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Doing their Patriotic duty
Posted: Wednesday December 02, 1998 10:25 AM
The arranged shift of the New England Patriots from suburban Boston to
downtown Hartford, Conn., illustrates again how different the business of
football is from other
sports.
On the surface, of course, it seems insane, to desert the seventh-largest
metropolitan area -- one with a population of five and a half million -- for the
30th largest, with barely a million. In any other team sport -- baseball,
basketball, hockey -- that would never happen. But football offers a specific
economic equation that doesn't require the critical mass that other sports
do.
However, make no mistake -- as popular as the pigskin is, football may not be
nearly as valuable to a city like Hartford as are the other
sports.
It's an ironic trend: the NFL is leaving behind the more populous areas for
smaller ones. It chose Jacksonville and Charlotte over Baltimore and St. Louis
for expansion teams. It moved Houston to Nashville, and abandoned Los Angeles
for St. Louis and Oakland. Boston for Hartford merely continues this
upside-down
pattern.
But obviously, there's no risk in this municipal downsizing for the wealthy and
wise team owners. After all, Green Bay has proved that a town with a population
of less than 100,000 can support an NFL franchise handsomely. The more cities
that can fight for franchises, the better for the few folks who own the
franchises.
The reason, of course, is that football is an event sport. Eight home games a
year, virtually all on Sundays or holidays. The other American team games are
linear sports. Places like Green Bay or Jacksonville or Hartford could not
possibly support a baseball schedule. But in the NFL, everybody shares equally
in the monstrous television revenues, so as long as you can fill up 65,000 seats
and a fair quota of corporate luxury boxes eight times a year, you too can be
the equal of New York or Chicago ... well, anyway, on a handful of autumn
afternoons.
In fact, football is such a national television sport that huge cities like Los
Angeles and Houston, with no insecurities about their municipal visibility, seem
to be more than content not to have to bother with traffic jams and messy
franchises. Hey, this way you're assured all the best NFL games on television
... for
free.
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Connecticut gave Kraft and the Patriots a stadium deal too sweet to pass up. Damian Strohmeyer |
But the pride of being a big-league city (!) is what animates small city mayors
and business leaders to build stadiums to attract NFL owners. Hartford, for
example, is justifying its new stadium as the centerpiece of riverfront
development.
But are football franchises worth the expenditure? For eight games? A baseball
stadium brings in fans on 81 occasions; basketball and hockey half that. The
public financing of downtown baseball stadiums and arenas makes psychic sense to
me. But football stadiums? A football stadium seem to me to be just one big
luxury
box.
I'm not so sure that a terrific little downtown minor-league baseball park,
like, say, Buffalo has, isn't a better civic bargain than is NFL football -- if
a city can just swallow its pride and settle for being minor league. Besides,
Hartford doesn't even enjoy the vanity of having its name in the standings.
It'll still be the New England Patriots. They could be playing in
Kennebunkport, Maine, for all the rest of America
knows.
But the United States that has developed is one of city-states, and, since each
city-state has an airport and a mall and a chain hotel with an atrium, what
else can distinguish you but a team? Especially since nobody votes anymore,
sometimes I think we're more a league than we are a nation. As long as that
mentality rules, cities on the make will build stadiums. Even football stadiums
-- those gigantic luxury
boxes.
These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNN/SI.
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