Everybody say cheese; the NFL's watching

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By MARY JO MELONE

© St. Petersburg Times, published January 16, 2001

Any self-respecting car thief, crowbar-wielding home invasion artist, or pizza delivery man stick-up squad has to deduce a certain message from Tampa's official vow to crack down on dirty dancing clubs during the Super Bowl:

Party down, dude.

The cops will be busy elsewhere.

They struck over the weekend at that hothouse of female glory, Mons Venus, just south of the stadium, and rounded up two pro hockey players and a couple of dancers.

This was meant as a sign of what's to come: A Super War On The Very Thing That Put This Town On The Map.

Totally naked women.

Okay, so sometimes they wear stilettos.

This was no small police operation. They needed not only undercover cops but backup uniform cops in case already heated passions morphed into another sort of passion and a brawl ensued.

Can you picture the headlines if fights break out on the Big Weekend? Mayor Dick Greco, who has said he'll probably watch the game at home on TV to see how Tampa's image plays across the country, might never want to come out of his house to smooch a strange woman again.

Are the cops going to go after those high-priced escort services?

Are they going to bust the nose candy freaks at those star-studded parties that we natives can't get into?

Or just the homeless and the lonely crack-addicted hookers on Nebraska Avenue?

Certainly we wouldn't want to be accused of hypocrisy.

So surely this will mean they'll peel off a couple of cops meant for the dirty dancing brigade -- unlucky fellows -- and reassign them to chase the kids who steal all those high-end rental cars.

But what if a kid being chased by the cops in a stolen BMW creams some NFL pooh-bah who is in the wrong intersection at the wrong time?

I wouldn't mind the Super Bowl so much if it weren't such a monument to Bloat.

You can spend five grand on tickets.

That's a down payment on a house in a lot of bay area neighborhoods.

And I wouldn't mind the Super Bowl if it weren't the only time the city worked hard at sprucing up things.

We've got $350,000 worth of flowers blooming, grass growing, trees swaying in the breeze. The city says it does these nice things all year.

Tell that to the guy who keeps calling the city to mow the abandoned lot next door in a neighborhood the corporate crowd will never drive through.

And now we have a crackdown on the very thing that made all the millionaires coming to town millionaires in the first place: free enterprise. Beginning Wednesday, you won't be able to sell so much as a T-shirt or balloon around the stadium without the approval of the NFL.

Since the rich are easily offended, the Tampa Sports Authority and the City Council don't want the area around the stadium to look ugly.

They're worried about ugly?

Then why don't they mow down Dale Mabry and start all over again?

Even originality escaped us. Tampa Bay had to lift the language of the NBA to come up with a slogan in advance of the Big Day. "Tampa Bay's Got Game," the billboards declare. "Let It Show."

If you find this difficult, do what beauty queens and cheerleaders do. Slap some Vaseline across your teeth from molars to molars. It'll force you to keep your mouth wide open in a big smile.

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