I've been reading a really good book these days -- Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money into Private Profit. It's a slow go -- I can only sneak in about fifteen minutes before bed and a few other moments here and there -- but I'm really enjoying it so far. Well, "enjoying" is not the right word, because it's not the type of book you can enjoy (unless you're a sports franchise-owning robber baron), but it's a terrific read. As you can guess from the title, it's all about what a ripoff publicly-funded sports stadiums and arenas are for the communities that pay for them. The promised benefits, by and large, never materialize. The direct revenues the facilities generate are pocketed almost entirely by the team owners; they don't generate anything in taxes, because they get sweetheart tax-free deals; and the economic side-benefits (jobs, tourist money, neighborhood rejuvenation, etc.) are generally way, way overstated. They're just bad deals -- plain and simple.
And yet they're ubiquitous now in the sports landscape. Part of this is just normal crony capitalism. If you have money and lack scruples, you can get the government to give you money in some form. I suspect this goes on in just about every industry, not just sports (Field of Schemes mentions an airline, Delta, I believe, completely screwing over a city in Minnesota). But sports has the added element of a "community" product. People get attached to their local sports teams. The Space Needle is flying the Seahawks "12th Man" flag as I write this. A sports team becomes part of a city's identity. Ownership is communal.
Except it's not. It's a completely one-sided relationship. To the team owners it's their business, to the fans it's supposed to be a partnership. A local team is only "your" team when it's in the owners best interest for it to be your team. It's like paying money for a stripper and thinking it's love. (I can't claim credit for this analogy. I lifted it from this story.) And when it comes time to push for a new stadium -- when the "economics" of the sport (as fabricated by the owners) dictate that a team simply cannot survive without an expensive new stadium built on the public dime -- the owners have no problem exploiting this asymmetrical relationship, by threatening, sometimes overtly, sometimes subtly, to relocate to a city far, far away. (It's a threat, I might add, that's probably more of a bluff than a reality.*) My Johnny Cochrane-esque line for this: The fans get played, the owners get paid.
Although to be fair to the fans, a lot of times it's not them. Frequently stadium deals that are rejected by the voters still end up being built through political finagling (ahem... Safeco Field). That's the most amazing (and amazingly corrupt) part about all this. Stadium deals are almost never favored by the public that pay for them. It's the owners and their buddy-buddy politicians who push these things through. It's messed up, and it's a sham, and it's not easy to stop.**
On a related note, the Seahawks play the Redskins tomorrow in the first round of the playoffs. This presents a small conflict in me, because I really want the Seahawks to win -- I still care about this game even though I know what a ripoff pro sports are on the whole, and even though I know how dumb it is for me, a grown man, to care about a franchise that, when it comes down to it, ultimately doesn't care about me. Sal Iacono, a writer on Jimmy Kimmel's show (and Jimmy's cousin), said it well in his weekly gambling column. (He's talking about his emotional state after his favorite team, the Cowboys, lost a crucial game.)
A normal person would step back and realize that the sadness/frustration that goes with rooting for a game played by mostly thuggish multimillionaires who couldn't give a crap about you should fall somewhere between getting a parking ticket and not being able to guess someone's offering on Draw Something. That's it. No more demoralizing, no less.
So what if Tony Romo came up short again? Why, after 41 years on this planet, why should I care? If I were still 7 years old, fine — but 41? The fact that I can't outgrow this is grotesque.
So true, so true. But I guess you can justify it by saying it's no more or less silly than what anybody else does for entertainment. I mean, is caring about a sports team any more pathetic than caring about, say, a TV show? I don't think so. (I used to read a weekly column about the show Homeland, because S and I were watching it regularly, and some of the reader comments... geez... people act as if a plot hole is an attack on their civil liberties.) I guess the answer is, like a team, follow a team, root for a team, but just know -- know what the score really is.
That's it for this week. Until next time...
*The Sonics did move after failing to secure public funds for a new arena, but, it's become pretty clear since then, that the owners had their hearts set on moving to OKC from the get-go. The fact of the matter is most teams that threaten to move don't actually move due to simple mathematics; there are at least 30 teams in each major American sports league, and at any given moment there are only about 2 or 3 possible places to relocate to, if that.
