Seattle Gets Screwed

It's a sad fact of life that to own a sports team you have to be a billionaire, and to become a billionaire you have to be enormously successful in business, and to be enormously successful in business you have to be a greedy bastard.

That fact is plain to anyone that puts a little thought into it, but we still manage to be surprised when the owner of our team turns out not to give a damn about us. It's easy to pretend our owner is the good one, the charitable one who loves his city, but as Seattle Supersonics fans are finding out, they're all too willing to twist the knife.

Seattle's team, as you probably know by now, is hightailing its way out of the proverbial party--but not before stopping to shit on the coats. Owner Howard Schultz, the head of Starbucks, had the audacity to throw a celebratory press conference--complete with green and gold balloons--as he handed over the team to an Oklahoma City-based group led by Clay Bennett, who once pledged to bring a team back home with him.

The new owners said they would give Seattle every chance to keep their team, but the city has been set up to fail. They would need to finance a new arena to keep the Sonics, but the ill will created by the sale left an already-unlikely stadium proposal all but dead. Attendance will drop next season as angry fans give up on their lousy team, giving Bennett and friends the chance to announce the regrettable necessity of leaving the area. It's almost straight out of Major League. And just like that, another city loses its team.

Perhaps it should be no surprise that the head of one of the country's most obnoxious corporate entities turned out to be a heartless villain, but he's just the latest in a long line of owners backstabbing their cities. We Cleveland fans tend to forget that Art Modell was revered for a time, before he squandered his holdings, packed up his bags and took our beloved team to Maryland. In so doing he joined a legion of despised executives populated by Bob Irsay (Baltimore), Al Davis (first Oakland, then Los Angeles) and all of Major League Baseball (Montreal). Schultz and Bennett could soon enter those ranks, along with New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson (perhaps the worst of all), who wants to abandon the hurricane-ravaged city for the sunnier streets of San Antonio.

It's a sad fact that these owners, who were no doubt huge sports fans as kids, are unable to abandon their cutthroat business ethos when they buy a franchise. They enter the league, I'm sure, idealistic, excited and naive. But after losing a few million in their first season, the owners quickly jack up prices, abandon expensive players and demand new stadiums. Somehow, for all their financial acumen, these shrewd dealers miss the fact that lots of sports teams lose money on a year-to-year basis. This oversight is the only explanation for Schultz's complaints about his stadium lease (the same one that was there when he bought the team) and the costs of operating a team (Really? NBA players are paid too much?). It's possible that these owners have been made so arrogant from their success in the business world that they think they can succeed in sports where others have failed.

And yet, for all their complaints, Schultz's group made a lot of money as the owners of a sports franchise. Even if you believe their claim that they lost $60 million while owners of the Sonics (doubtful), they still made a $90 million profit in the long run. Since buying the team just five years ago, it has appreciated from $200 million to $350 million--that's $30 million per year! With that kind of investment rate, I think a team can afford to lost a little cash on Danny Fortson.

But the added value just isn't enough. When the opportunity comes to make even more money, whether via a new stadium or moving the team, most owners are all too willing to jump at the chance. The idealistic notion of public stewardship has long since passed sports by.

Whatever happens to the Sonics, the chain-reaction could hit other cities. The Blazers could jump at the chance to move to Seattle (if that market is so bad, why is Portland's team so eager to go there?), and George Shinn hasn't ruled out taking the New Orleans Hornets to Oklahoma before Bennett can--the Hornets already played there last season after Katrina left their home city unable to host a team. Whatever happens, more fans will lose the teams they love, and the owners will rake in more money.

The sad thing is that Seattle did try. They offered a pretty sweet deal to Shultz, in which he would have had to pay only $49 million towards a $198 million arena. At the rate the Sonics were appreciating in value, he could have made that money back in less than two years just by hanging on to the team. And with the new stadium revenue coupled with a more favorable lease, he would have been in the black in no time.

But accepting that deal would have meant backing down, and that's not how the NBA works. Leaving Seattle will scare other cities, who will give even sweeter stadium deals just to keep their teams from bolting. Fans in Oklahoma will pour into the arena for about a year and a half, until they realize that these are still the Sonics and they don't win any games (see: Washington Nationals). Then revenue will dry up and the process will start again, with little regard for the hometown people that are dedicated to these teams.

It happens in every sport, but the NBA's motto sums it up in a way that I'm sure Sonics fans can appreciate:

The NBA--it's fannnnnn-tastic!

