How the 'Disneyland of football' may have saved Hall of Fame Weekend for Canton (2024)

CANTON, Ohio – The new office building behind the stadium next to the Pro Football Hall of Fame is nearly finished.

The bottom floors are fully furnished and operational. There is a Starbucks and a bunch of suites stocked with NFL helmets and memorabilia. On the top floor of the loftily named Constellation Center for Excellence, there’s a 360-degree view of the bustle of ongoing construction at the Hall’s campus at the birthplace of the NFL.

Out one set of windows, a bird’s eye view of Tom Benson Stadium, the 23,000-seat, $150 million jewel that opened in 2017 and is home to the annual Hall of Fame Game. Out of another set of windows, eight new outdoor fields and a white dome that went up in late June where organizers can host youth tournaments year-round, regardless of the notoriously crummy weather in northeast Ohio in the winter and spring.

On the back side of the Constellation Center, where patrons for Hall of Fame Weekend used to drive up the hill from I-77 and park in driveways and front yards for $10 to $30 a pop — plus another $1 for lemonade — there’s a view of a brand new parking lot and roads, plus a green space for food trucks, a zipline and a Ferris wheel.

And on the east side of the offices, there are acres of bulldozed land where a hotel and water park will be built by the end of next year, plus an impressive, boxy slab of elevated concrete where bars and restaurants will begin to open by the end of the month. And, of course, there is the hallowed Hall itself, football’s museum since its grand opening in 1963.

On the top floor of the Constellation Center on a rainy Wednesday last month, more than 50 employees from the Pro Football Hall of Fame ate barbecue ribs and hot dogs under exposed ceiling wiring.

They were guests of Michael Crawford and the Hall of Fame Village powered by Johnson Controls, the formal name for what’s been referred to as the “Disneyland of football” since the idea was first conceived almost seven years ago. A former Disney executive who has overseen the project since the end of 2018, Crawford has the project barreling toward completion. Hundreds of construction workers, along with trucks, cranes and steel beams dot the property.

The lunch for the Hall of Fame employees — they don’t work for Crawford, as the Hall and the Village are separate entities — was a celebration of progress, held about a month before the arrival of the Las Vegas Raiders, the Jacksonville Jaguars, the Class of 2022 enshrinees and hundreds of thousands of people in Canton for Hall of Fame Weekend.

The restaurants, bars, hotel, waterpark and Ferris wheel wouldn’t be ready for this year’s festivities, but the progress is tangible. Buildings are going up, the calendar is getting full and people are beginning to visit.

That’s what Crawford focused on during his short speech: progress and thanks for patience. As he spoke, a line of thunderstorms moved in from the west. The skies darkened and thick clouds boomed with trouble.

The Village is $100 million in debt. It lost $92 million in 2021. Johnson Controls, an international HVAC firm, wants its name scrubbed from the project entirely because of a $4.75 million payment it says was missed. Nasdaq has warned the Village that its stock price was too low and risked being booted out of the exchange.

None of these troubles are secrets. They have been covered ad nauseam in the local press and remain very real hurdles Crawford and his team must clear. In fact, there has been an enormous amount of pain, sacrifice, and setbacks in the building of the “Disneyland of football” over the last seven years, including the dismissal of the man whose idea the Village was in the first place.

But some in attendance at that lunch know without the Village surrounding the Hall, despite all the baggage that’s come with it, Canton may have lost the Hall of Fame Game, and, worse, the enshrinement ceremony.

On Thursday, the Raiders played the Jaguars in the first NFL game of the new season. This preseason exhibition has been played every year in Canton since 1962, save for the two times it was canceled. On Saturday, Tony Boselli, Cliff Branch, LeRoy Butler, Art McNally, Sam Mills, Richard Seymour, Dick Vermeil and Bryant Young will join the 346 Hall of Famers before them with bronze busts and gold jackets.

But when C. David Baker was hired as the Hall of Fame’s executive director in 2014, commissioner Roger Goodell, his advisors and some team owners were considering doing away with the game and moving enshrinement out of Canton and out of August, multiple sources told The Athletic. A new plan would involve moving the ceremony to a different NFL city every year.

“There just wasn’t a whole lot for Roger or the league to be excited about in Canton,” said one source familiar with Goodell’s thinking.

What were the league’s issues with Canton?

