Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 10:58:11 From: Michael Shapcott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: C4LDEMOC-L: SkyDome I - and SkyDome II Globe sports columnist Stephen Brunt has a very interesting analysis of SkyDome I - Toronto's financially disastrous sports stadium. Two of the principal financial architects of SkyDome I - Paul Godfrey and Trevor Eyton - are key players in TO-Bid, the corporate group that is running Toronto's bid for the 2008 Olympics. Of course, a key part of TO-Bid is SkyDome II - a brand new sports stadium for Toronto. ---------------------------- Want to know more about the 2008 bid: Tuesday, December 1st, 7.30 p.m. International Students’ Centre - Cumberland Room, University of Toronto - 33 St. George Street, Toronto, (half a block north of College and Beverley Streets), (TTC: St. George subway station, then walk south or College streetcar to Beverley and walk north). For more information, visit our web site at: http://www.breadnotcircuses.org ------------------------------ SkyDome saga a sad tribute to its time Friday, November 27, 1998 By STEPHEN BRUNT Consider what might have been. In 1984, a year before winning their first division championship, the owners of the Toronto Blue Jays began planning for the future. The business of baseball was changing. Salaries were escalating. New sources of money were going to have to be found. At the same time, fans were expecting more for their ticket dollars. The bare-bones experience of sitting at a ballgame and eating a hot dog -- at Exhibition Stadium, those bones were particularly bare -- would soon not be enough. Bells and whistles and giant television screens and private boxes were the wave of the future. To compete in the entertainment marketplace of the 1990s and beyond, they'd have to be on the cutting edge. A stadium, a real, honest-to-God baseball stadium and not the great compromise by the lake, was a necessity. That year, quietly, the Jays began planning the construction of the team's new home. No, it wasn't the SkyDome. It was a 40,000-seat, open-air, baseball-only park to be constructed on lands adjacent to Woodbine Racetrack in the city's west end, not far from Pearson Airport. The team had been offered a sweetheart deal: the Ontario Jockey Club would provide the land for free, in return for parking revenues and the benefits of being the ballclub's next-door neighbour; a developer offered to put the stadium up essentially for free as part of a larger project that included a massive shopping centre. All of the revenue, aside from parking, would flow directly to the team, which meant that even with 10,000 fewer seats to sell than they'd wind up with in the Dome, they would have been able to remain competitive, and to win those World Series in 1992 and 1993. As for the stadium's design, it was to have been a carbon-copy of baseball's state-of-the-art park of the moment -- Royals Stadium in Kansas City. But who knows? Given the time it would have taken to get the project in gear, perhaps someone would have come forward with the bright idea of building a modern stadium with traditional aesthetics, with brick and real grass and seats painted Fenway green -- Camden Yards before there was a Camden Yards. "It would have been nice to pursue that," Paul Beeston, then president of the Jays, once explained. "But as fast as it gained momentum, it quickly had its legs cut out from under it. The [provincial Tory] government and the brewery [Labatt's, the Blue Jays' principal owners] were very closely tied. We were at least told that [SkyDome] would be a good thing to have. Our point was -- we don't want to play in a dome, build us a retractable roof. So they built us a retractable roof." That's the way it was in Toronto in the go-go, greed-driven, no-limits Eighties, the same decade that gave the world Donald Trump. Want a retractable roof? Why not? Want to stick a hotel on one end of the stadium, and a health club, and a private dining room? No problem. Thanks to a compliant government (along the way the Tory Big Blue Machine was replaced by David Peterson's Liberals, but it turned out the only real difference was in the colour of their ties) the business boosters could push the project to four times its original budget, all without assuming one iota of risk. Blinded by the magnificence of it all, blinded by having the world's first whatever-it-was to sit next to the world's tallest thingamajig, the public (and the press) mostly made like sheep. Naysayers -- those who pointed out that the stadium's cost and its debt load meant that even if it was booked 365 days a year, it couldn't possibly pay for itself -- were drowned out by the oohs and aahs as the roof opened for the first time. No temple, no monument, no statue, could serve as a better tribute to those times. And now, as has been well documented the past couple of weeks, the 1980s are officially over. The SkyDome is a dinosaur, a white elephant, that yesterday was on the verge of declaring bankruptcy. Its ownership structure is a tangled mess, deals cut with friends-of-the-powerful for concessions and catering and the like have become huge impediments to rescuing the business. What 10 years ago was a triumph of the city's economic elite, and a sop to its citizens, now has become a colossal embarrassment. It was a great idea, say the Trevor Eytons, the Paul Godfreys. It just got a little out of hand -- as if they never had a hand in it. But what's happening at the moment is no tragedy. This is the rich squabbling with the hyper-rich. This is the Jays' current corporate parents, Interbrew SA, finding a way to gain majority control of the stadium, which in the end will make it easier for them to peddle both the SkyDome and the ballclub. The tragedy came some time ago, when the people of Ontario (hope you're enjoying this in the Soo, in Ottawa, in Windsor, in Thunder Bay) swallowed $300-million of the stadium's cost, more resigned than angry at being hoodwinked, sold on the notion that the SkyDome's construction was an inevitability, that they wouldn't have experienced Joe Carter's home run without it. Now, it's time to finally adopt Townsend's Credo when it comes to sports, stadia and the public purse: Won't get fooled again. Stephen Brunt can be reached via E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Copyright © 1998, The Globe and Mail Company ------------------------------- Michael Shapcott Toronto, Ontario, Canada Tel. - 416-367-5402 E-mail - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Bread Not Circuses on the web: http://www.breadnotcircuses.org | |To unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], no subject, with the |following message (and no other text): unsubscribe c4ldemoc-l
