greybeav.....your article defaulted to subscriber only.....here is a copy of the full article: By John Canzano | The Oregonian/OregonLive
Jim Etzel’s team at SportOregon got a surprise on Tuesday morning. They woke up to a memo from the NCAA, announcing that bids to host the 2027-2031 women’s Final Four would open earlier than expected.
It was just two years ago that Portland failed in an effort to win the large-scale March Madness event for 2025 or 2026 at Moda Center and Memorial Coliseum. Pitted against Phoenix, Tampa and Columbus with two bids at stake Etzel and the crew figured they had at least a 50-50 shot.
The SportOregon CEO and his team created a presentation and pitched the advantages of having two functional basketball arenas in close proximity. The bid touted the newly constructed hotels, huge investments in the convention and arena districts and the benefit of holding the event in close proximity to the Adidas and Nike campuses.
Tampa won the 2025 event.
Phoenix landed it in 2026.
The prevailing theory is that the Portland bid was sunk by one key thing -- Portland itself.
The brand of the city is broken. The images and news stories shared nationally over the last couple of years have been ugly. The NCAA steered clear of our state’s biggest city. The Portland bid fell short, just like the one two years earlier that aimed to bring the NBA All-Star Game to Moda Center.
Said Etzel in a long-form interview on Tuesday: “We’re going to go after it hard again.”
The women’s NCAA Basketball Tournament is getting a boost this year. ESPN announced this week that every game will be televised on ESPN/ABC and that the advertising inventory was already sold out. Our state is a hotbed for women’s college basketball. We show up for it at Oregon, Oregon State, University of Portland and Portland State. But Etzel’s bid team needs some help from city and state leaders.
“Politically,” Etzel said, “leadership is acutely aware of what needs to be done.”
The Portland Classic LPGA event was moved from Columbia Edgewater Country Club to the Oregon Golf Club in West Linn last year due to safety concerns and the encampments that sprouted up around the course. The Portland Diamond Project crew has implored the mayor’s office to clean up downtown because it dreads bringing Major League Baseball officials in for a tour of potential stadium sites.
In October of 2020, I obtained a series of emails between Craig Cheek, the founder of the Portland Diamond Project, and Mayor Ted Wheeler. Vandals and rioters had targeted the Oregon Historical Society and Cheek was concerned.
“Sorry to pile on,” Cheek wrote to the mayor, “but need to convey that this is having an extremely negative impact and really poor backdrop to our effort in bringing an MLB franchise to Portland. We were scheduled to host the Commissioner and other MLB execs out here to Portland after the postseason and World Series.”
Continued Cheek: “Neither the league nor our team feel comfortable in showcasing and hosting in downtown Portland at this juncture. We must get this under control and get back to celebrating what is great about the city we love.”
Cheek’s organization considered flying MLB officials to the airstrip in Aurora and then using a helicopter to showcase potential stadium sites from the air in order to avoid driving the contingent through Portland. They ultimately decided against it. The visit was called off and hasn’t been rescheduled.
The NCAA will hold some first and second round men’s tournament games this year at Moda Center, but those bids are not a Final Four. Also, they were secured years ago. If we want future large-scale sporting events to come to Portland and stay, we’ve got to address a glaring truth.
“We’ve just got to roll up our sleeves and help get our city back,” Etzel said. “Every avenue into this town doesn’t look great. Freeways from any direction don’t look great. All these people coming in this summer for the (World Track and Field Championships) that’s going to be their first impression.
“There’s a lot of talk about how we can clean up our front porch.”
I’ve wondered for months if the solution for Portland might be to initiate a large-scale clean up and contract with Wieden+Kennedy to create a marketing campaign aimed at changing the outside view of our city. Politicians and city leaders aren’t branding experts, so hire one while the city addresses homelessness, mental illness and garbage clean up. Maybe I’m naive, but part of the issue here is that Portland really is a mess. Another part is that the perception of that mess is amplified by the news coverage.
Etzel’s team is working on a compressed schedule. It thought the NCAA might wait a year before opening the bids, but Tuesday changed everything. They’ll submit preliminary documents, draft a budget, study hotel availability and hope to be invited back as a finalist again this cycle.
SportOregon thought Portland made a winning pitch in the last round of bidding. Tampa and Phoenix won the events instead. A couple of years before that, the Blazers put together a strong bid to host the NBA All-Star weekend. The late Paul Allen, who was at the time the longest tenured owner in the league, desperately wanted the NBA to bring the event to our city and went all-in.
Portland got passed over on both fronts.
Said Etzel: “We’ve got a lot of work to do as a community to put our best foot forward.”
(John Maher, president of Oregonian Media Group, is a volunteer member of SportOregon’s board of directors.)
