Miami Heat: Business or Game?
by SDM
One of SDM’s favorite movie lines about professional sports comes from Nick Nolte’s character in North Dallas Forty:
“Every time I say it’s a game, you tell me it’s a business. Every time I say it’s a business, you tell me it’s a game.
That quote raced back into SDM’s pea brain immediately upon reading “Miami Heat asks Miami-Dade County to extend arena lease.”
Let SDM say for the record that this blog loves the Heat. The team is a credit to the city it calls home in just about every way one can imagine.
The problem, as Nick Nolte pointed out, is that sometimes our emotional allegiance to a sports franchise clouds our collective brains when it comes to the business of professional sports. To see how some franchises play on our emotions, one only has to look across 826 to the (spit) Miami Marlins. Oh, how SDM hates that repugnant deal.
Just imagine if, instead of a half-empty baseball stadium, Miami-Dade had a brand-spanking new convention center on that very same spot. It’s heartbreaking to consider the potential alternative uses of a billion dollars, especially given the Marlins behavior since, well, forever.
SDM Says: It’s time for some tough love. Our beloved Heat must be told in no uncertain terms that operating arenas is a business. The community deserves a return on its investment now and that return must be delivered in American Dollars. Sure, we love the game, the players and the team. But it’s high time they love us back in kind.
Miami-Dade residents were given the opportunity to vote on a straw poll which would impose a miniscule tax to fund animal services. Regrettably, we were not given the same opportunity to opine on the billion dollar Marlins stadium ‘deal’. Every commissioner who voted for this should be thrown out of office!
Excellent point. SDM cannot agree more.
We can thank the courageous Lynda Bell for seeing that she and her colleagues have a limited life span on the commission. Unlike the Palmetto Bay despots who managed to give themselves lifetime tenure.
SDM is no fan of Bell. You appear to have been exposed to only one side of her. Take SDM’s advice and beware.
AGree with SDM on Bell……Beware because she thinks her next stop is Washington and that would be a disaster.
Funny standards. We can’t praise Fiore but people can beat up Bell on your blog all day long. And of course you lack the fortitude to and confidence to post dissenting points of view.
Bell’s next stop will be the Governor’s mansion.
Is she driving through Tallahassee today?