Emiliano Zapata Boulevard, the main drag of Guerrero Negro, is unpaved and dusty. The next morning, I maneuver the camper slowly past the taco stands, motels, pharmacies, restaurants, and bars, to where the street ended at a bank, a grocery store, and a small, palm-lined park. There races a group of teenaged boys, booting a soccer ball around between a pair of makeshift goal posts.
Soccer, fútbol in Mexico, as in much of the world, is the sport. I’m not a big fan, except when the World Cup rolls around every four years. My passion is the Minnesota Timberwolves. I was a season ticket-holder, and tried not to miss a game. What I’m not a fan of in the least is the power that money has come to exert over professional sports. And, as Terry and I pause to watch these enthusiastic kids playing soccer in a little town in Mexico, I think back to some of the brouhahas I became involved in as governor.
In 1997, the year before I ran for governor, there was talk that the Minnesota Twins baseball franchise was going to have to move unless a new stadium got built. Even Mexico City was said to be in the running to get the team. Governor Carlson tried to scare people by claiming a tristate group from the Carolinas was about to buy the Twins. Reporters went down there and discovered this was a made-up hoax.
Carl Pohlad, a billionaire banker who owned the team, wanted the state to pay for a new stadium. I’d been asked, in every debate during the campaign, would I support public money for new sports arenas? I said emphatically no. In the case of baseball, unless the stadium is under a roof for half the year, there’s nothing you can use it for during a Minnesota winter except maybe to send kids in to make snowmen in the middle of the field. A pro football team spends even less time in the stadium, maybe ten games a year.
I was playing a golf tournament in Tahoe, when the greatest hockey player in the world—Wayne Gretzky—came up to me. He said, “Governor, are you being pressured to build new stadiums in Minnesota?” I said I was, and Wayne said, “These owners fly off in their jets to $10,000-a-night hotel rooms in the Bahamas to have their meetings. They laugh at how they can manipulate the government and get the public, the working guy, to pay for their stadiums. Be the first one to say no.” I said, “Trust me, Wayne. I will be.” (I hope he hasn’t changed, now that he’s part owner of the Phoenix Coyotes.)
So I told Carl Pohlad that the state wasn’t in the business of financing a new stadium. He kept on making noises about selling the Twins. Pohlad happened to be good buddies with Bud Selig, the former owner of the Milwaukee Brewers who then became commissioner of baseball. Selig turned the Brewers over to his daughter and, as the closest team geographically to the Twin Cities, don’t you think they might reap some benefit from getting rid of the Twins? I wasn’t all that surprised when, in 2001, Selig came up with a plan to eliminate two teams from the league: the Montreal Expos and the Twins. As part of his “contraction proposal,” the other owners would be paying Pohlad $120 million to liquidate the team. (Several years earlier, Pohlad had given Selig a loan, in violation of baseball’s conflict of interest rules.)
So, at the end of 2001, I went to Washington to testify before Congress to oppose what I saw as an extortion scheme surrounding the Twins. Selig was there, and we sat right next to each other. He was claiming that the poor baseball owners were suffering economic losses of close to $600 million. My response was, these owners were also getting huge tax write-offs. I testified: “That’s why I have a hard time believing it, Mr. Selig, that they’re losing that kind of money and still paying the salaries they’re paying [averaging about $2.5 million a player]. It’s asinine. These people did not get the wealth they have being stupid!”
From the public response I got, I think I might have been speaking for baseball fans everywhere. Especially with the budget deficit Minnesota was then facing, I still wasn’t about to back public financing for a new stadium. Well, the minute the new Republican governor came in, House Speaker Sviggum—who’d also been opposing it—suddenly carried a bill to raise sales taxes in Hennepin County in order to pay for one. That’s because it’s all about legacy. If the pro teams left on my watch, the rogue independent governor Jesse Ventura would have taken the blame. Now, with a Republican governor, all stadiums will get built.
