Columnist John Katsilometes: Obnoxious XFL has a niche

Monday, Feb. 12, 2001 | 8:50 a.m.

John Katsilometes is the Sun features editor. His column appears Mondays. Reach him at kats@lasvegassun.com or 259-2327.

It's so difficult to pinpoint the moment where I felt attending the first XFL game in Las Vegas was a bad idea.

Maybe it was when I was halted in traffic, a short pass from the Sam Boyd Stadium general parking lot but still 50 minutes from actually parking my car.

Or when the Outlaws' radio team, apparently supercharged by fistfuls of Vivarin, offered a sizzling description of a wrecking ball's destruction of a taxicab (this was part of the elaborate pregame ceremonies).

Or when the guy sitting next to me cried, "I want my money back!," hot and bothered over being was unable to focus his binoculars on an Outlaw cheerleader shaking her chaps on the stadium big screen.

I do know it was before the 10-minute mark of the third quarter, when I ducked out of the creep show and called it a night.

From where I sat (next to the auxiliary scoreboard, thankyaverymuch), the XFL opener was an evening of bad fights and worse football, of drunken buffoonery befitting a midnight showing of "Animal House" and the inevitable traffic snarls whenever a crowd of 30,000 descends on Sam Boyd.

Oh, there was plenty to whine about after Vince McMahon brought his circus to town, but at issue is the larger question: Will it succeed?

For a while, yes.

The first mistake in examining the XFL is to treat it as a legitimate football league. It is not. This is bad football, more akin to the closing scenes in "The Longest Yard," than the NFL. The XFL should instead be treated as a show, with the crowd serving as the studio audience and the quality of football a mere diversion. In fact, the less you enjoy or know about football, the more you'll enjoy the XFL.

The league has two significant backers: NBC, which has committed its network muscle to the project, and McMahon, a proven marketing genius. Instead of comparing the XFL to the NFL, examine McMahon's World Wrestling Federation. The WWF's weekly shows on TNN regularly top the Nielsen's cable ratings, and the scripted WWF productions sell out across the country (including in Las Vegas).

The wrestling is not the primary draw, either. Studies have shown that McMahon's "WWF Raw" and "WWF War Zone" devote 20 percent of air time to actual wrestling, or whatever they call that flailing and leaping about. The rest is puffery, hype and sweaty men shouting into cameras.

Neither the WWF or XFL has any misconceptions about what they are. Long ago the WWF quit trying to perpetrate the ruse that its action was real and affixed the word "preconceived" to its product. And while the XFL is genuine competition (genuinely bad most of the time) the long-term allure will be the action on the periphery. Cheerleaders are displayed prominently in all XFL commercials and certainly during the game, given equal footing as the players. Fireworks and the screaming dissertations of WWF stars on the big screen will thrill the crowd when action on the field cannot.

Detractors have referred to XFL fans as the lowest common denominator. Maybe they are, but that denominator was represented by 30,000 fans in the seats, and many millions more watching on TV. The XFL is mostly hype and not fit for the entire family, but it can't be called a failure.