Houston is hoping Super Bowl will bring infusion of respect

i read this article this morning and thought that it described the houston i knew 10 years ago. maybe that's what bostonians think of our city, today...but it's certainly not accurate. particularly the comparisons with dallas..geez, it's been quite some time since dallas has been the focus of attention in this state. at least in my view.

 

sports guy is coming out with a blog during his stay here in houston for the next week. should be hilarious... and inciteful.

 

I do wish that more people would enter Houston through Intercontinental than Hobby. Not that the route along Beltway 8 and I-45 North is fantastic, but I have been to Hobby twice within the past month and....ugh, Sweet Lord Almighty, what are visitors gonna think when they see the area around Hobby, so sorry?

"Well we're here. We'll get the bags, you go to the Hertz counter and get the car."

Later, driving past construction workers, weed-overgrown lots and t*tties-R-Us and Denny's:

"Damn, couldn't they have held the Super Bowl in San Francisco?"

But I love my city, warts and all.

 

Simmons has been getting on my nerves lately, I expect him to bash H-town.

 

I like this article better...front page sports in USA Today.

A year as big as all Texas
By Tom Weir, USA TODAY

HOUSTON — In an oil-driven state that's long accustomed to cycles of boom and bust, Texans can count on a yearlong gusher in sports, starting with Sunday's Super Bowl.

That game will mark the first time the NFL holds its annual spectacle beneath a retractable roof, in Houston's $449 million Reliant Stadium, and will end the 30-year drought since football-obsessed Texas last hosted a Super Bowl.

The Super Bowl kickoff in Space City also will signal liftoff for an unprecedented sports trifecta for Texas. San Antonio's Alamodome will be the site of the Final Four championship in college men's basketball in April, and the Houston Astros will host baseball's All-Star Game in July. No state has been home to those events in one year.

There couldn't be a more opportune year to have the sports world focused on the Lone Star State because, on the field of play, now is no time to mess with Texas:

• The San Antonio Spurs are defending NBA champions.

• This summer, native Texan Lance Armstrong goes for his sixth consecutive triumph in cycling's Tour de France, where he's always made a point of waving the Texas flag.

• The Dallas Cowboys, rejuvenated under coach Bill Parcells, just made their first NFL playoff appearance in four seasons.

• Rice won last year's College World Series in baseball, and the University of Texas won the previous year.

• In college women's basketball, Texas Tech and Texas are ranked in the top five.

• And the Astros made the biggest offseason news in baseball by signing a pair of Texas-raised pitchers who had been superstars for the New York Yankees — Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte.

All of which, in a state where a future U.S. president was principal owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, brings new meaning to being a Bush Leaguer.

"We see sports as a major economic catalyst to create jobs and wealth in our state," says Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican.

His state also will host North America's richest day in horse racing when the $14 million Breeders' Cup is held Oct. 30 at Lone Star Park near Dallas. And men's tennis will have its biggest payday in Texas at the $3.7 million Masters Cup in Houston on Nov. 13-21.

"Every community is actively pursuing these types of activities," says Perry, who attributes that drive to the Texas tradition that "small, rural communities may not have a blinking light, but they still will have a football team."

Oddly, the Texas city without the NFL from 1997-2001 was its largest, Houston, after its Oilers moved to Tennessee to get a new stadium. Houston, the USA's fourth-largest city, also might have lost its baseball and basketball teams if not for a four-year building spree that gave the city Reliant Stadium for the NFL Texans, Minute Maid Park for the Astros and the just-opened Toyota Center for the NBA Rockets.

Houston has 'can-do attitude'

Robert McNair, the Houston Texans owner and the man most responsible for bringing in the Super Bowl, says his city's sports redemption is in keeping with the area's history.

"There were a lot of people here who made fortunes and lost them and made them back," McNair says. "There's always been sort of a can-do attitude, that we can do it — don't give up."

But in 1999 McNair was almost ready to give up on purchasing an NFL expansion franchise for Houston because the league's asking price was $700 million.

"The price got up to $650 million, and at that point I said, 'I'm not paying any more,' " McNair says. "I said, 'You've got to figure out how you can bring more value to the table if you want me to pay more than $650 million for this team.' So the NFL said, 'Well, how about a Super Bowl?' I said, 'Well, we'll talk some more.' "

McNair's team has quickly gained popularity and credibility, taking the Super Bowl favorite New England Patriots into overtime this season before losing. But McNair says that reborn sports enthusiasm was absent when the Oilers left.

"It was like the business community said, 'Who cares?' " McNair says. "I kept telling all my friends in the corporate community, 'You're going to regret losing this team, and you're going to wish we hadn't.'

"And everybody said it wouldn't make a difference."

