Santa Clara gets game — S. F. gets the fun
Greetings from Super Bowl City. Oh, and you, too, Santa Clara.
The official super- hype machine cranked up this week for Super Bowl 50, which is so big that it has transcended Roman numerals. Basically, the announcement was that San Francisco will have the parties, fan zone, network headquarters, tourists, soldout hotel rooms and buzz.
And Santa Clara gets the fuzzy end of the pickle.
We kid, of course. Santa Clara gets to host the actual game, which I’m sure will be epic for the Bay Area. In fact, I am prepared to go way out on the end of the goal posts and say it is entirely possible that that the Raiders and the 49ers could actually meet in this Super ... sorry, I thought I could get through this without cracking up.
So no, that’s not going to happen.
But the reality is this is going to be a San Francisco Super Bowl with a four- hour stopover in the South Bay for a ballgame. Which is exactly the way the NFL wanted it.
The league has always wanted to expand its pool of Super Bowl cities. After all, they can’t hold them all in New Orleans or Miami, which have each hosted 10 times. The consensus was that the league loved the 1985 Super Bowl in the Bay
Area — right up until everyone arrived at Stanford Stadium and realized the restrooms were Porta Pottis and the seats were bleachers with a small plastic cushion.
The common agreement about that one- shot bowl was: loved the parties, hated the stadium. So now that the 49ers have built a state- of- theart ball field — although the stadium grass still seems to need a reboot — the theory is that if this goes smoothly, we’ll be put in the rotation and get our Super Bowl on every seven years or so.
Event is beyond huge
Which is just dandy. But don’t get cocky, San Francisco. We know that we’re used to tourists. In 2013, for instance, 16.9 million visitors came to the city, spending $ 9.4 billion. So this is just an Oracle convention on steroids, right?
Not quite. This is beyond huge. At its peak viewing time, last year’s game drew a TV audience of 120 million viewers, according to NBC, which made it the mostwatched event in TV history.
But what’s really changed after 49 years of Super Bowls is pre- kickoff week. That’s where the city is going to be ground zero.
“It’s become like a national convention for the game of football,” said Hall of Fame 49er Ronnie Lott at this week’s press conference.
The media session was to show off the design for “Super Bowl City,” at Justin Herman Plaza, which is touted in the press release as one of the “centers of energy” for the week. Personally, I thought it looked pretty much like Justin Herman Plaza with better signage, but this is no time for nitpicking.
At one time there was talk of shutting down Market Street from Yerba Buena Gardens to the Ferry Building. That’s not going to happen. But fair warning, the NFL Experience fan fest will be at Moscone Center. Based on attendance of 165,000 at last year’s Experience in Arizona ( at $ 35 a pop), it will be humming.
It is likely that thousands of fans will stroll from the Embarcadero to Moscone daily, turning Mission and Market streets into a weeklong promenade. Joe D’Alessandro, president of San Francisco Travel, says his agency is expecting more than 1 million tourists for the week.
No rooms at the inns
Whoops, guess you’d better book a hotel room for Uncle Dave, right? Too late. D’Alessandro says they’re all full, some 35,000 rooms. Unlike the World Series, where an event lands abruptly in town at the end of the season, this is all about advance planning.
And here’s another factor. Host network CBS is going to set up its open- air broadcast center at the Embarcadero, with the Bay Bridge as a backdrop. If Santa Clarans were annoyed when regular season 49er games featured shots of crooked Lombard Street and the Golden Gate Bridge instead of South Bay highlights ( insert your snarky quip here), wait until they see the week of Super Bowl coverage.
One more thing. The media headquarters will be at Moscone West, which means an expected 5,000 media types downtown. Sure, they’ll take a bus to the media sessions and the always informative “media day” at the stadium, where players will be asked penetrating questions like: “If you met Bigfoot, what would you tell him?” ( Actual question from the 2014 Super Bowl.)
But they’ll be back here for dinner, parties and general beverage hoisting, all of which are San Francisco specialties. Expect lots of “Postcards from the Left Coast” dispatches, and even if they get some of it wrong, it will still be good brand- building for the city.
All in all, a case could be made that this will be the biggest international event, sporting or not, ever hosted by San Francisco. Technically this is the second Super Bowl here, but, as Lott ( who played in that 1985 game) says, that seems like eons ago.
“At this point,” he said, “it’s like it was televised in black and white.”
It is going to be a weeklong extravaganza, a whirl of parties, celebrities and global media coverage. And then there’s going to be a game. In Santa Clara.