Aside from everything that FOH readers have already tweeted, texted, blogged, posted and/or uploaded regarding the 12 minutes that was the Bridgestone Super Bowl XLV Halftime Show featuring the Black Eyed Peas, Slash and Usher, what follows here is a recap of the week that led up to that moment (and others) in and around Arlington's Cowboys Stadium.
The fact that Super Bowl XLV would be staged at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas was decided in 2007, well before the $1.3 billion stadium – the largest domed structure in the world – was even built. Arlington had co-hosted the World Series a few months back for the 2010 World Series at Rangers Ballpark, which is less than a mile from Cowboys Stadium. The city had also held the NBA All-Star Game at Cowboys Stadium earlier in 2010. But the Super Bowl is not just about the game or the halftime show. Beyond the stadium, it's this massively huge thing that generates huge amounts of money.
Long before the playoffs, planners in Arlington, Dallas and Fort Worth adopted a strategy of "regional cooperation" to spread the wealth and divvy up Arlington's Super Bowl pie. That probably made sense – the reality was that so many hotel rooms were needed and so much convention space was required that Arlington just couldn't handle all of it. But this arrangement definitely contributed to the difficulty of navigating Super Bowl week and helped to set things up for the bad rap that was to come.
Luckily, the area has two major airports – Love Field, which is close to Dallas, and DFW International, which is fairly close to Arlington, to accommodate the incoming crowds.
Beyond the Stadium
The number of events that are held around the Super Bowl and all of the ways to make money from it that don't involve the NFL are too numerous to cover here. Two weeks prior to Super Bowl Sunday – the minute the playoffs were over and it was decided that the two teams would be the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers – business phones all over the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex started ringing, and they did not stop ringing for two weeks solid.
Working the NFL Super Bowl, you better know going in that nothing stops the National Football League, and if you are working for them, you have to deliver at the top of your game. This is understood, but I suspect that even those who had done the event many times before would most likely agree that the week leading up to the game in Arlington, Texas was more trying than anyone anticipated.
The 19th NFL Experience, a family affair that celebrates professional football, was held at the Dallas Convention Center and was open for business a mere three days after the two Super Bowl teams were decided. Starting Jan. 27, it drew crowds for nine of the next 11 days with a price of $25 for an adult ticket. For this reason, the NFL people were, for the most part, staying in Dallas, along with most of the media. On a good traffic day, they were about a 25 minute drive to the site of the Super Bowl. ESPN, on the other hand, chose to broadcast from an open square in downtown Fort Worth, about a 20 minute drive from the site of the game. Fort Worth was also the headquarters for the Steelers team and fans, with the Packers making their headquarters nearest to DFW International in Irving, TX, where the old Cowboys Stadium reigned for decades.
The number of press members covering the game exceeded 5,000. The population in Arlington is about 380,000, and about 100,000 people were going to be in that stadium, including a former president and first lady, so at the stadium, both the FBI and Homeland Security found parking spots for their customized trucks. They left a space for the EPA, who would be on site too. Auto-piloted drone aircraft would be periodically flying over the stadium area to monitor the air quality, checking for chemicals. As game day approached they did manage to land and check out two small aircraft that were flying in restricted airspace. There was also a morning in which a suspicious package took over morning television in the form of a bomb scare. The Arlington Fire Department determined that it was harmless.
No doubt NFL Super Bowl producers know what they are doing and how to do this event, but this being the first Super Bowl in Dallas/Fort Worth, everything would have probably been just fine, except the unusual happened. Something you can't control. People on the inside of the NFL kept referring to it as "challenging" on the news channels. That factor was – you guessed it – the weather.
A Winter Wallop
Both teams arrived on the last day of January, which was a Monday, and woke up Tuesday morning to temperatures that were very close to all-time record cold for this week in the area. These near-record-breaking temps would last for the next three days. To give you an idea of how that went, the three major school districts – Dallas, Arlington and Fort Worth – would all end up being shut down Tuesday through Friday. It was estimated that 500 schools and day care centers were shut down for those four days.
This bad weather arrived on the Tuesday before Super Bowl Sunday, which was known as Super Bowl Media Day. Mother Nature had produced outdoor hockey conditions – everyone awoke to a blanket of ice, and with an onslaught of unrelenting cold temperatures, it would remain as a factor until Friday afternoon, which was the first time the temperature rose significantly into the 20s. To make things even more interesting, the city does not have a proper fleet of snow plows and prefers using sand instead of salt to treat the roads.
From the Tuesday forward, using either DFW International or Love Field would be touch and go. Flight cancellations and runway closures became a major headache for the entire work week, creating baggage and logistical nightmares. Both airports actually did close for several hours at a time, and more than once.
Media day was a cold one inside Cowboys Stadium, and with both the NFL people and the media holed up in Dallas, you can imagine them feeling as though they were marooned on an island, less-than-safe making the slow journey over to the stadium early that morning. In short order, both the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers would have to switch to a plan B of practicing indoors at local high schools rather than the preferred plan A, which, of course, was set for outdoor stadiums.
The bottom line is that everyone working the week inside or outside the stadium lost valuable, and much-needed time, all due to this overnight ice storm and the persistent cold weather as the week went on, trying to maintaining an air of professionalism with temperatures in the teens and wind chills of zero, with "Did my UPS or FedEx package arrive yet?" followed by "Damn its cold when that wind blows" as two of the more likely utterances.
Working outside in the parking lot meant that when you arrived at your production trailer, everything from your bottled water to the water in the toilet was actually frozen. If your equipment was still on the truck, then your equipment was frozen, and you were about to endure loads of annoyances like the long, slow rides to the work site, frozen catering and gaffers tape that was so cold the adhesive was totally ineffective.
