Snow and ice storms in the week before the Super Bowl left Atlanta streets frozen in 2000.getty images
Super Bowl XXXIV in Atlanta had one of the most dramatic endings ever. With time expiring, St. Louis linebacker Mike Jones preserved the Rams’ 23-16 victory by tackling Tennessee wide receiver Kevin Dyson on the one-yard line, as he was reaching for the end zone.
Still, when you talk to those who worked at or attended that Super Bowl week in 2000, they all have the same vivid memory: “Ice, ice, baby.”
Two snowstorms and accompanying freezing rain the week before the game made conditions miserable in a city ill-equipped to handle winter storms, especially with an extra 100,000 visitors in town. At its height, more than 675,000 homes in Northern Georgia were without power. Many flights were canceled or delayed by days. Most taxis were pulled from the streets, since they weren’t insured to operate in ice and snow.
Road closings prevented many hotel employees from getting to work. MARTA trains were running, but that didn’t matter much. Travel, even down the block, was just impossible.
“We took MARTA to a meeting, and the hotel we had to get to was 200 yards away, just up a little hill, but it was solid ice,” said 16W Marketing partner Frank Vuono. “We took the train back.”
At the NFL Charities golf tournament, fellow 16W partner Steve Rosner won the “closest to the pin” contest, but only because he topped his ball and it skittered all the way over a frozen water hazard, ending up on the green.
A sheet of ice more than a quarter-inch thick coated every road. Among the accidents was a 47-car pileup on Interstate 20, west of Atlanta.
“We were watching cars slide off of the interstate from our hotel rooms wondering if we should go out at all,” recalled Bob Basche, who was an executive at Millsport at the time.
Losses from the storm were estimated at $48 million, and while the Super Bowl game wasn’t affected, nearly everything else in town was. The Rams and Titans couldn’t even bus to practice the day before the game.
The bad weather made it the second-worst Super Bowl for those in the ticketing and hospitality business. Only the Super Bowl following 9/11 produced more of a buyer’s market for tickets.
“It was the Ice Bowl II,” recalled veteran ticketing and hospitality executive John Langbein, partner at QuintEvents.
The inhospitable weather caused much of the moneyed crowd who routinely attend Super Bowls to sell their tickets. Both Nashville and St. Louis were proximate enough that fans from both cities bought those tickets and drove to Atlanta. It felt profoundly different in the Georgia Dome.
“There were lots of real fans there,” Langbein remembered, “but there were also lots of empty seats. Some tickets didn’t get delivered until Monday or Tuesday, because FedEx wasn’t working.”
The abundance of tickets and hotels was an advantage for some. Marc Reeves, Nike senior director of NFL and NCAA, drove to Atlanta from New Orleans, where he was in law school at Tulane.
“Because of the folks not being able to fly in, I was given tickets to both the game and the commissioner’s party,” Reeves said. “I even got to hang out after the party with one of the bands. Best Super Bowl ever.”
Former NFL consumer products marketer Don Brown was showing his 80-year-old father his first Super Bowl week and felt the need to apologize, since the festivities weren’t up to their normal level of grandeur. “He just busted out laughing at the NFL’s Saturday night party, since it was the biggest party he had ever seen,” Brown remembered. “‘If this is scaled down,’” he recalled his father saying, “‘I’d hate to see the full version.’”
