pearson received $82.5 million in tax credits from the state.

As Panasonic and Pearson have proved, companies are showing renewed interest in New Jersey’s modern, rail-ready office portfolio, especially where it concerns urban locales.

“If you’re an owner of real estate in New Jersey and you’re sitting on that type of product, you’re going to be quite happy with your results,” said Gregory Barkan, senior vice president at CBRE, who added that tenants are choosing cities over the suburbs. “But if you’re sitting on that antiquated, kind of commoditized vintage-type product that seems to be pretty prevalent in New Jersey I think you have some heavy lifting.”

The vacancy rate for Jersey City has been low, currently standing at 9 percent. The asking rent for the area is $27.39.
Jersey City—which boasts 16.6 million square feet of office space out of the 20.7 million for all of Hudson County—currently has 8.1 million square feet of proposed new space in the pipeline, said Mr. Sammons. This bodes well for future tenants, but not for those who need space post-haste.

“They have no product available in the near term for a major tenant,” said Mr. Sammons.  “They can build fast enough, faster than you can in Manhattan. But most of the development sites recently have been for residential and not for office.”

NASSAU AND SUFFOLK COUNTIES

Nassau and Suffolk counties, meanwhile, are waiting for the market to turn.

In Nassau, the county tallied a vacancy rate of 16.l percent, with an asking rent of $29.99. Deals like Astoria Federal Savings’ lease for 55,000 square feet of space at 1 Jericho Plaza in June have been decent-sized, but certainly nothing to write home about.

In Suffolk County, the vacancy rate clocked in at 18.5 percent, down from 20.8 percent in March. That drop has been an encouraging sign, but still a far cry from high 2007 levels.

“This is surely not part of the go-go years,” said Chuck Tabone, a managing principal at Newmark Knight Frank.
The most notable deal happened at 5000 Corporate Court, a 264,482-square-foot property in Holtsville in Suffolk County purchased by Government Properties Income Trust for $39.3 million in September. Located just off the Long Island Expressway, the asset is already home to the IRS and the Bureau of Customs and Immigration Services and boasts more than 37 acres.

Despite its accessibility, however, the building has failed to impress Big Apple tenants.
“[Nassau and Suffolk are] too far off the grid for tenants in Manhattan, unless they are a call center or something like that,” said Mr. Sammons.

WESTCHESTER COUNTY

Transportation is Westchester County’s Achilles’ heel. While the area has space for rent, the region remains a dead zone for commuters, with buses and trains relatively scarce.

The Westchester County vacancy rate ended up at 28.1 percent in October, up from 24.9 percent in September 2010. Meanwhile, asking rents continue to hover around $30, ending at $29.98 for the month of October.

The availability of 325,000 square feet of space—thanks, mostly, to the departure of Starwood Hotels & Resorts from two spaces on Westchester Avenue in White Plains—has caused the vacancy rate to soar above year-end 2010 levels, said Mr. Sammons.

Nokia’s announcement in April that it will shutter offices at 102 Corporate Park Drive in White Plains as part of its efforts to consolidate didn’t help matters either.

“It’s been a challenging office environment in terms of job growth and companies coming into Westchester, so one of the shining stars has been the growth of the medical practices and the adaptive re-use of former office space into medical space,” said Budd Wiesenberg, a vice president at CBRE.

Among the medical conglomerates now picking up the slack in Westchester is WestMed Medical, which has expanded across the county with a handful of high-profile deals.

In October, the group moved into a new 84,000-square-foot space in the Ridge Hill development in Yonkers, and during the same month it announced a new 28,000-square-foot space on Huguenot Street in New Rochelle. The selling point for the medical group was the Huguenot office’s relatively convenient location, located just blocks from parking spaces, a Metro-North train station and a Bee-Line bus stop.

Meanwhile, Memorial Sloan-Kettering received approvals to remodel 400 Westchester Avenue into a $143 million cancer treatment facility.

