Super Bowl prankster did it for clicks, cash

Think of his monumental feat as Yuri Andrade’s Mount Everest. Except, instead of an Alpine parka, Yuri wore an immodest, undersized, one-piece woman’s swimsuit, pink, with a thong behind bisecting his hairy buttocks.

Thus garbed, before a television audience of 91.629 million, Andrade achieved “the greatest moment of my life.”

Also, the most profitable, minus the $1,000 bail Yuri and his accomplice posted after a night in jail.

Andrade, as you might recall if you were still awake for the second half, was the interloper who disrupted last Sunday’s Super Bowl. But don’t confuse him with streakers of old, who in ill-considered moments of drunken spontaneity scampered across America’s playing fields. Yuri Andrade, a Boca boy, was executing a choreographed performance for the Digital Age. His was a calculated commercial enterprise, staged for the clicks.

Also, as Andrade confided to the Tampa Bay Times, he did it to collect on his winning bets. He told the Times he had spread $40,000 among various gambling outlets on the longshot possibility that an unwelcomed someone would trespass on our hallowed annual ritual.

Wow. Who knew that betting parlors accepted wagers on whether a spectator would intrude on the Super Bowl? Apparently, gamblers can wager on the length of the national anthem, the outcome of the coin toss, the color of the Gatorade dumped on the winning coach, how many times the TV cameras focus on Gisele Bundchen (Tom Brady’s wife), which pack of dogs would win the Puppy Bowl? And, oh yeah, which team prevails in the human competition?

First, a decoy (paid $5,000) leapt from the grandstand, diverting the cops, allowing Yuri to make his own dash, tearing off his shirt to reveal his hot-pink scantiness before he was finally tackled at the goal line (something the Chiefs couldn’t accomplish.)

Such glory. But the key to this utterly unspontaneous operation was the “Vitaly Uncensored” emblazoned across the front of his swimsuit.

Andrade was actually a surrogate streaker, acting on behalf of notorious internet prankster Vitaly Zdorovetskiy, whose interruptions are so well known — the 2014 World Cup Final, the 2016 NBA finals, the 2017 World Series — that stadium security surely had him on a watch list.

Zdorovetskiy, also of Boca Raton, administers Vitaly Uncensored, an X-rated YouTube channel featuring videos of outrageous stunts, most of them involving naked young women appearing in unexpected circumstances.

“We (expletive) did it,” Zdorovetskiy tweeted, wallowing in all that valuable publicity.

Such exploits have reportedly made Zdorovetskiy a millionaire seven times over, thanks to the internet where posting eye-grabbing videos is a burgeoning industry, the modern equivalent of your father’s widget factory, because views translate into advertising revenue and merchandise sales. Who wouldn’t want to buy their bestie a hot pink Vitaly Uncensored thong-bottomed bathing suit for Valentine’s Day?

The wilder-the-better click-bait ethos similarly sustains the online presence of far-out political craziness. Among the Jan. 6 insurrectionists who breached the U.S. Capitol (and murdered a policeman,) unaffiliated freelance videographers were both live-streaming and encouraging the rioters. Either they shared the invaders extremist ideology or — just as likely — they wanted to generate clicks. “We’ve got over 100,000 people live, watching. Let’s go,” alt-right video provocateur Anthime Joseph Gione shouted amid the chaos. “Hit that follow button.”

Gione, according to the New York Times, was known for provoking, then streaming violent confrontations with, say, store clerks who insisted he obey a mask mandate. Gione explained to cops that he was an internet influencer with a large social media following, which explains a lot of lousy behavior.

The online awfulness of Georgia’s Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene might have been rebuked by civil society (except congressional Republicans), but in the parallel universe of social media, her bizarre QAnon-based conspiracy theories are money-makers. Within two days after she was stripped of her committee assignments last week, Greene’s Facebook and Twitter followers had donated $325,000 to her campaign fund. (That atop $1.6 million accrued after the national media dug up her past conspiratorial posts.)

Sure that video of Greene harassing Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg, whom she claimed was an actor in a faked massacre, was based on a repugnant lie, but truth is an irrelevant inconvenience in her online netherworld. Greene was only streaming a cynical video prank in pursuit of clicks and cash.

Between Zdorovetskiy and Greene, the uncensored Vitaly is so much closer to the moral high ground, he and Yuri could be looking down from Mount Everest.