There was a period in Butch Spyridon’s life when he was able to have a little down time between Christmas and New Year’s.
“In the ’90s, it was a pretty dead week,” he said.
But a few years after he took over as head of the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corporation in 1991, that began to change, thanks in part to two new events.
Music City Bowl
The first Music City Bowl
was in 1998 when a sellout crowd of 41,248 packed Vanderbilt Stadium to watch Virginia Tech and Alabama. Now, the bowl game takes place as the much larger Nissan Stadium.
When Tennessee played North Carolina five years ago, the game drew 69,143.
On Wednesday night, this year’s version of the bowl features the University of Louisville and Texas A&M. It’s not quite the marquee matchup of last year — Notre Dame vs. LSU — but with more than 50,000 tickets already sold, Spyridon expects downtown restaurants and hotel to be packed.
“[It] won’t have the hype that Notre Dame and LSU had, but at the end of the day, we care about, ‘How much did they spend?’ and, ‘How many rooms did they use?,'” said Spyridon. ”So I like the nighttime too. Having a 6 o’clock kickoff means most people will have to spend the night.”
Bash on Broadway
Nashville’s New Year’s Eve concert celebration started in 2009 and has grown every year.
“Year one was tough, because we’d never done it,” Spyridon recalled. “It was tough to get an act, it was tough to get the word out, and it was tough to convince Nashvillians that we could do a good job.
“It took us about three years to get it right, and now we may have gotten it more than right.”
This year, Kings of Leon and Chris Stapleton will be among the performers. Spyridon expects a crowd of 150,000 on Thursday night, the second big event of the week for downtown.
“Nobody talks about, ‘This is the slowest week of the year’ any longer, and that’s kind of a nice thing,” said Spyridon.
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