Few in American sport try to build without access to public money
A friend in the States remarks that this is the season for him to get bewildering emails from his mates in Ireland about his boys getting a battering. He usually sifts through the results of the basketball, baseball and gridiron teams he follows before the penny eventually drops. It’s the Ryder Cup they’re talking about.
That mental juggling has to be done because, as he puts it, the USA versus Europe in golf — despite the names involved — is usually the fourth or fifth item on the sports news.
“Ryder Cup under way” was the way it was reported on one TV channel’s sports ticker a couple of years ago: that was the level of detail, sans scorers or further updates, for the final day of the competition.
You may argue, of course, that just because American sports editors and TV producers feel an event is not newsworthy, it’s no reason for us to feel the same. You’re right, too.
If that were the case then the pages elsewhere in the newspaper covering the All-Ireland hurling final would be devoted to far less interesting pursuits.
God knows that the competition for attention in sports coverage is pretty keen, though. This particular corner of the paper didn’t fall in love with US sports coverage when living in the States, but we certainly did when we heard about the US newspaper which sent so many reporters to cover the Super Bowl that there was one journalist whose job it was to cover people going in and out of the loo (the ladies’, not the gents’).
On the serious side, they go into detail in the States. Take the matter of sports stadia.
One of the oddest things about American professional sports is that though they’re played somewhere that reveres capitalism, red in tooth and claw, as the only operating system for any enterprise, most of the pro leagues are run under a drafting and profit-sharing system which is perilously close to socialism.
The most obvious example of this is in the construction and maintenance of stadia. For decades municipal authorities were put under huge pressure to pay vast sums to build new facilities for sports franchises which were, after all, private businesses.
Incredibly, this worked for many years because hundreds of cities across America yearned for a big-time sports franchise to bestow instant recognisability on their region. The Indiana Pacers, for instance, get $10m (€7.7m) in subsidies from their municipal authorities, while they pay those same authorities a rental feet of... one dollar per year.
Sometimes even that amount of love isn’t enough, though. Take Seattle, the home of grunge and Microsoft, which was held to ransom by its basketball team, the Sonics.
At one stage the city authorities were staring at a $200m (€155m) bill to refurbish the basketball stadium, the KeyArena, but they were happy they didn’t cough up when the Sonics left and recreated themselves as the Oklahoma City Thunder.
The recession, however, has meant many sports teams have had to learn to rely on their own resources: the San Francisco Giants baseball team, for instance, built AT&T Park with private money, taking out a 20-year lease paying $20m (€15m) a year.
This was a deal that many observers felt would bankrupt the team, but they’ve been able to keep up the payments. Why? Because they gambled that the stadium itself would be an attraction and draw people, and it has been, a retro sports cathedral in San Francisco’s downtown.
Tourists in the Californian city have plenty of attractions to choose from as it stands; getting your sports stadium to draw visitors away from Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge is testament to its excellence.
Think back to the poor basketball-starved citizens of Seattle, however. Plans are afoot for a new arena for the city which is expected to cost $490m (€381m), but the city won’t pay for it.
Chris Hansen, a hedge fund manager of apparently bottomless pockets, has offered to pay for the stadium. Not only that, he says he’ll bring an NBA franchise to the city, and possibly an NHL team as well; no wonder the city council there recently approved his plans.
There are obstacles in his way. US experts reckon such stadia need 200 revenue-producing events to stay profitable, and there are stadia already in the Seattle area which could deprive Hansen of valuable music concert revenue. He’s not even guaranteed that the NBA would award the area a franchise.
My question is this: given similar plans in the southern capital, has anyone established whether or not Hansen has any Cork blood in him?
* michael.moynihan@examiner.ie
