Billionaire Beggars

Being a mostly red blooded American male I should be all excited by the football season.

I mean, really, what else matters in life?

And here in sad sad Arizona, "our" Cardinals are doing very well.

That's supposed to compensate for the low wages, crappy schools, hillbilly politics, racist sheriffs, brain dead populace, suburban sprawl, cultural wasteland, and all the rest of the ongoing river o' shit that is life in Arizona. Did I mention we have championship golf, too?

Bread and circuses, baby. Bread and circuses.

Unfortunately, I just can't bring myself to root root root for the home team.

Nothing against the players or the coaches. I'm sure they're a fine bunch of guys, with just the right mix of wife, and/or girlfriend, and/or child, and/or drug, abusers mixed in.

And I'm fine with all that. No, really, I am. I guess it's the libertarian in me.

What I can't abide are the team's billionaire beggar owners, the lovely Bidwill family.

Look in the dictionary under institutionalized mediocrity and there's a picture of Bidwill pere et fils.

4 winning seasons in 26 years in Arizona. This in the NFL, a league that does everything it can to insure parity. Wow. Because Arizona is the land of eternal optimism, after just one winning season the Cardinals were rewarded with a shiny new stadium at tax payer expense. This new bauble increased the value of the team enough to make the Bidwill's billionaires. Shouldn't that be enough for one lifetime?

But it's not enough. No, it's never enough.

Hardly a month goes by without young Michael Bidwill whining about the Cardinals not getting their fair share of something. Parking or signage or whatever. Their "partners", the City of Glendale, may crash and burn financially, but until Mikey's happy with his cut, nothing else matters.

Of course, they are not alone in this. Every major city in America has been, or will be, held hostage by some billionaire scum who owns the local team and wants something--usually a tax payer funded new stadium to replace the tax payer funded old stadium. Because, well, you know, old stuff's creepy.

Not nearly as creepy as a bunch of old white men with too much money and power and an overwhelming sense of entitlement...

Go Team!

You Decide!!!!!

So I get this flyer in the mail the other day from a group that calls itself Keeping the Promise.

It reads, in part: YOU DECIDE A Glendale casino means gambling everywhere...including near your family

Apparently, if I don't do something, there will be casinos all over the place, including in my neighborhood!!!!

Yikes!

I mean YIKES!!!

What the people who sent me this flyer want me to do is contact my nitwit US Senators, Johnny Mc and Flakey Jr., and tell them to stop the Glendale casino that the Tohono O'odham tribe is planning on building.

Otherwise....cue ominous music....dum dum dummmm!

Repeat after me, Native American tribes are recognized as sovereign nations. And their rights to build casinos on tribal land have been upheld by the courts.

Personally, I don't give a rat's ass whether or not this particular tribe builds a casino on their land near Glendale, or anywhere else for that matter. Nobody makes you gamble. Plus think of all the cheap shrimp cocktails, prime rib specials, and classic rock concerts! Besides, if there's any criminal element involved, certainly we can trust Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Tom Horne and the rest of our crack law enforcement crew to root them out. Yes, I am being sarcastic again. It's a character flaw, I know. But there it is.

How the flyer makes the jump from one more Indian casino to "casinos in neighborhoods and near schools" and "bars and restaurants offering gaming" is beyond even my hyperbolic imagination.

I guess it's the same kind of wishful thinking that takes a centrist Democratic President from Hawaii and makes him into a wild eyed, Muslim Kenyan Socialist hell bent on destroying "our" way of life.

Yawn.

The most interesting aspect of this is why anyone in a position of power in Glendale would object to a 365 day a year business enterprise drawing folks to that poor benighted place. It is beyond me. After all, they rolled over like submissive puppies for a 8-10 game days a year football emporium that will ultimately cost well over a billion dollars of tax payer money. And a 50 day a year hockey arena that costs the city 15 million dollars a year in fees--in addition to the bond debt costs of building it. Oh, and don't forget the Camelback Ranch spring training facility. You know what they say, a hundred million here, a hundred million there, and pretty soon we're talking about real money. Real money which the City of Glendale doesn't have. Like the 3 million bucks they've already dropped trying to fight this casino.

Go figure.