(thanks to Seattlest for the picture)

The headbutt--a retrospective

This year's World Cup could have been devastating to soccer in America. The national team embarassed themselves, thanks in part to a tough schedule, an unrealistically high ranking and foolish promotion from ESPN. The images etched into our heads weren't soaring headers and beautiful goals but red cards and players writhing on the ground. The Italians, known as a team of divers without any flair, won the whole thing. And the pundits were louder than ever, claiming that soccer was boring and girly.

And then something happened that changed the way Americans looked at soccer. Zinedine Zidane--an aging legend in his final game, the best player in the tournament and France's national hero--flat-out leveled Marco Materazzi. With his head. And while the media erupted in outrage, Zidane's legend was permanently tarnished and his team sunk into defeat, the average American had just one thought--that was the coolest thing I've ever seen.

In the two weeks since the headbutt, it's erupted into a phenomenon. It's all over T.V. and has become a full-fledged internet meme (See Zidane headbutt the Death Star! See Materazzi's head fly off! See Zidane K.O. the Karate Kid!). Even Conan O'Brien has a new sketch where Zizou saves choking victims with a cranial Heimlich maneuver. A month ago, could you have imagined soccer appearing on the Late Show?

So what makes the moment so appealing? The circumstances, obviously, along with Zidane's stature in the game and the fact that he used his head--no hands allowed in futbol, after all. If Materazzi had been hurt, it would have been much less exciting, but really, how much damage could that headbutt (planted in the chest, not the face) have really done? Instead we just have a man felled in his tracks, curled in a ball, clutching his ribs--all from a standing header. It could have happened in a Chuck Norris movie, but this is the World Cup!

It also helps that the whole thing just feels so damn justified. Materazzi, by all accounts, is a vicious thug--a quick search through YouTube will show him stomping on players' legs, delivering knees to the testicles, and dispensing one especially brutal elbow to the face of Juan Pablo Sorin that left him crumpled and bloody on the ground. He was also suspended for two months for punching an opposing player after a match and even accused of match-fixing after he scored an own goal to prevent another team from being relegated.

Let us set the scene then. We have the petulant punk, the cheap-shot artist, who was cursed even in his own country. Away from the play, he comes up behind Zidane, the superstar playing in his final match, and starts tugging at a handful of his jersey. Zizou makes a flippant remark--"We can trade shirts after the match, if you like"--and turns the other cheek. But the hoodlum follows, dispensing an insult (to Zidane's race or to his mother, depending on who you believe) that curdles the champion's blood. And our hero turns, eyes the villain, and plants him on the turf without raising a finger. Sweet.

In a world that thinks Samuel L. Jackson is cool because of what he says out of a script, Zidane must be the pinnacle of a badass.

In an instant, Zidane's legacy became not just his World Cup title or his Fifa Player of the Year awards, but his cranium and red card. Is it really tarnished? Well, it would have been better had he won the cup, but France's chances were slim anyway. Though they were controlling the ball, they had managed only two decent looks at goal in the last 60 minutes against the tough Italian defense. Three of Les Bleus' four best players--Henry, Ribery and Viera--had left the match, leaving the offense crippled. It seems unlikely they would have broken through in the 10 minutes remaining before penalty kicks. And once the kicks began, Italy's Buffon clearly outclassed France's Barthez in goal; it would have taken some extremely good luck for France to win.

So instead of leaving the field in likely defeat, Zidane left it in a small bit of triumph, if only in a physical altercation. He did not win the match, but he left his mark on it, and for that reason alone he is much more likely to be remembered than if he had kept his head to himself. He wasn't in the class of Maradona or Pele as a player, but he will be just as talked about. And to a generation of soccer-apathetic Americans watching on YouTube, he is now way cooler than either of those former stars.

FIFA's decision today to punish the players involved only helps the hero's cause. Soccer's governing body passed down a three-game suspension to Zidane, which matters little to a player that already retired. As a show of good faith he'll "serve" his suspension with community service. Materazzi, though, faces a two-game suspension that will cause him to miss qualifying matches for Euro 2008--including a potential match with France. In this case, his actions didn't appear to warrant the suspension, but FIFA appears to have adopted the position of "You're a douchebag, so we don't really care." It seems only fitting that the man who made a reputation doing things behind the referee's back is finally punished for something he didn't really do.

And thus Zidane walks away from the pitch with another small victory, as his victim suffers the only real punishment. Zidane will look at his 1998 World Cup trophy on the mantle (along with, perhaps, his Euro 2000 trophy), watch Materazzi stew on the bench in Euro qualification, and think about how good it felt to put that punk in his place. Then, perhaps he'll go online to enjoy some funny videos.

The one where Materazzi bursts into flames is particularly good.

