Organizers plan broad experience for Super Bowl in Arizona
PHOENIX -- From Jay Parry's 17th-floor office window, bluffs form the backdrop for the view of a modern cityscape that would fit just about anywhere in the country.
The stadium that will host Super Bowl XLIX is about a 25-minute drive away. But the epicenter of the NFL's premier event will be here, in the heart of a city touting $4 billion in recent downtown development it plans to showcase for the world next month.
"The brand message for Arizona is that we are a community that is youthful and progressive and energetic and very pro-business and business-friendly," Parry, the CEO of the Arizona Super Bowl Host Committee, told USA TODAY Sports recently. "It's the sixth-largest city in the country, and yet it's small enough that you can make an impact."
In other words, don't call this another Super Bowl in the desert, even if resorts and a good chance of sun will be a welcome change for many regulars from the cold in New York last year.
Beginning the Wednesday night before the Super Bowl (Feb. 1), 12 blocks of downtown Phoenix will be transformed into a football-themed "campus" for fans with free concerts, fireworks shows, autographs and a beer garden – a continuation of the model set by the widely hailed Super Bowl three years ago in Indianapolis.
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"We saw the power of having a centralized hub for everything going on with NFL Experience and an outdoor fan component and the media center all collocated," said Peter O'Reilly, the NFL's senior vice president of events. "We've taken the best of that with this Super Bowl Central."
It's a shift from the last time the Super Bowl came to Arizona in 2008, when the majority of the festivities were in and around University of Phoenix Stadium in nearby Glendale.
Development in Phoenix – new hotels and restaurants, light rail transit, a refurbished convention center and a downtown population that has quadrupled in the past seven years – was part of the pitch to bring back the game so soon. Now, the hope is to leverage the platform for the region.
The host committee will invite 75 CEOs from other states to attend a three-day curriculum on why they should do business in the state.
"There are 60,000 Latino-owned businesses in Arizona," said Steve Moore, the president and CEO of Visit Phoenix, "There is a huge, young, vibrant, diverse community that's grown in downtown that's taken a large foothold and is very successful."
The host committee is making a point to embrace its large Hispanic population, launching a Spanish-language website and social media operations as well as a targeted marketing plan that will be visible throughout the week.
"We've also had specific outreach with our board of directors to Mexico-based businesses and tourism groups to invite them to be a part of Super Bowl in Arizona," Parry said. "We've gotten a great receptivity to that and we'll see probably more cross-border traffic associated with Super Bowl than we would've if we hadn't made that outreach."
Parry said the committee estimates more than 100,000 people will visit Arizona over the course of the week, with an economic impact of more than $500 million.
That doesn't include fans who come for the Pro Bowl, which will be held in Glendale the week before the game and, O'Reilly said, was approaching a sellout as of last week.
"For us, it creates a great opportunity more than anything to get more fans in that Arizona market to experience the Super Bowl," O'Reilly said.
Record numbers of fans turned out for the 2008 events, O'Reilly said. Super Bowl XXX also was played in the state after the 1995 season, at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, which will host various events again this year, as will Glendale and Scottsdale.
Parry stresses the Super Bowl is a regional effort. But there's no mistaking its importance to Phoenix. Moore calls 2015 "the year of our reemergence," with college football's national championship game and the Final Four headed to the state in 2016 and 2017, respectively.
"You look at the education opportunities, you look at the business opportunities for young people and if you look at the amount of affordable office space that is booming in our downtown with new projects on the horizon," Moore said, "this will be an opportunity for everyone to see what we really know about Phoenix."
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Follow Tom Pelissero on Twitter @TomPelissero
