The Super Bowl has returned to the Valley of the Sun but instead of the game being played in Tempe, where it was played in 1996, the contest will take place in Glendale, which is 10 miles from downtown Phoenix. NFL owners would not have rewarded Arizona Cardinals owner Bill Bidwill with the Super Bowl if Maricopa County voters hadn’t narrowly approved a football stadium-spring training facility referendum in 2000. The football stadium referendum wasn’t the first time that politics and the Super Bowl intersected in the Phoenix area. In fact, the NFL yanked the Super Bowl in 1992 from Tempe’s Sun Devil Stadium because the state refused to recognize Martin Luther King Day, a holiday that was first celebrated nationally on a state-by-state basis in 1986.

Initially, NFL owners had no real interest in Arizona politics because the league didn’t have a team in the state. Former Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt had also declared that Arizona would celebrate the holiday in 1987, even though the state legislature failed to pass legislation to officially recognize the holiday. However, newly-elected Governor Meacham rescinded the holiday in 1987 because it was “illegally created.” Again, this was no major concern for the NFL as it had no business interests there other than having its games aired on both radio and TV within the state.

In 1987, St. Louis Cardinals owner Bill Bidwill struck out in his four-year bid to get St. Louis to build a new facility for his football club and decided to move to Tempe because the Arizona State University’s stadium had a much larger capacity than St. Louis’s Busch Stadium, and he preferred the warm climate of the Southwest. It was then that the NFL was forced into the Martin Luther King Day holiday controversy. Bidwill’s Cardinals bombed at the gate in their first season and in March 1990 the NFL decided to give Bidwill a boost by awarding Super Bowl XXVII to Tempe. NFL owners knew that Arizona was not celebrating the King holiday but were given assurances by Arizona business and political leaders that the state would change its stance and recognize the federal holiday. They also knew that there was an economic boycott of the state and that they were going to get involved in a politically sensitive issue in the state.

After Governor Meacham canceled the King holiday in 1987, performer Stevie Wonder announced that he would boycott performing in Arizona, and convention planners also bypassed the state. The battle was on. In 1989, the state legislature passed legislation to create a state holiday honoring King but opponents managed to get enough signatures to get voters in the state to decide on whether or not to honor King in November 1990. Arizona voters overturned the legislature’s decision and the NFL pulled Super Bowl XXVII from Tempe and moved it to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

But that was not the end of the story. NFL owners along with the National Football League Players Association stepped up the pressure on the Arizona legislature and told local politicians that the league would never consider playing a Super Bowl in the Phoenix area unless the state recognized the holiday.

The January 1996 Super Bowl became available, and the NFL was making noises that it was interested in going to Tempe if Arizona finally said yes to Martin Luther King Day. In 1992, Arizona voters had another chance at passing a referendum recognizing the King holiday, with a vote of 62–38, and approved the establishment of the holiday. About four-and-a-half months later, in March 1993, NFL awarded Super Bowl XXX to Tempe. The Arizona State College of Business claimed that the 1996 Super Bowl had a $305.8 million impact on Arizona and supposedly created 6,040 jobs.

The NFL had a good experience in Tempe, but Bidwill needed a new stadium and the NFL made it clear that it would not return to Arizona unless it got one. When Bidwill moved to Tempe in 1988, there was a vague promise that his Cardinals would eventually get a new stadium. In 1994, Maricopa County had put aside $238 million to build a baseball stadium for a Major League Baseball team as long as MLB granted an expansion team to Phoenix by 1995.

By 1999, Bidwill was pressuring Governor Hull of Arizona to build a publicly funded football facility and sending head coach Vince Tobin out into the community to give speeches encouraging Maricopa County residents to approve a new Cardinals stadium. NFL owners were very quiet when it came to the Super Bowl prize, but it was understood that the Phoenix area would not be considered Super Bowl-worthy until a new facility was built for Bidwill’s Cardinals.

In November 2000, Maricopa County voters approved a new Cardinals stadium and also funding for a new spring training facility that would be shared by the Kansas City Royals and the Texas Rangers in Surprise. Even though there was more than $200 million in public funding available for the football facility, there was no land available to build on and the Arizona Tourism and Sports Authority had to decide if Mesa, Tempe, Phoenix, or the western suburbs was a suitable spot for the building.

Eventually the authority settled on Glendale, a sparsely populated but growing area that put up money for an indoor arena for the Phoenix Coyotes NHL team and will be the spring training home of both the Chicago White Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers in 2009.

Stadium construction started in the spring of 2003. The NFL awarded Glendale the 2008 Super Bowl in October 2003.

The NFL rewarded not only Bidwill, but Houston Texans owner Robert McNair and Detroit’s William Clayton Ford with Super Bowls after they got public funding for new stadiums. New Orleans and San Diego, who were part of the Super Bowl rotation, will not get another Super Bowl until new facilities are built in those cities. The NFL was prepared to give Los Angeles and New York City Super Bowls had both cities secured public financing for new stadiums. Local Super Bowl bid committees hope that corporate CEO’s and other decision makers who attend the Super Bowl will consider moving part of their business to their city.

The Super Bowl is all about political power and financial clout disguised as a sporting event and if you don’t believe that just ask people in the Valley of the Sun, who can tell you that the Super Bowl becomes more than just a game.

evanjweiner@yahoo.com