— Don Welsh, president of the Chicago Convention & Tourism Bureau, sees May’s G-8 and NATO summits as “the highest-profile meeting” Chicago has hosted.
“This will be our Super Bowl of meetings,” he said, which, like calling Cadillac the Rolls Royce of cars, is as much an acknowledgment of what the G-8 and NATO conferences can’t be as a boast of what it is.
Chicagoans already anxious over the potential hazards, headaches and hurdles anticipated with the arrival of world leaders and thousands of multinational protesters for four days in May need no reminder.
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They know what’s been going on just three hours away by car, here in Indiana’s capital, home to Sunday’s Super Bowl XLVI, so close, so valuable and yet so out of reach to Chicago for so many reasons.
“The Super Bowl — clearly, clearly — it’s without a doubt, the No. 1 event in the United States, and we’re not professing that the NATO/G-8 conference is going to do that,” said Welch, who previously headed the Indianapolis Convention & Visitors Association.
Any Chicagoland resident at a Super Sunday party or even near a TV screen is at risk of having his or her nose rubbed in the fact that Indianapolis has secured an event almost certainly more valuable than the prized summits. But the Super Bowl also is more fun.
For all the talk of the summits giving Chicago a spotlight on the world stage and the opportunity for 3,000 media members to expose its charms to a potential audience of millions at home and abroad, there are more than 5,000 credentialed media people in Indianapolis for the championship football game that’s carried in 180 or so countries. Plus a huge audience for a week of buildup and a Madonna halftime show.
Not every host city can make a Super Bowl a game-changer, but it offers a community the opportunity to show off its assets.
John Dedman, a vice president with the Indiana Sports Corp., an organization founded by community leaders 33 years ago to lure major sports events to the central part of the state, said 65 percent of the attendees at a Super Bowl “are described as corporate decision-makers or managers … the ones that decide everything from where to host business meetings to where to open a satellite office,” so there may be benefits for years to come if they like the place.
Dianna Boyce, spokeswoman for the Super Bowl XLVI Indianapolis Host Committee, cited estimates of economic impact for the city between $125 million to $400 million, though sports economist Allen Sanderson suspects the actual number is closer to $50 million to $80 million.
“The Super Bowl is largely a party and a very poor investment, though the upbeat nature, attraction for tourists, etc., provide a small, positive benefit for the host city,” Sanderson, a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago, said by email from Hong Kong. “Summits in a major city are basically headaches and potential disasters.”
One difference is the Super Bowl has been luring area residents into the central city to partake in some of the attractions the Indianapolis Host Committee is staging near Lucas Oil Stadium, site of the game. Intentionally or not, the potential for street closures and protests during the Chicago summits threatens to scare locals away.
“That’s kind of a polarizing event, unfortunately,” said Kip Neal, an Indianapolis resident who ducked out of work early one day last week to bring his family to the free Super Bowl Village street fair. “The Super Bowl is a celebration.”
Taking a break in a recently closed Nordstrom store turned into “The Huddle,” a venue for visitors to eat, drink, hear music, buy souvenirs, and play video games, wife Sara Neal told of her knitting group producing scarves for Host Committee volunteers to wear.
“We’ve been looking forward to showing Indianapolis off,” Sara said. “People think it’s ‘India-no-place,’ and then they come and visit.”
One such visitor was Bonnie Luccio, a New York Giants fan from Bloomingdale, N.J. “I was like, ew, we’re going to Indianapolis … I want to live here now,” she said, half seriously.
Sara Neal said everyone she knows has visited the Super Bowl Village “and had a blast.” By midweek, before most out-of-town attendees were to arrive, the attraction was said to have drawn more than 400,000 visitors. But she knows no one who is going to the game, with tickets starting at $900. “Who has that kind of money?” she said.
Even if the National Football League’s 2014 New Jersey experiment with staging its annual winter extravaganza in an open-air cold-weather stadium works out, the city and the Bears all but assured their also-ran status for a Chicago Super Bowl bid when they decided to wedge the renovated Soldier Field into the footprint of the old one.
The resulting $660 million makeover left Chicago with a roof-less stadium with the smallest capacity in the NFL, less than any facility to host the Super Bowl. It’s a pity because the city clears a more typical stumbling block for a would-be host by virtue of having more than 33,000 hotel rooms.
Indianapolis, meanwhile, opened Lucas Oil Stadium, complete with retractable roof, at a cost of about $720 million a few years later in 2008. Added to the city’s existing sports and convention complex, it can host college basketball national championships and Big Ten Conference games unavailable to Chicago, complementing the annual Indianapolis 500.
Indianapolis, which secured private funding for the Host Committee’s $25 million budget before submitting its Super Bowl bid, was awarded the 2012 game in 2008, giving everyone time to get ready.
“We worked very hard the last couple years to tell people what’s going to happen” Boyce said. “Yep, you’re going to be inconvenienced. Yep, there are going to be streets closed. Yep, we’re going to have to make deliveries at times different from what you’re used to, but let’s work together.”
As of Friday, Indianapolis had seen a couple of notable labor demonstrations, but nothing like the kind of protests that have come to be expected at the sites of multinational conferences.
“If things go well (in Chicago), and I truly hope they do, it’ll be a … period in which the city shuts down and residents leave town,” Sanderson said. “If things go poorly, there is really no level to which the city’s reputation could not sink.”
But Welch, of the Chicago Convention & Tourism Bureau, offered a rationale, saying Chicago needs to raise its profile internationally. “For the most part we have a long, long way to go to somehow create the awareness,” he said.
“I realize there is the potential of protesters and that element,” Welch said. “But this is clearly saying, ‘We’re a global city,’ and we need to somehow start acting and thinking like a global city.”
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Indianapolis doesn’t have that problem this week. It’s just hoping to have fun.
Twitter @phil_rosenthal