No sooner was the hurricane tearing apart the city than he was talking to San Antonio. Then he fired his VP, Arnold Fiedkow, the guy who negotiated a sweetheart deal worth $125 million to Benson, engineered sellouts for a perennial doormat, and advocated staying in New Orleans.
You know, it’s generally a principle in sports that you don’t lose your job if you get hurt. Well, New Orleans is hurt, but not beyond repair. They’ll be back. But when they do, will their team be there? I don’t think the owner realizes what the Saints have meant to the displaced people of New Orleans. No, check that. I think he does know. I just don’t think he cares.
He’s taking a page out of the Art Modell/Robert Irsay manual, only he’s being even more craven, because rather than posturing for years about moving like they did he’s taking advantage of a natural disaster. Just a few months ago he loved New Orleans. He bought the team years ago with the intention of keeping them there. Now he wants to get out of town just as fast as he can.
I have finally found something to agree with mayor Ray Nagin about.
This totally sucks. My S.O. is a die-hard Saint’s fan–and you have to be a die-hard if you’re a Saint’s fan. She’ll be crushed if this goes down as advertised. But I think it will be a big black eye for the league, and hopefully the negative PR will outweigh the percieved benefit. After all, as the article points out, a move to San Antonio is going from one small-market town to another.
I agree that New Orleans, the NFL, its players and its fans really don’t need this. Greedy owners are a fact of life these days…I just hope it doesn’t get too bad down there.
In fairness to Benson, he’s been looking to do this for some time now. He has a home and business interests in SA. NO was a small market even before the flood, the Saints almost never sold out the Dome and consequently almost never got on local TV anyway, and it just may never have been a viable market anyway. One story has it that the team only exists because Pete Rozelle needed Sen. Russell Long’s support to stay clear of anti-trust issues when the NFL and AFL merged.
But NO is going to be a smaller, poorer market in the near future. They won’t have a usable stadium for quite some time, other priorities being more urgent. The Saints are a business and have to be run like one. If they were owned and operated as a public trust, like very few sports teams are, then sure, they’d have to stay as part of their purpose of existence. This move is simply what a business planning realistically for the future probably has to do. Sure, it sucks for NO, but it would have sucked even without the flood.
You could argue that LA would make even more sense, but they need a stadium, too. If the NFL wants to be rid of Benson, look for a (effectively forced) sale to Red McCombs.
Good for New Orleans! Now they can knock down that Superdome monstrosity and offer the property to someone who’ll bring in a real industry that provides good-paying industrial jobs.
Sports franchises demand expensive stadiums and then, before the initial construction bonds are paid off, demand more skyboxes and lower rents.
Let Sony, Hyundai, Toyota, Toshiba, or even a turncoat US-based company feeling remorse over spending so much of its Bush tax cut in 3rd World hellholes have the Superdome property. Even if they demand 15 years property-tax-free, they’ll put more back into the local economy in that 15 years than they take out.
Now, if they can get the bloodsucking casino barges to rebuild their docks elsewhere, New Orleans will have hit the Daily Double.
this is about a fucking sports franchise? sorry, I can’t even muster up a small amount of ‘give a shit’ about it. the city has way fucking more important things to worry about, like say, rebuilding the whole fucking city, the displaced thousands of people, the police issues, the millions upon millions of personal property, the trauma of those whose loved ones are lost and may never be found. etc.
this would be so far down my list that it wouldn’t even merit a moments thought.
This is a question of morale, just like when baseball continued during WWII and after 9/11. Life goes on, and this is probably the only continuity some people from New Orleans have right now.
I agree with you that it’s low on the list, but when you lose everything but your teddy bear and then someone takes that away from you, insignificant as it seems it’s still a blow.
In other words, you can save the righteous indignity for someone who cares. I’m upset because this guy is kicking one more time people who have been kicked enough.
it’s not as if I didn’t understand what your OP was, Airman- it’s just that ya know, when you don’t know when you’ll have a fucking home again and you don’t know if Aunt Ethel is still alive and if so where, and if not, where, , it’s tough to give two shits about a bunch of overpaid sports personnel and the team owner’s issues. But that’s just my perspective. Obviously YMV’s.
Is it righteous indignation? No, you get to give a shit about what you choose. It would have been nice, from my perspective, to know that the issue du jour was a sports team, vs. say, info that the checks from FEMA were hijacked or any of a thousand other issues that could have happened to dampen the morale/ or worse for the folks there.
Strange, wring, several of my friends are now homeless, yet have still managed to catch every Saints game this season. When you don’t have anything left is when you really need those familiar pleasures, and as bad as they’ve been, the Saints are certainly a pleasure. And they DO sell out despite being in a small market, something like 35 straight until this year.
“In 2002 the New Orleans Saints pumped a total of $402.17 million of new dollars into the New Orleans and Louisiana economies. That total was made up of $181.10 million of direct spending and $221.17 million of secondary spending.”
I understood that the recent Saints “sellouts” were contrived by distributing huge numbers of freebies. Whatever. It’s still a small market, now smaller, and with no usable stadium either.
NurseCarmen, I don’t understand - are you worried about the Vikes moving to NO to replace the Aints? LA is still a much more inviting destination for a business.
what part of “that’s just **my **perspective” or “so far down on my list” (emphasis added) was unclear?
Look. I avoid sports threads. why? 'cause even on a good day, I don’t give a shit. I don’t avoid current event threads, political threads etc. there was nothing in the title of the thread that warned me to not even hover my mouse over the thread. Even when I hovered, it gave me some oblique (to me) crap about
which only spells “Sports thread” to folks who follow fucking sports enough to recognize any of the names involved. So I opened it. Had I had any forewarning that all this was about was some bunch of over compensated sports figures and the team owners, I’d not have bothered. C’est la vie.
and ya’ll are more than able to care loads about the issue. I’ll focus my indignation, caring, concern about stuff like “do they have homes/schools to go to?” “what about jobs? what about Aunt Ethel?” “another polics scandal? damn!” if it’s all the same to you. And even if it’s not.