Houston soon learned otherwise. Astros outfielder Craig Biggio recalls the Oilers' move as "a big belly punch here because people love football." It also left Houstonians with one, dreaded choice for watching football on Sunday.

"I didn't want to watch the Dallas Cowboys every Sunday," Biggio says of Houston's rival team, "but you had no other choice."

Now, with Reliant's retractable roof and Houston's weather likely to attract more Super Bowls, Texas pride dictates the Cowboys make good on their goal of a 75,000-seat, $650 million, retractable-roof stadium that could expand to 100,000 capacity for special events. The team hopes to have a referendum on the November ballot that would designate hotel and rental-car taxes for construction, to be completed by 2009.

"We want to have something that's more than a stadium," says Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones, son of owner Jerry Jones. "We want something that's not only about competition but that is a tribute to sports. ... We could make this a place where people go to learn about sports."

Jones says the team is open to all innovations and the stadium complex will include a sports-oriented mall and might house a variety of halls of fame.

"I think our fans deserve this," says Jones, whose team has played in a record eight Super Bowls. "I think it ought to be of the magnitude that would go hand-in-hand with the history of our franchise."

Such leaps in stadium design aren't new to Texas. Houston's Astrodome was billed the "Eighth Wonder of the World" in1965 when it opened as the first domed stadium. Outdated by the '90s, it was the reason the Oilers left and why the Astros considered moving to Virginia. To provide a new park for the Astros, Houston in 1996 passed a referendum much like the one planned in Dallas.

"There might not be a (pro) team in Houston today if we hadn't won that referendum," Astros owner Drayton McLane says of a measure that barely passed with 50.7% support. The elder George Bush "certainly helped us campaign. I said if we won, we would do everything to get an All-Star Game."

But even McLane's state-of-the-art, retractable-roof stadium, Enron Field, became a symbol of civic embarrassment as the scandal over the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history began to unfold in 2001. To rename it Minute Maid Park, McLane had to buy back the naming rights from Enron's creditors.

"It just shows the spirit of Texans," McLane says of Houston's rebound in sports. "Things go wrong sometimes, and you can't feel sorry for yourself. That's the exciting part of Houston, that it's such a resilient community."

That sports fervor is just as big in small-town Texas, says Texas Tech women's basketball coach Marsha Sharp, whose team has been ranked No. 1 this season and draws as well as Tech's men. By recruiting mostly in Lubbock's northwest-Texas region, Sharp says, "there will be caravans from small towns to come and see us."

Houston 'on world stage'

Texas' sports windfall in 2004 isn't by design so much as it is the serendipitous product of several ongoing efforts randomly coming together at once.

McNair made his Super Bowl deal with the NFL in 1999 and as a Breeders' Cup board member had influence on city selection. San Antonio made itself a perennial Final Four candidate in 1998 when it hosted the event for the first time and won wide praise as a visitor-friendly city where many fans could walk from their hotels to the Alamodome. McLane vowed to reward voters with a successful All-Star bid when the referendum passed.

Breeders' Cup spokesman Jim Gluckson says Texas wasn't a tough sell, particularly because of the state's appeal to horse racing's high rollers from Europe, the Middle East and Japan.

"The person wearing that cowboy hat is still one of our great symbols," Gluckson says. "People from overseas enjoy that quintessential American image, and they want to see Texas."

Worldwide, the most-watched team is from Texas, when the NBA Rockets have their games broadcast in China, the nation of their 7-6 center, Yao Ming.

Robert Dale Morgan, president of Houston's Super Bowl Committee, says most of this week's 100,000 visitors will be seeing Houston for the first time.

"This is Houston stepping onto the world stage," says Morgan, who for Super Bowl XXXVIII has organized a 38-hour "Main Event" with 40 bands performing in a 16-block downtown area. Fans can shuttle from there to Reliant Stadium on a new light rail system that opened this month.

"Mega events help cities get things done on schedule that they wouldn't have done otherwise," Morgan says. "What Super Bowls do for cities is validate them. People say it must be a world-class city if it's capable of hosting a world-class event."

Texas pride on display

But even with the Super Bowl in Houston, McLane's Astros have been an equal source of optimism in the last month after signing Pettitte and Clemens to pitch for their hometown team.

"The whole town is excited right now," says Astros outfielder Lance Berkman, a two-time All-Star who was the team's only Texas-raised player until Pettitte and Clemens signed. "I can't tell how much of it is the Super Bowl and how much is us signing Andy and Roger."

Berkman typifies Texas pride. He went to Rice and proudly displays a Lone Star State flag over his locker, each year bidding "good riddance" to teammates who don't make Texas their offseason home. And Berkman says Texans really aren't surprised by their dominance of the 2004 sports calendar.

"I think people in the state of Texas strive for things like that," Berkman says. "Texans, myself included, make no bones about saying we're the best state on the planet."