Year End Valley Sports Roundup

I know, I'm just as surprised as you are that the world is still here. I even had  "12-21-12 world ends" written in my day planner. I mean, if you can't trust the looney predictions of some bat shit crazy nut jobs based on a fundamental misinterpretation of the calendar of an extinct civilization, what can you trust?

So, since it isn't the apocalypse after all, and too much holiday cheer has left me kind of groggy, we might as well take a close look at the Valley's sports scene:

Jesus, what a cesspool!

Where to begin?

Well, they say it's football season, though that would be hard to tell from what we've seen around here. So let's start with our beloved Arizona Cardinals.

One thing I know for sure, once a cheap SOB always a cheap SOB. That pretty much sums up my feelings about the Bidwill family's business. They got a new stadium and all the cash flow that went with it, and the franchise is now worth about a billion bucks. So why are the Bidwills always getting into fights over money? First it was with the Fiesta Bowl over signage, then Westgate over parking, now NAU over training facilities. For a franchise that has been mediocre at best for generations they have a tremendous sense of entitlement.  All that money and they still don't spend on depth. They are always one injury away from disaster. The defense is strong, but not strong enough to shut out every opponent, which is what they have to do to win. The offensive line is consistently awful. Their "running" game is a joke. Their GM is a joke, too. This is a team that passed on both Adrian Peterson and Terrell Suggs in the draft. As for the head coach's decision making regarding the quarterback position, well, let's just say that Jeff George is sitting somewhere right now waiting for his phone to ring. It is becoming clear that they were very lucky to have Kurt Warner and Todd Haley for the brief period of time that now looks like their Golden Age. The worst part of this whole debacle is that Larry Fitzgerald, who is still one of the top two or three receivers in the league, is spending a large part of his prime without an NFL quarterback to throw to him.

OK, what about "your" Phoenix Suns? Steve Nash made everybody around him look better--including Alvin Gentry. Steve Nash is gone. Goran Dragic is good, but he is still a work in progress. And the gap between "good" and "great" in the NBA is wide. Gortat was the best back-up center in the league--emphasis on back-up. Jared Dudley is a solid 6th man. Michael Beasley has a world of talent, and if he ever...blah blah blah. You can grow old waiting for people to change. The point guard they drafted, whose name escapes me, was briefly demoted to the D-League. And the rest of the roster is made up of guys who would be 8th, 9th, or 10th men on a good team. This all adds up to lots of empty seats at the Purple Palace. On the plus side, with Toronto still one of the worst teams in the league, at least we haven't had to hear the "if only Bryan Colangelo was still around" wails coming from the local media. Yep, Bryan has done such a great job as GM with the Raptors. Uh huh.

Remember a few seasons back when the Suns' roster was 10 swing men, a power forward and Steve Nash? Well, the Arizona Diamondbacks seem to be cornering the market on light hitting short-stops and middle relievers. (Hey, maybe they can trade Justin Upton for Eddie Brinkman. That'll show him!) I know, Kevin Towers is a genius, etc etc, but come on. I haven't checked with Bill James yet, but I'm pretty sure that nobody ever won a pennant with a team full of utility infielders. Of course, it probably doesn't matter what the D-backs do, because both the Giants and Dodgers have way superior talent. This all adds up to one thing: there will be plenty of good seats available to watch your favorite baseball teams when they come to town next summer.

Which brings us to hockey. Is there still a hockey team? There must be, because the city of Glendale has committed $300 million dollars to pay some guy to keep the Phoenix Coyotes in town. The city will have to divert this money from other services. This will mean cutbacks for the people who live in Glendale. Fortunately, this will not affect most hockey fans, because most hockey fans do not live in Glendale. So they couldn't care less about what happens to Glendale. Come to think of it, I don't really care what happens to Glendale either. But if I did, I'd be pissed off right about now.

And last, but not least, we have the ASU Sun Devils. Sure the baseball team used to win the College World Series on a regular basis, and the basketball team has sent several very good players to the NBA, including Jumpin' Joe Caldwell, Byron Scott, Fat Lever, and James Harden. But for those of us of a certain age, ASU will always mean Frank Kush. Do the names Mini Max Anderson, Curly Culp, Ron Pritchard, Fair Hooker, JD Hill, Joe Spagnola, Danny White, John Jefferson, Woody Green, and the Malone brothers, Art and Benny, ring a bell? (Yes, I really am that old.) Anyway, I'm pretty sure that Frank Kush would be embarrassed to take a 7-5 team to a bowl game. But, as Dylan reminds us, "things have changed."

