After all the hype surrounding the NFL Draft, any fair review of its impact on Pittsburgh is a tale of two cities. It was an incredible national public relations success, but it is also clear that all that glittered was not gold for the neighborhood businesses outside the tightly controlled area of the NFL’s sponsored activities.
Anyone who follows football — who was here or watching on national television — saw the beauty of our hills and rivers. And, by all accounts, Pittsburghers could not have been better hosts to the hundreds of thousands of out-of-town guests.
Hopefully, visitors learned about the simple formula that allowed those who built this town to work together despite their differences: Show up. Do your job. And respect others who are trying their best to do their jobs. Pittsburgh football fans will say that is the same work ethic that makes the Pittsburgh Steelers a different kind of football team.
Pittsburghers should have learned some things, too, from this event.
In the heady days leading up to the draft, we needed more realistic talk from our local officials. The alarmist predictions that the city would be brought to a halt by a tsunami of visitors were untrue, and it turned out that we all could have gone on living our regular lives during the big event.
Pittsburgh Public Schools could have and should have stayed open. Anyone commuting to the universities that refused to close arrived in record time every day of the draft. The roads and highways were nearly abandoned, and the disruption that Pittsburgh families dealt with because of school closings was unnecessary.
For all the talk from our leaders about how the draft would be great for Pittsburgh business, they needed to make it clear that they meant long-term big-business development. Local businesses that hired additional staff and stocked more food or goods took a beating and are scrambling now.
And there could have been fewer dire predictions of transportation gridlock around the city generally. Not only did local businesses get no new business from the draft, but their regular customers also stayed away. Not all big events have worked that way.
“More Taylor Swift is what the city needs,” according to Ray Mikesell, former owner of Café Raymond in the Strip District. “When she was in town, her fans mingled with the regulars, and you could barely move in this neighborhood,” he said as part of the sparse crowd outside La Prima Espresso on the third day of the draft.
There is something that the city can and should do in the future if it is truly pro-business. All these big events — as much as they enrich our cultural lives — benefit the sponsors at the expense of local merchants.
Whether it is the NFL Draft or Little Italy Days in Bloomfield, there should be some form of revenue sharing tied to the license for the event for local businesses that close or may as well be closed.
And the biggest lesson comes from the game of football and a quote attributed to a number of legendary coaches like the Cleveland Browns’ Paul Brown. After watching a player dancing wildly in the end zone — carried away by the excitement of the moment — the coach suggested a more measured approach.
“The next time you make it to the end zone, act like you’ve been there before,” he said.
Because of the lessons learned from hosting the NFL Draft, you can bet that when Pittsburgh gets the next big civic event, it can now act like it has been there before.