Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/637179
| SUPER BOWL SUNDAY | 5 SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2016 Kevin Moore, a Santa Clara city coun- cil member at the time, kept staring at the parking lot. He stared and stared. He saw an NFL team playing on it. Moore contacted the 49ers. The parking lot became Levi's Stadium. San Francisco phi- lanthropist Daniel Lurie and various politi- cos stared at the stadium under construction. They saw a Super Bowl. The NFL heard Dan- iel Lurie speak. The NFL saw he was right. Thus did the glorious Super Bowl 50 come to inhabit the former non-glorious parking lot. That's the short version of the story. The longer version had many, many more com- plicated twists and turns — not the least of which were the 49ers' efforts to finance and construct the Levi's project. "At the start, we were told that bringing the NFL and the Super Bowl to little Santa Clara was impossible," Moore said last week. "It was like throwing a football through the eye of a needle and the football was not de- flated. We had to put our egos on the side- line and we had to outthink, outwork and outpray our competition." Lurie, who chaired the Bay Area bid for the game and now serves on the SB50 advi- sory board, recently drove past Levi's and took in all the decked-out structures that have been built to support the game. "The transformation is remarkable," Lu- rie said. "I think this is going to be unlike anything this region has seen, just the scale of it. That's why we needed two and a half years of preparations to make it happen." You can go back even farther than that, really. The key decisions that led to this big Bay Area moment actually date to Decem- ber of 2003. Moore, a Santa Clara native and realtor, had been a longtime booster of efforts to bring a sports franchise to the suburban city. He had failed with the Giants and A's. But shortly before his election to city council, Moore hand-delivered a letter to the security desk at the 49ers headquar- ters on Centennial Drive, directly across the street from the empty parking lot. The letter was addressed to Dr. John York, then the team's operating owner. But it was re-directed to Larry McNeil, the 49ers' chief financial officer. McNeil called Moore. Discussions began. In 2006, the team announced it had cut off talks with San Francisco and intended to move to the South Bay. John York's son, Jed, took over the stadium project and maneuvered it through a Santa Clara election and a financ- ing gauntlet. By 2012, construction began. And that's when Lurie entered the pic- ture. The 49ers had attempted to ease hurt feelings with San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee by encouraging him to lead a Super Bowl bid with his city as the official host. Lee met with Lurie, who as a member of the fa- mously humanitarian Haas family had es- tablished a nonprofit organization to fight Bay Area poverty called Tipping Point. By the time the 49ers played in Super Bowl XLVII in January 2013, Lurie was on site in New Orleans to scout the game's mammoth infrastructure. He had also roped in two other key people. One was for- mer Giants' marketing executive Pat Galla- gher, who possessed experience at such big events as the All-Star game and World Se- ries. The other was Joe D'Alessandro, presi- dent of San Francisco Travel, a private asso- ciation that promotes the city as a tourist/ business destination. All of them brainstormed. They knew the NFL would look upon the Bay Area as favor- able destination for the Super Bowl. But there were hurdles to jump. The next two games available for bid were in 2016 and 2017. "Looking back, we felt pretty good through the process," Lurie said. "But in the moment, you just don't know. We did believe we were putting our best foot forward." When cities and regions try to land a Su- per Bowl, they must raise millions of dol- lars to cover the event's costs outside the NFL's game-day operations. The money usu- ally comes from local corporations who be- lieve the game will benefit the region. Those corporations, in turn, receive ticket access and other considerations when the big show comes to town. Lurie, as the CEO of Tipping Point, had an additional vision. He wanted to make the Super Bowl into a significant altruism ma- chine. His pitch to companies was that one- fourth of all the money raised would be do- nated to charity. The pitch worked. Lurie began by calling on the region's major corporate entities — Apple, Google, Intel. Within a few months, he had persuaded 15 companies to pledge $30 million to the Super Bowl fund. This amount eventually grew to more than $50 million, which puts Lurie's goal of giving $13 million to local nonprofits within reach. "If we reach that, we will be the most philanthropic Super Bowl ever," Lurie said. Yet as the spring of 2013 unfurled, noth- ing was certain. An important deadline neared. The NFL owners scheduled a meet- ing on May 21 to pick future Super Bowl sites, including one for the prestigious Super Bowl 50. The Bay Area's competition con- sisted of Miami and Houston. Lurie decided to bank on creativity and regionalism. Jumping aboard his team were San Francisco advertising man Rich Silver- stein (whose agency created the "Got Milk?" campaign) and former Apple vice president Bill Campbell (whose eclectic resume in- cluded six years spent as Columbia Universi- ty's football coach). Silverstein provided creative input as Lu- rie's group assembled a spiffy high-con- cept "bid box" that contained the latest Ap- ple iPad mini loaded with the latest Adobe software. One box was mailed to each NFL owner. When the iPad was turned on, it booted up a video pitch that included scenes of Pebble Beach and the Napa-Sonoma wine country as well as San Francisco's skyline and the under-construction Levi's. Mark Purdy HOW THE GAME WAS WON THE LANDING OF SUPER BOWL 50 "IT WAS LIKE THROWING A FOOTBALL THROUGH THE EYE OF A NEEDLE AND THE FOOTBALL WAS NOT DEFLATED." — Kevin Moore, former Santa Clara city council member on the building of Levi Stadium In the beginning, there was just that empty parking lot. It was a pasture of black asphalt in Santa Clara, built to handle car overflows at Great America theme park. And almost always unoccupied.