Always 2 sides to every story

I have noticed the houston bashing the last couple of days and I have to say I was a bit dissapointed. But like everything there are 2 sides to every story. So I thought I would post some positive media response we have been getting.

/begins to rant and flashes of bill simmons getting hit by metro rail enters mind

It really makes me wonder sometimes though how spoiled these media guys are. You put me in Any Town, USA to cover the super bowl and you won't hear a complaint from me. It seems as if they forget what they are here to do. People remember you are sports writers not architecture experts, nightlife aficianados, city planners, or any other interest you guys have been bashing experts. If you can't have a good time during super bowl week in the nations 4th largest city (warts and all) you are just a looser. You wouldn't have fun at the playboy mansion with Hef on a year long sabatical and asking you to fill in!! So suck it up and quit your whinning!!!
/end of rant

so here are the links, I will post the full articles in other post.
http://www.news14charlotte.com/content/local_news/?ArID=53056&SecID=2
http://www.sacbee.com/content/sports/story/8174238p-9105656c.html
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04028/266494.stm

 

HOUSTON – The NFL hosted a party for the media Tuesday night at Houston's downtown aquarium. Exotic fish and sharks swam around in three-story tall tanks as reporters and photographers enjoyed gourmet food, music and rides.

Media from around the world have been putting in 10-, 12- and 16-hour days in Houston to help cover the Super Bowl teams. So the city of Houston put on the event to make sure they have a blast.

A Sports Illustrated photographer who has covered the past 34 Super Bowls said the party was nothing but super.

"Fantastic," said Photographer John Iacon. "I never had food like this – to be honest with you – in my life. It's great. They have every chef from every major restaurant in Houston.


The party was for the media covering the Super Bowl.
"It's excellent. God bless you Houston."

So far, he said Houston has been his favorite Super Bowl city, with New Orleans coming in second.

Wednesday is the day most fans will arrive in Houston for the Super Bowl, and both teams will take to the field for practice in the afternoon.

Back in the Queen City, leaders are planning a big celebration for Monday in the case that the Panthers win the Super Bowl.

The team plans to return to Charlotte on Monday. The exact time is yet to be determined.

If they win, the Panthers will travel in buses directly from the airport to the celebration, which would take place at Trade and Tryon streets in uptown Charlotte.



Exotic fish in three-story tanks swam around during the event.
If they do not win, Charlotte officials said there will not be an official celebration for the team's winning season. The initial plans called for a celebration despite the outcome of the big game, but the Panthers said they only want a celebration if they win.

Either way, all week fans will be signing a message for the team to cheer the team on to victory. Bank of America has a giant Panthers banner people can sign until Friday at Founders Hall, which is located at 100 North Tryon Street.

The banner will be available for signing between 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. It will be sent to the team in Houston and displayed in their hotel.

 

HOUSTON -- Armed with a hefty, impressive portfolio, George Postolos has run campaigns, clerked for a state Supreme Court justice, worked as a special assistant to NBA Commissioner David Stern, and most recently, served as president and CEO of the Rockets, where his tasks include ensuring the new arena's entrances are tall enough to accommodate the city's most intriguing resident, 7-foot-6 Yao Ming.

Yet this week has been a real stretch, even for a Harvard man. This week, Postolos is just another down-home Houstonian who can be observed strolling the vibrant, urban streets with swelling chest and bleary eyes.



Houston, we have a party ... and another ... and another.

The Super Bowl tends to bring out the champagne -- or OK, the beer and barbecue -- and, given recent developments, a brutal hangover is virtually guaranteed.

Local politicians, athletes, celebrities and sports executives, all suddenly and seemingly civic-minded, are intent on dusting off what they believe to be a modern marvel: Their downtown. Their model for all things urban and innovative.

Their answer to all the yahoos who said it couldn't be done.

"Sports is a way to communicate with the rest of the country, even the rest of the world," said Postolos, who succeeded current Kings president John Thomas five years ago. "People used to look at Houston, and they thought about NASA, the Astrodome. Now they know about Yao Ming, the Toyota Center, Minute Maid Park.

"It's very hard to quantify the influence, how much impact professional sports has in bringing people together downtown. But this is a really exciting week for us. There is such a sense of pride, of utility, of doing something important, of getting people to visit our city and see everything we have to offer.