Other activity includes Acorda Therapeutics, a biotech company, leasing 138,000 square feet of space at 410 and 412 Saw Mill River Road in Ardsley. w Jersey, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, National Football League, UBS, Stamford, Connecticut, Hudson, Morris, Essex, Middlesex, Chris Christie, Panasonic, Pearson, Gregory Barkan, CBRE, Nassau, Suffolk, Acorda Therapeutics, 4

“I will say that health care has become a darling in Westchester,” said Frank Tomasulo, a senior vice president at CBRE who represented WestMed in both deals.
drosen@observer.com

According to CNBC, "some people" think this has put a severe crimp in the league's style:

Some people are said to be unhappy about this conservative approach and have nicknamed the NFL the "no fun league" as a result.

We're pretty sure we've heard the "no fun league" epithet before learning of Goodell's fiscal conservatism. Contra CNBC, here are some actually plausible reasons why "some people" might reasonably call the league "no fun":

No Tweeting

No Tweeting by proxy

No impersonating rum icon Captain Morgan

No snow angels

No sex tapes

Rigorous accounting is not fun, but given the choice between the "fun" of teams plunging heedlessly into a financially uncertain future and the actual fun of allowing players to celebrate their touchdowns with snow angels, we'll take the snow angels every time.

Now located at 280 Park Avenue, between 48th and 49th streets, the NFL will move to 345 Park Avenue, between 51st and 52nd, according to a release. Starting in the third quarter of next year, it will occupy about 175,000 square feet in a 44-story tower owned by the Rudin family, which owns about 10 million square feet of office space in the city.

The leased space breaks down thusly: three full floors (5, 6 and 7) comprise about 150,000 square feet of office space, while the rest, approximately 30,000 square feet, is "below-grade," for "various operational and administrative departments."

Franklin Speyer and Lou D'Avanzo of Cushman & Wakefield teamed with Peter Hennessy and Daoud Awad of Jones Lang LaSalle to represent the NFL. Tom Keating of Rudin Management Company repped Rudin.

Bill Rudin, CEO and vice chairman of Rudin Management Company, called the NFL "the most respected and successful league in all of professional sport."

Eric Grubman, executive vice president of NFL ventures and business operations, said the new space "will enable us to be more efficient."

walden@observer.com

I’m talking about the argument over N.F.L. touchdown dances and other outcroppings of fun in this sport that takes itself so seriously.

As the Super Bowl approaches, the sports prudes are at it again. Consider the deep distress with which an otherwise intelligent local sports media columnist reacted to Fox TV’s coverage of a recent playoff game, which featured—brace yourself—repeated cutaway shots of a woman in a cutoff shirt with an NSFW slogan magic-markered on her bare belly.

Just when a shaken nation was recovering from the trauma of the Janet Jackson Super Bowl horror!

But this was far worse: The Janet Jackson incident took place during a half-time show. Here the camera cut away to this deeply, shamefully immoral and frivolous image of a bare belly during the profoundly serious, extremely socially significant game itself! When we should all have been focusing on the tactical shifts of the game plan!

People! Where are your priorities!

What’s really disturbing about this, of course, is the mindset of a purported grownup who can get all exercised about how troubling this is. Lighten up, dude. It’s a game, you’re not covering the State of the Union.

But this isn’t an isolated incident; it’s emblematic of the attitude of the entire National Football League, a bureaucracy of hacks in suits habitually overimpressed with the grandeur of their enterprise, a small-minded bureaucracy which last year issued one of the most laughably stupid rulings in the history of the sport: the ban on what they called “prolonged or excessive celebrations” by players celebrating touchdowns or big plays on the field.

It was this ban, announced last March, that led to the N.F.L. being dubbed the “No Fun League” by players and fans. But the killjoy N.F.L. bureaucrats, in their campaign to extinguish playfulness and joyfulness—because it might threaten their granitic image of the game’s gravitas—seem to be unable to distinguish a football game from a meeting of say, the U.N. Security Council.

