Staging Super Bowl Is Worth Price

TAMPA, Fla. —  By his own admission, $2 million is a small investment for a $120 million return. Still, Walter Baldwin can’t help but think about what it cost to host the Super Bowl only seven years ago.

The Tampa Bay Super Bowl Task Force spent about $250,000 on the NFL championship game in 1984. Its budget for this year’s game is nearly 10 times that, although no one -- certainly not Baldwin -- is complaining about the tab.

The price of doing business with the biggest single-day event in sports includes providing lodging and transportation for the participating teams as well as league officials for a week. While that wasn’t the case seven years ago, Baldwin and others concede the benefits still far outweigh the cost for a community.

“The change came about because of a shift in the philosophy of NFL owners,” said Baldwin, Task Force co-chairman. “They’re no longer picking a city and putting on their championship game. Now they pick a city and you put on the game (financially).”

An NFL study conducted after the 1984 game in Tampa Stadium concluded that about 65,000 visitors dumped $87.4 million into the local economy. Most of that was spent on hotels, restaurants and transportation.

“We emphasize that that’s direct spending,” said Baldwin, who estimates the 1991 game with generate up to $120 million. “It’s much more difficult to gauge the so-called trickle down effect with money being turned over within the community.

“The residue of the Super Bowl probably lasts three or four years,” he added. “Who knows how many conventions or conferences will wind up in the city because a decision-maker came here for the Super Bowl and liked what he found.”

Baldwin said about 65 percent of the 74,000 ticketholders for Sunday’s game at Tampa Stadium will be people who are in decision-making positions with various companies. And with hundreds of journalists expected to cover the game, major hotels in Tampa were booked solid until the outbreak of war in the Persian Gulf.

Many newspapers and television and radio stations revised their Super Bowl plans, but there was no indication that the situation in the Middle East affected the travel plans of fans, who were more than happy to fill canceled reservations.

“A week ago we were scrambling trying to get 100 more rooms (for the media),” Baldwin said. “As soon as the war broke out, we’ve got 100 we need to sell.”

It could be weeks, or even months, before local merchants can determine how they benefitted from the Super Bowl, said Jim Clark, executive director of the Hillsborough County Office of Tourism.

A number of businesses, including many of the smaller hotels in the area, felt cheated because officials overestimated the immediate economic impact seven years ago.

Clark and Baldwin said the city learned from an “honest” mistake as a first-time Super Bowl host. This time, secondary service merchants like dry cleaners were told to expect only a modest increase in business.

“Expectations were too high,” Baldwin said. “We were new to this and really thought the Super Bowl was a seven-day event. We sold people on how much they were going to get out of it. What we found is it’s really a four-day event, and the money is not spread around nearly as much as some people might think.”