To begin with, the old stadium next to the Hall, Fawcett Stadium, was built in 1938 and crumbling. The locker rooms were glorified bathrooms. Most of the seating was on one side of the field. There was a chain-link fence behind the south end zone, and fans could sit on a hill and watch the game in the north end. Watching games there had a minor-league feel, and the NFL doesn’t do minor league.

Additionally, Canton, like so many old steel towns in the midwest, had fallen on hard times economically. The previous decade was especially harsh, as factory closures from 2000 to 2004 cost the city and its surrounding communities thousands of jobs. The NFL wasn’t going to penalize Canton for that, but the fallout meant a lack of development around the Hall.

There was one downtown hotel, and it had become dilapidated to the point where league dignitaries, teams and enshrinees weren’t even staying in Canton for Hall of Fame Weekend. There was no entertainment or ambiance near the Hall. Former NFL standout Chris Spielman, a local, bought an old horse barn in 1992 and turned it into a football-themed restaurant. It lasted about a decade.

While Canton wouldn’t lose the Hall itself, losing the festivities surrounding Hall of Fame Weekend would have been a fate worse than the one that befell the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, which has split induction ceremonies with New York City every other year since 2018.

“Could that have been the model for Canton, where the Hall of Fame is based here, but the pomp and circ*mstance around the enshrinement of a new class is held in this glitzy setting in New York or Los Angeles? Yeah, I think that crossed some people’s minds,” said Richard Desrosiers, spokesman for the Pro Football Hall of Fame, during an interview in his office at the Hall, with a view of the stadium from his window.

“I think that was part of the vision that developed here seven, eight years ago, to say, ‘Hey, it’s time for a refresh here,'” Desrosiers said.

A spokesman for Goodell did not respond to multiple messages seeking comment, and Baker declined to comment when reached by The Athletic, but sources said Baker’s “Disney” vision was his plan for keeping those iconic events in the city where the NFL was founded in 1920.

Baker, a 6-foot-9 bear of a man whose son was an NFL lineman, went big. He knew he needed to fix the stadium first, and approached his friend, New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson, for a contribution to get the project started. Benson, who died in March 2018, kicked in $11 million in return for his name going on the new stadium.

Construction began in August 2015, just after the Hall of Fame Game that summer. The following year, disaster struck. The turf at the old Fawcett Stadium was deemed unplayable about an hour before the Packers were to play the Colts, and the game was canceled.

The disaster could have meant the end of the game in Canton, but Baker’s Hall of Fame Village project was already underway, complete with a $476 million price tag. It called for not only a new stadium, but also a hotel, a waterpark, a sports bar, an indoor arena, outdoor practice fields, a players’ health center, living quarters and an amphitheater. Baker wanted the Village to host the NFL Draft.

And he said it would all be done before the NFL’s centennial in 2020.

That wasn’t to be. The stadium alone cost $150 million – way too much, according to accountants familiar with the project. Though it “opened” in 2017 (the old Fawcett Stadium was completely refurbished on the same spot), there was still work to be done in one of the end zones. Stadium and hotel construction halted by fall 2017 because workers weren’t being paid. Liens were filed. Baker and his partners even discussed the possibility of raising the local sales tax to pay for the Village, but county commissioners told them a tax increase wasn’t happening.

Cost estimates to complete the Village soared north of $800 million.

“David definitely gets credit for the original vision,” Desrosiers said. “It took somebody like David to come in and dream big, and help other people to dream big. But it just wasn’t going to work. Financially under the original idea, the original strategy just was not going to raise the capital needed to get it done.”

Investors and developers, most notably Stu Lichter of Los Angeles-based Industrial Realty Group, decided to take the Village out of the Hall of Fame’s hands (which meant out of Baker’s hands) and form a separate entity to finish the project. Crawford was hired in December 2018. Baker ultimately retired as the Hall of Fame’s chief executive last year.

“There was a stadium that was 80 percent complete and a sports complex that was 70 percent complete,” Crawford said. “It was really just fields, a lot of homes, a lot of weeds. I just think there was a slightly over-ambitious view of how much we were going to build all at the same time. And we had to sort of dial that back and get people to understand that they should always want to be building — that’s what keeps people coming back over and over.

“Walt’s favorite saying was ‘Disneyland will never be finished,’ and it’s not every year they show something,” Crawford continued. “So it can be the same here.”

