Everybody's in a frenzy over the Super Bowl here in Indy, streets are being closed, traffic patterns altered with new one-way streets downtown. (There will be two circular patterns of one-way streets: The "Super Route" and the "Bowl Route". I can't believe someone was paid to name those.) The party zone downtown will include what I was assured by the anchorperson on the TeeWee will be the "world's highest and longest temporary zipline." That oughtta be fun in a Hoosier February. Broad Ripple will, of course, be an alternate Party Zone, but since Broad Ripple Avenue is already thronged with vomiting drunks of a weekend eve, who'd notice?
Chambers of Commerce are gleefully dumping money into local "Super Celebration Sites" in places like the twee bedroom hamlet of Zionsville and West Lafayette, home of Purdue University. Never mind that these municipalities are, respectively, sixteen and sixty miles from the location where the game is being played, hopeful boosters are sure some lost Super Bowl attendee will drop some magic beans in their community's chest: "We went to go see the Super Bowl, but had so much fun ice skating in the Zionsville town park that we just skipped it!"
Meanwhile, the town's Debbie Downers are predicting fiasco: The city just can't handle a big event like the Super Bowl! We'll fail miserably! Some Lear-jetting attendee will wind up having to sleep under a bridge due to hotel overbooking while 38th street thugs boost the hubcaps from his Gulfstream at Eagle Crick airport...
To everybody getting all bizarrely hyped over the implications, pro and con, of ¡SUPER BOWL XLVI! for our fair city, may I remind y'all of one thing: Lucas Oil Stadium seats 70,000 people, max, while the little car race that happens out on the west side of town was all glum because they had barely over 300,000 souls in the stands last year. A sense of proportion please?
This should be a walk in the park for a city that hosts half a million folks for a restricted regional race every memorial day.
ReplyDeleteI was down there a few years ago for the Moto GP and dirt track races, the quote of the weekend was when we were riding to the dirt track, a friend opened his helmet at a stoplight, pointed to a guy next to the road and asked "Is he selling parking or crack?" We figured it was probably both.
ReplyDeleteDon't a large proportion of the Indy 500 attendees sleep onsite, in their campers, though?
ReplyDeleteThe Super Bowl will draw about half a million to every city it's played in. The vast majority of people attending do not go to the game. I've been to two and most of the people I met from out of town were there for the weeklong celebration leading up to it.
ReplyDeleteSGB,
ReplyDeleteThe Indy 500 draws a half-million or so every year. (The Brickyard 400 and Moto GP also draw big crowds.)
The point is that I find all the chatter about whether the city will be able to host a large sporting event amusing, considering that they bill the 500 as the "Largest Single Day Sporting Event In The World".
There's no doubt Indy can host a Super Bowl. They fret for the cameras. :-)
ReplyDeleteFootball fans to weird things. We get folks for Virginia Tech games who will drive all the way to Blacksburg from $WHEREVER in their $100,000 RV's, park them in the $500 on-campus parking spot they were allowed to buy because of their $1500 season tickets, and watch the game on their big screen TV's in the RV.
ReplyDeleteI've never understood that.
wv: tsessemi - Open tsessemi!
Jake,
ReplyDeleteOh, trust me, I know. Don't forget that I just spent eight years in Knoxville. :o
How soon people forget the Pan Am Games. They were talking the same smack about handling crowds back then, and it worked out just fine.
ReplyDeleteMe? I just think the city is going to lose its fiscal ass. There may be millions of dollars coming into the region, but there are also millions of dollars being spent. I'm guessing the real balance sheets aren't anywhere near as rosy as the CIB and the Super Bowl Committee want everybody to think.
And the CIB, shoot, I thought they were already broke. And here they are losing another $800K on the deal. Eh, no biggie, it's Other People's Money. Nothing to see here, please move along.
Do Learjets have hubcaps? Inquiring minds want to know.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure it will work out. Personally, I would walk across the street to see the 500, but not the Stupor Bowl. My last Indy event was the NHRA Nationals in 1965. I drove in with 5 other guys in an old station wagon, we parked it over a grassy ditch and slept under it. Very happy it didn't rain.
ReplyDeleteIs there some kind of ball game going on or something?
ReplyDeleteI'd like to see the MotoGP crowds get bigger just to insure that they keep scheduling a race here in Indy.
ReplyDeleteYou need to regularly visit the Nats, tickmeister.
ReplyDeleteThe crowds in the campgrounds are always entertaining (more so than any other sporting event, festival, or concert I've attended) and the thunder from the top fuelers is literally breathtaking.
(An awesome sensation to have your whole body feel like it's being directly blasted with jet exhaust.)
Erm, could the zipline be made permanent? Yeah, I wouldn't want to try it in February - nor July - but plenty of people would, and pay for the thrill.
ReplyDeleteHeck, we get some tourists here in RI because they want to have climbed to the highest point in every State, including our 620-foot skyripper.
Am I the only person that's wondering why they don't paint a football field in the middle of the Indy Race track and just move the Super Bowl over there?
ReplyDeleteHey, wait a minute. If they did, just think of the half-time show, a 15 minute Indy Race special!
;-p
WV: ablessi - more tickets to sell, what ablessi!
Somehow I had gotten the impression that Broad Ripple is always an "alternate party zone", for whatever definition of "alternate" and "party" you wish to apply.
ReplyDelete"Zone", too, come to think of it...