For wandering onto the court to protest officials” calls and other precocious antics during NBA games, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has been fined more than $1.6 million. Often, his outbursts and shenanigans are an embarrassment to his own players.
And this, it”s been said, is the best owner in professional sports.
If that”s so, they should raise the bar of behavior for owners ? if they can find out where the bar is buried.
Standards for owners? We ought to demand it. But fans simply let these rich guys walk right over them by paying ever higher prices for tickets, concessions and parking. Or, committing tax money to a new stadium where they can pay even more and the owner can get even richer.
Little chance the owners will police themselves when the commissioner, Bud Selig, is among the worst of the lot. Selig got his new stadium in Milwaukee, but has done zilch to repay the fans by putting a winning team in it.
Don”t buy into the new billion-dollar stadium and you get Art Modell, who, after years of faithful fan support pulled the Browns out of Cleveland and hearts out of all those faithful fans by shifting to Baltimore ? which, of course, gave him the new stadium he wanted. Does it surprise you that George W. Bush, was managing general partner for the Texas Rangers when they got a new ballpark on the backs of the taxpayers?
While on the stadium subject, explain to me one more time how the so-called “Oakland Raider Nation” continues to pander with dog-like loyalty to this team when shifty Al Davis has moved twice and would move again if he could.
I”ll never understand the allegiance to the silver and black, carried aloft to some extent by gangbangers and felons. More than one was an actual Raider player. There are so many guys behind bars wearing Raider logo tattoos at San Quentin and Vacaville that you might think they were prison issue.
But at least Davis, himself, isn”t a felon. Which is a claim that George “The Boss” Steinbrenner cannot make. If not for a timely pardon by Ronald Reagan when his presidency expired, might Steinbrenner have become as familiar with prison stripes as he is with his beloved Yankee pinstripes for making illegal contributions to Nixon”s campaign?
In the first 23 years of his more than 30 years of Yankee ownership, Steinbrenner fired 20 managers. Sure, managing is a precarious perch, but this was madness.
I knew such an owner. The irrascible, penurious, eccentric Charles O. Finley, who in his first four years in Oakland had four new managers. One of them, Hank Bauer, may have sealed his fate the day Finley called him down to the dugout from a phone in his private box informing Hank there was a grass stain on the seat of his uniform pants. “That ain”t grass stain, Charlie. That”s mistletoe,” Bauer responded.
Finley”s bringing his team west availed fans to the opportunity of seeing the eccentricities of sports team ownership up close. Finley provided plenty to see.
This was a man who rented hotel rooms for Charlie O., his full-grown mule mascot, which he coddled in the way wealthy dowagers coddle poodles. This was a man who for his first act in Kansas City, where he first owned the team, publicly burned a bus. The statement he was making was that the “shuttle-bus system” that saw several talented A”s go the Yankees in exchange for lesser talent under prior ownership was at an end.
Finley mostly despised the media. Sometimes his hate boiled over into demonstrations. In Kansas City, he once held a pregame “poison pen” night for a writer who offended him. A float carried a giant pen. Or he might lash out physically. Once, he opened his hotel door to the beat writer he had just agreed to meet with just enough room to grab the writer by the face.
On another occasion, a Chicago baseball writer was invited to go along for a dinner party at a Cincinnati restaurant just before the A”s opened the World Series against the Reds. A man who ordered for his guests and was fastidious about seating arrangements, Finley on this night was directing each guest who rode to the restaurant in a trio of limousines to their place at the table.
Finally, he directed A”s shortstop Campy Campaneris to the open place on his right, and, according to Nightingale, commented to Shirley Finley, his wife and the mother of their dozen offspring, “I hope you don”t mind, dear, but a good shortstop is harder to come by than a good wife.”
After reading his own comment the following day, Finley attempted to thrash the writer on a Cincinnati street corner. Like a man breaking out in the fur of a werewolf, Charlie couldn”t stand to see himself when the newspaper mirrored his behavior.
What professional sports need is a rent-with-an-option-to-buy system. Before one of these moguls who wants to buy a franchise can become a full-fledged owner he would have to rent. To qualify for ownership, a candidate must first prove that he has enough sensitivity to have never pushed his grandmother down the stairs and that he is of the human species.
A good place to experiment with the “rent-a-team” concept is with the 49ers, currently presided over by Tom York, whom some believe is a rented person.
