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 Are
you familiar with FUBAR?
Do you know what it means?
It’s one of thousands of acronyms that Army folk use to
boil a complex situation down to a root truth.
I’ll clean it up a bit, just in case any kids still read
newspapers: Fouled Up Beyond All Repair. And folks, what
an apropos adjective it is for Birmingham’s sports
scene.
Our local sports situation is FUBAR. It’s FUBAB (Beyond
All Belief), it’s FUUSAB (Until Space And Beyond), and
moreover, it’s TAUFU (Totally And Utterly Fouled Up).
We lost hockey’s Bulls in 2000, football’s Thunderbolts
and Steeldogs in 2001 and 2007 respectively and
basketball’s Power in 2005. The only major professional
sports team Birmingham has – baseball’s Barons – is
Birmingham’s team in name only, ever since former owner
Art Clarkson abandoned historic Rickwood Field in favor
of Hoover’s Trace Crossings subdivision in 1988.
Last week, Birmingham’s athletic malaise spilled over
into the amateur ranks, as the Alabama High School
Athletic Association pulled the Super Six football
championships out of Legion Field and into a rotation
between Auburn’s Jordan-Hare and Tuscaloosa’s
Bryant-Denny stadiums.
Despite the grim news, city leaders bragged about
hanging on to the state basketball finals for now, which
is their prerogative to do. But raise your hand if you’d
like to take basketball’s side in an argument over which
sport the majority of fans in Alabama prefer.
Not everyone at once, please.
It seems a wild claim nowadays, but Birmingham’s sports
heritage is actually pretty stout. Willie Mays and the
Black Barons won the Negro League pennant here back in
1948. Hockey legend Gordie Howe scored his 1,000th goal
at the BJCC, becoming the first in his sport to reach
that milestone. The USFL’s Stallions were Birmingham’s
entry into the greatest non-NFL football effort
undertaken in this country since the old AFL. Hell,
Michael Jordan wasted a year of his prime athletic
career in our berg, striking out hundreds of times at
both the Met and various gentlemen’s clubs about town.
But now we find ourselves in one heck of a sports
drought. A 100-years drought; an Old Testament-style
drought. And we need to know why.
Whenever I need answers to questions regarding the
history of professional sports in Birmingham, I look no
further than Gene Crowley. Years of old fashioned,
pre-Google research yielded Crowley’s Web masterpiece:
BirminghamProSports.com. It’s the Wikipedia of local
sports, only you can believe every word on it.
Gene and I know one each other from my days with the
Birmingham Steeldogs, the longest-tenured football team
in our city’s history. We had a pact, I gave him
Steeldogs game programs, ticket stubs, pocket schedules
and media guides for his site and, in turn, he would
provide valuable sports history information for me at a
time of my choosing. This week, I cashed in.
“When you look at the last 15 years, this year is
certainly the low point for professional sports in
Birmingham,” Crowley says. “Last year was almost as bad
as this year, but at least we saw the All-American
Football League hold player tryouts and a glitzy player
draft in anticipation of a 2008 kickoff.”
Unfortunately, kickoff for the AAFL never materialized.
Advertisers are hard enough to woo as it is, but nearly
impossible to corral during a recession. The league
folded before it ever played a single down, having run
out of money before there was anything to spend it on.
Therefore we have our first entrant into our whodunit
sweepstakes: the faltering economy. However, it’s also
our flimsiest excuse, as our country’s current fiscal
health is poor, it has been so for only a little more
than a year. Birmingham’s sports prognosis has been
negative for far longer. Nope, can’t blame this one the
economy.
Well, can we blame the University of Alabama? Don’t
laugh, some do.
Before the three (soon four) Bryant-Denny expansions
that have taken place over the past 15 years, the Tide
played a handful of home games each season at Legion
Field. But in the late 1990s, a decision was made to
transition the school out of the Magic City and
exclusively back to Tuscaloosa. From 1998 to 2003,
Alabama went from a handful of games per season to one.
And then it was none. In Gene’s opinion, the loss of the
Super Six pales in comparison to the loss of Alabama
football.
“I think there’s a sharp difference between three days
of high school championships versus one day of an
Alabama football game,” he says. “I have to believe we
lost more with Alabama leaving.”
He’ll get no argument there. But can you blame Alabama
for wanting to play games in its own backyard? That
university is Tuscaloosa’s lifeblood after all,
shouldn’t they be the one to cash in on it? Without a
doubt, they should. Nope, you can’t blame the University
of Alabama.
You can blame, at least in part, Legion Field. Our
cornerstone venue is too past its prime to host national
events, but its prime was prime enough to officially
earn a “historic” tag. And it’s usually not advisable to
put the wrecking ball up against something that’s
historic (see Terminal Station, Birmingham).
Technically, it’s a downtown stadium. And Birmingham
needs a downtown stadium. But that area of town is FUBAR.
Make that FUUSAB. So pumping money into the place is
turd polishing — too big a risk.UAB hates playing
there. It’s has too many seats. It’s unsafe. It doesn’t
impress today’s recruits. However, UAB has no choice but
to play there. There’s no other option, unless you want
to give Lawson Field a go. (And believe me, you don’t.)
It’s the pawn that gets moved back and forth in the
domed stadium argument. Nobody wants to come to Legion.
Not even the high schools! If we had a dome to replace
Legion, we’d have the SEC Championship back, etc.
The question of whether or not Birmingham needs a domed
stadium has been argued back and forth for most of my
cognizant lifetime. The answer is two-fold. Yes,
Birmingham needs a new sports venue, but no, not a
full-scale domed stadium.
Get a solid minor league hockey franchise back in the
BJCC first. Field an A or AA franchise at Rickwood. Grow
a full set of baby teeth before you start pulling for
permanents. Right now, all we have is a mouth full of
gums.
After that, build a state-of-the-art, multi-purpose
arena to replace what we currently have at the BJCC.
We’re talking 25,000-30,000 seats plus all the modern
perks money can buy. Get the NCAA Regionals back in
town, the SEC basketball Tourney, and who knows, maybe
even a Final Four. Once you can sustain that kind of
success, then you’re ready to start pricing domes. But
not until then.
Because lack of appropriate venues is only half of
Birmingham’s pro sports problem. The second half, a lack
of major corporate dollars, is more complicated.
Corporate money is the lifeblood of professional
athletics and the most effective means of diagnosing the
health of a city’s local sports scene. Regardless of how
passionate sports fans in a particular city may be, if
corporate money isn’t there to pay salaries, fund media
campaigns, fill signage at venues and buy up blocks of
tickets, then pro sports don’t happen.
If you want to point to the moment in time that
Birmingham lost its sports mojo, it was when
HealthSouth’s star fell to earth. The world’s monopoly
on sports medicine was a title sponsor for nearly every
major sports franchise in the modern history of
Birmingham. Without Scrushy’s millions pumping through
the local sports economy, our pond dried up and the fish
died off. We’ve yet to recover.
Before our city gets better venues, we’re going to need
a corporate cash transfusion. That usually funnels down
from large corporations that set up within the metro
area. So how do you woo Fortune 500 companies to town?
Well, responsibility for that leads us to our city and
county officials.
That means that you start by not doubling the business
license fees. Then you’ll avoid promising a lot of money
for transit and then pull it off the table weeks later.
It’s best not to make posters with fairytale endings to
Aesop’s fables. And what ever you do, don’t push your
county into a historical municipal debt.
Of course, if any or all of those scenarios have already
taken place, then I’m afraid you’re SOL.
Look it up. |
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