Columnist Susan Snyder: Football’s not the only game in town

Saturday, Jan. 27, 2001 | 10:40 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or 259-4082.

What a difference a decade makes.

As you watch today's 35th annual Parade of the Over-Paid and Padded, you may see footage of another parade from Super Bowl host city Tampa, Fla. It will have pirates and drunks and all the fixings of a proper Gasparilla Pirate Fest parade.

This annual Tampa event usually happens in February, but was moved to January so it would coincide with the Most Important Football Game in the History of the Universe. But as I said, what a difference a decade makes.

When Tampa hosted Super Bowl XXV back in 1991 the NFL wouldn't touch Gasparilla with a 30-foot goal post. The parade, a sanctioned Super Bowl event this year, was a super-sized public relations nightmare 10 years ago.

That's because the event -- a mock pirate invasion -- was run by a private, invitation-only, all-white, all-male organization called Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla. At the time Ye Mystic Krewe was the treehouse to which Tampa's wealthy, white men wanted to be invited. Its ladder was not extended to blacks.

And that type of exclusivity emanating from the well-heeled bowels of a Southern city didn't sit well with the forward-thinking officials of the NFL.

The national news media jumped on Gasparilla like a blitzing Baltimore Raven. Ye Mystic Krewe anchored its pirate ship and stayed home. There was no Gasparilla. The city quickly concocted a lame pedestrian mall logjam called Bamboleo. Tampa's collective response was, "Bambo whut?"

The Bills weren't the only losers that year.

So just what is Gasparilla?

It's a massive street party with a Mardi Gras-type parade dedicated to the legend of Jose Gaspar, a pirate whose story was resurrected in 1904 by a Tampa newspaper society columnist.

The legend says Gaspar robbed and pillaged along Florida's west coast during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The former Spanish naval officer walked the path to piracy after leading a 1783 mutiny and stealing a Spanish sloop.

Today Ye Mystic Krewe members sail into Tampa via Hillsborough Bay on a 165-foot, fully rigged pirate ship. They dock at the city's convention center and spill over the railing for the parade which, until 1991, included only them and members of six other exclusive "krewes."

The 1991 Super Bowl wasn't the first time Gasparilla made publicity waves. In 1916 a mess of pigs and chickens fell off a schooner and drowned during the invasion. The animals reportedly plunged into the water after slurping up the grog spilled on the deck.

In 1926 the pirate ship ran aground and severed a telephone line, leaving one of the city's elite neighborhoods without service. And in 1927 a pirate fired his 12-gauge, double-barreled shotgun at a hovering dirigible, forcing an emergency landing.

After 1991's unpleasantness Ye Mystic Krewe opened its membership to blacks (still invitation-only). The field of secondary krewes now is 24.

There are krewes for women, one for aviation buffs and one in which members honor the all-black U.S. Calvary Buffalo Soldiers of 1866. There's a krewe from the Seminole Indian casino and one devoted entirely to racial diversity.

What a difference a decade makes.

Pass the salsa. Go Giants.