True, it would probably be inappropriate if, after exercising a veto in that august chamber, the Russian U.N. ambassador did a “sack dance.” But the N.F.L. and much of the sports media treat it like an equivalent issue.

In fact, as I’m writing this, the Saints’ rookie running back, Reggie Bush, just scored a touchdown for New Orleans against the Bears and—racing toward the goal line after a beautiful catch and run—did a total frontal somersault flip into the end zone for the score, and then went into a complex, slow-motion imitation jog/dance that was both celebration and parody of celebration and totally cool in every respect.

I can picture the entire old-school sports media having a virtual cow when it happened. And, indeed, some did point to Reggie Bush’s conduct in the course of that scoring play as a terrible turning point. In fact, Reggie Bush himself apologized for letting himself get “caught up in the emotion of the game.” And yet emotions are what make great sports clashes different from combat by robots or digital images in video games. Emotions may well be the reason Reggie Bush got as far as the goal line he flipped over in the first place.

I don’t necessarily believe the world needs a micro-analysis of this moment, but, as ESPN’s Mike and Mike in the Morning team pointed out to their credit the day after the game, there was nothing wrong with the flip and the dance; rather, Reggie Bush’s real mistake came 10 yards before he scored, when he turned and taunted the Bears’ scary linebacker, Brian Urlacher, who was futilely chasing him—thus incensing the Bears’ entire team, which went on to win the game.

On the other hand, what made Cassius Clay into the Muhammad Ali we know and love if it wasn’t his daring death-defying taunting of his opponents? The old-school sports establishment came down on him for “prolonged and excessive celebrations,” too. Live by taunting, die by taunting—the game is psychological as well as physical, and sometimes you intimidate by taunting, sometimes you suffer from taunting, but it’s all part of the drama.

Oh, the Humanity!

I had thought the sports-prude attitude had finally died of old age, but look at how everybody got all outraged all over again during the A.F.C. divisional playoffs, when some of the victorious Patriots had the nerve—the unmitigated gall, the shamelessness—to do a victory dance on (sit down so you don’t faint) the San Diego Chargers’ midfield colored chalk logo at the end of the game!

Yes, they disrespected the sacred chalk logo! I swear this sacrilege actually happened and was shown on national TV, and it was as if certain sports commentators’ heads exploded. They treated it like the Saddam execution cell-phone video of sports. Oh, the humanity!

Never mind that the Satanic glee the Pats players were exhibiting was an attempt to mock the sack dance of one of the Chargers players (Shawne Merriman)—so that, in a witty, meta way, the Patriots were exercising a critique of sack-dancery. But instead of applause for their ingenuity, the Patriots got the same old tired condemnation: that they didn’t show “class.”

What gets to me was the careless use of the word “class” and “classlessness,” words that are thrown around by clueless sportswriters writing about this subject. Did Muhammad Ali lack class? No, his grace and wit transcended the jock-sniffing boxing writers.

In fact, it’s kind of obvious to any observer that it’s not about class, but about race. Most often, nerdy white guys who feel inferior to large, gifted, (mostly) black athletes and thus try to find some way to feel superior to them.

Meanwhile, all the opprobrium obscures the fact that touchdown dances are one of the most entertaining and, in a way, athletic aspects of the game. I mean, breathes there a soul so dead that he cannot appreciate the wit of the Ickey Shuffle?

Yet apparently these dead souls abound. Remember the Ickey Shuffle? Everything about it was pure delight. For those who don’t remember, it was one of the first touchdown dances, and it featured a massive 250-pound Cincinnati Bengals fullback named Elbert (Ickey) Woods delicately shuffling his bulk back and forth in a slightly off-center, comically tilting yet debonair, even Fred Astaire­–like fashion.

