Sports in America

by James A. Michener

  NEW: It sounds to me as if you’re making the survival of sports depend upon the survival of the city.

  OLD: I am. Anything which arbitrarily weakens the city, weakens the base on which sports have always existed. The metropolitan newspapers, the radio and television stations, the subway alumni, the tax base on which to build and supervise the stadiums. Without that interlocking web, you haven’t the infrastructure necessary for sports to exist.

  NEW: You’re fifty years in the past. We live in a new age, with the automobile instead of the subway. Our market is the people living in the surrounding areas, and unless we can pull them in comfortably, we’re going to go out of business. As between the old-fashioned help the city can give, and the new-fashioned strength to be found in the suburbs, I’ll take the latter every time.

  OLD: You overlook one thing. I suspect that the age of the automobile, as we’ve known it, may be past. Families aren’t going to have three cars in the future. The gas-guzzlers won’t be here ten years from now. Shopping centers on the far edge of town are going to find themselves in trouble. Stadiums twenty-five miles out in the country are going to be unreachable. Some form of public transportation will be essential, and it will bring people back into the city, not out of it. I’ll feel a lot safer, economically, if we have our new stadium as close to downtown as possible, because that’s where the action is going to be.

  NEW: Dead wrong. America will never give up its automobile. Our ingenuity will devise some alternative way of fueling, and ten years from now we’ll be more mobile than we are today. I want my stadium out in the country, with space so that we can macadam about sixty acres and park all the cars that will ever want to patronize us. I want to see Kansas City complexes all across the nation, because that’s the wave of the future. New Orleans Superdome? Seats eighty-four thousand. Has parking for twenty-five hundred cars. It was obsolete three years before it was finished. Your Yankee Stadium. The bill for refurbishing it was supposed to be twenty-three million dollars. I read the other day it’ll cost a cool hundred million. And when it’s completed you have an old-fashioned dump in an old-fashioned area with no parking. The city stadium is doomed.

  OLD: Looking at the splendid jobs Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati have managed, I’d say the age of the new city stadium is just beginning.

  NEW: You keep avoiding the basic problem. The city as you knew it is doomed. New patterns of living are evolving, and the city will be relegated to a ghetto subsidized by the suburbs. But the action will be in the suburbs, and so will the stadiums.

  OLD: The city has survived for five thousand years as the center of civilization. The automobile has damned near killed it, but its resilience will be amazing. Keep the stadiums in the city, and give it help in surviving.

  NEW: The game’s the thing. Sports aren’t a sociological agency. Having a good team and winning and attracting loads of paying spectators is the name of the game. And you can’t do any of those things in a city any longer.

  OLD: Will you grant me one thing? Maybe football can flourish in the suburbs, but baseball can’t. And even with football I see the day when the fickle suburban fan abandons the game the way he abandoned boxing and wrestling. Then real sports will return to the stadiums in the city.

  NEW: Football is good for another quarter-century. Nothing could damage it. So it ought to go where the big buck is, and that’s in the suburbs. We break ground next Monday, twenty-three miles north of the city.

  Competition between communities struggling for the sports dollar can become ridiculous. The New York football Giants, unable to find adequate quarters in their home city, decided to move their franchise to a garish new sports facility which the State of New Jersey promised to build for $291,000,000 just across the Hudson in what the brochures called the Hackensack Meadowlands, more popularly known as the Jersey swamps. A feature of the new installation would be a massive race track, which could be counted on to siphon customers away from the New York tracks at Yonkers and Aqueduct. This would mean a substantial loss in taxes for New York, which garnered at least 17 percent of the pari-mutuel handle.

