Well, it’s The Examiner, of course, so you know it’s going to be short.
Here it is, essentially a follow from my post yesterday about tomorrow’s D.C. United fan rally, which is certainly getting a fair share of attention, at least in the soccer media. In putting together the story, I asked around a little bit to try and get some perspective on what went wrong for United, both in D.C. last year and Prince George’s County this year. Who’s really to blame? The economy? Baseball? Politicians? The team itself? The structure of the deals? The methods by which they were conceived and unveiled? There’s probably a little bit to each. But there is one constant, of course, that keeps creeping up.
It brings to mind something that happened when my son was about 2 1/2. I was just putting him down at bedtime, and we were having one of our usual conversations — him in his bed chatting away, me in the other room trying to convince him to actually go to sleep — and all of a sudden, he says, “Hey Daddy? I want some money.” Now, he has a piggy bank – two, in fact – but the concept was well beyond his age and literally, we had never talked about the subject. So I was stunned.
Me: “Money?”
My son: “Yeah, money.”
That’s where it ended, and we both ended up in hysterics. I found it funny, and he found it funny that I found it funny, and that was all she wrote.
What’s my point? Of course, it’s way too simple, and I’m no expert on this stuff, you can be sure of that. But my take is this: the landscape for public-private stadium partnerships has changed. There’s a simple way to ease the worries of ‘not in my backyard’ types, whether it’s the general public or elected officials. My son apparently knows what it is, and he’s never spent a dime. I still don’t know where that came from…