The Minnesota Vikings’ owner, a billionaire from San Antonio named Red McCombs who started out selling cars, was another who wanted a new stadium. Skip Humphrey, who everybody had assumed would be the next governor, canceled a gubernatorial debate that had been planned for months, to be held in front of students from all the high schools in the state—because he was being wined and dined in Red’s private box at a football game. I pointed that out at the next debate, and Skip didn’t know what to say. Of course, Red called in his congratulations the day after I won the election.
After the Vikings came within an overtime period of making the Super Bowl in January of ’99, Red asked if we could have a meeting. I enjoyed it immensely, although I can unequivocally say that, from a business standpoint, it was the worst meeting I had in my four years as governor. That’s because Red came in with no preparation, no plan whatsoever. He simply plopped down in a chair in my office and said, in his Texas accent, “I need a new stadium, governor.”
Chuckling inside, playing naïve and dumb, I said, “Well, Red, build one. I’m certain there’s someone out there you could buy the land from. What do you need to see me for?”
Red cleared his throat a few times and said, “Well, I can’t do that without some participation of state money.”
I said, “But Red, you’re private enterprise. Why would you require state money?” Maybe, having only bought the team the previous summer, Red was a rookie at the fund-raising game. Or maybe he was just used to getting what he wanted, with his holdings in oil, and TV and radio stations. I then explained to Red that our Metrodome, where both the Vikings and Twins played, was younger than my son, who was twenty-one at the time. I felt very strongly that, when government or the public participate in building something, they should expect they’ll get more than twenty to twenty-five years of life from it. I went on to tell him that my Roosevelt High School had been built way back in the 1920s, and kids were still being educated there.
“Red, outside the stadium the trees aren’t even mature yet,” I added. “They were planted when the dome was built, and they’ve only grown twenty feet, and these are big beautiful trees that reach as high as fifty feet.”
Red then got to the gist of the matter. Which was keeping up with the Joneses. He explained to me that the average NFL owner made somewhere between $8 and $12 million a year, but he was some 50 percent lower than the average. Well, governors are expected to think on their feet and come up with quick solutions, so I did.
“Red, if that’s the problem, the dome holds about 64,000 people, doesn’t it?” He said, yeah.
I said, “You have ten home games, counting preseason, that are all sold out.” He said, yeah.
I said, “Okay, that makes it easy. We can multiply in tens off the top of our heads. If you raise your ticket prices ten dollars a seat, and you keep selling out, that’s $640,000. Do that over ten games, it’s $6.4 million. Doesn’t that put you right in the middle of that average the other owners are making? In the spirit of true capitalism, Red, when your product is selling out, you have the ability to raise the price until it doesn’t. I don’t think ten dollars a seat, or even twenty, would upset the apple cart that bad. Why a new stadium? I would think you should look at all other options first. A stadium is a huge investment, and there may be fixes we can do here to get you happy.”
“Governor,” Red replied, “I can’t simply just put this on the backs of our most loyal fans.”
I responded back, “Red, my wife couldn’t care less about football. In fact, my wife frankly couldn’t give a rat’s ass about football.” (I always figured it was smart to use language a wealthy Texan would understand.) “My wife pays taxes to the state of Minnesota. So do a lot of other people who think just like her. And I have to represent all of these people, a
nd all of their interests.”
That was pretty much the end of the meeting. From that point on, any time he could, Red would tell people: “Minnesota was great until we got this character Jesse Ventura as governor.” For my part, I called upon the Vikings to open their finances to public scrutiny, in order to help taxpayers make an informed decision on whether they deserved public funding.
My last year in office, Red put the team on the block. Three years later, in 2005, he found a buyer who agreed to pay him about $625 million. Since he’d bought the team for about $246 million back in ’98, I’d say Red made out—for lack of a better phrase—like a bandit. With or without Jesse Ventura and a new stadium.
