There was a large group of people standing behind Visit Tampa Bay CEO Santiago Corrada and Hillsborough County Commissioner Al Higginbotham at Monday's press conference discussing Tampa's role as host of the 2014 International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) awards, but none loomed larger than Lutz real estate agent Chetan "Jason" Shah.
Shah is the man who got the process rolling back in January, when he presented the idea to Higginbotham unsolicited during "a five-minute window" in the commissioner's schedule. Shah made the most of it, describing how big a deal landing the event could be for the Bay area. Tampa made its bid after plans for the original 2014 host city were canceled. (That locale was never revealed to the public.) His hard work paid off last Friday, when IIFA made the announcement in Macau, China, that Tampa had beaten a number of American cities (New York, Chicago and San Francisco among them) and would host the event.
"The credit goes to everyone. I'm not the only one who can take any of this credit," Shah said today.
This article appears in Jul 4-10, 2013.