The most frequent reminder of the cold that week was watching ESPN broadcast from outside in the cold in downtown Fort Worth. Part of their set was this "cozy den" looking affair where they would do some sit down interviews. Kudos to their set designer, as it did look very warm and inviting – I think it even had a stuffed animal in the background. But you could tell the temperature there was in the teens, because you could see everybody's breath as they spoke.
Surprise Blackouts
Wednesday morning, the city again awoke with near all-time record cold temperatures, and also a new problem – surprise electrical rolling blackouts. Fortunately, the stadium was exempted, but as close as two miles from it, as well as in Dallas and Fort Worth, entire hotels would go dark with no warning. One person who was affected told me that there had been an outage lasting 14 hours. Others reported outages of less than an hour at a time, but multiple times a day. Secondly, in Texas there can't be near record cold without freezing pipes that burst, and those were dealt with too. Some of our guests were in the dark, cold and wet. Not the best way to start the work day.
At this point, it was obvious that the lead-up events were going to suffer. The ones that suffered the most, or were even cancelled because of the weather, were non-NFL events. On Wednesday night, Gene Simmons and Shannon Tweed hosted an event for Aces & Angels in Dallas. Fearing the weather would cause low attendance, promoters got the word out via the media that 1,000 of the $475 tickets would be made available for $100 each. It seemed to work.
Promoters of a charity show featuring Prince and Erikah Badu, however, had to abandon the original plan to produce the show in a large tent in a parking lot in Dallas and move it into a ballroom at the InterContinental Hotel. This $1,500-per-seat event did cancel. Just prior to show time.
There were big parties every night. The Sports Illustrated party, the Maxim party, The Gatorade party, Jerry Jones' party, the NFL party…and on and on they went. Despite these good times, it definitely seemed as though just when you thought the conditions had kicked everybody around enough and tried everybody's patience enough for the day, then something else would happen. Like what the city awoke to on Friday morning.
The Friday before the game, the city saw four or five inches of new snow all across the DFW area, on top of Tuesday's still-unmelted ice. Love Field was closed until about noon on Friday, and there were runway closures at DFW International Airport. On average, Dallas would get 5 inches of snow in a year's time, and this was four to five inches overnight.
By this time, four days of snow and ice sat atop the world's largest domed stadium, and also on the tent city built all around it – with stages set, truss hung and equipment in place in tent after tent, waiting for parking lot performances from Maroon 5, Keith Urban and Blue Man Group, to name a few. Never mind the gaping holes that the wind had already created in these structures, they were now weighted down with four inches of new snow.
Just after lunch, at about 1:15 pm, with the temperature still below freezing, sheets of ice and snow started to break loose, gain momentum and slide off over the side of Cowboys Stadium, falling nearly 100 feet – onto the ground in most cases, but also through some of the tent structures. A few workers were hit directly and sent to the hospital, with one person in serious condition.
One Entrance
For the remainder of Friday and Saturday, all the stadium entrances except one had to be closed. There was now in effect an 85-foot perimeter all the way around the stadium that no one except emergency personnel was to be in. This meant that there was no route in or out by anyone working the game except through the one loading dock tunnel, and that is quite a walk.
With one worker hospitalized in serious condition, the plan was now for the Arlington fire department to get the ice off of the roof. The fire department did a fantastic job of removing snow and ice by creating controlled avalanches with helicopters and then ventured out on to the roof to chip away the remainder of the snow and ice by hand. At least one tent struck by an avalanche was still buckled as of Saturday morning.
If you arrived in Arlington on Saturday, you would never know any of this had gone on. Even with Saturday being a beautiful 60-something-degree day, there was still some snow and ice visible on the dome at game time on Sunday. Nevertheless, it was a beautiful day in which money was to be made, and it was.
Over at the stadium, there had been a plan for a seating company out of New York to put up 13,000 temporary seats inside the stadium. These temporary seats were going to help to break the all time attendance record for the Super Bowl. Cowboys Stadium had already set the all-time attendance record during a regular season NFL game with creative use of standing room.
Well, this seating idea didn't go exactly according to plan, as you may have heard. By kickoff, instead of 13,000 temporary seats, the Arlington fire marshal officially cleared only 11,740 for use. Some 850 ticketholders were seated elsewhere; another 400 watched the game from standing-room only locations.
This situation seemed to be the big news story the NFL couldn't escape, and remains a hot news topic as of this writing – especially for those who flew to Arlington for the game to find that they had no seat.
Cowboys Stadium had hired in and used the seating company previously to do floor seats for the NBA All-Star Game and the Manny Pacquiao fight. Perhaps this familiarity may have had something to do with the confidence factor in having these new seats assembled and passing inspection before game time. The company representative responsible identified the problem as time lost due to the weather earlier in the week.
In a bid to break the attendance record, the NFL said they would allow Cowboys Stadium to include in the attendance tally thousands of people who paid $200 a head to sit outside the stadium and watch the game on a big screen. Well, what started off as a beautiful Sunday slowly started to change, and by the third quarter, a cold, hard rain started to fall, and little by little, fans left their $200 seats and went on their way. The stadium didn't break the Super Bowl attendance record, and as it turned out, wouldn't have, even with the 400 extra seats.
After the game, it would be another 12 days before the last of the big tents was dismantled and loaded on to the trucks, but it would be the very next morning after the Super Bowl that Kathie Lee Gifford on one channel and Whoopi Goldberg on another complained on national TV about the performance of the production crews working the Super Bowl Halftime Show. The overall broadcast sound, Fergie's microphone, the volume of Slash's guitar and the partially-lit "V" in the stage sections spelling out L-O-V-E were all mentioned by them with a whiney "C'mon guys" attitude.
If they only knew.
