I've just about had it with the petulant demands of the owners, both real and potential, of our local sports teams. I'm frequently reminded of the old National Lampoon subscription request. There was a picture of a big, silver revolver, pressed against the head of a very worried looking dog. The caption read, "subscribe to this magazine, or we'll shoot this dog." Well, go ahead John Ellis. Go ahead Ken Bering. Shoot the dog. Leave us alone.
There's no doubt that there are a lot of football, baseball, and basketball fans in this country. They are willing to pay big bucks to watch men (and it's always men, isn't it?) who seem to be nothing like themselves beat each other up over control and movement of some little ball, even if the ball isn't even shaped like a sphere. To the sports fan, the ability of "their" players to perform takes on all of the mythical countenance of Greek gods doing battle high on the slopes of Mt. Olympus. If the home team looses, the team's fans are depressed. If the team does well, the fans rejoice. How silly. As if the conglomerate will of thirty to fifty thousand people in a room, with hundreds of thousands more watching on television matters in the great scheme of things. I mean, if you are having troubles with your boss, is the final score of the game on Sunday going to change your life? No, it's not.
I have to admit that I do like baseball, and that I find the sport to be somewhat worthy of worrying about. I dislike basketball for it's shameless hucksterism and unnecessary violence. I dislike football for it's NECESSITY of violence. Sure, there is violence in baseball too, but it's supposed to be a more civilized spectacle, with people modeled after more attainable body types, struggling to do something inherently hard. In football, the idea is to out-muscle the other guys and get your little ball past a line. In basketball, not only must you get the ball passed a line, but you have to deposit it in a special receptacle, and then they put the receptacle out of reach of normal human beings. In football, there is a decided advantage in crippling an opposing player, because the guy that replaces him is by definition less skilled than the person you hurt. Oh yes, there are "rules" against this sort of thing, and woe be unto the player who actually admits this as a strategy. Yet the sport demands, and the media fuels, the attitude of the players who actively seek to injure an opponent. Hell, you might as well watch boxing. At least the purpose of hurting the other guy is stated and understood up front...
Those of us living near Seattle, and in King County in particular, now find ourselves in the position of having to make sacrifices in many of the things that we wish our government to do in order to subsidize the owners of two out of three of the major sports franchises in the area. The guy who owns the football franchise wants to move the team to a place where he can make more money with it. More power to him. But the cry goes out to save "our" Seahawks, and not let this dastardly deed take place. A local boy who made good is willing to purchase the team and keep it here, but only if the trifle of money the county makes off the games is given to him outright. What he really wants is to have us destroy the perfectly serviceable multi-function facility in which they play so that a football-only building complex could be built in which his new team could make money. Likewise, the owners of the baseball team want a new baseball only complex to be built so that they can make more money in it. There are many critically stupid arguments here, but it all comes down to money, and you, dear reader, are now in a position to hear a few of them...
The Mariners, the baseball team, insist that we, the taxpayers, spend upwards of four-hundred MILLION dollars of taxpayer money on a facility that will look good, but will in fact hold fewer people than the place where they play now. I don't know how many of you out there in Web-land have that kind of money to throw around, but I certainly don't. How can the Mariners make money by selling tickets to fewer seats than they do now? I don't know, but when George Bush called Ronald Reagan's supply side theories "Voodoo Economics," he may have had this scheme in mind. I guess the theory is that there will be more tickets sold over the course of a season as opposed to individual games. Or that somehow the idea that we, as spectators, will be willing to pay inflated ticket prices and increased taxes in order to watch baseball being played outside will somehow make it all worthwhile... And this price tag: $400000000. That's a lot of zeros. It would be cheaper to BUY the team and FORCE them to play in the Kingdome! Hell, we could buy a couple of teams and play them against each other, kind of like an instant cross town rivalry!
The football team hasn't had a sellout crowd for a home game all year. Yet the only options being bandied about are the demolition of the existing building, and the subsequent construction of another stadium in its place. To make matters worse, the new stadium and the new ball park would be built directly next to each other, YET WITH NO COORDINATION OR SHARED FACILITIES BETWEEN THEM!!! Is this crazy or what? I mean, we should be encouraging mass transit, right? But instead, we're going to build two new sports complexes with no shared parking? No heating or air-conditioning? (well yeah, it's outside, right?) How about locker rooms, hotel rooms, press facilities, and so on?
So how is the creation of new places to play, with fewer seats, going to make these teams into money makers? The answer is that it can't. The only way that the owners of these teams will make more money in the deal is by holding the taxpayers of King County hostage for the next fifty years. So we go and spend all of this money, and build two sports-specific stadiums. The owners can always ask for more and more givebacks from the county. After all, without the teams, these giant white-elephants will be even bigger money losers than they would be without the teams. The owners can always threaten to leave without even more taxpayer subsidies. And what would the county be able to use to keep the teams in place? A lease agreement, which could be broken, bought off, or fought, all at great taxpayer expense... That's where the new money comes from: the screwing of the taxpayers...
Like I said earlier, I like baseball, but I don't support baseball. I haven't been to a game in a couple of years. I much prefer to watch the games on television (usually while playing or working on my computer, but that's a side issue...). As long as I enjoy baseball (or golf, or fly-fishing, or embroidery, or whatever) vicariously by watching it on television, it doesn't matter where the event is taking place. Think about it for just a minute. I could choose any team in any league in any sport to support, to care about, as long as there was sufficient coverage of the games on television. In this theory, the Atlanta Braves are in fact America's Team, because almost all of their games are televised on the cable only channel WTBS. The Mariners could move to Vegas, to Vancouver, to Amsterdam, and I could still watch them, enjoy them, and care about them. I don't need them in my back yard, and if they're going to charge me a couple hundred bucks a year whether I support them or not, then my call is not to let them put me in the situation of paying that kind of money. Forget it. Let 'em go. Get outta town. I like the Mariners, but not at the expense that they are requiring...
In thinking about the Seahawks, my feelings are much the same, except that the arguments are even more absurd. I use a 1990 Mazda hatchback to drive to work. I COULD dump it and get a Ferrarri, a Lambourgini, a Rolls Royce, or whatever, to drive to work. Sure, it would cost a heck of a lot more, but while I would look a lot better driving it, it still wouldn't get me to work any faster. What it WOULD do is bankrupt my family trying to pay for the damned thing! The Kingdome is like this. Built in the seventies, it's perfectly serviceable for a multitude of functions. It isn't glamorous, sexy, or beautiful, but it works. Kind of like my Mazda. It's housed basketball tourneys, boat shows, home shows, carnivals, rodeos, motocross, whatever. But should we spend four hundred MILLION dollars to tear it down and put up a facility that can ONLY be used for football, perhaps eight to ten times a year? NO WAY!
So let 'em go. Show the millionaire owners that are ruining professional sports that there is one town in this country that doesn't need sports franchises to shore up a sagging regional identity. If you want to enjoy sports, watch your television. Pick a good team at the beginning of the season, and cheer them on. When they do well, tell your friends that you told them so. When they don't do as well, claim that you were never really for them anyway. Enjoy your sports if you must, but by all means resist the demands of millionaires who insist that you subsidize their stupid and pound-foolish flipperies with your tax dollars. Just say no...
This document was placed here on Dec 10, 1996, and has been viewed countless times.
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