  So New York retaliated in various conniving ways. First it threw the New York Giants out of the field they were using, on the logical principle ‘If you’re going to desert us eventually, get out now.’ Then state officials announced that they were planning to build a $275,000,000 sports complex—flat racing, harness, football—at an imaginative site on a platform over an old railroad center. (This had the collateral effect of making it impossible for New Jersey to peddle her bonds for her projected sports center, because if New York’s plan succeeded, it would divert customers from New Jersey, which would mean that the New Jersey complex might go broke, making the bonds worthless.) New York had another salvo in its guns. It threatened to cut its share of the race-track handle on win-place-show from 17 percent to 14 percent, which meant that if New Jersey wanted to attract bettors, it would have to cut its take too, and this in turn would diminish its profits. This internecine war has not yet been resolved, but as one New Yorker said, ‘That’ll learn ’em not to meddle around with the Rockefellers,’ it having been widely rumored that the New York retaliation had been spurred by the Rockefeller brothers in an attempt to protect their New York financial interests.

  In the meantime, poor New Jersey, preoccupied with battling her enemy to the north, was being attacked on her southern flank by Philadelphia. A group of hotshot race-track operators from my home county erected a spanking new track called Keystone, and entered into competition with the long-established New Jersey tracks at Atlantic City and especially nearby Garden State. While New York was siphoning money away in the north, our boys would be draining it off in the south, verifying the famous description Ben Franklin once gave of New Jersey: ‘A keg tapped at both ends.’

  New Jersey might be powerless to contest the depredations of the Rockefeller brothers, but it was no paper tiger where Philadelphia was concerned. It waited till Keystone had announced its racing dates, then scheduled precisely those dates for Garden State, and since the New Jersey track was much better established, it blanketed the newer one in Pennsylvania. But even so, New Jersey was sorely damaged by the competition—its average attendance slumped from 10,944 to 7,942 and its daily handle from $1,624,492 to $885,750. By clever statesmanship, New Jersey may be able to fend off its two enemies and arrange some kind of reasonable truce. In the meantime, chaos reigns.

  A more amusing competition has been taking place at the opposite end of the nation. San Francisco, long established as a sports center, has had to watch upstart Oakland, a few miles across the bay, surge to prominence, winning championships regularly in both football and baseball while San Francisco teams foundered in wind-swept Candlestick Park, which seated only 43,400.

  Oakland entered the big time with a bang, erecting a stadium which seated 54,500, whereupon San Francisco renovated Candlestick, providing 61,100 seats. This was interpreted by Oakland as a dare, so they issued contracts to raise their capacity to 63,000, after which the San Francisco baseball team announced that it was going broke.

  Baltimore, always in competition with Washington, clung to its outmoded Memorial Stadium, hardly a fit place for man or beast, and watched Washington build its fine new Robert F. Kennedy stadium, seating 45,016. Thereupon Baltimore increased its seating to 60,238, which encouraged Washington to raise its total to 53,041. At this point Washington lost its baseball team altogether—leaving the stadium in perilous financial condition, and Baltimore lost its basketball team, with the possibility that it might lose football and baseball too. To forestall this, there was talk of building a big domed stadium to house both teams.

  Once a decision has been reached on whether a new stadium is needed, and where it should be placed, the problem arises: How shall it be financed? Four possibilities are available:

  Public taxation. After prolonged public discussion of need, location and cost, a proposition to build is placed on the ballot and a public referendum i
s held. If a majority of the voters approve, public tax funds are used to build the stadium, but only after a score of lawsuits test the authority of the government, delay the schedule, and double the costs. This was the route taken by New Orleans in building its Superdome by Philadelphia in building its Veterans Stadium, by Denver in adding to the capacity of the stadium it already had, and by a suburb of Kansas City in building its superb pair of stadiums.

  Existing institution. Some institution, usually a university, allocates its own funds to the building of a massive structure. Thus the University of Pennsylvania built one of the most congenial stadiums in the country, Franklin Field; Yale built its famous Yale Bowl, still serviceable even for professional football: Michigan built its mammoth stadium, which can seat 105,500 spectators, and the University of South Carolina built its Coliseum, perhaps the finest basketball court in the world.

