ninme

The Sunday Times - We can still win the Olympics … by hacking it back to size Simon Jenkins

Good for reflecting upon why one should never ask the government to do anything.

There’s some kerfuffle going on here about the Key Arena, where the basketball team, the Sonics, play, at the Seattle Center, which is where the Space Needle and Monorail etc is. The team wants to spend a couple dozen million making it bigger, the city isn’t keen, and I guess now the team wants to move down to Renton. I haven’t exactly been following it closely. The Starbucks guy sold his interest in it which made it more likely they’d leave the city, so now lots of Seattlites are mad at Starbucks, I guess. I think it’d be great if it left since it’s hideous and all of Queen Anne has to look down on it, but apparently without it the Seattle Center would shrivel and die. Or so the guy on the radio says.

Personally, I say if an amusement park surrounded by fairgrounds, the ballet and an opera house, supported by tons of area restaurants, can’t support itself without a sports team clogging up the streets once a week during the season (then there are the monstrous parking garages which stand empty and community-killing all year except for when there’s a game) then maybe the city doesn’t deserve a professional sports team because it’s run by a bunch of amateurs.

But the only reason these teams need so much money from the government is because they build these monstrosities of stadiums. You look at old baseball stadiums, for instance, and they’re a bunch of wood shacks. Yet everyone had a swell time. When I realized in high school that it costs fifty dollars to get into a football game, and then there’s the price of a hotdog… and yet these stadiums can’t support themselves?

And there’s my sports rant over.