By Terry Golway

February 4, 2001 | 7:00 p.m

TAMPA, Fla.-There is talk now that if the taxpayers of New

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.