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EVENTS
CNNSI.com GROUP
COMMERCE
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Rolling in the money The NFL's big game means big bucks for the host city
Updated: Wednesday January 24, 2001 12:05 AM
By John Donovan, CNNSI.com TAMPA, Fla. -- The NFL does not simply give the Super Bowl to a city. It awards it. The Super Bowl is a huge NFL prize, a kind of bouquet, and cities will elbow each other like burly bridesmaids at a wedding to try to snatch the thing. That probably explains why all the people in Tampa who have worked to bring the Super Bowl here are just so darn chipper to finally see it arrive. Super Bowl XXXV -- more than three years after the league "awarded" it to Tampa -- has landed in all its moneyed, practiced splendor. Banners with the Super Bowl logo hang downtown above newly swept streets. TV crews camp out on Harbour Island. Yachts drop anchor along the Hillsborough River. Ybor City, just northeast of downtown, is bracing for one of the bigger parties in the state -- which, in Florida, is saying something. And all of it driven by ... you guessed it ... money, brought here by the NFL and its showcase. Lots of money.
Still, $100 million or more probably isn't that far off, when you consider what the NFL alone plops down. The convention space leased for the 3,000 members of the media, for instance. The hotel rooms used by the league, the media and the few thousand fans that actually are here for the game. Transportation. The parties. Heck, the parties alone that the NFL throws for advertisers, media, owners and other bigwigs must put the league back a few million. More than what immediately goes in or comes out, though, may be the long-term effect that hosting a Super Bowl may have on the health of a city. Tampa last threw a Super Bowl 10 years ago, and since then the waterfront area of downtown and the surrounding area has seen some $700 million worth of improvements. Luxury hotels, an aquarium, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' new $168 million stadium, the $160 million hockey arena, a sprucing up of the Port of Tampa ... the city's center has been virtually reborn. Not all of it can be tied directly to hosting the NFL's big show, of course. But when more than 100,000 people crowd into town for the events surrounding the game, and more than 800 million worldwide watch the game on television, you can argue that hosting a Super Bowl certainly hasn't hurt Tampa's rebirth. "In a generic sense," says Vicki Isley, the vice president of marketing and communications for the Tampa Bay Convention & Visitors Bureau, "the exposure and visibility of the Tampa area [that a Super Bowl provides] might have something to do with [the resurgence]." Tampa -- or, more accurately, the Tampa Bay area, because Tampa and St. Petersburg go hand-in-hand, like it or not -- was awarded Super Bowl XXXV back in 1997, and the city has had a task force of somewhere around a dozen full-timers in place for the past 18 months. You can see signs of their work in many places you go in this metropolitan area of 2.5 million people. The downtown is the centerpiece, of course. It is where the NFL bases itself for the week. Many of the pictures fans see of the days leading to the Super Bowl will come from here. But St. Petersburg, some 20 minutes away, and Clearwater Beach, a half hour to 45 minutes from downtown Tampa, will hold their share of events. And many outlying communities, like Sarasota, Bradenton, Lakeland and Winter Haven will get their slice of the Super Bowl, too. All of it makes for an area that, for the time being, is consumed with image. And money. Lots of it. Super Bowl Scene will appear each day through Sunday's Super Bowl.
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