The Game’s the Thing

Another one of those mysterious elite people who own National Football League teams has held an entire American city and state hostage. This time it was the close-mouthed Bill Bidwill, owner of the St. Louis Cardinals. While Bidwill drove St. Louis to fits by hinting that he would move the Cardinals to another city, other cities that would do anything to have a major-league professional football team put themselves through hoops to get Bidwill to come to them.

While both Baltimore and Phoenix performed like mating birds, Missouri politicians went bananas doing whatever they could do to keep the football Cardinals in St. Louis. As usual the ransom seemed to be a new stadium. So the Missouri Legislature voted Wednesday to create a stadium authority that presumably would build facilities that might make Bidwill happy. But no one was quite sure what would make him happy, since Bidwill says nary a word about what he wants or what he might do with his team under what circumstances.

Phoenix offered to build a domed stadium that would allow its NFL team to play in the searing heat of August and September. The Maryland Legislature voted $250 million in bonds last year to build not just one but two new stadiums--one for the hoped-for NFL franchise that would replace the Colts, spirited away in a dark and stormy night a few years ago to Indianapolis, and a baseball palace to satisfy Baltimore Orioles owner Edward Bennett Williams, who periodically pledges not to move the team from Baltimore and then hints that he might.

The beat goes on, and the owners of professional football teams continue to make American politicians look like fools, pledging hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies for what must be the most elite business in the country to be underwritten by government--despite television contracts guaranteeing the owners a big profit even if no one shows up to watch the games.

For the hostage cities and states the bottom line usually is the same: the notion that any American metropolis must have major-league sports teams to qualify as a “world-class city.” This is perhaps the biggest fraud of all. World-class status, to say nothing of civic pride, cannot be dependent on the whim of an eccentric wealthy person whose team is a plaything.

Here’s to the city that refuses to submit to blackmail and ransom demands and insists that sports-team owners behave like responsible citizens. If that city did lose a franchise, perhaps it could take the stadium money and build a first-rate museum or library. That would show real class.