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Come Monday, Tampa Will Return To Normal

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By STEVE OTTO

sotto@tampatrib.com

Published: February 1, 2009

Well, there's still the game tonight, although after Super Bowl Week the game is almost anti-climatic. Most of the interest seems to lean in the direction of how good the commercials might be.

It should be a great show at Raymond James Stadium, but by Monday morning the last of the private jets will be gone. All of those celebrities, even the ones whose names were vaguely familiar at best, will have moved on to the next place where it is fashionable to be seen.

The media will have packed their laptops and cameras and moved on. My e-mail from the NFL media center, which mailed out quotes and reports on every move anyone associated with either team made during the past week - I was getting 100 breath-taking bulletins a day - will stop as they apparently have lost interest and closed.

Our week as the center of the civilized world will be over. Even the NFL Experience, that vast sports flea market where, among other things, you could stand on real turf just like the football players, will be disassembled and put away until next year. That looks to be a bigger job than putting away the Christmas decorations at our house.

Tampa will become another statistic in the record books, although the national audience caught up in that ice and snowstorm that rolled across the Midwest into the Northeast might also remember those gorgeous TV shots of palm trees and sunsets over Tampa Bay and wonder why they don't pack up and come our way more often.

Back In The Big Guava

Tampa can cut back on its preening and get back to being Tampa, which is not a bad thing. Despite the thousands of media types in town and the gaggles of public relations people trying to pitch this and that, my guess is they didn't get a grasp of what this place is about.

The rest of the country saw the glitz and the landmark buildings of the area but they might not have noticed that Tampa is a real city with real people.

It has neighborhoods and schools and churches. It has strip malls and grocery stores and parks. In a lot of ways it could be any city in America. Squint and it could be Denver or Omaha or Seattle. OK, it never could be Omaha, Neb., no matter how much you squint, but you get the idea.

Goodbye Neon

We really aren't Neon Deion. Tampa is blue-collar. At Channelside you see the gleaming white cruise ships, but we are a port city that ships phosphate and chemicals. We're miles of warehouses and small shops. We're people who get up before light and dutifully join in traffic crawling across town on interstates and expressways.

We pay taxes, worry about getting laid off, go to PTA meetings, visit relatives in assisted-living homes. We take an hour for lunch if we're lucky and it's not chicken livers wrapped in bacon and white tablecloths. More likely it's Cubans or burgers or something from home in a bag.

We're soccer moms and retirees. We are thousands of county and city workers and about all any of us want is a fair shake. In short, we're pretty much like everyone else in the country.

Of course, if you come back later this week for Gasparilla where things get just a tad out of hand, I might have to take some of this back.

Keyword: Otto Graphs, for more of Steve Otto's musings.

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