Detroit – People arrive for Super Bowl XL ready to whack this city.
Jennifer Granholm, Michigan’s governor, knows it.
She said something Monday about people outside of Michigan “looking down their noses at Detroit.”
Actually, plenty of people inside of Michigan look down their noses at Detroit.
Granholm said she saw this moment as a chance to change perceptions.
I had been in the city only a few hours when a fellow journalist said her hotel was bracketed by two abandoned, boarded buildings that made her area of town feel like Baghdad. I heard about how the homeless had been swept off the downtown streets and into shelters in order to “clean up” for XL.
Guess they missed one.
I walked five blocks from my downtown hotel to a restaurant and en route saw a homeless man curled in tattered blankets with dirty food beside him. He was sleeping in broad daylight on a sidewalk manhole. He had found one emitting steam in order to keep warm.
By the time I returned, the blankets and food were there, but he was gone.
Maybe he got swept up, too.
Good thing Detroit can take a punch.
And turn a bashing into a bash.
I know this because I lived in Detroit for nearly five years in the 1980s. It was a time in Detroit sports when Jim Harbaugh was scrambling and delivering darts at the University of Michigan, when Nuggets assistant coach Adrian Dantley was banging for the Pistons, when Chicago Bulls coach Scott Skiles was dribbling and shooting circles around foes at Michigan State, when Tommy Hearns and Billy Sims were kings, when the Tigers were world champions and when Steve Yzerman was building his Red Wings legacy.
Detroit was resilient then and still is.
The sports scene remains vibrant despite the lousy Lions. Downtown shows signs of rebirth.
I asked Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick about the national focus on Detroit hosting the Super Bowl soon after hundreds of thousands of layoffs by U.S. automakers and plant closings that affect Detroit like few other cities. Insensitivity or a chance to spur growth?
“This Super Bowl was awarded to us a few years before those recent auto announcements, but people still have the right to feel like it’s insensitive,” Kilpatrick said. “Those people are catching hard times. But this brings new dollars into the city. This gives us a chance to change our lives and attitudes. To create new opportunities for those displaced auto workers. It can create new opportunities for us all that are lasting.”
He is right.
When bad news comes, what do the achievers among us do? Recoil? Or hitch to a galvanizing event, like this Super Bowl, and let it be a catalyst for improvement?
Kilpatrick said that 70 new businesses have opened in downtown Detroit as a result of this Super Bowl. That there are 35 new restaurants. That it served as a jolt for a $2 billion riverfront project that will turn it from industrial to recreational. That this Super Bowl is the genesis for economic development in a way that Detroit has not moved in the past 50 years. He said similar opportunities were missed when the game was held here in 1982. Not this time. Especially with the international boost of nearby Windsor, Canada, intricately involved and folks expected to arrive here from Toronto and Montreal and other Canadian cities.
Beyond that, the NFL is correct in playing its biggest game on occasion in northern cities. Golfers gripe about missing warm weather to enjoy their sport. Others insist that the game should always be played in sunshine and they should be surrounded by palm trees. But what makes pro football America’s No. 1 sporting passion is the interlocking feel of spirited, high-grade competition and loyalties across the country. All parts of the country should experience the Super Bowl’s magnetism.
It is not simply a gala for the rich or for the warm. The spillover effects of hosting a Super Bowl in several ways reach all nearby. Detroit is worthy. And proud.
Much has and will be made of Jerome Bettis returning to this, his hometown, to play in likely his last game. He grew up 7 miles from Ford Field downtown, where XL will be played.
Here is a part of that story that is more special. Bettis will be a majority owner of a chemical/tire plant on the Detroit River that encompasses 44 acres. He will turn it into condominiums, retail stores and a hotel. He is investing in his hometown.
And he will use this Super Bowl as a platform for more Detroit economic growth.
“For years businessmen have looked at this as a place they did not want their headquarters,” Bettis said. “We’re changing people’s minds. I’m willing to put my resources into the city to try to make it happen.”
This is his neighborhood, Bettis said.
If we as a nation consider ourselves one, if we celebrate the rich contributions in autos and music and people that Detroit for more than 300 years has offered, it is our neighborhood, too.
Staff writer Thomas George can be reached at 303-820-1994 or tgeorge@denverpost.com.
