It’ll Be Their Day in the Sun

Among the revelers drawn to New Orleans for Super Bowl XXXVI, the San Diegans are the ones with the clipboards and checklists.

Next year the Super Bowl returns to San Diego, and a delegation from the city is in New Orleans to see what works and what does not.

“We’re here to observe and absorb,” said Sal Giametta, vice president of the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau.

With hundreds of millions of dollars and the city’s image on the line, San Diego has sent a blue-chip lineup of San Diego city officials and business leaders.

It’s not entirely voluntary: The NFL requires the host city for the next year to attend the weeklong buildup and pay attention.

“We’ve got a pretty good playbook going in but there is always room for improvement,” Deputy City Manager Bruce Herring said.

San Diego played host to the Super Bowl in 1988 and 1998, the Republican National Convention in 1996, and the national biotechnology convention last year, all to kudos from visitors and the traveling press. In a tourist-dependent city such as San Diego, image is nothing to trifle with.

Like all metropolises, San Diego has its civic quirks and shortcomings. Political quarrels between the big city and surrounding smaller communities are common. Estrangement between business leaders and elected officials is endemic.

San Diego prides itself on doing the big event as well as any city in the land. The city is determined Super Bowl XXXVII will follow the pattern.

“It’s one thing that San Diego is very good at: coordinating big efforts,” said Gayle Falkenthal, an official with the San Diego Convention Center. “It’s a real rise-to-the-occasion kind of performance.”

A year in advance, the city has a spruce-up list for 35-year-old Qualcomm Stadium. By kickoff time Jan. 26, 2003, the city has pledged, among other items, to install a new sound system, renovate the locker rooms, and make sure every seat is bright blue.

Also, at the urging of the NFL, the city has promised 70,000 seats, not the 68,913 for the 1998 game.

Most of the big-ticket items are considered under control in San Diego: hotel rooms (plenty, unlike Houston and Jacksonville, which want luxury liners to park nearby), transportation (lots of new buses and a trolley line that goes directly to Qualcomm) and experience in throwing parties (76% of Super Bowl visitors in 1998 visited the Gaslamp District nightspots).

And then there is that natural asset: the January weather.

“I’m sitting here in humid weather and we had storms the last couple of nights,” Giametta said from the city’s booth in the exhibition center at New Orleans. “San Diego is a paradise,” by comparison.

The biggest change, of course, since 1998 involves police protection. In the post-Sept. 11 environment, the U.S. Secret Service and Homeland Security forces have asserted control of law enforcement inside the Louisiana Superdome.

Whether that will be the case next year at Qualcomm is unknown, Herring said. San Diego police officials are in New Orleans to watch the coordination of the 40 federal, state and local agencies involved.

For the GOP convention and the biotechnology convention, both occasions when thousands of protesters came to San Diego, the city ordered a virtual full mobilization of its police force. There were few arrests and no disruptions.

If security is different from the last time the Super Bowl came to San Diego, one thing is just the same. Local organizers have been unabashed in confronting the issue, a perennial in Super Bowl cities.

At an early meeting with volunteers pledged to help Super Bowl XXXVII go smoothly, beer distributing executive Ron Fowler, chairman of the city’s Super Bowl host committee, made one thing clear:

“There are no extra tickets. Don’t ask.”

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