"Getting the Toyota Center built was an unbelievably difficult journey, a 10-year process, but it was also one of the most satisfying experiences of my life."

This is definitely show-and-tell time, and why not?

This is a city transformed.

A decade ago, Houston was a sprawling, physically unappealing metropolis with too little zoning and too many strip malls. Motorists routinely circled the moribund downtown and battled gridlock en route to the Astrodome and the world-renowned Galleria, or otherwise escaped to the plush suburbs. Traffic remains a constant source of irritation; the freeways are a staggeringly familiar maze of concrete, under-construction additions and off-ramps, and the access roads and side streets also offer cones of all shapes, sizes and colors.

But that Interstate 610 loop no longer leads to nowhere. And if you can get there -- and traffic flow is being addressed with improved connecting routes and expanded light-rail service -- the city center has a real pulse, feels like a real place, replete with restaurants, theatres, hotels and professional sports facilities.

Within a contiguous, seven-block area, the region's aggressive urban-renewal commitment has led to expansion of the George Brown Convention Center and a spectacular Hilton Americas hotel, and, at opposite ends, a spanking new sports complex: the $286 million Minute Maid Park, a 40,950-seat facility that has accommodated the Astros since 2000, and the brand-new $252 million Toyota Center, the 18,500-seat arena that houses the NBA's Rockets, WNBA's Comets and Houston Aeros hockey team. (Reliant Stadium, with its distinctive rectangular shape and retractable roof, remains a Houston outcast, although depending upon traffic, it is located within minutes of downtown.)

"We were just very fortunate to have civic leaders who felt it was to the benefit of the city to get it done," said Postolos, nodding, "and so, within the last four years, the city has three new sports properties."

The newest of the three, the Toyota Center, was financed primarily with public funds -- approximately $202 million from bonds and taxes on hotel occupancy (2 percent) and rental cars (5 percent). The Rockets contribute an $8.5 million lease payment that includes $1.6 million for capital repair funds, another $1.5 million for maintenance and $200,000 for naming rights.

Whether the comfortable and improved surroundings impact the season-ticket base and overall attendance is unclear. Even in the best of times -- the 1994-95 championship seasons -- Houstonians never ranked among the NBA's most impassioned fans. The Rockets, in fact, have failed to crack the 15,000 mark in average attendance in three of their previous four seasons, although this year's average is 14,984 and moving upward entering tonight's game against the Kings.

"Part of that is because we haven't made the playoffs the past four years," explains Postolos, "and, unlike Sacramento, there are other pro sports teams sharing the marketplace. It's going to take some time, but it will happen."

Jeff Van Gundy's hiring helps. Yao Ming's presence helps. The club's improved won-lost record probably helps most of all. And while the Rockets continue to lag behind the Texans in overall popularity, they indeed appear engaged in their own transition: A poll conducted by the University of Houston's Center for Public Policy for the city's major daily newspaper, the Chronicle, listed Steve Francis as the city's favorite athlete, a development unheard of since the Hakeem Olajuwon championships years.

So, no, with the Super Bowl projected to dump millions into the local economy, the downtown revitalized and the Democrats and Republicans having held hands long enough to achieve their ends, Houston no longer is the sports town known merely as the site of the Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs match (1973), Elvin Hayes' performance against Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the 1968 NCAA Championship, or the adopted hometown of the still-beloved Rudy Tomjanovich.

Trees grow. Cities change. The Rockets are rising and, it appears, helping complete their city's downtown face-lift. It looks good. It really does.

 

By Ed Bouchette, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette



Amy Sancetta, Associated Press
Stadium workers inflate a replica of the Vince Lombardi Trophy at Reliant Stadium in Houston.
Click photo for larger image.
Related article:

Super Bowl Notebook: Marino, Montana engage in dairy duel

HOUSTON -- Houston has the Super Bowl Sunday, Major League Baseball's All-Star Game in July, the NCAA Final Four on its way, Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens, the defending NCAA baseball champions, Yao Ming, a new football stadium and an NFL team to go with it, a new baseball field and a new basketball/hockey arena.

The way things are going here, Houston-based NASA could soon reveal that Mars rovers Opportunity and Spirit discovered little green men afoot on the Red Planet.

