Organizers had said Delilah Wallenda planned to retire after Thursday’s walk.īack on the ground, she said “maybe not.” Another walk by the time she turns 70 'looks good to me.” “My mom was six months pregnant with me walking the wire still,' he said, 'so I’ve been walking with her longer than I’ve been alive.” They had only done a couple of tandem walks before, but in a sense, Thursday’s outing wasn’t exactly new. “It was magical,' said Nik Wallenda, 40, who walked a wire smaller in diameter than a nickel with his mother, Delilah, 66. Thursday’s event had an over-the-top quality to it, with celebrity appearances (along with Urban and Kidman, model Christie Brinkley), a Vegas-style show featuring the Ukranian neon and LED dance troupe Light Balance and two members of the Great Wallendas circus family walking a high wire strung between the casino’s two hotel towers. RELATED STORY: We went inside Seminole Hard Rock’s $720 million Tampa expansion When general manager Jim Fontana came home from work, his wife made him take off his business suit in the garage because it reeked of cigarette smoke. The tribe, which now has 4,263 members, started in the early 1980s by building a 20,000-square-foot metal-sided warehouse for bingo games on its Tampa reservation, then a small village with a softball diamond near Interstate 4. Along the way, the Tampa casino and hotel added 2,000 permanent jobs, bringing its total payroll up to about 4,800 positions. The Tampa expansion took 2½ years to complete and created 2,000 construction jobs.

Alone among casino companies, Allen said, Hard Rock’s debt is rated investment-grade by the three leading credit rating agencies. From a profitability standpoint, the Tampa casino is the most successful casino in North America, Allen said, and ranks fourth or fifth in the world. Hard Rock has more than 45,000 employees and 254 properties, many of them cafes and stores, along with what will soon be a dozen casinos, in 75 countries. Today the Seminole Hard Rock Tampa is the flagship of Hard Rock International, generating $1 billion a year in revenue for a corporation with total revenues of nearly $6 billion annually, said Jim Allen, chairman of Hard Rock International and president of Seminole Gaming. “We started off with a chickee and one alligator in a pen,” Seminole Tribe vice chairman Mitchell Cypress said, “and look where we’re at.”

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