The subtle mockery of a freight-car-sized fullback performing these dainty little dance movements was a witty wink-and-nod at the cult of massive body violence in the N.F.L. I may have the chronology wrong, but it seemed to me at the time that it was a response to the crude posturing of Mark Gastineau’s dumb-jock “sack dance.” The best touchdown dances belong to the aesthetic of satire. And yet the clueless N.F.L. actually outlawed the Ickey Shuffle! It was dangerous to the extreme dignity of the game.

A short course in end-zone celebrations might have to include the wholesome collective gung-ho variations, such as the Fun Bunch group-jump, where the Washington Redskins’ offense would gather around the goalposts for a choreographed high-five-ish group love-in. And Green Bay’s Lambeau Leap, which soon got old for me thanks to its obligatory quality: Every time someone from the Packers scored, they had to leap into the end-zone stands to be mauled by drunken fans. No spontaneity!

The Ickey Shuffle was succeeded by various versions of the Electric Slide, the elbow-flapping slapstick of the Dirty Bird and the like.

It makes you wonder why the No Fun League encourages soft-core cheerleaders and face-painting fan-geeks, yet puts their players in straitjackets. Come on! The celebratory impulse and gesture are part of the American national character. We don’t need no stinkin’ stiff upper lip. Didn’t we learn anything from Prohibition and the idiocy of Comstockery?

But for innovation and variation, nothing recently has matched the veritable one-man crime wave of touchdown-celebration freak shows courtesy of controversial, much-maligned and (thus) much-traveled star wide receiver Terrell Owens, the bête noire of sports prudes everywhere. Mr. Owens is the guy known for scoring a touchdown and then taking out a Sharpie pen he’d stuck in his socks, autographing the ball and ostentatiously handing it to his financial consultant; on another occasion, he borrowed a cheerleader’s pompoms to celebrate himself. And then there’s Joe Horn, who used his moment of touchdown triumph to demonstratively take out a cell phone and call his family to break the news.

N.F.L. Brain Damage

What’s really outrageous and hypocritical on the part of these No Fun League bureaucrats is that they’ve sanctioned a game where the one thing that is permitted to be “prolonged or excessive”—and reverently celebrated—is vicious, crippling violence.

Recent studies of the cumulative effect of traumatic brain injuries of the kind sustained in concussions by professional football players (as reported in ESPN the Magazine) suggest that previously neglected brain damage—especially to the pituitary gland—is even more widespread than realized. But the N.F.L. suits are too busy policing end-zone celebrations to do anything about the kind of poorly policed, head-butting, helmet-spearing violence endemic to the league. (They could put a stop to it if they penalized the players $15K as well as 15 yards).

The league winks at violence so it can promote its product with jacked-up, “jacked” violent-hit videos. What fun! Brain damage in the making. It’s O.K. to have fun watching the players’ frontal lobes battered to jelly, but God forbid that they let off a little steam after they make a great play.

In fact, there may be a connection between the two that the N.F.L. suits don’t seem to get. I was talking to a knowledgeable friend who pointed out that in the violent pressure cooker of N.F.L. games, touchdown celebrations are lighthearted ways of letting off steam. And that the ability to let off steam in harmless ways may be a factor in reducing the unnecessarily malicious viciousness of the hits that cause brain damage.

How do we make the No Fun League come to its senses? Somebody has got to make a YouTube video of great N.F.L. touchdown dances. The superb archivists of the game at N.F.L. Films could do it in a heartbeat (maybe they already have). It would demonstrate just how much a part of the game these moments of physical joy are. That athletics isn’t all brute force, but wit and, you know, fun, too.

Bring back the Ickey Shuffle.

Overheard on the W train rumbling beneath the West 20s on Thursday evening:

Two men, one in a Jets jacket, struck up a conversation about the NFL team's playoff prospects. The conversation, then, as it often still does in New York, turned to real estate, and the non-Jets man introduced himself as a broker.

Jets Jacket: CNN said today that home sales are up while prices are down.

Broker: But Manhattan, it's totally different. [Buyers] know it's an island, so there's only so many places you can go.

Jets Jacket: And there's a lot of people running around with more dollars than sense.

