Las Vegas Weekly

February 3, 2009 · 6:27 AM

Miss America scores Super Bowl tickets and aims to bring NFL event to town

By Robin Leach

Chuck Sykes, 2009 Miss America Katie Stam and two Super Bowl XLIII tickets.

Photo: Tom Donoghue/www.donoghuephotography.com

New Miss America Katie Stam is aiming to bring the “Taste of the NFL” extravaganza to Las Vegas next January for the 2010 Miss America Pageant. Katie took part in the official food bank charity during Super Bowl XLIII and wowed everybody so much that the NFL might now team up with the Miss America Organization.

If plans materialize, a chef and a football star from every NFL team would join with next year’s state pageant winners for a “Taste of Vegas NFL.”

It’s been a whirlwind 10 days for Katie since she won the 2009 Miss America crown here at Planet Hollywood on Jan. 24. Today, she tours a children’s hospital in St. Petersburg, Fla., as part of her duties with the Children’s Miracle Network. Before week’s end, she’ll attend a congressional dinner in Washington, D.C., to make her first pitch for volunteer and charity work.

But the highlight to date was when Katie landed two tickets for Miss America Organization President Art McMaster and herself on the 45-yard line at the Super Bowl. “I’m on top of the world,” she exclaimed, “and Faith Hill and Tim McGraw are sitting right beside me in the next suite!”

Her two valuable tickets came about in a unique way. Forty-eight hours before kickoff, country stars Miranda Lambert and Brooks & Dunn were unable to attend the big game! Chuck Sykes, president and CEO of Sykes Enterprises, a Tampa-based company with 35,000 employees in 20 countries, owns the largest suite at Raymond James Stadium. He’d held on to his country music friends’ tickets “just in case for somebody else.”

Sykes, whose company provides customer contact management solutions for hundreds of Fortune 1,000 companies, ran into Katie at the “Taste of the NFL.” “I knew right then she was meant to have the tickets,” he told me by phone from the suite just before the Pittsburgh Steelers-Arizona Cardinals battle got underway.

Our contributing photographer Tom Donoghue was on hand to capture these great shots of Katie with Chuck and the other celebrities she met at the big game! Art also told me by phone: “Katie cannot believe it. We are in the best location of the entire stadium -- right between the 45- and 50-yard line thanks to an extraordinary benefactor.”

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