As an example of how quickly stories evolved early in the shutdown of sports, AMB Group’s Brett Jewkes described the experience with the cancellation of the Final Four:
A 2020 Final Four T-shirt on the clearance rack at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.AP images
“We were supposed to have the Final Four in [Mercedes-Benz] Stadium on April 4th and 6th. And I can’t remember exactly which day it was, March 10th or 11th. At 9 in the morning, we were good. Final Four was going to happen. The tournament was on. At 10 o’clock, we were hearing from the [Atlanta] Sports Council, the city offices, whatever, ‘No, not happening. They’re going to move it out of the stadium, but it’ll still be in Atlanta.’ At 11 o’clock, it’s not going to be Atlanta. It’s going to be in Indianapolis, but they’re still going to have some of the events. And by 1 o’clock, it was toast. The whole thing was gone. …
“When you operate a stadium downtown for a major event that’s been on the books for six years, you have the impact on the hotels, the restaurants, city officials, everybody who’s built marketing programs around this, the network partners. We had shut down our building for six weeks. At that time, we didn’t know what was going to happen. Were we sitting there holding a bag of no events? There’s just so many different audiences and so many different stakeholders impacted by particularly that one specific event that it was minute-to-minute where I was getting a call from a president amongst our business like, ‘What are we doing? What are we saying?’ Fifteen minutes later, this plan was shelved. And then 15 minutes later, we needed a new plan. It was crazy.”
