ORLANDO, Fla. – It’s a crowded late-autumn Monday morning at Orlando International Airport, and I’m weaving through multiple terminals and thick crowds to find Pat Williams, the sports executive who helped bring a big-league franchise to this city some 35 years ago.
He wants to do it again. Search Williams’ name and you’ll read about how he helped build the NBA’s Orlando Magic. You’ll also find he’s leading a group called the Orlando Dreamers that is trying bring Major League Baseball here. That’s his big goal, but until last spring, Williams had one eye on still another possibility, albeit a faint one:
It didn’t happen, and it won’t. But when Williams was watching, it wasn’t an impossibility, and so I’m here today to take the visit that Buffalo Bills owner Terry Pegula never did.
“This is the busiest airport in Florida,” Williams says after I find him waiting in his car. “It’s one of the 10 busiest in the country and it never slows down. When you’ve got 80 million visitors a year coming in, that airport just never stops.”
Eighty million visitors. The pitch is already underway. Orlando, which was known for its orange groves before Walt Disney World opened a half century ago, sounds big-league.
Orlando has seen explosive expansion of tourism destinations – and the people, hotels, jobs, spending and development that comes with them. It has Williams believing that Central Florida can support more than one big-league sports franchise, and he’s selling it fervently. He’s taking meetings with potential investors in a baseball franchise, if Orlando were to be offered one, and he would have been eager to meet with Pegula if the circumstances were right.
In a phone conversation several weeks before my visit to Orlando, Williams told me that he had been watching “very, very carefully” the Bills’ progress in reaching a stadium deal with New York State and Erie County. If those 2021-2022…
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