Crawford negotiated with investors to defer the repayment of loans. He asked subcontractors for patience, and completed a merger with Gordon Pointe Acquisition Group, a financing engine that took the new company public in 2020 (it’s traded on Nasdaq as Hall of Fame Resort & Entertainment Company, or HOFV).

The Village paid $30 million to refurbish the old McKinley Grand hotel downtown, which was easier — and cheaper — than building a new hotel from scratch while trying to finish the fields and indoor facility for youth tournaments. The downtown property is now a DoubleTree. A second hotel, to be operated by Hilton, is scheduled to open sometime in 2023, as is the waterpark.

Shula’s steakhouse and BrewKettle sports bar — complete with an indoor golf simulator provided by Top Golf — are expected to open this year. Hall of Famer Isaac Bruce is opening a Smush Cookies franchise. A Build-A-Bear workshop, where fans can build bears licensed by their favorite NFL teams, is going in, too. The Village has a media company making documentaries about football Hall of Famers.

Last month, Canton hosted the USFL and the Women’s Football Alliance playoffs. Last year it was the site of the NCAA Division III National Championship. Rock legends Journey will play at Tom Benson Stadium Saturday as part of Hall of Fame Weekend. Village officials claim they will make $126 million in annual revenues by 2026.

“I think of this place more as a regional destination centered around an iconic sport – pro football,” Crawford said. “The comparisons to Disney, it’s a fun thing to do, but I also think because we’ve created experiences, little mini-experiences that can sort of act as rides or shows or events, and I think we’ve done a good job at building an event slate that really is pretty powerful.

“We don’t have a gate around us. We’re not charging you dollars to get in. We’re trying to allow people to come in and experience the destination as they want to experience.”

Despite its momentum, the Village is still facing its share of trouble.

Why would the title sponsor want to quit? Why are investors so cold?

Last month, the Village received another $50 million in loans and financing, including a $10 million loan from Lichter (the general contractor and majority owner of the Village) that’s due in September. Lichter, who declined comment to The Athletic, has contributed many millions to the project, including a $22.8 million loan he extended until 2024.

Crawford has a term for the loans that keep construction going – “just-in-time financing.” He says it was the only way to finish the Village when a global pandemic dried up financing and the market for construction materials.

On the matter of Johnson Controls wanting its name taken off the project, Crawford said “they were told one thing when they joined and this was pretty new, and then it took more time to materialize. Now, unfortunately, it’s materializing, and they’re, I think, trying to step aside a little too soon. We’ll resolve that conflict.” A spokesman for Johnson Controls declined comment.

Crawford said the Village would do what it took to avoid being booted from the Nasdaq, from filing an extension to executing a reverse stock split, which would raise the overall price of the stock but hurt investors. Another way to raise the stock price would be to get in on the now-legal Ohio sports-betting market, which would be worth millions in annual revenues.

There are dozens of licenses available from the Ohio Casino Control Commission, with preference given to pro sports franchises. The Village filed to run a brick-and-mortar sportsbook and an online book, but filing an application does not mean a license will be guaranteed.

“A lot of these conversations I’ve been having, it seems that folks think that if they submitted an application, they have a right to the license without understanding that the General Assembly has had a lot to say about whether someone should have the privilege of a license,” Casino Control Commission executive director Matt Schuler said at a recent public meeting.

In the meantime, the Village has earned the cautious support of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine. Developers say they have “constant access” to DeWine’s staff, which is working to help procure tax credits once the Village creates a certain number of jobs. Ohio lawmakers set aside $2 million in the state budget to help Village construction.

The NFL likes the progress in Canton, too, and has pledged $10 million, but that money hasn’t come through yet. There is a belief locally that the league wants to see the Village project bear more fruit before paying into it. The Pro Football Hall of Fame, meanwhile, hopes the Village will boost museum attendance. Plans are underway to build admission packages tied to staying at the Village’s hotels and visiting its other attractions.

“This is a cynical community, a community that’s been punched in the stomach a lot,” said Desrosiers, the Hall’s spokesman who worked for years as sports editor of the Canton Repository. “Factories closing, auto plants closing, steel mills closing, if not closing then at least downsizing dramatically.

“I don’t think anybody in this building ever lost their optimism, but it required some regrouping,” he continued. “It required some people stepping forward and taking additional risk than maybe they thought they might have to originally. But at each turn, the thing that needed to happen has happened.”

Good thing, as the future of Hall of Fame Weekend in Canton was riding on it.

(Image courtesy of the Hall of Fame Village)