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A 42 few years ago, city leaders in Indianapolis were looking over a bundle of forms from the National Football League. It was a request for bids to host Super Bowl XLVI, and the stakes were high: If they answered the questionnaire correctly, the city might win a chance to put on the biggest show in American sport — and bask in the warm spotlight of the nation's highest-rated media extravaganza. Mark Miles, then president of the committee handling the Indi- anapolis bid, liked their chances. Seats? Lucas Oil Stadium, com- pleted downtown in 2008 at a cost of more than $700 million, was a state-of-the-art, retractable-roof showplace with nearly 140 luxe corporate suites. Event space? A planned $275 million expansion of the Indiana Convention Center, connected to the stadium, would put more than half a million square feet un- der a roof — perfect for banquets, parties and the league's signature NFL Experience attraction. Accommodations? The city had close to 6,000 downtown hotel rooms, and the ink was drying on a deal to build a soar- ing, 1,000-room JW Marriott hotel just a few blocks from the stadium. Travel? The brand-new Indianapolis International Air- port, with nonstop service to 34 destinations, had opened operations to rave reviews. Everything, it seemed, was in place. Then JANUARY 15, 2012 Miles and company flipped to the page la- beled "Championship Golf Courses." Pause. Central Indiana has lots of nice golf courses — several by renowned course designer Pete Dye. Indianapolis is a great place to golf — from May to October. But the Super Bowl is in February, when the average high tem- perature is 40 degrees. The committee mem- bers looked around at one another. "How do we answer that?" Miles wondered. With a proverbial shrug of the shoulders, they dutifully listed each of the region's top-tier AA.COM/AMERICANWAY championship golf courses. Then, beside each course, in the space marked "price," they wrote "free of charge." "We thought that was pretty funny," Miles says. Although the Indianapolis Super Bowl Committee was working on behalf of a climate-challenged city in a small media market in the middle of Middle America, they were still confident — glib, even. For one, they had precedent on their side. De- troit — even more miserable in February than Indianapolis, in terms of the weather — had won the big prize in 1982 and again more recently in 2006. And games given to Houston and Phoenix suggested that NFL owners were willing to make good on a kind of unspoken, gentleman's understanding: Cities that ponied up public funds for pro football stadiums would be richly rewarded. In fact, Indianapolis' bid for the 2011 game, seen as a strong dark-horse contender the year before, likely fell short only because an even more lavish sporting palace in Arling- ton, Texas, stole the show. But Indianapolis had more than NFL his- tory on its side. While it might have been a surprise to everyone else when the NFL an- nounced that Indianapolis would host Super

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