LAS VEGAS — It’s Super Bowl week, which means the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers are starting to feel that nervous tingle as football’s greatest show rapidly approaches. 

As Super Bowl LVIII closes in on Sin City, the golfers are fine-tuning their short games, the boxers are making their grueling weight cuts, the hockey players are licking their wounds and the Power Slap “athletes” are doing whatever they do to prepare for combat (more on Power Slap later).

The LIV event’s midweek pro-am features current NFL players like Derek Carr and Will Levis, as well as expected high draft pick Drake Maye all taking part. By design, it seeks to borrow from the success of the PGA Tour’s WM Open in Phoenix, which boasts a raucous party-style atmosphere and coincided with the Super Bowl last year and in 2015. 

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“I think it’s us trying to create a spectacle for the United States,” 2020 U.S. Open championship Bryson DeChambeau told reporters. “I think we haven’t been highlighted enough here in the States, and I can’t wait to see what the response is like with football fans and Vegas fans alike.” 

In the early iterations of the Super Bowl, rival sports would steer clear of the host city, reasoning that with so much focus on the big game, there would be little bandwidth left for anything else. 

Inevitably, there is also a collection of more offbeat activities, all trying to grab an audience share. In 2019, in Atlanta, an enterprising promoter named T.J. McAloon brought “No Ring Bar Wrestling” to the doorstep of the Super Bowl, renting out a facility and setting up his patented show, which as the name suggests, involves wrestlers doing their thing not in a ring, but among the crowd in a regular bar.