Thursday, April 30, 2009
Last Sunday, as the swine flu spread, a Mexican professional soccer game was contested in an empty Estadio Azteca — Latin America’s largest stadium.
While this rare scene of hundreds of thousands of unoccupied seats was prompted by the threat of lethal influenza, my mind drifted to a daydream with more plastic than flesh in the stands of our nation’s state of the art digs.
The H1N1 virus arrives at a curious time. In this 21st century a greed-borne illness has afflicted professional sports franchises, sometimes creeping to the “amateur level.” There’s never a bad time to be a fan, but the swine like to make it close.
When we elect to take in a game at a local sports bar or in our homes, we are not driven away from the stadium by the play on the field, but instead by the field itself. Free parking, cheap beer and crystal-clear Hi-Def take precedence over paying to park and paying even more to wait in line at the toilets.
For the first time since I’ve had a breath in my body, my dad has relinquished the Chiefs season tickets he’s held since 1980, when $15 would get you close enough to get mud on you.
I rang him the other night to discuss this and what the future may hold. We used to arrive plenty early to cook homemade chili before freezing our butts off inside Arrowhead Stadium for a few hours and went home happier because of it. Now, he — like a growing number of fans — simply can’t afford to pay the annual $1,600 for a pair of tickets to an event that gouges you into oblivion before you leave your car.
“It costs way too much for food and beer,” he told me. “And it’s better on TV.”
The Chiefs used to have a waiting list for season tickets like several other NFL clubs. It was like the mafia: Death was usually the only way out. But as prices rose in concert with poor play, 12-hour wallet-decimating excursions began losing their luster. And most of us won’t be there to inherit what for many had become a family tradition. Hell, if my dad can’t afford it, how can I?
One needs only to look to the recent mega-stadiums popping up for evidence that sports executives are catching on to this. Sure, they may promote nostalgia, innovation or some combination of both but the proliferation of luxury boxes and privileged seating suggests otherwise. Our shiny new stadiums are beginning to replace the Marriott as the destination for corporate conventions. Pro sports execs know who their new target audience is.
I guess the sad thing is we may not really care all that much. Since it’s cheaper and easier to get together with friends, crack open a beer that doesn’t cost $9 and watch every game in HD we may not mind seeing more suits than painted bellies so long as the game’s still on. Or, like Mexico, we may watch with no crowd at all.
— — Edited by Heather Melanson
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