Broker [laughing]: Exactly.

- Tom Acitelli

April 12: "Jay Cross...said the stadium would not be ready to open in time for the 2010 Super Bowl unless he ordered 17,000 tons of steel by the end of May."

But here we are in the end of May, and this week's NFL vote has the Jets still in line for 2010.

"Another deadline that turned out to be, shall we say, elastic," writes a correspondent.

An uproar ensued, of course. The National Football League announced that the skit was "inappropriate and unsuitable for our Monday Night Football audience."

The N.F.L. got it exactly wrong. The skit was entirely appropriate for M.N.F., if you assume-as the show's producers and advertisers clearly do-that the show's audience consists in the main of moronic frat boys who guzzle beer, play violent video games, drive fast cars and require a little help in the bedroom.

To watch M.N.F., or any professional football game today, is to be overwhelmed with salacious beer ads featuring women bursting out of small bathing suits, crude commercials for violent video games featuring thug-like athletes, and a potency-improving drug that warns users to call a doctor (but not a desperate housewife?) in the event of a four-hour erection.

Pre-game shows feature former athletes who clearly could have benefited from more effective head protection during their playing days. One of the N.F.L.'s broadcast partners, Fox, regularly celebrates not skill and grace, but self-centered grandstanding and violent tackles. CBS uses its N.F.L. coverage to promote shows like C.S.I.: Whatever, making sure to show lots of mangled corpses and gratuitous gunfire to excite the football-viewing masses.

Despite all this, I still follow the Giants on TV every week, and I'll check out the two Thanksgiving Day games this Thursday. But when I'm watching the N.F.L., the remote is never far from my hand, lest any innocents enter the room.

You'd think I was watching porno. But it's just the N.F.L.

-Terry Golway

Five Reasons Sideways Flops

1. It steals a whole plot line from Swingers (guy tries to get his heartbroken buddy laid during road trip; heartbroken buddy ditches hot prospect, makes pathetic phone calls to ex)-and Swingers had less irritating interstitial music.

2. The idea that someone who looks like Virginia Madsen would go for someone who looks like Paul Giamatti-ludicrous. No wonder paunchy fortysomething heterosexual film critics like this movie.

3. Ooh, look at me! I'm a fancy "indie" director. I can split the screen into four parts!

4. Half an hour too long.

5. Who leaves wedding bands in his wallet?

-Alexandra Jacobs

Hand-Licking

The latest fashion in sex is hand-licking.

"Strangely, it started on the Upper East Side," notes sex researcher Kyle Davaratt. "It slowly migrated downtown and has now reached Brooklyn."

Most popular among 29-to-34-year-olds, hand-licking usually occurs during foreplay but may also accompany genital sex.

"It can be erotic, but sometimes I find it nauseating," observed Adele S., 30, of Chelsea. "If I drink margaritas I like it, but after two beers it grosses me out."

"When I was a kid, I had a border collie who constantly licked my hand," recalled Matt Vistad, 33, of Carroll Gardens, "so I find it comforting."

-Sparrow

York are willing to part with a billion dollars of their money, one day they

will know the thrill of playing host to the great ahistorical American

spectacle formerly known as the National Football League championship.

The massive West Side stadium proposal, which Mayor Rudolph

Giuliani has revived and reconstituted to serve as a new home for the New York

Jets, would qualify as a potential Super Bowl site because it will, in the

words of hockey writer Michael McKinley, put a roof on winter. The N.F.L.

demands that the Super Bowl be played in winter-defying locales like Tampa or,

on very rare occasions, in suburban northern locations with indoor stadiums and

E-Z access to the interstate system, like Pontiac, Mich. That these places not

only defy weather but history is not coincidental. The Super Bowl is the

grossest sort of sports-history revisionism, its Roman-numeral chronology

suggesting that the world championship of American football held its first

convocation a mere 35 years ago, and not back in the early days of radio.