**One obvious solution is to have the public start buying their city's sports teams. The problem is that the other owners won't allow this. Joan Kroc tried to give the San Diego Padres to the city and Major League Baseball forbade it. Given this, the only solution I see is for people to just absolutely refuse to give in on stadium deals (and demand politicians do the same) even if it means losing the team. Maybe I'm being Pollyannaish, but I think this could happen someday soon. It might be a silver-lining of the economic recession and the rise of the Tea Baggers.
And yet they're ubiquitous now in the sports landscape. Part of this is just normal crony capitalism. If you have money and lack scruples, you can get the government to give you money in some form. I suspect this goes on in just about every industry, not just sports (Field of Schemes mentions an airline, Delta, I believe, completely screwing over a city in Minnesota). But sports has the added element of a "community" product. People get attached to their local sports teams. The Space Needle is flying the Seahawks "12th Man" flag as I write this. A sports team becomes part of a city's identity. Ownership is communal.
Except it's not. It's a completely one-sided relationship. To the team owners it's their business, to the fans it's supposed to be a partnership. A local team is only "your" team when it's in the owners best interest for it to be your team. It's like paying money for a stripper and thinking it's love. (I can't claim credit for this analogy. I lifted it from this story.) And when it comes time to push for a new stadium -- when the "economics" of the sport (as fabricated by the owners) dictate that a team simply cannot survive without an expensive new stadium built on the public dime -- the owners have no problem exploiting this asymmetrical relationship, by threatening, sometimes overtly, sometimes subtly, to relocate to a city far, far away. (It's a threat, I might add, that's probably more of a bluff than a reality.*) My Johnny Cochrane-esque line for this: The fans get played, the owners get paid.
Although to be fair to the fans, a lot of times it's not them. Frequently stadium deals that are rejected by the voters still end up being built through political finagling (ahem... Safeco Field). That's the most amazing (and amazingly corrupt) part about all this. Stadium deals are almost never favored by the public that pay for them. It's the owners and their buddy-buddy politicians who push these things through. It's messed up, and it's a sham, and it's not easy to stop.**
[Voted down, yet still built.]
On a related note, the Seahawks play the Redskins tomorrow in the first round of the playoffs. This presents a small conflict in me, because I really want the Seahawks to win -- I still care about this game even though I know what a ripoff pro sports are on the whole, and even though I know how dumb it is for me, a grown man, to care about a franchise that, when it comes down to it, ultimately doesn't care about me. Sal Iacono, a writer on Jimmy Kimmel's show (and Jimmy's cousin), said it well in his weekly gambling column. (He's talking about his emotional state after his favorite team, the Cowboys, lost a crucial game.)
A normal person would step back and realize that the sadness/frustration that goes with rooting for a game played by mostly thuggish multimillionaires who couldn't give a crap about you should fall somewhere between getting a parking ticket and not being able to guess someone's offering on Draw Something. That's it. No more demoralizing, no less.
So what if Tony Romo came up short again? Why, after 41 years on this planet, why should I care? If I were still 7 years old, fine — but 41? The fact that I can't outgrow this is grotesque.
So true, so true. But I guess you can justify it by saying it's no more or less silly than what anybody else does for entertainment. I mean, is caring about a sports team any more pathetic than caring about, say, a TV show? I don't think so. (I used to read a weekly column about the show Homeland, because S and I were watching it regularly, and some of the reader comments... geez... people act as if a plot hole is an attack on their civil liberties.) I guess the answer is, like a team, follow a team, root for a team, but just know -- know what the score really is.
That's it for this week. Until next time...
*The Sonics did move after failing to secure public funds for a new arena, but, it's become pretty clear since then, that the owners had their hearts set on moving to OKC from the get-go. The fact of the matter is most teams that threaten to move don't actually move due to simple mathematics; there are at least 30 teams in each major American sports league, and at any given moment there are only about 2 or 3 possible places to relocate to, if that.
**One obvious solution is to have the public start buying their city's sports teams. The problem is that the other owners won't allow this. Joan Kroc tried to give the San Diego Padres to the city and Major League Baseball forbade it. Given this, the only solution I see is for people to just absolutely refuse to give in on stadium deals (and demand politicians do the same) even if it means losing the team. Maybe I'm being Pollyannaish, but I think this could happen someday soon. It might be a silver-lining of the economic recession and the rise of the Tea Baggers.
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