Gaining Super Bowls and Gaping Sinkholes
There seems to a growing trend in the National Football League, and that is if you want your city to host a Super Bowl, simply build a new stadium. On Tuesday the NFL announced that Minneapolis will be the host city for Super Bowl LII, that’s 52 if you’re not the Roman Numerals type.
Granted, the building of a new state of the art stadium does not always guarantee the worlds media descends into your city for a fortnight each year, but it does help. Just recently we have had the big game played in Dallas’ house that Jerry built, and of course the 50th anniversary Super Bowl will be held in Levi’s Stadium, the new home of the San Francisco 49ers.
One thing that maybe swayed the voting away from New Orleans and Indianapolis, who finished second and third respectively in the voting, was the fact that almost half of the $1 billion stadium has been funded by the public, something which the NFL smiles greatly upon and they like to give back to those that give out in the first place. Also the city has plans to upgrade many downtown areas of the city in advance of the season finale in 2018.
Minnesota’s only other occasion hosting the game was back in 1992 when the Washington Redskins defeated the Buffalo Bills 37-24 in the recently demolished Metrodome.
Away from the bright lights of the NFL and the glory of the Super Bowl comes a tale of small town woe. On the same day that Minnesota were celebrating landing the big one, another big one appeared in Tennessee.
Unfortunately for the good people of Clarksville, and in particular the Austin Peay University Stadium it was in the shape of a 40ft by 40ft sinkhole in the corner of one end zone.
At first construction workers on a $19 million facility facelift discovered a small 5ft by 5ft hole, but when they started digging deeper to find stable bedrock so they could fill it in, the problem escalated.
“As they began digging, it became bigger and bigger and bigger,” said Bill Persinger, spokesman for the 10,000-student university, located about 50 miles northwest of Nashville. Persinger is confident that the hole will be filled and the stadium will be fully operational come the start of the football season in September.
