From pucks to politics

The penalty boxes, not to mention those choice $107 seats behind them, have given way to row upon row of television camera stands. Luxury suites have been turned into TV studios with anchor desks where drink rails once held beer cups.

John McCain will accept the Republican presidential nomination from a massive podium somewhere above where Wild hockey coach Jacques Lemaire typically paces and scowls behind the players' bench. And sign-waving delegates will hoot and holler where center-ice faceoffs usually go down.

GOP logistics planners picked up the keys to the place July 21, but the Xcel Energy Center's actual transformation from puck palace to political epicenter really began in April 1997.

A group of Twin Cities business leaders and hockey aficionados was trying to bring a National Hockey League expansion team to the old concrete drum known as the St. Paul Civic Center.

One problem: The Shrine Circus was in town when the NHL owners came to visit, and the odor of circus-elephant dung hung thick in the air as they toured the 25-year-old arena. An ultimatum promptly followed: Build a new arena if you want a franchise.

600 workers dive in

Nearly a dozen years later, the elephants are marching back in to a far more sumptuous arena for the Republican National Convention.

"This is a state-of-the-art modern sports arena, so it's great for television and has everything you want, especially with the wide concourses open to the lower bowl," said Mike Miller, 71, operations chief for the Committee on Arrangements. This is his 10th GOP convention (actually 12, if you count two he attended as a media member).

Miller is breathing easier than four years ago in New York City, where the cramped and outdated Madison Square Garden required the installation of a false floor with offices tucked below and a theater-in-the-round setup for Night 4.

Nearly 3,500 seats at the Xcel Center have been yanked out and put in storage to make room for 15,000 media members, bloggers and radio talk-show hosts covering McCain's nomination coronation.

Work crews, orchestrated by the Dallas-based Freeman Co., have converted nearly two dozen luxury suites into TV studios, complete with some glassed-in anchor decks and temporary Velcro walls. Roy Wilkins Auditorium and the RiverCentre convention space adjacent to the arena have turned into event office space for the media and the "radio row" gantlet of talk jocks.

"The media end up in two-thirds or three-fourths of the actual real estate that's used for the convention," said Greg Lane, the national project manager from New Orleans who's Freeman's point man and has worked half a dozen conventions -- not to mention Pope John Paul's visit to Denver 15 years ago.

Cost of conversion

The price tag for the makeover is part of a $10 million contract the RNC has with Freeman, Miller said. That includes more than just the arena bowl changes; it also pays for changes at the adjacent Roy Wilkins, RiverCentre convention space and outside the complex. The money to turn the arena into a convention hall comes from a pot raised by the local Twin Cities host committee.

Part of that dough pays for the podium -- it's not a stage; logistics officials insist on calling it a podium -- plus lights and a sound system. The arena's everyday lights and speakers, which seem fine for the Wild's Marian Gaborik, are strictly backups this week. The GOP convention raised its own trusses a month ago and filled them with lights, speakers and, come Thursday, a galaxy's worth of balloons. Much of the transformation won't be as visually apparent. Paint this turnover with numbers and you'd have a vivid array buried below the surface with some 135 miles worth of extra traditional copper wiring; roughly 2,000 Qwest-installed data and phone lines, and a dozen miles of high-capacity fiber optic lines dropped between the X and Qwest's St. Paul telephone call switching office.

"One of the great things about doing this every four years is to drop in and see the advances in communication technology," said Miller, the logistics maestro, who recalls that a cordless microphone was cutting edge back when Elizabeth Dole was on the podium.

Now, after months of planning and weeks of labor, the hockey rink has been gussied up for the Big Time.

And then ...

It will take two weeks to revert the place to a hockey rink. A less ballyhooed convention, a state superintendents' conference, is slated for Sept. 18.

And the drink rails, luxury suites, Zambonis and 3,500 seats should all be back in place when the Wild opens its preseason against the Columbus Blue Jackets (oh, the irony) Sept. 24.

Amid all the devilish details, the logistics gurus realize why they're doing what they're doing.

"It doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or a Republican," Lane said. "It's an unruly kind of event but it's at the heart of how we nominate presidential candidates, and it's taught me a lot about the American political process."