Super Bowl 2023: Race, rap and the Arizona Super Bowl that never was

Arizona is now an established Super Bowl host. But it hasn't always been like that.

On Sunday, state capital Phoenix will host the NFL's championship game as the Kansas City Chiefs take on the Philadelphia Eagles. It will be the fourth time the season showpiece has come to the city.

But in the 1990s Arizona, tucked in the south-west of the United States, was an American football outpost.

So what better way to put the state on the map than staging one of the world's biggest sporting and cultural events?

"I feel as though I've won the lottery," said Governor Rose Mofford in March 1990 as Arizona earned the right to host the 1993 Super Bowl.

"This is one Super Bowl that nobody will ever forget."

However, the NFL had underestimated something. Within the state, a debate was brewing to the boil.

Politicians and celebrities had picked sides. Hip-hop superstars Public Enemy would release a song about it.

And finally it engulfed the biggest sports event in the state's history - the 'Super Bowl that nobody would forget' instead became the Super Bowl that never happened.

Arizona had only one professional sports team until the Cardinals NFL franchise, owned by the Bidwill family since 1933, moved from St Louis to Phoenix in 1988.

Initially they played at a 70,000-capacity college stadium, which was only supposed to be a temporary home. It was hoped their would grow to fill it. The opposite happened.

In the Cardinals' first season in Arizona, they attracted an average crowd of 59,000. In the second, it dropped to 43,000 as a losing record got worse.

Until then, the Super Bowl had most often been staged in Los Angeles, Miami or New Orleans, but the NFL had begun to expand its brand by taking its showcase event to other cities.

So to help Cardinals owner Bill Bidwill boost his flagging franchise, the NFL handed Phoenix the 1993 Super Bowl.

"The Super Bowl's a big deal, it's a monumental cultural event," Dr Todd Boyd, professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Southern California, told BBC Sport.

"A lot of people host parties around it, everybody's watching - certainly back then as people didn't have as many things to watch.

"American football is the most popular sport in the country and the Super Bowl's an unofficial national holiday."

In Arizona, though, it was in conflict with another national holiday.

In 1983, President Reagan had signed into law a national holiday honouring Martin Luther King Jr, the pioneering black civil rights leader shot dead in 1968, on the third Monday of January.

It took several years before those in Arizona could enjoy it.

The Republican state legislature blocked several attempts to make it a paid state holiday.

It was only in 1986 that Governor Bruce Babbitt - a Democrat - forced Martin Luther King Jr Day on to Arizona calendars by executive order.

Babbitt made the announcement from the pulpit at the First Institutional Baptist Church in Phoenix, where Dr Warren Stewart is the senior pastor.

"In his speech here, he said 'you're going to have to fight for it', which was really prophetic," Dr Stewart told BBC Sport.

While running for election as Babbitt's successor, Evan Mecham made a campaign promise to rescind Babbitt's order. Days after taking office in 1987, he kept it.

"King doesn't deserve a holiday," said Mecham. "You folks don't need another holiday. What you folks need are jobs."

ers of the outspoken Republican insist he believed that economics was the key to improving the lives of black people in his state, but his comments on social issues made him a polarising figure.

Dr Stewart knew where he stood.

The pastor, who moved to Arizona from Kansas in 1977 via New York, formed a multi-faith, multi-race coalition to try to get Mecham or the state to a holiday.

"We were angry, he disrespected the legacy of Martin Luther King," said Dr Stewart.

Dr Boyd added: "It's one thing to oppose it; it's another to repeal it once it's already been put in place.

"There was no shame in Evan Mecham's game. He was comfortable openly flaunting his ignorance and bigotry.

"In a lot of ways he sounded like a holdover from the type of characters you would have encountered in the 1960s - unapologetically bigoted, especially racist, and kind of a relic."

Mecham was removed from office in 1988 after being convicted in an impeachment trial of obstruction of justice and misuse of government funds.

But his abrupt departure from power did not ensure the immediate return of the Martin Luther King holiday.

Governor Mofford - Mecham's successor - ed its reinstatement. The Republican state legislature still opposed it. Deadlock.

In November 1990, Dr Stewart's coalition collected enough signatures to force a tiebreaker - a vote by the people of Arizona themselves.

With Phoenix having now been awarded the Super Bowl, they went to the polls knowing the NFL was watching.

At the time, the percentage of black people in Arizona was about 4%, way below the US national percentage of 12%.

Dr Stewart says he was not totally in favour of a people's vote "because so many people didn't understand the holiday". He would have preferred the state legislature to act.

"That's their job," he said. "When we started the coalition, I sent letters to all the white business leaders, the executives, to help us fight this and they ignored them. They wouldn't pay attention to us.

"But when the NFL started suggesting they wouldn't bring the Super Bowl here, that's when the business community began to call me, to lead the fight towards the 1990 referendum.

"I kind of backed away because I knew they didn't want it for the right reason. They just wanted a football game. I didn't feel comfortable working with them."

NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue said the league was "trying to act in a fair-minded and responsible way", that they didn't want to do "anything punitive".

But as the people of Arizona took to the polls, the consequences were clear: a no vote would mean no Super Bowl.

There was also some confusion as the ballot paper featured two propositions regarding a Martin Luther King holiday, which diluted the yes vote.

Nevertheless, 51% voted against it.

"All heck broke loose, the bad publicity," said Dr Stewart. "We became the only state in the nation to vote on the holiday and we defeated two different versions.

"It was terrible. The defeat caused the business leaders, the state, to be in a deep funk. It was like 'how could that happen">