Similarly, its warm-weather locales have bulldozed the past and constructed a

narrative beginning in the 1960's. Here in Tampa, a lonely marker commemorates

the site of Fort Brooke, from which two future U.S. Presidents, Andrew Jackson

and Zachary Taylor, directed wars against the Seminoles. The marker is meant

for passers-by; this being a 1960's city in Florida, pedestrians are few and

cars many. This being Florida, the site of Fort Brooke is a parking lot

adjacent to an elevated highway named not for a President, but for a football

player, Lee Roy Selman.

Throughout Super Bowl

week, the N.F.L. fed the media a diet of processed, flash-frozen and

microwavable facts dating back to Super Bowl I in 1967. We were presented with

a list of Super Bowl M.V.P.'s; the record for completed passes in a Super Bowl;

the fewest points allowed in a Super Bowl. Halfway through the Ravens' 34-7

rout of the Giants, the media was informed that the two teams already had combined

for the most number of punts in a Super Bowl. Punt returner Tiki Barber was a

busy man.

Written out of these records, then, are those teams and

individuals who competed for the world championship of American football before

1967. As the giant video screen in Raymond James Stadium entertained the crowd

during endless commercial breaks with highlights from past Super Bowls, the

contingent of foreign press and other tourists might have concluded that

American football didn't exist before the

invention of color TV, Astroturf and performance-enhancing dietary

supplements.

Like Tampa, like the

other Sunbelt cities that host most Super Bowls, the N.F.L. prefers lonely

markers to preservation. A spiral-bound press handout had a small account of

championship games before 1967; the era of the Super Bowl, however, had its own

records, its own narrative, its own legends. Sam Huff, Sid Luckman, Charlie

Conerly and Rosy Grier have no place in the revised history of the N.F.L.

championship. It is as if Major League Baseball decided that championship

history began with divisional play in 1969, and that the likes of Ted Williams,

Stan Musial, Jackie Robinson and Bob Feller deserved no more than a plaque on a

lonely corner. In the revised canon of N.F.L. championship lore, the New York

Giants have two wins and one loss. In fact, the Giants have competed for the

world championshipof American football 17 times since 1933, winning five

titles. But only the championships of 1987 and 1991 are celebrated; the others

have been virtually erased from the record.

The Super Bowl, then, is completely harmonious with its

usual settings, and surely would seem out of place in New York, where a

Landmarks Preservation Commission attempts to control the impulse to wipe out

the past, where residents do not touch even a single brick on a landmarked

townhouse. New Yorkers are famous for their apparent disregard for antiquity if

it stands in the way of a buck, but that reputation is highly exaggerated, as

many a foiled developer well knows.

Nevertheless, a campaign

to bring the game to New York seems inevitable. The Jets and Mr. Giuliani will

play the part of the Ravens' defense to the taxpayers' Kerry Collins. The Jets

and the Mayor will disguise their maneuvering; they will set up distractions, and

they will force errors.

Gone are the days when

New York could watch places like Tampa and Pontiac and Jacksonville with

confident detachment, recognizing quiet desperation in their hunger for Super

Bowl validation. Mr. Giuliani is not unlike those good citizens of the

provinces who associate civic pride with sporting events. He was here in Tampa,

walking grim-faced toward the losing team's locker room and wearing a blue

Giants' cap with an "NY" logo.

The Giants, of course, have been playing in the New Jersey

suburbs, with E-Z highway access, since 1976.

Of course, there's another, perhaps more profound, reason to

argue against the pairing of New York and the Super Bowl. Somebody, wiser than

he or she may ever know, once said that politics is show business for ugly

people. To that axiom, add another: The Super Bowl is the Oscars for fat

people.

That's not to say that the Super Bowl is only for people of

girth-although those who trolled this city's ad-hoc souvenir stands for an

official Super Bowl golf shirt with the letter M on the collar were subjected

to the humiliation of sifting through mounds of XL's and XXL's. It was enough

of an ordeal to feel singled out, personally aggrieved and even discriminated

against, and thus eligible for the victim-compensation entitlements (appearance

on talk shows, large legal settlements, etc.).

