by Bailey White
Staff Writer
When it comes to hosting the 2005 Super Bowl, Jacksonville has noing to worry about, according to Chuck Day, the co-author of “The Making of the Super Bowl: The Inside Story of the World’s Greatest Sporting Event.”
The book, a product of a three-year collaboration with Don Weiss, the Super Bowl’s head of operations for 35 years, chronicles the history of the game and includes some of the more disastrous moments in the event’s history, including a number of problems surrounding Super Bowl IV in New Orleans.
“The Kansas City Chiefs quarterback, Len Dawson, was mistakenly linked to a Detroit gambler five days before the game, and, despite the bogus allegation, it made for a disruptive week, especially when Jimmy the Greek showed up to cover the game for a Las Vegas newspaper,” Day said at the Rotary Club of Jacksonville meeting Monday at the Omni. “The ‘War of 1812’ was played as a halftime theme and one of the guys lost two fingers when he got too close to the cannon being shot off. Plus, it rained all week and some of the floats in the parade got stuck in a foot and a half of mud and had to be pulled out with a tractor, delaying the start of the game. There’s no way we could screw up as badly as that. We’ll do just fine.”
Plus, the Ponte Vedra Beach resident has confidence in the leadership of the Super Bowl Host Committee.
“For one thing, we have Michael Kelly at the helm, and he’s been through this before.
And the cruise ships have just as much to prove as anybody,” said Day, who’ll serve on the on the Media Services Committee. “The Super Bowl brings roughly 100,000 people to a city and I think somewhere between 6 and 9,000 of those people will be staying on the cruise ships. This is a great marketing opportunity for them.”
But, he said, we should be prepared for some inevitable negative coverage.
“We should get a little thicker skin,” he said. There will no doubt be people who will lambaste Jacksonville, call it a dull city. Somebody from the media, maybe lots of people from the media will complain, but they’d beat up any city.
“And people need to keep in mind that they can’t equate this event with the Florida-Georgia game. It’s a different crowd. The person attending the Super Bowl spends two and a half to four times what a person attending another sporting event would. They’re high rollers with high expectations.”
Day predicts nightlife will be a little livelier by the time the game arrives.
“It seems most cities try to replicate the feel of the French Quarter in New Orleans,” he said. “In Tampa, it was Ybor City and in San Diego they were successful in creating the Gas Lamp Quarter. Here we could have a lot of fun with San Marco and I think they’ll close the Main Street Bridge to form a connection between the Northbank and the Southbank. The beach could be a focal point, at Jacksonville Beach and at Atlantic by the Sea Turtle Inn. We have pockets of places.
“The challenge, and the opportunity, will be to create an efficient transportation network to link all that together.”
With one sports history book complete, Day, an adjunct professor at the University of North Florida and the president of a communications and editorial services company called SearchWrite Inc., hopes to do more in the genre.
“I’m writing for the ‘Jaguars Inside Report ‘ as an NFL historian,” he said. “And I’d like to do as much sports history as I can.”