Disco Demolition Night? His baby. Owns six minor-league baseball teams, promotes the peanut shells out of them. His dad was Bill Veeck, the greatest American impresario since P.T. Barnum. Sent a midget to the plate for the St. Louis Browns.

Mike Veeck bows down to the Super Bowl, which has become, in the words of Lawrence Wenner, professor of communication at the University of San Francisco, "a cultural high-holy day."

(Norman Vincent Peale, giving a sermon in New York City on the day of Super Bowl X, told his flock, "If Jesus were alive today, He'd be at the Super Bowl." Advertising maven Jim Johnson of Anspach Grossman Enterprise told his flock, "If we were to brand America, the brand would be Super Bowl.")

Mike Veeck is alive today. He won't be there in Detroit on Sunday, but he'll be watching, along with, oh, 130 million other Americans, many of whom will be hosting or attending Super Bowl parties (and ordering 3.2 million pizzas, give or take a pie or two) — and most of whom will be waiting breathlessly for the commercials.

Waiting for the commercials! Not running to the restroom, but actually looking forward to them. Chances are, in the ensuing four hours, a new national catch phrase will be born, the "Whassup?" of 2006. A business or four will be saved or ruined, depending on how their agency came through for the company's $2.5 million per 30 seconds of air time.

"In my world — advertising — the Super Bowl is judgment day," legendary ad man Jerry Della Femina wrote in the Wall Street Journal. "If politicians have Election Day and Hollywood has the Oscars, advertising has the Super Bowl."

Back to Veeck. Got sidetracked there. That happens with the Super Bowl, which is a main tent surrounded by dozens of sideshows, a blur of noise and commotion. Lose focus, and you can get lost in the cacophony. Fred Dryer, who played in a Super Bowl with the Rams (XIV, if we may numeral-drop here) before he stepped down a notch in glitz and went to Hollywood, was asked if the Super Bowl was as big as death.

"Bigger," he replied. "At least it comes in a bigger box."

But we digress. Veeck. Focus.

"I think any time you can captivate the country the way they have, obviously they've done a magnificent job," Veeck said. "Can you over-hype it? Of course. Are they getting close? Of course. The fundamental thing is, will they know when to quit? No. The fans let you know."

The hype has come to define the event. Even the scholarly descriptions of the Super Bowl are hyped up. Listen to Dr. Don Beck, director of the National Values Center, who in 1991 called the Super Bowl "the American dream on cleats," in an interview with the St. Petersburg Times.

"It has all the drama of soap operas on television," gushed Dr. Beck. "It has the high technology, the whiz-bang space age, the gadgets. It has the whole concept of strategic, goal-centered thinking. It keeps score so we know who wins, who loses. It has the echoes of the warrior class, with the gladiators. Then you add in all the celebrity Hollywoodizing ... "

Add all that up, and the Super Bowl has come to a point that the very term "hype" — connoting, as it does in Webster's, "deception" or "fraud" — is no longer apt. The Super Bowl delivers what it promises — the ratings, the buzz, the return on investment (both emotional and financial).

"To me, it's way beyond hype," said Cliff Burnstein, co-manager of Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fountains of Wayne and Shania Twain.

"The word hype derives from 'hyperbole,' to overstate. Which, of course, in my business might be good for a time for some people, but you don't want to make it your bread and butter. If you overstate and people under-deliver, the whole game is over.

"Hype is a dangerous thing. I don't think the Super Bowl is hype."

David Carter, a sports business professor at USC, calls the Super Bowl "as much of a pop-culture phenomenon as anything that's come along in some time ... just short of a national holiday."

But Carter posits the question, "Is it over the top?" and concludes, "I don't think it is. The hype is commensurate with the amount of interest in the NFL."

Jim Steeg, now chief operating officer of the San Diego Chargers, was Super Bowl coordinator for 26 years as the NFL's Director of Special Events, from 1979 to 2004. Speaking Roman, that's XIII to XXXVIII.

"It's not hype," Steeg said firmly. "The league, if anything, has always tried to downplay it. I'll give you the irony: Find where the league has gone out and advanced the Super Bowl.

"For all the 240 games during the year, you have to send a PR guy into the city. Here, it's like stories happen because the media creates them. You sit back and respond."

Steeg, like most NFL insiders, gives full credit to Pete Rozelle, the visionary who guided the Super Bowl into hyperspace.

"I just think he had an idea what this could become," Steeg said. "It was his baby, absolutely. The first year we did the Friday night party, he was literally into what type of flowers we put out."

The NFL's first stroke of genius was putting the game at a neutral site.

"We could never move this traveling circus into place on one week's notice," said Steeg.

And the second stroke of genius was adding the extra week after the NFC and AFC title games, which allows the drama and anticipation to fester.

"It was as calculated a decision as was ever made by the league," former Cowboys president Tex Schramm told the Dallas Morning News. "The idea was to give the game time to build. That allowed us to get the teams in early, to make them available, to make sure that the media got everything it needed to tell the world about our game."

It did. It still does.

"The Super Bowl," Rozelle once said, "is like the last chapter in a hair-raising mystery. No one would dare think of missing it."

That's not hype. That's reality.

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