Super For Arizona?

State turns into sports mecca

By Chris Kahn, AP Business Writer

GLENDALE — Landing the Super Bowl is making the huge bet made on sports-related development in this Arizona town look like a winner. But it could be years before local taxpayers find out whether the tens of millions of dollars in debt they could be on the hook for turns out to be a wise investment.

The NFL will play its biggest game in a stadium that didn’t exist when the rights for the 2008 game were awarded five years ago. The sleek $455 million facility opened two years ago on what was little more than a hardscrabble patch of cotton and alfalfa fields 16 miles northwest of downtown Phoenix.

Voters in Maricopa County approved it, giving the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals a home to replace the team’s previous home at Arizona State University’s stadium in Tempe. But the real payoff always was viewed as the bonanza that would come from hosting Super Bowls after the NFL made it clear the ASU stadium used for the 1996 game was too shabby for another championship.

This week, as football players, fans and celebrities descend on Glendale, city leaders are celebrating their new stature among tourist destinations. Their experience serves as a prime example of the transformative abilities of professional sports, including the estimated $400 million windfall that boosters claim comes from hosting a Super Bowl.

During the past few years Glendale has scraped away many of the old farms on its far west side to make room for a sports and entertainment district that will pull in business once slated for Phoenix.

Next to the football stadium is a hockey arena for the NHL’s Phoenix Coyotes, which opened in 2003, along with high-end specialty shops, restaurants with valet parking, and a huge fountain that squirts water in time with rock music. Nearby, the city broke ground in November on a spring training facility for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Chicago White Sox.

Almost at once, Glendale’s urban center moved from a quaint row of antique shops in its historic district to a patchwork of new developments on the west side. “The community decided they wanted to be a little bit more,” said Glendale city manager Ed Beasley.

Beasley and other Glendale leaders fought hard for this, beating out bids from Phoenix and two suburbs on its east side, Mesa and Tempe, for the state-funded football stadium.

But the city issued or guaranteed about $150 million in debt for the hockey arena and has made big infrastructure investments in the area, according to Deputy City Manager Art Lynch.

Glendale’s population grew by 48 percent in the past decade to nearly 250,000, landing it on the U.S. Census Bureau’s list of fastest-growing cities along with Phoenix and several of its other suburbs.

That growth has been accompanied by a jump in the market value of taxable property to $10.3 billion last year from $7.5 billion in 2002. And while home foreclosures have been spiking in recent months, Lynch notes that even with the increase in the city’s sports-related debt, there hasn’t been an increase in property taxes in 13 years, and in seven of those years, the rate was reduced.

During the past six weeks, Hampton Inn, Residence Inn and a SpringHill Suites opened hotels in Glendale. The combined 700 new rooms almost doubled the amount of hotel space the city had to offer last year.

All three immediately jacked up prices for the Super Bowl rush. Hampton Inn, for example, has no vacancies for Super Bowl weekend despite boosting its nightly rates from about $219 to $799.

Tim Hogan, an economist at Arizona State’s W.P. Carey School of Business, said the Super Bowl has a huge economic impact, comparable to an entire year’s worth of NASCAR and other events at Phoenix International Raceway.

Hogan, who in 1996 studied the spending habits of tourists attending the Super Bowl in Tempe, said sports fans showing up in Glendale are the perfect demographic for making money. “They’re big spenders,” he said. “And unlike a Cardinals game, pretty much everybody is from out of town.”

Super Bowl tourists not only give a short-term boost to restaurants and hotels, but they help drive the rest of the economy by creating a greater demand for companies that supply goods to restaurants and hotels, Hogan said.

Arizona’s Joint Legislative Budget Committee estimates that spending by Super Bowl tourists will boost state sales taxes by $3.6 million to $5.5 million. That’s based on an assumption that 90 percent of people at the game will come from another state and that another 17,000 will come to Arizona without tickets simply to take part in the festivities.

Along the Way: Football madness everywhere

By Corky Simpson

The Super Bowl is the nation’s biggest beer-bust, televised commercial and avocado-sales incentive.

Some people waggishly suggest professional football’s championship game — holy guacamole! — is our No. 1 religious holiday.

Whatever. The best part of it is, you don’t have to go there to enjoy it. In fact, you’re crazy if you try.

It’s the ballyhoo we rally to.

But for heaven’s sake, stay as far away from ground zero as you can get. The National Football League’s magnificently exaggerated title game will be played in University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale on Sunday.

The undefeated New England Patriots will face the Cinderella New York Giants, but the game is a sidebar. The real show is the parade of the world’s costliest, wittiest television sales pitches.

And all ya gotta do to enjoy the best part of the big shindig is turn on your TV and be grateful that you don’t have to head north on the Interstate and actually be there.

This will be the second time in 12 years the Phoenix area has been the site of the Super Bowl. Any oftener and about half the population of Maricopa County would move back to Duluth or Waukesha, Akron or Alpena.

Having covered two Super Bowls, XXII in San Diego and XXX in Phoenix-Tempe, I can tell you this in all honesty:

I wouldn’t wish the Super Bowl on my worst enemy’s hometown.

It is a madhouse of public relations warriors, corporate executives and their caddies, celebrities in sunglasses trying desperately to be recognized, body-painted football nutcases and worst of all, the largest army of television soldiers on the planet.

The football game itself will be played — between commercials — wherever they can find enough ground in the midst of television cables, various power lines, ropes, barricades and extension cords.

The two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl is a world of powdered and coiffed TV sports anchors, trailed around by large young men hauling shoulder-fired cameras and then by print journalists in cheap sportcoats and dresses, trying hard to fill notebooks with quotes and catchy phrases.

Rat pack journalism is at its wackiest at the Super Bowl.

Twelve years ago, I happened to be in a men’s room at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, at the same time as Chris Berman, the ESPN announcer. A fine man and a sage, Mr. Berman announced to all within earshot, “This is the best place in the stadium. No crowds. Plenty of room. And it’s quiet.”

Nine years before that, in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl XXII, I got trapped in a stampede of journalists — mostly from the TV world — in a narrow spiral-staircase at Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego. I got smacked on the head by one of those shoulder-held cameras with a lens big enough to view the moons of Jupiter.

Reporters assembled for a Super Bowl would make one of Cecil B. DeMille’s movie epics with a “cast of thousands” look like a meeting on the pitching mound.

Some guy from National Football League Properties, Inc., once figured out there are 100 media per football player gathered on Media Day alone. That’s got to be a conservative estimate.

Phoenix and Glendale — well, Arizona at large, I suppose — wangled the Super Bowl as all host cities do, by first spreading the word to constituents about the enormous monetary benefit.

We’ve been told more than $400 million will be funneled into the state’s economy. What we haven’t been told, and what hasn’t been tallied, is how much it cost to bring the circus to town. Expenses for police and fire protection, marketing efforts for tourism and other odds and ends will add up to tens of millions of dollars.

“Nothing is free,” Host Committee president Bob Sullivan told the Arizona Republic newspaper. “If you want a Super Bowl, everybody needs to step up and make an initial investment.”

Well, OK. We’re proud to be the center of the universe and have the Super Bowl in Arizona again.

But those of us who live far enough away from Maricopa County to avoid the trampling of TV soldiers and the mass of print reporters, the many sideshows and exposition tents, the clamor of the crowded streets and charging, oversized TV cameras. . .

We’re the lucky ones.

When the tumult and the shouting dies, and the captains and the kings depart, our friends and neighbors in the Phoenix area, who’ve had to endure this nonsense, can begin to think about returning to normal again.

Green Valley resident and former Tucson Citizen columnist Corky Simpson writes a Friday column for the Green Valley News.