INDIANAPOLIS —
If praise and adulation could put points on the scoreboard, then Indianapolis had a blowout victory hosting its first Super Bowl.
The host city has won rave reviews from a tough crowd of out-of-town fans and media skeptics smitten by both the city’s hospitality and compact size.
New York Giants coach Tom Coughlin opened his morning-after-victory speech with unconditional praise for the host city — and a shout-out to the general manager of the hotel where his team stayed.
But is a chorus of accolades enough to land Indianapolis another Super Bowl?
That’s the question fielded Monday morning by sleep-deprived Super Bowl organizers who’d pulled off, without a hitch, what many thought was a once-in-a-lifetime event for the city.
They weren’t quite ready to respond.
“It’s like asking a marathon runner who crosses the finish line, ‘Are you ready to do this again?’ ” said Dianna Boyce, head of communications for the Indianapolis Super Bowl Host Committee.
“To say it’s on our radar screen that we can do it is true,” Boyce said.
“To say it’s something we’re pursuing at this point might be premature.”
That’s not what others are saying.
Days before game day, Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard said his city should have a good shot at joining the regular rotation of Super Bowl host cities that include Miami, Tampa and New Orleans.
That seemed like an unlikely boast from a politician, until Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay — who put up a lot of money to land this year’s Super Bowl — said something similar to a roomful of reporters: “I think we can make a serious case for this event returning.”
That’s not the storyline anyone was telling a few weeks ago.
Conventional wisdom — especially among the national media — was that Indianapolis was a Super Bowl fluke: A small-market city in a cold-weather climate that won its Super Bowl bid as a one-time reward from the NFL for building a publicly financed, $720 million stadium.
But as game week unfolded, another vision emerged, helped by crowd-drawing warm weather and impressive execution of a hospitality plan that was four years in the making.
In the 10 days leading up to the game, more than 1.1 million visited Super Bowl Village, an open-air festival site in downtown Indianapolis surrounded by bars and restaurants. Another 265,000 people paid $25 a piece for admission into the theme-park-like NFL Experience in the Convention Center.
As corny as it may sound, a big dose of Hoosier Hospitality helped.
Janice Zoeller, head of sales at the downtown Indianapolis Marriott where the Giants stayed, said hotel staff conducted “intelligence-gathering” on the team’s wants and needs so they could be accommodated easily. That included everything from heightened security to a high-carb, low-spice meal menu for players.
Meanwhile, a sister hotel, the J.W. Marriott, hosted many of the 5,000 credentialed media in town for the game — including East Cost and national media who sent out a rash of Twitter messages like the one tweeted by New York Times sports writer Judy Battista: “Hope the game is back here soon.”
“Our service culture is just phenomenal,” Zoeller said of the hotels. “We are always going to be hungry to land another event of that kind.”
There’s some bubble-bursting reality, though, in landing another Super Bowl.
It’s an expensive venture. Beyond the millions of tax dollars that went into building Lucas Oil Stadium in hopes that it would land the city a Super Bowl, the Indianapolis host committee had to raise $25 million from private sources to stage the event.
It came from corporate sponsors who got little in return, other than boosting the city’s image. The relatively small size of Lucas Oil Stadium is also a liability since it cuts into the profit share that the NFL takes from the Super Bowl. It sat about 68,000 for Sunday’s game, far short of the 103,219 fans who were crammed into the Dallas Cowboys‚ home stadium for last year’s Super Bowl.
On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported another Indianapolis liability: The lack of private airport space for the many well-heeled millionaires and billionaires who flew in for the game. Several had to land at the French Lick airport, two hours away.
The number of private aircraft may have been high, the paper reported, because of the small number of luxury hotel rooms in Indianapolis.
And February in Indiana, most years, is still February; without the freakishly warm temperatures that blessed the Super Bowl host city last week.
Still, landing another Super Bowl may not be the only prize that city leaders covet. John Livengood, head of the hotel and restaurant association in Indiana, said the payoff for pulling off a good Super Bowl experience is the champion image it conveys to other big-event sponsors.
“It boosts the city’s image,” said Livengood. “I think we’ll see that pay off for a long time to come.”
Maureen Hayden is the Indiana Statehouse bureau chief for CNHI, the parent company of the Tribune-Star. She can be reached at maureen.hayden@indianamediagroup.com.
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Host city hopes its experience is a game winner
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