Super Bowl Puts Town on the Map and in the Big Leagues

The city once known for the pungent reek of its paper mills and down-home Southern drawl of the locals is preparing for a coming-out party that will place it in the national eye this weekend: Super Bowl XXXIX.

Jacksonville may be Florida’s largest metropolis both in area and population, but, says its top local pol, many Americans can’t find it on a map. “I hope this will be an experience that will introduce this city to the world,” said Mayor John Peyton.

Long considered “redneck, industrial swampland,” to use the words of one Florida writer, this deepwater port and rail hub 30 miles from the Georgia-Florida line now markets itself as the spot “where Florida begins.”

Without the edgy glitz of Miami or the theme-park lure of Orlando, Jacksonville has had to work hard to revitalize its economy and repopulate its downtown. In the last two years, two Fortune 500 companies have been coaxed into relocating here -- one, Fidelity National Financial Inc., from Santa Barbara.

And, 10 years after snagging an NFL franchise, it has become the smallest market to play host to the Super Bowl.

For the event, Jacksonville is compensating for a shortage of luxury hotels by bringing in five cruise ships with 3,617 rooms. The city lacks an established entertainment district like, say, the French Quarter of New Orleans, so it is creating one temporarily along the banks of the St. Johns River, the broad and meandering waterway that bisects the city of 735,000.

“We have moved to a level of local confidence that says, ‘You know what, we’re not second-class. We’re a major league city,’ ” said Jerry Mallot, executive vice president of the Jacksonville Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Hosting America’s premier sports event, he said, should take Jacksonville to a whole new level -- “nearly a billion people or so will watch all or part of the Super Bowl,” said Mallot. “Eighty-five percent will be in other countries.”

The NFL championship matchup Sunday between the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles -- along with the three days of related activities that precede it -- are expected to draw 100,000 visitors, said Michael Kelly, president of the Super Bowl host committee. That could inject $250 million to $300 million into the local economy.

“I don’t think we could get anything bigger than the Super Bowl,” said Paul Shami, manager of Mudville Grille, a popular sports bar and eatery on Beach Boulevard. For the game-day crowd Shami is planning a $50 all-you-can-eat-and-drink buffet, and ordering 12 kegs of beer -- twice the usual quantity.

Looking good on Super Sunday has become a citywide obsession -- for homes as well as commercial establishments. Nine thousand locals, who will wear red polo shirts and hats, have volunteered their time and efforts to make the event a success.

“I knew people would be excited, but some are ready to do anything, including taking time off from work to volunteer,” said Benny Hsu, 27, a restaurant manager who is helping coordinate volunteers.

To impress visitors and the television audience, members of the Garden Club of Jacksonville have been sprucing up their homes, said trustee Nancy Mahon.

“Of course, it’s a time of year when we don’t look our finest,” she said. “We have some cold weather and the grass is brown.”

Greg Blake of the Gold Club, an up-market gentlemen’s club, said: “We’re trying to put on our best face.” To lure the Super Bowl crowd, the manager said, the club recently installed a new bar and an animal-print carpet in its VIP Champagne Room, and laid in a $100,000 stock of bubbly “for the discriminating guys who have the money.”

The night before the game, the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, arguably Jacksonville’s leading contribution to contemporary American culture, will anchor a televised “tailgate party” in the party zone. Lead singer Johnny Van Zant said that if somebody had told him even 10 years ago that his hometown would be the site of a Super Bowl, he wouldn’t have believed it.

“As a kid, it was a little Podunk town that people passed through going to Orlando and Miami,” the 45-year-old musician said. “It was kind of in the same category as Two Egg, Fla., if you’ve ever heard of that” -- Two Egg being a rural hamlet in north Florida.

For historian and author James B. Crooks, professor emeritus at the University of North Florida, the coming football game and all the hoopla that surrounds it are nothing less than “the fruition of efforts to remake the city,” which nearly burned to the ground in a 1901 fire.

Long considered backward even in other parts of Florida, Jacksonville had an especially heavy legacy of segregation and racial tension to deal with but went on to become Florida’s first city with an elected black sheriff.

In 1968, following corruption scandals and the loss of accreditation for its public schools, city and county governments were consolidated, creating the largest municipality in the continental United States (840 square miles, approaching twice the size of Los Angeles).

It took two decades, but even the notorious air pollution was cleaned up, to the point where the strongest smell wafting through downtown nowadays is the aroma of coffee beans roasted at the riverfront Maxwell House plant. On Sept. 3, 1995, a red-letter date in local history, the Jacksonville Jaguars of the NFL played their first regular-season game (losing, 10-3, to the Houston Oilers).

This city had been a surprise choice to be awarded a pro football franchise, and being included with the likes of New York, Chicago -- and Miami -- galvanized the citizenry.

Not coincidentally, Crooks said, “it’s been about 10 years that people here have begun to have pride. We had an inferiority complex because of race relations, the odors. It used to be known as the capital of south Georgia when south Georgia was considered the armpit of the country. Now, people who move here like it.”

Not all the news has been good lately, including word that the Navy may mothball the locally based aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy.

Last month, black community leaders held a march and rally to allege police brutality in the death of a man who died of a broken neck Dec. 3 when officers tried to arrest him for having an open drink container outside his home.

And Hugh Douglas, a defensive end and former Jaguar who’ll be coming to town as part of the Eagles squad, said in a recent newspaper interview that being black in Jacksonville was “like stepping into a time machine” to the 1950s.

This weekend, the city hopes that it will be its accomplishments that people notice and remember.

As a major part of a $10-million municipal campaign to make the city more photogenic and safer in time for the game, workers have installed 6 1/2 miles of electric cable and hundreds of light bulbs that now make the downtown bridges over the St. Johns glow white, blue and mauve after dusk.

“The lights that span the bridge are like a strand of pearls across the greatest river in the world,” wrote Kay Day, a local poet. Day said she reluctantly moved here 2 1/2 years ago from South Carolina. Now she doesn’t want to leave.

Some visitors may sneer at a town where it’s easier to find fried sweet potatoes than veal Marengo, but Chuck Day, coauthor of a history of the Super Bowl, thinks that if the weather cooperates, the game’s 39th edition will be a splendid success.

In fact, he’s worried that Jacksonville’s hunger for greater exposure and fame could backfire and that the north Florida he loves, a “crown jewel” of a region rich in rivers and estuaries, will be fast overrun by developers and new residents.