OUT OF THE SHADOWS NFL SHOWCASE GAME PART OF SPROUTING SPORTS MOVEMENT BRINGING HOUSTON ...

Byline: Billy Witz Staff Writer

HOUSTON - As downtown work crews hustled to pave streets and clean up parks and sidewalks in recent days, this city is taking one last deep breath - and holding it - as it prepares to welcome visitors and media from around the country for Super Bowl XXXVIII on Sunday.

For a city that hasn't held the nation's eye like this since it hosted the Republican National Convention more than a decade ago, it's a chance to change its image of an aesthetically and culturally vacant town best known for its traffic, smog, oppressive summer humidity and the Enron scandal.

Or, if it fails, it will demonstrate why the NFL has waited 30 years to return its championship game here.

``The Super Bowl is viewed by the city fathers as a great opportunity to present a different picture of Houston than was portrayed during Enron,'' said Oliver Luck, a former quarterback for the Houston Oilers and current CEO of the Harris County-Houston Sports Authority. ``Unlike other cities, we haven't had this game in a long time. There's a strong sense that it gives Houston a major platform we haven't had in a long time.''

It's a game that is being staged here in large part as a formal thank you to Houston Texans owner Bob McNair, who paid a record $700 million franchise fee to wrest an expansion franchise away from Los Angeles in 1999, and to the city for building $450 million Reliant Stadium mostly with public funds.

Super Bowls, with their influx of corporate dollars, can generate as much as $300 million for a community, but Houston is looking to do more than win back money it has laid out. It's hoping to join the big leagues of American cities.

Rebirth through sports

After decades of sprawl that left downtown Houston empty after 5 o'clock, more people are moving back into the city in old buildings that are being converted to lofts. A light-rail line has been put in, there are burgeoning theater and museum districts, a new convention center, and a state-of-the-art baseball stadium and basketball arena have helped give downtown some life after dark.

In recent months, there has been effort to make cosmetic changes. Empty buildings have been knocked down or boarded up, volunteer crews collect trash on weekends, and thousands of trees have been planted.

Yet there is some question as to how fundamentally Houston can change. Despite billions in infrastructure investment, much of it fueled by the energy boom of the late 1990s, is it simply mutton dressed as lamb?

Houston is not the kind of entertainment draw as the site of the past two Super Bowls - New Orleans and San Diego - nor does it have the weather of next year's game in Jacksonville, Fla. Also, the matchup between two defensive-minded teams in New England and Carolina could diminish the number of expected visitors, which is about 100,000.

``People who live in Houston apparently love it,'' said Kathy Schloessman, president of the L.A. Sports and Entertainment Commission. ``I visited once and I would never go back there except under duress. They were certainly in line with a new owner, a new team and a new stadium, but the guest experience is another story. You're going to have a lot of people staying 30 to 40 minutes outside the city. It could be a big nightmare.''

If there's pessimism elsewhere about how this Super Bowl will come off, there is a palpable sense of optimism here. And, at least in the sports world, it's easy to see why.

Houston is undergoing a sports renaissance. Along with the Super Bowl, baseball's All-Star Game will be played here in July. In addition to the Mid-Summer Classic, there also is talk of hosting a Fall Classic after the Astros lured future Hall of Fame pitcher Roger Clemens out of retirement this month to team with another former New York Yankees star, Andy Pettitte.

The Rockets have one of the world's most recognizable players in Yao Ming, and one of the NBA's best coaches, Jeff Van Gundy. And, this being Texas, where football is king, the expansion Texans have sold out every game in their two-year NFL history.

Most significant, though, are the three new buildings in which the teams play. In an era when providing tax dollars to build pro facilities is viewed increasingly as corporate welfare, Houston did it three times in three years - at an upfront cost of about $1.2 billion. Each time was with voter approval.

How?

``The short answer is good politics,'' said Dr. Robert Stein, a political science professor at Rice. As Houston's demographics changed from overwhelmingly white to a plurality with significant black and Hispanic populations, it became necessary to build coalitions to get any deals done.

``It wasn't difficult to sell when it's sold the proper way,'' Stein said. ``If you want to pass referendums you need to have everybody on board. You can't have organized opposition. These things are easy to defeat and hard to pass.''

