Wow what a long day


Day 2 in Houston

Here's the first of a series of entries on my 6th Superbowl for Sporting News Radio (formerly One on One Sports).

This year we're in Houston, and Jen and I quite underwhelmed with the city. Our hotel is downtown , but most everything closes downtown after all the offices close. There is a decrepit department store across the street from our hotel, but Jen says they have a bad selection. There are no restaurants around us (other than the hotel restaurant and a few fast-food establishments). The only thing we found open last night was a convenience store that sold individual cans of beer and rotisserie chicken.

I nearly missed my flight yesterday. I was up until 1:30 Wednesday night packing and doing some other work. I had a 7:00 am flight, and decided to get up a 4:00 am for a 5:00 am cab ride. Well, the alarm went off at 4:00, but I didn't get up until 4:45! Good thing I had packed just a few hours earlier!

When we arrived, got our rental car, checked into the hotel, had lunch, and headed to the George R. Brown Convention Center (the NFL Media Center for the Superbowl) with our boxed and boxes of equipment and supplies. After spending an hour just figuring out how to get passed security, we unloaded our gear, and headed to the hotel for the night.

This morning, we headed to Reliant Stadium to check our broadcast telephone lines. We spent two hours trying to get into the stadium, as security is very tight there, and it's still nine days before the game! (For regular-season games, the stadium takes care of security. But for the Superbowl, the NFL, in conjunction with the FBI and an outsourced security firm, takes care of security, and they don't mess around. We saw stadium employees having trouble getting into the stadium.) Most of the outsourced security don't know what's going on, and the people that we know with the Texans football club have no control over the security. So we make tons of phone calls just to get the proper credentials just to get in.

Once in there, it only took about 30 minutes to test all of our lines. But of course, one of our lines wasn't working properly, so the technicians had to spend some time trying to figure that out. Better now than 30 minutes before the broadcast...which is exactly why we come out here so early to make sure we have all the proper credentials, and all of our phone lines are working properly.

Following that visit, we headed to the convention center, where we setup our "workroom" and waited several hours for an NFL official to approve our broadcast location. That guy never showed, so we ended up going to him...with a box-full of cookies in hand. Never underestimate the power of schmoozing.

Off to bed, because we have to finish setting up our broadcast location.

Posted: Fri - January 23, 2004 at 04:48 PM      

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