Regardless of body shape

and size, the 100,000 people who came here to watch the Ravens pummel the

Giants were fat-that is, fat in the sense of being unfashionable, whether in

dress, personal consumption, reading material or voting habits. Although they

gather every year to put on the single biggest spectacle in American popular

culture, Super Bowl goers do so without the company of society's high priests

and priestesses, i.e., the glossy New Yorkers who celebrate the edginess of

fart jokes in prime time or the courage of actors who publicly proclaim their

devotion to partial-birth abortion and animal rights.

More people watch the

Super Bowl than watch the Academy Awards, a fact that was noted with some

astonishment last year in The Village Voice . The Super Bowl, then,

could be and indeed should be viewed as the signature event in American popular

culture. Yet during Super Bowl week, there were no equivalents of those

fabulous Oscar parties (unless one counts the Commissioner's Ball, and one

doesn't), no celebrity editors attaching themselves to a famous face in hopes

of a moment of reflected glory, no Fleet Street types (or their high-end peers)

voicing their well-informed interpretations of Americana.

The Super Bowl apparently is a puzzle for those who

otherwise are quick to celebrate, or excuse, popular culture. Over Super Bowl

weekend, National Public Radio-a reliable

barometer of elite opinion-acknowledged the game with features about the

criminal records of some of the participants and a light-hearted report on

testosterone levels that had all the hallmarks of an anthropological study of

this odd species known as the male sports fan. One earnest NPR host (the

redundancy will be excused), in the course of wringing her hands over the

admittedly bad behavior of some N.F.L. players, noted with some exasperation

that fans still flocked to the game despite the low crimes and misdemeanors of

some players. No doubt I missed similar

commentary about those who continued to donate money, vote for and defend a

handful of Democratic miscreants in recent years. On Super Bowl Sunday itself,

NPR featured a celebratory report on the persistence of disco culture in

Europe-there was no mention of some of that culture's ancillary activities,

like drug consumption and date rape.

At its heart, the Super

Bowl is a Red Country cultural event, looked upon with disdain or ignored entirely among Blue Country's arbiters in

New York. This is just as well, I suppose: The Super Bowl may well be as

commercial as your average political

convention, but it remains strangely

unaffected by the rituals of celebrity culture. Unfortunately, some N.F.L.

officials apparently find this worrisome, and thus they recruited MTV to help

produce a half-time show that took only a few seconds to put matters on a level

the cultural elites might better understand. One of the hosts, looking for that

cutting-edge NPR audience, used the word "sucked" during this most-watched

television event known to humankind. This great cultural victory for hip

entertainment took place at about 8:10 p.m. E.S.T., early enough for the

children in the audience to listen and learn.

Though it no doubt would

take some courage on their part, N.F.L. officials would be well-advised to

resist the urge to bring their product down to the low levels celebrated in

high places, like New York. The sport's heroes-its legitimate heroes, not the

thugs who are as naturally inclined to violent sports as self-centered louts are

to show business-are positively countercultural.

At a Super Bowl eve

ceremony announcing new inductees to the N.F.L. Hall of Fame, the speeches were

humble, touching, self-effacing and utterly without political or cultural

commentary. In other words, precisely the opposite of the Oscars or the Grammys

or the MTV awards. Jack Youngblood, the onetime Los Angeles Ram, began his

remarks by thanking God for giving him talent; Jackie Slater, one of the

largest human beings in Tampa or on the planet, paid tribute to his teammates.

And Marv Levy, the Harvard history major who coached the Buffalo Bills to four

championship games, cut himself off when he decided he was rambling. He had

spoken for no more than a minute or two.

For better and for worse, the Super Bowl clearly is best

suited elsewhere.