  Group cooperation. Certain districts, having struggled for years to build a stadium through public taxation, become irritated by delaying tactics and lawsuits, and decide to quit the major city and its infamous politics and build the stadium with their own money. This was done in Foxboro, Massachusett’s and Pontiac, Michigan, and it is a strategy that many other communities should consider, even though it forces the builders to elect a suburban solution on practical rather than philosophical grounds.

  Individual initiative. A few communities, faced by the Same frustrating indecisions mentioned in the preceding instance, are lucky enough to contain citizens of great wealth who, in impatience, cut the Gordian knot. They acquire a large piece of land, hire architects to design the best possible structure, finance and build the stadium themselves, and arrange some complicated procedure whereby the construction will ultimately pass to public ownership. Clint Murchison did just this when Dallas could not agree to supplant its rickety old Fair Grounds with a new football stadium; he went northwest to the suburb of Irving and did the job himself. Abe Pollin, in the Washington-Baltimore complex, waited vainly for years, hoping that his region would come up with a sensible plan for a sports complex. When decision became impossible, he went to Landover, Maryland, and built a fine installation, using his own money.

  In each of these four options there is bound to be chicanery, for the building of a massive sports complex is never uncomplicated. The hucksters at New Orleans went before the public with a solemn promise that a Superdome, ‘much better than Houston’s,’ could be built for a mere $35,000,000, and in 1961 and 1962 they received voter approval for that amount, with an implied promise that the limit agreed upon would not be exceeded. Deplorable acts by labor, by subcontractors, by politicians and by operators never identified, escalated the cost to $68,000,000, then to $110,000,000, and finally to something around $163,000,000, not counting operating expenses. Furthermore a little-known clause in the authorizing legislation provided that in the case of emergency, and God knows this became an emergency, the whole financial burden could be shifted to a public authority which could spend and tax until the job was paid for. Starting to build a stadium is taking the first step in an open-ended commitment of which the final cost may double or triple. And once started, the operation cannot be called off, so that a community runs the danger of undertaking a massive future tax burden mainly to gratify the building mania of men and women long since dead.

  The so-called free gift of a public benefactor like Clint Murchison and his Dallas Cowboys’ stadium isn’t always so free either. The stadium was paid for by sports fans who bought bonds, that’s true, but the roads leading to it, the added facilities that were needed, the tax rebatements that were offered, and the lost taxation in future years were paid for by the public. Though after forty years Texas Stadium passes into the ownership of the suburb in which it is built, by that time it will have become outmoded and, as in the case of Yankee Stadium, it will probably cost the taxpayers some $100,000,000 for refurbishing.

  DRAWING BY DONALD REILLY; © 1973 THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE INC.

  ‘Keep shooting! Wilt the Stilt has signed

  for a million eight!’

  A basic question has arisen recently. Should public money, either as hard-cash contributions or tax rebatement, be used to build pleasure domes for the use primarily of the wealthy few? This was first questioned in the case of Lincoln Center in New York, where the city taxpayer was required to pick up huge incidental costs while forging normal taxation on what had become tax-exempt real estate. At the same time, since the seats in the opera house and concert hall were both overpriced and oversubscribed, he could never buy a reasonably priced ticket, or even any ticket, to a house which his money had helped build. The problem was compounded when it was disclosed that most of the ticket holders lived outside the city, so that city taxpayers were subsidizing the suburbs at the same time that city tax rolls were being diminished.

  Did the city of Philadelphia, for example, have a reasonable right to obligate itself not only for the original cost of its Veterans Stadium, which would be used by private football and baseball owners for their personal enrichment, but also to contribute $1,500,000 each year for operations? Did the State of Louisiana have the right to spend $163,000,000 on a building whose primary purpose would be to aid private owners of teams? And perhaps more pressing, did voters in the Kansas City area show reasonable judgment when they built two massive stadiums, side by side, one for football, one for baseball, at a total cost of some $75,000,000 when the State of Missouri had social problems of a pressing nature which could have profited from the use of those funds?