Another consideration, Stein said, is the Houston ethos of a place where people come to do business, where there are no city or state taxes, no zoning laws and often no obstruction to those with good ideas and initiative.

``Nobody comes to Houston to retire or to vacation,'' Stein said. ``Houston's a place where you go to make a lot of money and then leave. You can see how traffic gets better and worse as a function of the economy. If people don't have a job, they leave.''

Big money

The catalyst for the new buildings came in 1997, when the Oilers - with flagging attendance and an unfavorable position as the secondary tenant in the Astrodome - left for Tennessee.

``It wasn't as much of a shock as the Browns leaving Cleveland, but all of a sudden people looked in the mirror,'' Luck said. ``Here they were in Texas, where football has this mythology, and now they've lost an NFL team.''

Then Astros owner Drayton McLane, unhappy with the Astrodome, made rumblings about moving to Virginia if he didn't get a new stadium. Rockets owner Les Alexander followed with noises about inadequate suites and facilities.

Soon, new stadiums were viewed less as a handout than as an investment. Voters approved measures that call for the venues to be financed mainly through Harris County hotel and rental-car taxes - the argument being it shifts the burden from citizens to visitors.

There also are ticket and parking taxes, rent from the three teams, fees from naming rights and, in the case of the football stadium and basketball arenas, a secondary tenant.

``I kind of felt like, gee, once we get a baseball stadium that's it,'' said Billy Burge, a property developer who is chairman of the HCHSA. ``Most cities, if people get one, they say 'We need street repairs, why are we giving money to these rich owners?' Timing was everything and we happened to have perfect timing.''

One concern is whether there are enough corporate dollars to keep the seats filled. Tickets to see the Rockets are the third-most expensive in the NBA, according to Team Marketing Report's fan cost index; the Astros were seventh in Major League Baseball and the Texans 15th last year.

``There's not much buyer's remorse,'' Luck said. ``When you ask the corporate community to buy suites, the Rockets have suffered from being the third team to go online with a new facility. But if you're asking are there enough discretionary dollars to go around, we think the answer is yes.''

The Texans, despite two losing seasons, have been such a hit they were rated the seventh most valuable franchise in sports last year by Forbes. The Texans have season-ticket holders in 42 different states and six different countries.

``It's the best investment I've had,'' McNair said. ``A lot better than the stock market. This is a wealthy community.''

Maintaining makeover

Perhaps it's the city's boom-bust history, but there also is plenty of skepticism of what will happen when the Super Bowl is over.

Visitors no longer will be discouraged by hotel clerks or cabbies from taking Interstate 45 from the city's main airport to downtown so as not to look at the gaudy billboards, seedy shops and mawkish signs that line its feeder roads.

Nor will political officials lean on downtown landowners to knock down eyesores sooner than later.

``It's wonderful that they're doing all this work,'' said Trish Nimr, a New York transplant who opened a Mid-Town bar last year with her husband. ``But what about two weeks from now?''

It's critical that it doesn't stop, some leaders said. If Houston is to thrive and become anything more than a place to make a quick buck, it must change. To successfully diversify away from the volatile oil, gas and energy markets and into tourism, it must consider quality of life: arts, entertainment, culture and aesthetics.

``On (I-)45, you don't have mountains to look at, you have billboards,'' said Camden Trust chairman Ric Campo, who also has an office for his development company in Newport Beach. ``When freeways were built, nobody ever thought about how they'd look long term. People are finally starting to say let's look at spending money on architecture, on planting.

``We've got a bayou system here that's underutilized. It's late in the game, but you've got to start somewhere.''

When the media and visitors begin arriving today, along with the Patriots and Panthers, the people of Houston will get a better idea of just where they stand in the rest of the country's eyes.

Beauty, they soon might learn, is in the eye of the beholder.

Billy Witz, [phone]

billy.witz(at)dailynews.com

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5 photos

Photo:

(1 -- 3 -- color) The Super Bowl at Reliant Stadium (below) is helping Houston, and Texans fans (above), re-establish tourism in a city known more for negatives such as the Enron scandal (top), smog and traffic.

(4 -- 5) The city of Houston is hopeful the transformation helped by the Super Bowl will continue the growth it already has had with Texans' Reliant Stadium and other new venues for its professional sports franchises.

Associated Press photos