What Was That About Worshipping False Idols?

There it was, on the front page of the sports section of The Arizona Republic. An urgent plea for a statue of Jerry Colangelo to grace downtown Phoenix. Oh, they love them some JC at the Republic! And to be fair, compared to the other owner's of professional sports franchises that our sad metropolis has been burdened with, Colangelo would probably be the pick of the litter. But what a feeble litter!

Let's see, first you've got the Bidwill's, pere et fils, who spent years defying the NFL's concerted efforts to raise up the historically bad franchises by any means possible. Parity is the expressed goal of everything the league does. And still the Cardinals always stayed at or near the bottom. That kind of commitment to mediocrity was rewarded by a shiny new tax payer funded stadium, by the way. The new stadium increased the value of the Bidwill's family business to close to a billion dollars. This same stadium will cost well over a billion dollars of public money by the time all the bonds are paid off. But never mind that. We love our football too much to care about such things. Besides, the Cards are semi-respectable these days.

Then there's that trucking magnate who pissed away 2-300 million bucks on the Coyotes. I've never been quite sure how to pronounce his name. Is it "Moyz" or "Moyess"? I suppose "numbnuts" will do in a pinch. Of course, he had the help of the Mayor and City Council of Glendale--except when he really needed it. The Coyotes are now owned by the NHL--and heavily subsidized by the tax payers of  Glendale. Services will be cut, residents will suffer, hell, the city might even go bankrupt, but you'll never take our hockey team! Never, never, never!

After nearly 40 years and no NBA championships, Colangelo himself was forced out of the Suns by Robert Sarver, he of the court-side seats, big foam finger, and crappy personnel decisions. Some people buy sports franchises thinking they are the next Mark Cuban or George Steinbrenner. Most of these people are dead wrong. Robert Sarver meet Daniel Snyder.

That brings us to the Diamondbacks, Colangelo's other noteworthy accomplishment. Yes, they did win the World Series 11 years ago. Yes, JC deserves some of the credit for it. However, he ran the team so deeply into debt with a string of big deferred money contracts (Bernard Gilkey? Really?) that it's taken them the better part of a decade to get their heads above water again. At some point, the partners who had real money invested in the team grew tired of seeing their shares diluted and showed JC to the door. Since he never had much of his own money invested, it wasn't that hard to remove him.

But then Jerry Colangelo has always been very good at spending other people's money. This has worked out very well for Jerry Colangelo, but not always so well for the people whose money he used.

So, in keeping with his modus operandi, I propose that any statue of Colangelo be paid for with borrowed money...that will never be paid back.

Oh, I See

Having just watched the most inept half of allegedly professional football I think I have ever seen--how 'bout that high powered Cardinal offense!--I pause to turn my attention to today's news.

There are times in life when the veil is lifted from our eyes and we see things clearly at last. The Arizona Republic, which is the final word for all things concerning Phoenix, the 6th largest city in the US and a well known hot bed of conservatism, free market capitalism, personal freedom, rugged individualism, and just dad-burned God loving, Get the Damn Government Off My Back Americanism, has an interesting story in its Sunday edition.

The Republic tells us that the state is suffering from a glut of doctors who over prescribe narcotics. That's right. A whole bunch of guys and gals who were absent the day they went over the Hippocratic Oath at Med school have been handing out prescriptions for "oxy" this and "perco" that and all other manner of legally mind altering substances. Lots of prescriptions. Lots and lots. I guess the idea is that "a stoned public is a happy public." Or at least a docile public. (It probably sounded better in the original Latin.)

All this time I thought the problem with our state was that it was overrun with a bunch of ignorant, bigoted, hateful, racist, Hillbillies. Turns out I was wrong. The problem isn't ignorant, bigoted, hateful, racist, Hillbillies. It's ignorant, bigoted, hateful, racist, stoned Hillbillies.

I stand corrected.