On our way out of Guerrero Negro, we pass a brick-and-concrete complex with a sign—ESSA, which stands for Exportadora de Sal. This was headquarters for one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of industrial salt. It turns out there are some 14,000 uses for salt, everything from making plastics and paper, to glass, aluminum, and fertilizer. According to our guidebook, the company’s founder back in 1954 had been none other than Daniel K. Ludwig, a reclusive American billionaire who at one time was the richest man on the planet. Always looking for new commodities to transport in his lucrative shipping business, Ludwig had sailed down the Baja coastline and bought the rights to extract salt from the nearby lagoons. In 1973, he’d sold out to Japan’s Mitsubishi Corporation.
“Guess it’s hard to escape from billionaires out to make a few extra bucks,” I tell Terry, and put the pedal to the metal into Baja’s Vizcaíno Desert, among the high cardón cactuses and the thick-tangled cholla.
CHAPTER 10
The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same
“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.”
—Theodore Roosevelt
Above the many miles of scrub and cactus that line the desert plains, the Sierra de San Francisco mountains appear suddenly. The Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve we’re driving through stretches across more than six million acres, and is the largest protected area of its kind in all Latin America. It’s the last habitat for more than one hundred peninsular pronghorn antelope, here called berrendo. Terry and I are keeping our eyes out for these deer-like animals, one of the fastest in the world, with the capacity to sprint at speeds of 55 miles an hour.
Some eighty miles south of Guerrero Negro, we approach the old mission town of San Ignacio. You need to turn off the main highway for a mile to reach it. Driving down an avenue of Arabian date palms and citrus trees—first planted by Jesuit missionaries about three hundred years ago, and still the primary livelihood for the oasis’s thousand residents—you come to a square shaded by huge laurels. Behind it stands what’s described as one of Baja’s most beautiful churches. It was built over a fifty-year period in the eighteenth century of nearly four-foot-thick lava-block walls.
We take a look inside the stone church with its whitewashed façade. An effigy of Saint Ignatius of Loyola glares down at us from the altar. When the first priest came here in 1716, our guidebook says, the Jesuit order was still among the most powerful in Rome. Most of the work of founding this mission, which for a while was the biggest and most prosperous in Baja, fell to a priest who used to tell the local Indians: “Come to the faith of Jesus Christ! Oh! If only I could make all of you Christians and take you to paradise.”
That sounded familiar. The missionaries founded schools and took the native children away from their parents to indoctrinate them in the Christian religion. One historian wrote of the mission system: “There was nothing voluntary about it.... Every mission had its whipping post, its jail cell, its set of iron shackles, its stocks.” Not to mention all the Baja Indians who died from new diseases the Europeans brought with them—smallpox, typhoid, measles, even the flu. They just had no immunity. From disease or from persecution. It wasn’t a matter of choice. And I couldn’t help but be drawn back, once again, to my time as governor—and the increasing intolerance I saw sweeping the country. My home state was not immune from that.
The Christian right wing in America is a polarizing force when it comes to gay rights, abortion, and patriotism. To me, these aren’t “issues,” they are matters of individual freedom of choice. But the militant Christians, like the Baja missionaries of several centuries ago, are just about ready to burn at the stake those who disagree with their fire-and-brimstone approach. They especially don’t like anything beyond their idea of the “normal”—like the percentage of our population who happen to be gay.
To me, gay rights is simple: it’s about equality. We’re all supposed to be equal under the Constitution, which doesn’t say anything about the “Hetero States of America.” (Granted, I often wonder how our forefathers could have written a document about everyone being equal under God and the law when they owned slaves.) Gay rights hit home to me personally, through the world of pro wrestling, believe it or not. I had a good friend who was gay, and he had a partner. They’d been together for as long as any married couple, probably well over twenty-five years. At one point, my friend’s partner became ill and had to go into the hospital. He was in the intensive care unit, and my friend was not allowed to sit bedside—because the hospital rules stated explicitly “spouse” or “next of kin.” In the eyes of the law and of society, he fit neither category. I thought, that’s just plain cruel and inhumane.
