Well, you may or may not have heard, depending on your feelings about the football, the Super Bowl will be in Dallas. I was only vaguely aware of this until about a month ago. And let’s just say, my anticipation level is not high.
Not so much that demon football will be taking place in my town. Frankly, I care not. If fat men falling on each other is your thing, have at it. Have a beer and a wing for me while you’re at it. (And no, I don’t watch “just for the commercials”; I got a DVR so that I wouldn’t have to look at commercials the other 364 days of the year; no commercial is that good.) What really has me tweaked is the fact that I’m just really not at all sure that Dallas can handle it.
I lived in Phoenix when they hosted on year, and the whole thing pretty much ended up as a non-event. PHX routinely hosts a major bowl game and a large scale PGA tournament. They have a very well designed traffic system, and a tourism-based economy that is focused on the winter months. I barely even noticed a change during the Super Bowl.
Dallas isn’t like that. We have extremely unpredictable weather. Not the massive winter extremes of Pittsburgh or Wisconsin (see, I even know the teams – I’m not completely sports ignorant). But we get freak storms so often that they don’t even qualify as freak any more. It’s just Texas weather. And our traffic system SUCKS the big wazoo. Really. We don’t have nearly the number of cars of bigger cities. But we have whackado interchanges, poor signage, HOV lanes that never let you get off, and major arteries that bottle neck in some very odd places. Add to that the fact that we’re not really a tourist destination of any note (you should see how much trouble I have trying to figure out how to keep out of town guests amused), and you’ll know how ill-prepared our hotels are going to be for the massive influx. Oh, and our cops can’t do crowd control to save their lives. We’d be better off hiring a bunch of ranch hands to come in and move ‘em around like one big ol’ cattle drive. Seriously.
Possibly there are thousands of tiny adjustments and maneuvers that the local municipalities have been taking care of discreetly and behind the scenes. Doubt it. But I could be eating crow come February 7. Doubt it.
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2 comments:
Don't know much about Dallas. Don't know much about football. But I have to agree with you on the commercials bit. I am inundated with them on the television, so why would I watch them on purpose? People do look at you in disbelief when they discover that you haven't watched "the Super Bowl commercials".
Give a report on how well it was handled by Dallas.
Especially in the land of YouTube. If there's a truly great commercial, I can pull it up and spend 30 seconds watching it, rather than spending 3 hours of my life.
I totally get the companionship/ having a party aspect, but I do that all the time. I don't need permission from the NFL.
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