The Super Bowl's travels have taken it to 11 cities, but it has been most at home in New Orleans, Miami and Los Angeles, where 24 of the 38 previous games have been staged.
The first seven Super Bowls did not stray from those three sites.
But the Feb. 6 game will be in Jacksonville, Florida, which did not even have an NFL team until 10 years ago. Most outsiders know little about the city other than that the Gator Bowl is played there (at Alltel Stadium, where the Super Bowl will be) or that it is the home of the Jaguars. Music fans know that Lynyrd Skynyrd was formed there. And some people know that paper mills once emitted a stench there.
Jacksonville is spread out over more than 1,300km2, making it among the largest cities in the country, but in terms of its population, about 775,000, it is the smallest city to be host to a Super Bowl. No Bourbon Street. No South Beach.
The famous 17th hole at the TPC Sawgrass course is in nearby Ponte Vedra, Florida.
"If you polled the general public, there's always been a small inferiority complex," said Michael Kelly, president of the Jacksonville Super Bowl Host Committee, who held the same position in Tampa Bay for the 2001 game. "But the leadership past and present has exhibited a spirit of not taking no for an answer."
In 1993, NFL owners voted to give Jacksonville (and not Baltimore or Memphis) an expansion franchise. Almost exactly seven years later, they granted Jacksonville's bid for Super Bowl XXXIX over one by Miami to be the host for what would have been the ninth time.
"We'd just come off the 1999 game in Miami," said Jim Steeg, the league's senior vice president for special events, who has overseen Super Bowl planning for 26 years. "I've always said it's tough for a city to get a game having just had it."
Bidding for a Super Bowl is a domestic version of chasing the Olympics. Host committees combine with teams and cities -- with new stadiums built or to be constructed -- to show the league what they can do: Here are our plans for lodging, transportation, security and entertainment. Owners award the games years in advance to give cities time to prepare.
With Alltel Stadium having long since been completed, there is no rush to finish construction, as there was for the Olympic stadium in Athens, Greece.
The league had concerns about Jacksonsville's labor pool and the airport's capacity to handle the short-term crush of visitors. But the league was most focused on a shortage of hotel rooms.
Steeg recalled a presentation to the owners in 1999, more than a year before the vote, when the Jacksonville boosters laid out a big map "and plopped little wooden ships along it" to demonstrate how they would provide as many as 10,000 extra rooms.
Tom Petway, the co-chairman of the Jacksonville host committee, said that Wayne Weaver, the owner of the Jaguars, had devised the idea of using cruise ships to supplement the shortfall in hotel rooms.
"Wayne concluded that we qualified for the Super Bowl with no real issues except the hotel rooms," Petway said.
Before the NFL owners chose between Jacksonville and Miami, Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said that the Kansas City Chiefs' owner, Lamar Hunt, had made a persuasive pitch.
"He said he was in favor of Jacksonville because he thought it was part of the tradition of the NFL, with the Chiefs and Green Bay, small markets, being so prominent in the early Super Bowls," Tagliabue said Thursday in a telephone interview. "He saw Jacksonville as the heir apparent to those types of cities."
Tagliabue added: "To me, it's an act of loyalty to a community that came forth. It's the little engine that could; it outcompeted against larger markets."
The city and the league have had to provide what other Super Bowl locales already have. A temporary, tented entertainment district along 2.3km of riverfront has been erected to augment the smaller Jacksonville Landing festival marketplace. The interactive NFL Experience will not be in the local convention center, but under tents near the stadium.
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