I fought hard during my four years as governor to get equal rights for Minnesota state employees who happened to be gay. We were losing some of the best and the brightest to the private sector, simply because they were gay and not receiving the benefits that should be provided. Most of the major corporations in Minnesota—General Mills, IBM, and others—provide health care and other benefits for gay couples. It’s a known fact that you get paid less in the public sector. The most I could pay any of my commissioners was $115,000 a year. In the same position in the private sector, you can bet they’d be making a quarter-of-a-million. Generally speaking, you entice people to work in government because the state provides a better benefit package.
As part of the settlement of a state employees strike in 2001, I finally achieved this for gay people. The benefits didn’t last long beyond my time in office, though. When the contract came up for renegotiation, and there was no strike, the new governor proposed a pay freeze—and a cut in benefits for gays. And the union accepted these terms. So much for Democrats supporting gays; that was the first thing they bargained away.
As for gay marriage, a solution I endorse comes from a woman I met at Harvard when I was teaching there. She said, “Governor, solving the gay marriage question is simple. Government should not acknowledge marriage at all. Government should only acknowledge civil unions.” That way, when you fill out the consent form, your sex doesn’t even have to be asked. From that point on, you allow the church—a private institution—to choose whether or not to recognize gay marriage. But when two people are forming a civil union, whether you are heterosexual or homosexual doesn’t matter. The government is off the hook. With all the bickering and fighting over gay marriage, that’s as simple as it needs to be.
I’m proud of the fact that in 2006, Lavender—the top gay magazine in Minnesota—put me on the cover and said I was the best governor for gay rights in the state’s history. I find it interesting that distinction would come to a heterosexual Navy frogman, someone who could see through all the smoke and mirrors and know the difference between right and wrong. Even though I’m sure that the Christian right’s opinion would be that I’m completely out of line.
My views on abortion come from my mom. She was a nurse in surgery for her entire adult life, and used to tell me how terrible it was before Roe vs. Wade—when back-alley abortions often placed the woman’s life in danger. Today, some people live under a false premise that, if the government makes something illegal, it will go away. But then the illegal activity is simply controlled by an underground or criminal element. And, in the case of abo
rtion, you will not receive the safety and precautions necessary.
In 2000, when I was governor, the Minnesota legislature passed what its supporters called the “Woman’s Right to Know” bill. It required that abortion providers give their patients information about alternatives, twenty-four hours before they had their abortion. Its opponents, including myself, preferred to call it the “Women Are Stupid” bill. Wouldn’t a woman walking into an abortion clinic already know what it is, and have come to a decision? She doesn’t need to read all this material on adoption, etc., in case she might change her mind. This piece of legislation seemed more like the first step toward additional restrictions on abortion services.
Running for office in 1998, I’d been asked to fill out a questionnaire for the Minnesota Family Council. I said that, without question, I opposed any ban on partial-birth abortions. But I also stated at the time that, while I wouldn’t promote any legislation calling for a twenty-four-hour waiting period, I’d sign it if the legislature passed it. So it’s true that I changed my position, after doing some considerable fact-checking, question-asking, and soul-searching when the bill became a reality.
First I had my staff call up a half-dozen abortion clinics in Minnesota and ask if any of them provided abortions in less than twenty-four hours. They all assured us that it already requires more than a twenty-four-hour wait after a woman walks in—it doesn’t happen immediately. So then what was the point of making the law?
I consulted with a former governor of Minnesota, Elmer Anderson. He was a great inspiration to me, and a terrific educator. He made it very clear that the Republican Party of today is not the same party that he’d been proud to be a part of. When I asked Elmer his advice on the abortion question, he said, “Abortion is religion’s failure to persuade. So now they must legislate.”
Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! Page 18