Can-do spirit makes city a Super choice
Energy. Houston has it in spades — in its collective civic spirit.
That’s the point Richard “Ric” Campo intends to passionately drive home Tuesday in Boston when he tries to sell the National Football League’s owners on returning the Super Bowl to Houston for a third time.
“Energy drives Houston,” said Campo, the chairman of the board and CEO of Camden Real Estate Trust who’s serving as the chairman of the city’s 2017 Super Bowl Bid Committee. “And I’m not talking about the energy sector. It’s something you feel the moment you step off a plane here. We’re an incredibly welcoming city, and we always find a way to pull together and get things done.”
Campo and his copresenter, David Crane, CEO of NRG (which sells
the kind of energy the world associates with Houston), will have 15 minutes to make their case that America’s fourth-largest city is far more than just a place where oil gets refined into money. Their mission is to convince at least twothirds of the NFL owners that Houston’s superb infrastructure in tandem with a relentless can-do temperament makes it a no-brainer pick.
But the competition is stiff. San Francisco, a pretty cool place in its own right, will have a fancy new stadium ready to showcase by 2016, and Miami is, well, Miami. Those white sandy beaches, swaying palm trees and turquoise water are always tough to trump, especially when a number of the owners are personally invested in South Florida, either through real estate holdings or yacht moorings.
However, the Dolphins’ hopes of hosting a record 11th game were damaged, perhaps irreparably, by the Florida Legislature’s recent rejection of public assistance for the funding of a major facelift to Sun Life Stadium.
The first vote will be between San Francisco and Miami for the 50th anniversary Super Bowl in 2016. The loser then vies with Houston for the subsequent game, LI.
Campo said he will be speaking straight from the heart to the owners, and his story is a classic Houston tale. He arrived in the mid-1970s, straight from college with “a great idea and no money.” But by the early 1980s, he had founded Camden, which today is a $9 billion publicly traded company with 2,000 employees.
“It was Houston’s support system,” Campo said, “that made it possible.” Plenty of practice
Campo’s esoteric arguments are supported by hard fact. The region’s robust economy speaks for itself; the climate — the steamy summer has zero relevance to a February Super Bowl — is mostly delightful, and Houston is an easy place to get to from anywhere. Historically, the city has been primarily a business-travel destination, but we’ve lifted our game dramatically as a tourist draw.
Just recently, the New York Times, hardly a Chamber of Commerce mouthpiece, rated Houston the world’s seventhmost enticing place to visit this year, citing both our cutting-edge restaurants and the cornucopia of cultural options.
It’s not because of bribery or dumb luck that since 2004, when Houston got back in the mix with its first Super Bowl in 30 years thanks to some deft bargaining by Texans owner Bob McNair, ours is the only metropolitan area in the country to have hosted the NFL’s championship game, the baseball and basketball all-star games (two of the latter) and the NCAA Final Four, plus a number of significant soccer competitions.
Next week, in fact, the Mexican national soccer team visits for the 13th time, and the Final Four is again headed our way in 2016.
In short, this ain’t our first rodeo.
“There’s no question our community can perform,” McNair said. “Everybody told us we did a great job in 2004, and we’re well-prepared to do an even better job in 2017. We have some resources this time around that we didn’t have before that strengthens our bid. With these resources, it really sets up well for Houston. I think we offer an ideal situation.” Innovative perk
But to make it slightly more ideal for the 31 privileged families who hold the city’s Super Bowl fate in their hands, McNair personally suggested a unique perk: giving them an access to a dedicated runway at Ellington Field for their private jets. Having himself spent “five or six hours on the tarmac” waiting for clearance to take off the day after previous Super Bowls, McNair figured it would be a valuable enticement.
“No other city I’m aware of has ever offered that,” said McNair, who gets five minutes in private with his peers after Campo and Crane are finished to make a personal pitch on his city’s behalf.
Speaking of rodeos, Team Houston will remind McNair’s fellow owners the biggest rodeo anywhere is held right here every year. It’s a nearly three-week-long event that mobilizes 14,000 volunteers, far more than would be needed to stage a Super Bowl with over-the-top hospitality. In February, the Harris County Houston Sports Authority had no problem rounding up 1,700 folks to help with the NBA AllStar Game weekend. Last summer, it even persuaded 1,500 hardy souls to brave the heat and assist with the Junior Olympics.
“I do think we have the drill down,” Campo said.
Janice Schmees Burke, the Sports Authority’s chief executive, has “lived all over the country” while helping a number of cities “brand themselves.”
She calls Houston her favorite for its damn-thetorpedoes entrepreneurial Super Bowl 2004 Final Four 2011 MLB All-Star Game 2004 - NBA All-Star Game 2013, ’06 2008 Total 5 5 spirit and because “we’re such a good volunteer city. As an outsider, that’s always amazed me. It’s truly amazing how generous Houstonians are with their time. We have a huge database of people willing to help.
“I just love Houston’s vibe and, in my experience, so do people from national organizations who come to see what we’ve got to offer. It’s a real plus.”
Texans president Jamey Rootes, another transplant who was personally floored by the initial warmth of Houston’s embrace, said the city has reached critical mass as a major-event site. It no longer has to prove it can throw a huge — and hugely successful — party. Been there, done that.
“I call it the progress principle: ‘Things in motion tend to stay in motion,’ ” Rootes said. “But it’s still incumbent upon the community, our organization included, to stay humble and work hard. If we do, good things are going to happen.”
Conventional wisdom suggests Miami’s best chance is to convince the owners it deserves the first of those games on sentimental grounds, coinciding as it would with the 50th anniversary of the Dolphins’ franchise. But just as the Orange Bowl had become outdated for the game by the 1980s, the current venue that opened as Joe Robbie Stadium in 1987 also has seen better days.
The Dolphins were seeking sales tax rebates and increased tourism taxes to help pay for a $300-plus million renovation. That plan died when the legislature killed the bill that would have brought the matter to a public vote.
Still, Campo insisted nothing can be taken for granted. If anything, the presumed good news out of Florida has made his team lean even further forward.
“We’d already put together our proposal before that happened,” Campo said, “but the final one was done afterward. After we heard the news, we immediately held a conference call with everyone involved and agreed we needed to stay aggressive, or even be more aggressive. I’m com-