KANSAS CITY, Mo. — If you watched the NFL draft on Thursday night from Las Vegas, the entertainment capital of the world, you saw the Bellagio fountains and the Vegas version of the Eiffel Tower and draftees taking an endless walk through a playing card-themed tunnel to the stage.
Perhaps you caught sight of an Elvis impersonator or a glimpse of a scheduled appearance by Mad Apple, described on the Cirque de Soleil website as a "cocktail of high-flying acrobatics, music, dance, comedy and magic celebrating the city that never sleeps."
All very Vegas, in other words.
"The key thing for the draft is to take on the character of where we are," Eric Finkelstein, NFL senior director of event operations, told The Associated Press. "This is not a cookie-cutter event. We try to embody and highlight where we are."
So it's safe to say what happened in Vegas won't quite appear the same way when the emerging extravaganza is contoured to Kansas City from April 27-29, 2023. And why should it?
"Will it feel and look like Vegas? Absolutely not," said Kathy Nelson, president and CEO of the Kansas City Sports Commission and Visit KC. "The Kansas City draft will be its own unique thing."
With its own distinct flourishes sure to embody and highlight where we are.
"You will see something that's really core to the city ..." Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas said in a phone interview on Friday. "You will see something that really gives that front porch vibe to Kansas City and shows what we're all about."
Most of those specifics remain in the detailed planning phase or works in progress, part of an exhaustive ongoing process since Kansas City was awarded the draft in 2019. But the "anticipated location," as Nelson put it, will be at Union Station flowing up to the National World War I Museum and Memorial.
That's iconic and hallowed ground in many ways, including in recent years as the site where hundreds of thousands of fans were sardined in for the Royals' World Series victory party in 2015 and for the Chiefs' Super Bowl celebration in 2020.
But brace yourselves: This is going to be at least in one sense (over the course of days) on a scale beyond even those spectacles as likely the largest spectator event in Kansas City history.
In the modern era, that means more so than the Royals' back-to-back World Series runs and the Chiefs playing host to four straight AFC Championship Games. And more so than the MLB All-Star Game and the MLS All-Star Game and Big 12 basketball tournaments and NCAA Tournaments and U.S. Figure Skating Championships and U.S. Gymnastics Championships.
More broadly, it will draw more than any of the 10 NCAA men's basketball championship games played here (last in 1988) and the 1976 Republican Convention.
Enormous as those events of yesteryear were (and would be if they were here again now), they lured tens of thousands ... not hundreds of thousands over the course of nearly a week.
Which is what we should expect next April.
Especially if draft attendance in the last few years unaffected by COVID-19 are an indication of not just the site (Nashville, Tenn., in 2019; Vegas) but of an apparently ever-mushrooming event.
"I don't think people get it yet," said Nelson, speaking earlier this week before she left for Las Vegas among a 10-person organizing entourage.
In 2020, when it was initially to be in Las Vegas, the pandemic rendered the event all-virtual. In 2021, COVID-19 restrictions (including recommended masking and distancing) remained a factor during the draft in Cleveland ... which still drew about 160,000 people, injected $42 million into the local economy and was witnessed by around 40 million viewers, according to the Greater Cleveland Sports Commission.
Nashville has its own appeal, of course, as obviously does Vegas. But so do we ... even if it's not as widely understood.
And this also has become about both the happening itself (free to attend) and a galaxy of related and community events that will translate in its own distinct way here.
And it will put us in the national spotlight for days even if we don't quite draw 600,000 people or reap what the NFL and the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp announced was $133 million in direct spending and $224 million in economic impact three years ago.
Even if it don't necessarily realize the windfall being enjoyed by Vegas, which was expected to rival if not eclipse the records set in Nashville for the mega-event, and a game itself, that has morphed in an unrecognizable way since the draft's inception in 1936.
Per NFL.com's historic account, that year at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Philadelphia "clubs selected from a pool of only 90 players. There were no formal scouting departments, no agents and no 24-hour sports media coverage. The list of eligible players was compiled from newspaper reports, visits to local colleges by team executives, and recommendations to front-office personnel."
With the first pick of the first NFL draft, the Philadelphia Eagles selected Heisman Trophy winner Jay Berwanger from the University of Chicago. But Berwanger instead chose a career as ... a foam rubber salesman, a decision that embodied the times.
"Only 24 of the 81 players chosen in the first draft went on to play in the NFL," NFL.com wrote. "Most opted for more secure and stable professions, many of which paid better."
Essential as the draft has become in the growth and popularity of the game, even as recently as 1980 then-commissioner Pete Rozelle was puzzled by the proposition from ESPN that it should be televised.
But it soon became must-see TV not merely for so-called draftniks but also the general fan the NFL has astutely learned to keep engaged year-round. Part of that strategy was to move the draft to Radio City Music Hall in 2006 and later making it a traveling show up for bid starting with Chicago in 2016.
Now it comes attached with all the showtime elements, including marquee entertainment acts over the three-day draft, and the "NFL Draft Experience" interactive football theme park and even a series of community events to be hosted by the NFL. We'll know more about how those specifics will apply here in the months to come, but here's how the NFL put it in a news release regarding Las Vegas:
"From character-building initiatives, youth football events, mentorship opportunities and community greening projects, the NFL aims to leave a lasting, positive legacy ..." it wrote.
But this is also about Kansas City leaving a lasting, positive impression on the scores of visitors who come here. Beyond what Nelson estimates will be $120 million or more in economic impact, there's a virtually unprecedented opportunity to show off the city and the region.
"We couldn't afford to buy that kind of marketing and promotion," Nelson said.
At a perfect time, too.
Barring any unforeseen developments, scores of visitors will arrive at the spiffy new KCI, set to open early next year. On their way downtown, they might get a look at the south bank of the Missouri River between the Kit Bond and Heart of America bridges and the construction of the first women's soccer-specific venue in the NWSL (and certainly among the first in the world built for a professional women's team).
Perhaps they'll pass the future site of a downtown baseball stadium by then and ride to Union Station in a free streetcar amid its extensive extension work.
Maybe they'll be looking around a city that's been named a 2026 World Cup site, as Kansas City hopes will happen in the next few weeks, an event that in turn would be on a geometrically different scale than the draft.
"It's a chance for people to see there's just a lot going on in Kansas City," said Lucas, who hopes people also see KC as poised to be "one of the 'it' cities of the next generation."
Generated by the power of what's unique to us.
