The Business Of Heros And Villains

More draft analysis to come, but a little item that caught my attention this morning: Colts owner Jim Irsay is refusing to reopen negotiations on the Lucas Oil Stadium deal.

Okay. Not surprising, right? There's really no good precedent for reworking the terms of a stadium deal, publicly financed or not.

Except, Indianapolis city officials feel that the current economic crisis represents extenuating circumstances. The main problem centers around the city's Capital Improvement Board (CIB) which operates Lucas Oil Stadium, leasing it to the Colts. According to Indiana governor Mitch Daniels and other state and local officials, the CIB is facing a $47 million dollar deficit for 2010.

Government officials are asking for an additional $5 million, in good conscious, from the Colts and the Pacers (the CIB also operates the Conseco Fieldhouse) to alleviate some of that deficit among other measures set to save the CIB.

My question is this, given the Irsays' history, why would Indiana ever believe they would get anything from the Colts?

Jim's father Robert was the one who loaded up the team in the middle of the night and moved them from Baltimore to Indianapolis in the first place. Of course, the Colts situation in Baltimore deteriorated around the lack of a new stadium. Back-room negotiations became front-page bickering. Distrust deepened on both sides. The elder Irsay tried to use a sale or move of the club to finalize a public financed stadium deal. But the tactics blew up in his face, eroding support in government and in the public for the franchise's stadium needs.

The saga was a public relations nightmare from every side. The city of Baltimore, with the backing of the Maryland legislature, tried to seize the club. The specter of seizure sped up the negotiations between Indianapolis and Irsay. Once finalized, Indianapolis mayor John B. Smith sent a fleet of Mayflower trucks to the Colts facility in Owings Mills and whisked the franchise away in the middle of the night.

Of course, the Irsays blame the city of Baltimore and the state legislature. And many government officials blame Robert Irsay's lack of tact in the final years of the stadium imbroglio.

There's probably enough blame to go around for both sides. But, to bring it up to the current day, does the state of Indiana really expect the the younger Irsay to go back on the terms of his very favorable deal? I'm assuming not.

Are they simply trying to create a convenient villain, a temporary one that citizens won't hate forever, but will distract the public attention's long enough while the city government raises some local taxes? That seems more likely. Irsay's already come out and said, "I'm not going to renegotiate. That's the bottom line."

I don't know if the situation between the state of Indiana and Irsay will get uglier. The public financed stadium has been taken as a given in this day and age. However, the current financial crisis has the public reexamining its values along the line of where its money goes. When city and state agencies are running up overlarge deficits simply to keep multi-millionaires and their sports teams in town, there something wrong with the system.

Unfortunately, politics tends toward convenient villains rather than real solutions. I'm not saying Irsay is right and the governor is wrong or vice versa. But they're both operating with flawed contentions, inherited from the twisted business of pro sports over the past few decades.