Mark Spector

Mark Spector is a columnist for sportsnet.ca

You know the Super Bowl is close at hand when a rum and coke cracks the $12 mark.

“When the Great Scorer comes to write against your name

He won't ask whether you Won or Lost

But how you played The Game.”

— Grantland S. Rice, once known as the Dean of American Sportswriters.

MIAMI — And so they get ready to play the game here in Miami.

Not “The Game” on Sunday. You don’t come to a Super Bowl to stress on Wednesday or Thursday over what’s going to happen on the football field three days from now.

The game that’s being played in Miami over the next couple of days and nights unfolds with predictable larceny every year. Take the drinks at The Clevelander, for instance.

The last time we ordered an everyday, rum and Coke at this open-air bar along Ocean Dr. it was seven-dollars-and-change. That’s about three bucks for the drink, and four-and-a-half for the fantastic, South Beach atmosphere.

Today, on Super Bowl week, they’re bending patrons over to the tune of $12.50 a pour. Just one of the many ways a Super Bowl can account for an economic impact of some $300 million to the local economy.

John is a regular on this strip — Miami is in his sales territory — but he’s staying 45 minutes away in Ft. Lauderdale this week. It seems the hotel nearby where he usually gets a room in the $100 range wants $1,057 per night this week.

“I do a lot of business there. They don’t give a ****,” he gripes.

John is in his late 50’s, stands about 5-foot-3, and talks a lot of smack about getting spotted by the legendary bird dog Tex Schramm, the original GM of the Dallas Cowboys, when he was a young stud. Says he had a tryout with the Cowboys, got $100,000, but blew out a knee.

Guys who don’t want you to look them up always say they blew out a knee at the last minute, right? We’re not buying much of what this guy’s selling, but he’s friendly enough. And he’s clearly had a few practices at The Clevelander, because he is in Position A at the front bar.

From where John is standing, he can order drinks, chat with me and survey the sidewalk parade. Meanwhile, every person (read: woman) who walks into the bar has to walk right past him on their way in.

He leers at each one like a brand inspector at a cattle auction.

“Already had three hookers talk to me in the past two hours,” he said with some pride.

Ya think?

Surely, if you looked up the term “John” in Webster’s Dictionary, you’d find a picture of our hero. Moneyed, older, single, unwilling or unable to act anywhere near his age. He is, curiously, somewhat of an aficionado on the sex trade and its habits during Super Bowl week.

“They all typically fly in Friday. The game’s Sunday, so Friday and Saturday are the money-making nights,” he said, talking to me like he is breaking in a young protégé. “It’ll be a whole different ballgame down here Friday night.”

Out front, a woman in a sexed-up version of traffic-cop garb is dancing on the centre-line between the slow-moving lanes of traffic on this busy drag, cars steering carefully past. A pair of stylishly ripped jeans strangles her hips, and she has procured some form of cleavage-producing reflective vest and a fake cop hat.

The irony is, of course, if traffic cops looked like they would cause more accidents than they prevented. And somehow, none of the real cops seem to want to stop her.

On a Wednesday night of Super Bowl week, she still stands out. By Friday, she’ll have to stand in line.

“Friday, Saturday down here… It’s going to be crazy. All the freaks come out,” our John says. “Hey — everybody strives to make a dollar, work hard. But everybody strives to have some fun in their life. I enjoy having fun.”

They’ll close Ocean Dr. tonight, the two-lane street that separates a 10-block strip of bars and restaurants from the beach and ocean. Those $12.50 drinks will become portable and the streets will be full of over-juiced partiers with ever-decreasing wads of cash in their pockets.

They’re expecting 70,000 people down here every night now. Rihanna, Nelly Furtado and others are scheduled to play a giant stage set right on the beach.

The Direct TV blimp hovers directly overhead. On the street, limos so long they could have been in the Flintstones — with a set of horns on the front — pass by. One after another, after another.

If you don’t live here, you wish you did. If you can’t afford to be here, you wish you could.

If you think you can afford to be here, you’d better check your bank account.

Because Happy Hour isn’t a regular at Super Bowl. It won’t be back ‘til Monday.