Fifty years ago, the idea of putting the Super Bowl in Las Vegas, coupling the two primary examples of American excess, was as surreal as those two prodigious entities. Mostly because the National Football League—its Super Bowl showcase already out of control in 1974 and proclaimed by a commentator in that year’s host city of Houston to be “the championship of the solar system”—was adamant in its holier-than-thou stance against gambling.

“I would go anywhere,” then-NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle declared during Super Bowl Week of ‘74, “to testify against any proposals favoring legalized betting in pro sports. There is no doubt about the suspicions involved with betting, and we must be above suspicion.”

But here we are. The NFL now gleefully partners with multiple sportsbook operations—MGM, Caesars, FanDuel, DraftKings—has bookmaking establishments inside NFL stadiums that are open on game days, and debuted official NFL slot machines in Vegas days before this year’s big game. Where there is money to be made by the league…

It was right to the point, then, for the New York Times last week to note that the first Super Bowl played in Sin City “feels like a moment manufactured for” Hunter S. Thompson “as Las Vegas furthers the polishing of its image with the imprimatur of the NFL, which has made a seminal turn of its own with a public embrace of the gambling industry.” Thompson, creator of the subjective, first-person narrative he called “gonzo journalism,” attended that 1974 Super Bowl and produced a Rolling Stones magazine article headlined “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl.”

That was a take-off on Thompson’s best-selling 1971 book, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.” And the idea of the Rolling Stones piece was to subject the NFL to Thompson’s critical eye; though he considered himself a football fan, he cast himself as apart from what he saw as the NFL’s self-serving model of integrity.

For Rolling Stone, Thompson wrote that the Super Bowl headquarters hotel in Houston was “jammed with drunken sportswriters, hard-eyed hookers, wandering geeks and hustlers (of almost every persuasion) and a legion of big and small gamblers from all over the country who roamed through the drunken, randy crowd….”

That Super Bowl Week, I spent the better part of one day with Thompson, assigned by my Newsday editor to study the then-36-year-old, slightly bald, bespectacled, casually dressed celebrity author who smoked Benson & Hedges through a cigarette holder. (Not the only thing he smoked.) And the irony was that he appeared to be searching in vain for the Las Vegas cliché of rampant immorality.

During lunch in the lobby of the aforementioned hotel, he muttered about the absolute normality surrounding him. Where were the players and high rollers propositioning prostitutes? He drove me without warning to a dilapidated roadside bar—which appeared to be a topless joint, though not in use for that activity mid-day—but quickly left, with nothing to report.

We spent some time at a Super Bowl practice session for one of the teams—Miami eventually clobbered Minnesota in the dull title game to come—and Thompson decided that “the players almost all strike me as being the same person. I’ve never seen so many boring people.”

Then, as now, the hordes of reporters had no real news to unearth; everything about Super Bowl opponents already has been widely disseminated by the time they gather at the championship site. “I feel like calling my editor and telling him there’s no story here,” Thompson said. “There really isn’t anything happening.”

He subsequently wrote for Rolling Stone, “For eight long and degrading days, I had skulked around Houston with all the other professionals, doing our jobs—which was actually to do nothing at all except drink all the free booze we could pour into our bodies, courtesy of the National Football League, and listen to an endless barrage of some of the lamest and silliest swill ever uttered by man or beast…”

It must be noted that “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was straightforward in Thompson’s depictions of his own drug-induced haze—pill-popping, pot-smoking, tequila-swilling, acid-dropping. And that, in “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl,” he described his “crazed and futile effort to somehow explain the extremely twisted nature of my relationship with God, Nixon and the National Football League…”

The Super Bowl—I covered seven of the extravaganzas—never appeared to reach the level of disreputable behavior perceived by Thompson, though his radar likely was more sensitive to such grotesqueries. The event most definitely is over-the-top—a massive royal ball for the elite, scripted as a morality play of American values and competitiveness, sold as entertainment for the masses—thanks to the reach of television. In short, a voracious money magnet for the league and its partners.

Hunter S. Thompson died in 2005, of suicide. But he appeared to sense, a half-century ago, this just-consummated no-guilt relationship, which nicely fits Sin City’s marketed dispensation that “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” There already are hints that the Super Bowl could return there annually.

If so, they’re made for each other.