The headline Monday in the Houston Chronicle that actually knocked the Super Bowl from the top news story of the day: "NASA hits a 'jackpot' on Mars."

Another gusher for Houston.

It's good to be a Texan these days. There's one in the White House, the reigning NBA champions are in San Antonio, born Yankee Bill Parcells led the Dallas Cowboys into the playoffs for the first time in the past four years, and six-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong is dating songbird Sheryl Crow.

Yeee-haa!

With presidential-backed plans for NASA to colonize the moon and put men on Mars, Houston is the nerve center of the universe these days in more ways than one.

It wasn't always this way. In 1996, the Houston Oilers broke as many hearts in Texas when they fled for Tennessee as did the Browns in Cleveland when they bolted for Baltimore. The aging Eighth Wonder of the World, the Houston Astrodome, looked more like the Eighth Blunder of the World. (Trivia: The only other Super Bowl game played in Houston was in Rice Stadium in 1974 because the Astrodome wasn't large enough). The Houston psyche was nearly as bad as the oil bust of 1983.

Houston had lost its football team to Nashville. What was next, the Astros skipping to Baton Rouge?

"Here you have the nation's fourth-largest city losing a team to the 35th largest city," said Oliver Luck, a former West Virginia University quarterback who played for the Oilers and has been CEO of the Harris County-Houston Sports Authority the past 2 1/2 years. "It was a shock to everyone."

It also served as something else.

"A catalyst," said Luck.

Houston had a plan. State legislatures created the Sports Authority in 1997 with several goals in mind: Win back an NFL team and build new venues for football, baseball and basketball/hockey. Oh, and by the way, colonize the moon.

With the loss of the Oilers fresh in their minds, voters approved a plan that would fund the $1 billion to construct three new facilities by adding a 2 percent hotel tax and 5 percent car rental tax in addition to various user fees such as a $2 admissions tax per ticket to every event at Reliant Stadium.

The approval built Minute Maid Park for the Astros in 2000, Reliant Stadium in 2002 and the Toyota Center in 2003.

The NFL quickly awarded this Super Bowl and baseball bestowed its All-Star Game this summer on Houston, where they believe sports can market a region and serve as a rallying point for the local citizenry.

"It's an opportunity to bring the world to Houston," Luck said. "Houston is a vibrant community and is able to put together the resources and develop venues like these that are truly outstanding. I don't think any other city in the world has the kind of sport venues that we have today. The citizens are great sports fans, and they recognize the benefit."

Luck, a Rhodes Scholar, thinks big.

"I think it's meant a lot to Houston, quite honestly. Houston's a very rapidly growing city. A lot of people who live here aren't from Houston, weren't born here. I'm a perfect example. Sports is one of the few things that can act as a glue to keep the city together. Houston is a pretty progressive place in terms of diversity, and sports is one of those things everyone follows."

Not to mention the following Houston now has in China.

"There are now 1.3 billion people in China who know where Houston is," said Les Alexander, the sometimes overly exuberant owner of the Rockets. "They know that Yao Ming plays here and that Toyota Center is his home, and they want to find out about our city as a consequence of that."

That would be great if Nike were hiring Houston citizens at $2 a day to stitch $140 shoes. Even Luck acknowledges that the impact of the Super Bowl and All-Star Game is temporary and won't have a lasting effect on Houston's economy. A study predicted that the annual economic output of the three sports venues would produce $900 million. But it's not necessarily the economy, stupid.

"The economics for the events are good for the city, but it's only five, six days," Luck said of the Super Bowl. "That's an economic benefit you can get with conventions. The bigger benefit is to give a city like Houston a platform to show the rest of the country and the world that it's made tremendous strides."

Super Bowl tickets ... going for $2,000. Super Bowl hats ... $25. Super Bowl T-shirts ... $20. CBS showing Houston's frolicking nightlife ... priceless.

"Houston, despite its size, hasn't been on anybody's radar screen," Luck said. "Over the next 10 years, Houston is projected to grow another 2 million. Houston eventually will become the third-largest city in the U.S. For a guy who grew up in Cleveland, it's hard to believe."

Hey, they've played an All-Star Game in Cleveland.

 

This was just a few articles I ran across. Like I said before there are always 2 sides to every story. Everyone also knows that those who have negative point of view make more noise than those who have a positive exerience.

I am proud to be a Texan and I love my city!