The streets of downtown New Orleans are awash in scarlet and gray and purple and gold. There's no place to park and pedestrians are flooding walkways and making driving hazardous at best or snarling traffic to a crawl. The French Quarter is filled to capacity. But nobody's complaining. It's the national championship in college football for goodness sakes. There's bragging rights up for grabs and a crystal trophy shaped like a football, the Coaches Trophy, that goes to the victor. The All State BCS National Championship Game, as it should properly be called, starts up in earnest later tonight, but the rivalry between the number one (Ohio State) and number two (LSU) teams in the country has never been more keen. One can smell it in the air. To fathom how big this event is, move along Poydras Street, home of several hotels including Ohio State's headquarters, the Hilton Riverside, The pedestrian traffic -- almost all wearing the colors of their favorite schools -- is at least double the regular rate and with the Baton Rouge delegations that arrived yesterday the number of automobiles traveling along the streets has also increased sharply. Near the Superdome, the site of tonight's battle, there are large satellite-link dishes that have sprung up overnight, massive television facilities housed in 18-wheelers, and various support vehicles. And there's a very visible police presence on the streets as well. So what does this all mean for New Orleans, a city still on the road to recovery in other areas not very far away from the busy CBD and French Quarter? Well, according to estimates the recent All State Sugar Bowl and tonight's BCS National Championship Game will bring in $400 million dollars into city coiffers. That's an economic shot in the arm that any city would welcome. However, this city more than most, depends on that revenue to speed the rate of recovery from the lingering effects of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita related floods. Yesterday also kicked off the first of the Carnival season's street parades in nearby Gretna and Slidell. Mardi Gras parades and balls will also energize the local ecomony leading up to Fat Tuesday on February 5. The real winner is not Georgia, Ohio State or LSU. It's New Orleans and Louisiana, shaking off the negativity associated with the past and moving towards a better, more progressive future. The game has yet to be played, but we have already won.
2 comments:
The City should be proud of the job we are doing to host this event. And congrats, Alan, on starting a blog. You wanted comments. If you would allow me to plagiarize from my own letter to the T-P, here goes:
The Committee on Presidential Debates says New Orleans would not be ready next September to host one of their events:
http://www.debates.org/pages/news_111907.html
New Orleans has been hosting week after week of sellout games, starting on its third post-Katrina Mardi Gras, and conventions with tens of thousands, all with the unstrained confidence Alan describes. But this Committee believed that New Orleans "is not ready" to host a debate, and Oxford is? What kind of breadth did the Committee demonstrate by selecting two of the four debate sites in adjacent states only 290 miles apart?
What if I, along with just 649 other New Orleanians, booked one of Oxford, Mississippi’s massive inventory of 650 presidential-debate-ready hotel rooms? No harm done to Oxford; their hoteliers would be just as happy to sell out to us as to politicos and journalists. Those same journalists might pay a little more attention to our recovery if their only choices for lodging were Memphis or Jackson or even the not-so-ready New Orleans.
We know how to do this--we did it most recently on August 29, 2005--but this time we can all come back the next day, and our homes won’t be playing host to floodwaters ushered in by the Corps.
We could call it "Debate Bowl" or "Not quite Allstate, Sugar? Not so much..Bowl"
Anyone up for a road trip to Oxford in September?
Alan, This is a great idea and my first ever BLOG contribution. I think a lot will have to do with the content. Naturally, I'm hoping for a huge Tiger win but 1 point will do just fine. On the political side I think it's Mike Huckabee, not Jerry. As a side note about Huckabee, he's got my support at this point for several reasons. The main one being he impressed me greatly as Governor of Arkansas by his responsiveness and approcahability. (is that a word?) Also, it might be fun to add a "none of the above" category as the campaigns begin to expose more flaws and characteristics of the candidates.
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