  I have wrestled with these moral problems for many years and have concluded: 1) a city had better have a good stadium if it wants to maintain its morale and its public acceptance; 2) city politics have become so totally corrupt, it is almost impossible to avoid paying about 100 percent graft on any major operation, but if pressure can reduce this graft, it should be applied; 3) legitimate overrun costs are to be expected; 4) it would always be preferable to finance a stadium by private rather than public funds; 5) but this is usually impractical, so a city is justified if it builds with tax funds. But I would hope that city fathers would explain honestly what the stadium was going to cost, rather than hiding behind the subterfuges common today.

  On one philosophical point I am adamant. Ninety-nine out of the hundred greatest buildings in world history—pyramids, Parthenon, Chartres Cathedral, Rockefeller Center—would never have been built if approval from the general public had been required. You cannot construct a beautiful city by plebescite; someone with vision must force the issue, override trivial objections, and ensure that the job is finished artistically. Therefore, I would not want the building of great stadiums to be subjected to picayune supervision by the general public. Let the project be explained, justified and funded honestly; then let the men and women of vision proceed with the actual work.

  In most of the new stadiums a tradition has evolved whereby one tier is enclosed in glass and divided into sumptuous private suites, which are then peddled to large corporations or wealthy individuals in the community. The cost is high and is borne by the lessor and not immediately by the taxpayer, but it is obvious that a large part of the basic construction of the suite was carried by the taxpayer, and that the yearly rental is written off as a public relations cost, so that in the end it is the taxpayer who picks up most of the tab.

  I would like to invite you into one of the more luxurious suites in one of the recently built stadiums. It is on the forty-yard line, about halfway up the side of the stadium. It consists of two large rooms plus bar and bathroom on one level, three bedrooms and two baths on the next level above. The entire floor area is covered with expensive carpeting from Belgium, on which have been placed massive pieces of Renaissance furniture providing seats on the main floor for some sixty guests. The wall decorations are paintings from Europe, mirrors with heavily carved frames imported from Europe and tastefully arranged scenes from former football seasons.

  The bar was imported from London, a stupendous affair alon
g which forty or fifty of the guests can stand comfortably. At convenient spots are pull-out tables on which the guests can place their trays while dining from the lavish smorgasbord. The upstairs bedrooms are done in French provincial style with ornate furnishings of considerable value. The bathrooms are marble and gold.

  Because I am a nosy man with unpolished manners, I asked the owner if he would review with me the costs of such an establishment, and he laughingly agreed, with the understanding that I not use his name.

  If you wanted one of the more modest suites, you could get it for $18,000 a year, with a five-year obligation, and you pay years one and five in advance. My suite, which is a little more pretentious, is $31,000 a year, obligation for five years.

  For that I get four bare walls and an uncarpeted floor. I paid about $75,000 for furnishings and decorations, but my tastes are lavish in some things, and I don’t like to stint. You could furnish yours for much, much less. Say $15,000 and everything you put in remains your property, which you can sell to the next owner if you ever decide to give up your suite. Incidentally, in this stadium all the suites were sold six months before opening, and there have been no turnovers.

  Now, you can’t just walk into your suite. First you have to buy a ticket to the game. Not only for you, but for your guests too. I buy seventy seats for every game. You understand, we get those seats right in front of the suite, so the guests move in and out of the suite as the game progresses. I pay $12 a seat, or $840 a game, seven games during the season, which is I don’t know exactly how much.

  The suite owner cannot bring his own liquor into the stadium, so he has the day catered by the stadium restaurant. I spend about $1,000 a game for drinks, $1,500 for food, which makes it $2,500 a game times seven games.

  I studied these figures for some time while my host attended to other visitors. Adding up the details, I figured that this suite cost him, counting in a prorated cost of the furnishings and tips, not less than $79,000 a year. When I showed him this calculation, he said, ‘Something like that, but it’s worth it to my business. When I fly customers in from other cities and tell them, “I’m putting you up at the stadium …” ’