Folks, let's face it, there are only two kinds of sports fans. First up, there's the blood-and-guts romantic variety–you know who you are–the sort of person who takes sport seriously, very seriously, perhaps too seriously. These fans become moody and erratic when their teams lose, wild when they win. They attend to their teams like crazy, jealous lovers. They submit completely and willingly to the mythology of sports, to its pantheon of heroes and villains, to its desire and despair and to its own internal logic and justice. They believe in another world and will gladly suffer for it. Some people say they're just plain nuts, that they should lighten up–after all, it's just a game–and yet during a three-hour ball game, romantic sports fans know a life more bold, coherent and fulfilling than the so-called real life outside the stadium.

These are tough times to be gushy about sport: Salaries are inflated beyond any sensible measure; players whine and gripe, rivaled in greed only by the owners who treat them like cattle, on a good day. The second kind of sports fan, who knows all about tough times, has grown adept at handling the compromises of modern sport. These are the sports cynics, and though at one point in their lives they may have been sports romantics, they now embrace a hard truth unknown to Joe Six-Pack (the beer, not the abs) in the stands. While the romantics submit to the game, the cynics find fault with the alienation of athletes from their fans, with the unchecked greed of owners. (For further reading, see Phil Mushnick's column in the New York Post .)

Though the sports cynics survey the field with a cold gaze, they're not completely heartless. They're in love with the past, which they unfailingly cast as a halcyon period of purity, when athletes played for the love of the game, cheered on by well-mannered fans, in $3 seats, while the owners, lovable family philanthropists, happily contributed to the public good.

Which brings us to American Fan , by Dennis Perrin, which purports to analyze the current condition of the American sports nut. Mr. Perrin keeps his observations limited to the big three (National Football League, National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball), but there's little else to structure the book–it meanders like an extended Mike Lupica column. In one early section, Mr. Perrin drifts from a riff on Dennis Rodman's bad behavior to Mormon fans to Phil Jackson to Buddhism to the Champions for Christ to homosexuality–all this strung together by the loosest of narrative threads.

American Fan seems mostly an opportunity for Mr. Perrin to display his own punk rock sensibilities. Before going on to take quick shots at George Will, born-again athletes, double standards in the N.B.A. ( No , really?), Mr. Perrin informs us that he used to be an American Basketball Association fan, and that he preferred the now defunct World Football League and World Hockey Association to the N.F.L. and the National Hockey League. That should come as no surprise to readers of Mr. Perrin's previous book, Mr. Mike , a biography of evil-genius humorist, National Lampoon then Saturday Night Live writer Michael O'Donoghue. In that largely uncritical work, Mr. Perrin established his taste for Mr. O'Donoghue's edgy, dangerous fare. He brings the same attitude to American Fan .

All elbows, Mr. Perrin tries to put some angry, ironic distance between himself and his subject matter, but he's so poor at controlling the tone that you never know whether he's joking or not. Thus a serious homage to A.J. Liebling comes across slightly sappy, and a tongue-in-cheek appreciation of Mike Lupica comes across clumsy.

The finest section of American Fan addresses Michael Jordan and his compromised relationship with Nike–especially pertinent in light of the basketball great's recent ascension into the ranks of N.B.A. owners. For once, Mr. Perrin sustains a single line of inquiry. Why couldn't he achieve that sort of focus throughout?

Actually, I agree with most of Mr. Perrin's observations, but the ideas–George Will is pompous, the N.B.A. is deceptive, Nike is exploitative, Mike Lupica is a weenie–though presented with lots of verbal punch, are themselves practically cliché and hardly bear repeating. In one typical passage Mr. Perrin observes, "most fans of major league franchises are bent over railings while owners act out the love scene from Deliverance –and then are asked for a donation afterward." Like we need this?

Mr. Perrin underestimates his readers. He lays out his diatribes as if to a dopey and blinded public. Perhaps sports fans, far from being hapless idiots, very consciously seek out delusion. Perhaps even the romantic fans are secret cynics: They know they are being exploited, but the delusion is important to them–so important that to retain it, they will happily pay even more money than they already do.