LA Super Bowl week 2022 taking shape

[www.ocregister.com]

Downtown, the beach, a little George Lucas magic and, let’s just accept it, probably the New England Patriots. Four years out, Los Angeles’ first Super Bowl in almost three decades already is taking shape.

Welders and crane operators are deep into work in Inglewood, where the new NFL stadium is set to open in mid-2020 and then, 18 months later, host Super Bowl LVI (that’s number 56). For the type-A planners, the tentative date is Feb. 6, 2022. That’s stamped on Kathy Schloessman’s mind.

Four years might seem like forever, but for Schloessman, one of the major players who in 2016 made a successful bid to bring the Super Bowl to Los Angeles, planning is underway and ever-evolving.

“There’s going to be events going on all over town,” said Schloessman, president of the Los Angeles Sports and Entertainment Commission. ”We’re so excited, because there’s going to be so much energy everywhere.”

Unlike this year’s host city, Minneapolis, which has a downtown stadium and chose to center most of its game-week activities in that area, the Los Angeles group plans to spread out the map in 2022.

Plans naturally remain tentative, but the group, headed up by Southern California sports power-player Casey Wasserman, already has identified likely sites for most of the big events leading up to the Super Bowl.

— The Convention Center will host NFL Experience, an annual fan festival billed by the league as an “interactive theme park” with various attractions and activities.

— Exposition Park’s outdoor area is expected to host Super Bowl LIVE, another festival with concerts and food and drink.

— The teams will hold game-week practices at USC and StubHub Center.

— The NFL Honors, the league’s annual awards show, will take place either at The Forum or at a 6,000-seat performance venue set to open adjacent to the Inglewood stadium.

— Media events will be housed downtown at the Intercontinental Hotel.

— The outdoor area around the Inglewood stadium will host concerts and other game-week events.

— The commissioner’s party, an invite-only event for NFL owners and league A-listers, is planned for Universal Studios Hollywood because, as Schloessman said, “We are the entertainment capital of the world. We should be at a movie studio of some sort.”

— Unspecified activities are slated for Venice Beach and for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which is scheduled to open adjacent to the Coliseum in 2021.

The only major event without a specific home, to date, is “media day,” which typically is held in a sports venue, so perhaps Staples Center or Dodger Stadium could be in play. The Super Bowl, as Randy Newman once put it, will stretch from the South Bay to the Valley, from the West side to the East side.

“You want the entire city to have Super Bowl fever, and I think that’s what the design reflects,” said Kevin Demoff, the Rams’ chief operating officer and another major figure in the 2022 game.

Demoff grew up in Los Angeles and was in high school in 1993 when, 25 years ago today, Dallas beat Buffalo at the Rose Bowl in Super Bowl XXVII. Two years later, the Rams and Raiders relocated, and Los Angeles became an NFL desert, although San Diego hosted the game in 1998 and 2003.

In the interim, Super Bowl week has exploded. In 1993, NFL Experience was in its second year and was limited to a carnival-like event in the stadium’s parking lot. Now, it’s a week-long party.

“In this era of mass amounts of content, everything changes,” Demoff said.

Houston hosted the Super Bowl last year, and that committee estimated that 46,000 people came in from out of town without game tickets, simply to take in the ancillary events. According to the committee, a combined total of 1.3 million people attended the Experience and LIVE week-long events.

Los Angeles is not stranger to major events. The NBA All-Star Game will be held at Staples Center Feb. 16-18. Schloessman’s helped plan that out, and she noted that it includes 30 official events. The NHL All-Star Game was at Staples Center last year, and Wasserman also led a successful bid to bring the Olympics to Los Angeles in 2028. Other events, such as the NCAA Final Four, likely will come to Inglewood.

The games play out on their own. The weather should cooperate, given that temperatures here have been in the 80s this week, and barely above zero in Minneapolis. All of that is beyond the control of Super Bowl planners. They’re more like a city-wide concierge service for tourists.

“Your goal is always that the event reflects well on the entire city, the citizens, the transportation hubs and the stadium,” Demoff said. “It’s a complete effort. From the moment you land at the airport as a guest, to the moment you get back on the plane, did you enjoy the Super Bowl city experience?”

To that end, the work will continue. The Super Bowl will go to Atlanta next year, then to Miami and Tampa, and Los Angeles organizers will examine what worked, plus areas of possible improvement.

Two years ago, San Francisco organizers created “Super Bowl City,” which was rebranded as “Super Bowl LIVE” this year. The event was a hit, and reinforced the idea that innovation is important.

“We want to see what everyone else is doing, but we want to do it different,” Schloessman said. “We want to take it to a different level because of our city and the fact that the weather is so great here. We have so much to offer and we’re so spread out.”