Not to go all firejoemorgan on you, but I had to point out a gem from John Kruk on Sportscenter this morning. Krukie--best known for being a star on some pretty wild Phillies teams and now a totally incompetent baseball analyst--proclaimed that the only chance the NL had to win today's All-Star game was if Albert Pujols hit a three-run first-inning homer.

Now, that's a pretty bold prediction, and raises some questions: can the NL win if Pujols hits a grand slam instead? Will the runs not count if he hits a homer in, say, the third inning? And why couldn't David Wright, Miguel Cabrera, or Home Run Derby Champion Ryan Howard hit the home run instead?

But it's best not to question Kruk, the guy that said Randy Johnson would win 30 games last year. Needless to say, it'll be interesting to see how this bold statement plays out.

Also, did anyone see Kruk look like a tub of goo in the celebrity softball game last night? And how about the fact that, of all the random celebrities in the game (including Jimmy Kimmel, Sarah Silverman, and Dean Cain), the one idiot that managed to get caught in a rundown was John Kruk, former baseball player?

Someone really should have live-blogged that game. Unfortunately, I tuned out whenever the camera left Sarah Silverman. But here's another juicy tidbit from ESPN's helpful little graphics: Danny Masterson (from That 70s Show) says that he would give up acting in a second if he could make millions of dollars playing softball.

Well, that's a pretty wild statement, Danny, but I'll go even farther--I would give up writing and computer programming in a millisecond if I could make even a single million playing softball. Heck, even $50,000 a year would do it for me.

How's that for going out on a limb?

The sporting youth

I haven't been around for a little while because of a weekend excursion to the wilds of Illinois, and then another day spent recuperating. In the meantime, distressed about keeping up with my fantasy team and numerous sports blogs, I thought about the lengths that modern sports fans go to in following their sport. I think the young sport fans today don't quite get the credit they deserve. Allow me to ramble for a bit...

I've noticed an interesting trend in my generation--and no, I don't mean drunkenness, bad music and Paris Hilton (sometimes all at once!). This is a sports blog, goddammit, and that's what I'll talk about. See, there just aren't as many sports fans as there used to be. People are doing other things, and it's becoming more and more acceptable for a young Clevelander to just say "Hey, you know what? I just don't care whether the Indians score more goals than the Steelers."

I mean, sure, there used to be guys like that, but they would just get shoved in a locker by a burly jock and never heard from again. Now these are the cool kids. And it's not like I begrudge them their interests--most of these guys are the ones I hang out with--but I miss the time when you could go up to a random stranger on the street and say "Hey. Browns, eh?" and the other guy would go "Man, do they suck this year," and you'd be buddies just like that.

But while my generation might not boast as many fans, we sure have a lot more FANS. My grandfather talks about the good old days, listening to games on the radio and getting up each morning to check the box scores in the newspaper. I scoff at that. I've got one game going on the T.V. while I keep a running tab on the others over the internet. My daily routine takes me through my local paper, over to the online wire stories about last night's action, past my fantasy baseball team (The Evil Dead) and then into five different sports blogs (but never to ESPN.com; the true modern sports fan hates ESPN)--all before lunch.

There's just so much more to engross yourself in these days. There are more sports, and where there isn't sports, there's content about sports. If the major sites aren't enough for you (they aren't), then Deadspin will tell you what pickup lines the broadcasters use. On the DL will show you Major League Baseball players playing beer pong at frat parties after games. Fire Joe Morgan is even devoted to writing about sportswriting. And all it takes is a couple of fantasy teams to give you a rooting interest in every single game.

We even communicate about 'em differently. When I went off to college in Illinois and my fellow Cavs fan went to Purdue, we still talked after every game--but usually through smiley or frowny faces in instant messenger. There's some perception that we don't have the passion that the older crowd does, but it's there.

But in Cleveland, where the misery is the currency of sports credibility, it's all about your age. You might have experienced the '97 Indians World Series collapse and Bernie Kosar being cut, but are you old enough to remember The Shot? What about the Indians' 30 years of futility? Oh, and you weren't even alive for Red Right 88? Then don't even talk to me, whippersnapper.

Well, old fellas, you've got me there. But were you young enough to sob all night after the Tribe lost the 1995 Series? Did you write a letter to Kosar when Art Modell moved the Browns because your 9-year-old brain knew you had to do something?

We've had our misery in spades, too, but if anything our youth insulates us. The older generations were pounded down by the defeats and have all but given up, but the young crowd still believes in Lebron and holds out hope that Charlie Frye will turn out differently than Vinny Testaverde.

In the end, we'll be beaten down too, by steroids and failure, pitchers punching their wives and GM's trading future all-stars. But until then, despite our growing numbers of disinterested peers, we read more, watch more, know more and care more.

Kids these days.