Stan Kroenke is a bald asshole, Part II
"John" has a nice explanation online today, courtesy of Deadspin...Three football teams want to move, from San Diego, Oakland and St. Louis. The cities are asked to come up with a plan to try and keep them. Oakland pretends it can’t hear you and does nothing. San Diego, who has been dealing with this for 14 years, says they have an idea, but won’t clarify what it is. St. Louis immediately goes into action and draws up a plan for a reasonable stadium that will revitalize the northern riverfront and financing is put into place. The land is acquired and ground will be broken as soon as the league commits to the city.
Time passes....
Oakland continues to play with its dick and ignore the situation. San Diego plans a vote for well after the relocation issue will be already voted on itself, to maybe get the money to start thinking about doing something. St. Louis is told their stadium plan will actually be 100 million more than they thought and they need to come up with that money too. So they say, ‘Sure, no problem. If you can loan us that money up front, we’ll raise the tourist tax a little and pay you back with that revenue’ and amend the stadium plan to reflect that.
The NFL throws a fit about STL counting on an extra 100 million for a stadium even though they’re going to get paid back and makes sure to send a press release chastising the city for actually trying to keep its team.
Then...
The owner of the Rams in the relocation papers says St. Louis is a failing city based largely on its placement on some growth index from some study and anyone who puts a team here would be doomed to financial ruin. So he’s going to move the team to Inglewood which actually RANKED LOWER THAN US ON THAT SAME FUCKING LIST. He also whines we don’t support the team that didn’t have a winning record in a decade and had the worst five year stretch in the history of the whole fucking league. (15-65)
So...come vote day.
Despite having a set stadium plan and a way to finance it in place, St. Louis loses its team. The San Diego owner has one year to decide if he wants to move into the Inglewood stadium with the Rams. But since that city vote is in June, there’s still a chance they get to keep their team even though they don’t actively have a stadium plan after 14 FUCKING YEARS. And Oakland, which has done not one goddamn thing to keep the Raiders, still has a team. For now at least. They play in a stadium where sometimes raw sewage backs up onto the field during heavy rains. Gotta take care of a city that lets that happen.
Oh and the best part? That extra 100 million that the NFL threw a fit about us counting on? That we were going to pay back? It’s been offered to both San Diego and Oakland if they build new stadiums in their current cities. Free of charge. It’s a gift!
I don’t think a city has ever been fucked this bad by a sports league ever. I don’t even know what second place would be. So you know what? I hope Stan Kroenke gets paralyzed from the neck down and once a day for the rest of his life someone rubs a cheese grater across a random part of his face. But at least make a small concession and have said cheese grater be made of solid gold. Dude’s rich. He’ll like that. Also the occasional teabag would be nice too. And that goes for anyone else that was a part of this. There’s no hell bad enough for that level of greed. Sorry this isn’t very funny.
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And from Will Leitsch...
So, St. Louis has lost its team, and despite the local angst, there has been a decided lack of national sympathy for the city's plight. This makes a certain amount of sense. The Rams were in Los Angeles for nearly 50 years, and there is a certain symmetry to them returning; it is difficult for some to feel too badly for St. Louis for losing the team many believe they stole from Los Angeles in the first place. But there's also an undeniable antipathy toward St. Louis that has grown in recent years; it has somehow become acceptable in public discourse to just dump on St. Louis, a town that's going through some of the same problems that Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh have all gone through over the past two decades. If people talked about Detroit the way they regularly do about St. Louis right now, they'd be excoriated for it, and rightly so. This is a proud city with lifelong residents who are working their tails off to make it through an extremely difficult period. (And making some progress.) To ignore their efforts because you didn't like Tony La Russa and feel like making a cheap joke on social media is insulting in the extreme.
The frustration from St. Louisans is less about the Rams, in specific; they've been frustrated with that franchise for a decade already anyway. The frustration is that the city tried so hard to keep the team -- or a team, any team -- and were essentially just ignored by the NFL. Oakland and San Diego are barely trying to keep their teams; St. Louis put together a substantial plan, and not only was it dismissed out of hand, both Kroenke and the NFL took turns trashing the city on the way out the door. And then they gave the city a condescending pat on the head about it. Jerry Jones, the ghastly skin mask that owns the Dallas Cowboys, helped put the deal for Kroenke together and then had the nerve to say, "Don't rule St. Louis out. … It's an NFL city. It just didn't have it right this time. ... Get it right the next time relative to other teams." If St. Louis wants to get another team, hey, maybe it can sign a deal as terrible as the one it signed with the Rams in the first place, one that allows some other owner to exploit it for 20 years before we go through all this crap again.
posted by CM @ 9:08 PM
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