Quentin Kopp wanted his Super Bowl. For years, the then-San Francisco supervisor had been negotiating between the NFL and the Bay Area's various sports arenas, trying to find the best venue for the big game. Oakland Coliseum was too small; Candlestick Park was too small and it was falling apart. The only place that fit the bill was Stanford Stadium, roomy enough to jam 86,000 spectators together. But the deal snagged on the NFL's worry about how comfortable those 172,000 butt cheeks would be in the no-frills environs of wooden benches and antique accoutrements.
"Isn't that the stadium with the hand-crank phone system and the Morse Code press room?" asked Chris Dufresne in the Los Angeles Times. "Why this stadium?"
Completely renovating the stadium for a one-time event wasn't an option, and Kopp'd be damned if his city was going to lose the estimated $100 million Super Bowl boost into the local economy, so the Bay Area Super Bowl Task Force — an amalgamation of local and state government and business leaders that had been trying to land the game in the Bay for years — decided to gussy up the joint with small tweaks paid for by $2.3 million in private donations. They put state-of-the-art communications in the press box, refurbished all the locker rooms, and bulked up the ticket offices and concessions stands. But there was one area that still needed dire attention: Those precious asses.
The stadium's iconic wooden seats, installed in 1921, had been slowly chipping and splintering off into fans' derrières. Completely swapping out the seats was infeasible, so the Task Force sought a sponsor. They approached an up-and-coming tech maven and sold him on the publicity, as well as the projected goodwill that'd come with protecting the hindquarters of the populace. He OK'ed the deal.
Which is why, on Jan. 20, 1985, more than 86,000 fans watched the San Francisco 49ers destroy the Miami Dolphins while perched on plush white cushions, on top of which was the tech maven's logo: A giant rainbow-colored apple.
Without getting too local news trivial on you, when the Bay Area last hosted the Super Bowl, Roman-ly numbered "XIX," a single ticket cost $60. Adjusted for inflation, that's roughly $132 in today's money. But to get these tickets back then, at that price, required some luck.
Because the 49ers were the "host team," and also hometown heroes since Joe Montana and Ronnie Lott led that year's squad to the promised land in their own backyards, the team held claim to 20,000 of the stadium's 86,000 seats. Some lucky Candlestick Park season ticket holders were chosen to sit on Steve Jobs's apples through a randomized computer drawing; the unlucky were left to either plead their fan bona-fides on TV in the hopes that some generous soul would show mercy, or else crawl through the minefield of the secondary market, where legit but pricey tickets mingled with fakes (at least 500 floated around, according to cops investigating a counterfeit ring at the time) and stolen property (a block of 50 tickets was taken from the Golden Gateway Holiday Inn on Van Ness at gunpoint and resold, leaving innocent buyers out of luck). But even with those dangers, fans had at least a shot of going to the game.
Flash-forward 31 years, to this year's game, dumbed down to the Arabic numerals "50," because "Super Bowl L" sends the wrong message. While it won't garner the local interest XIX drummed up for the simple reason that this year's 49ers were a steaming tire fire and Raiders fans are too busy celebrating the "victory" of another year sentenced to penury in the Coliseum, the home crowd may be entirely shut out from attending, despite many of these fans literally funding the stadium in which it's being played.
Nearly half of Levi's Stadium's $1.3 billion price tag was funded through the diabolical "personal seat licenses" model, whereby fans fork over ridiculous chunks of change — between $2,000 and $80,000, depending, presumably, on the proximity to toilets — for the ability to purchase season tickets. In addition to seeing the (dreaded) on-field product, fans were supposed to be given first dibs on other events to be held at the stadium. The final few Grateful Dead concerts, say. Or WrestleMania. But, evidently, that offer doesn't extend to the biggest event Santa Clara has ever seen.
As Mike Rosenberg reported in the San Jose Mercury News, the Niners claimed 3,000 of the 75,000 tickets, a near 5 percent portion that's become the new standard for "host city" claims. But rather than parcel out those 3,000 tickets to deserving fans, or to the lucky winners of random lotteries, they're being handed out to "VIPs, sponsors, 49ers employees, and high-rollers," Rosenberg reported. This means everyone who wants in must deal with the secondary market. That requires significant wealth: As of mid-January, the lowest price on StubHub, way in the nosebleeds, is $3,628 for a single ticket; by Tuesday, prices were soaring above $4,000.
The ticketing debacle is further evidence that the Super Bowl is not for you. Maybe it never really was, sure, but the past few years of Bay Area sports machinations have shown that — unless you're one of the aforementioned "high-rollers" reading this atop a mound of silicon chips and disposed human souls — none of it's about the common fan anymore.
Sports have been gentrified. Fans have been priced out. Not out of our literal seats, and definitely not out of the ability to watch games from afar on television (oh, the commercials!). But our emotional investment in the "local" pro sports team — strong as ever — is being exploited by the NFL, the owners, the city. Our roles have insidiously been shifted from spiritual participant to fiscal pawn.
Mayor Ed Lee is very excited about the Golden State Warriors!
Don't take my word for it, though. Check out the Twitter avatar of the 43rd mayor of "the Innovation Capital of the World!": A grinning Lee stands in front of City Hall, flashing a thumbs up while in the background, hanging from the mayor's office's Beaux Arts balcony, is a blue-and-white-and-gold banner proclaiming this governmental seat as "Warriors Ground."
Yes, it's the rallying cry of the coalition pushing for the Warriors' eventual trans-bay exodus from Oakland's Oracle Arena to a $1 billion-plus complex in Mission Bay, but as it hangs, it looks more monarchial, a flag-planting claiming ownership for a faraway king.
"[It is] my legacy project," Lee proclaimed during a waterfront press conference held at Piers 30-32 back in 2012, in reference to the Warriors' move to San Francisco, which has taken some twists and turns: That original waterfront location, on crumbling city-owned piers once offered to Oracle's Larry Ellison in exchange for him hosting the America's Cup here, was eventually scuttled in favor of the Mission Bay site, land purchased from Salesforce.com (whose CEO's name happens to grace the new UCSF hospital in the neighborhood).
The path to achieving that legacy before the 2019-2020 season looks clear now, too; Lee recently bought the support of UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay, one of the last remaining holdouts to the plan, with a $10 million annual fund dedicated to "controlling the flow of traffic in the neighborhood," ostensibly squashing concerns over the gridlocked nightmare — nevermind patients' heightened stress levels due to the game day commotion — of the Warriors and Giants playing in town simultaneously. (UCSF scientists project that 11 "key" intersections will be — and I'm paraphrasing here — quite fucked during game nights; subsequently, the Board of Supervisors added another $55 million to the coffers for "transit infrastructure.")
In addition to the arena, the Warriors' grand plan calls for 3.2 acres of public space, 100,000 square feet of retail space, 580,000 square feet for offices, and 950 parking spots. "[Ticket] prices have yet to be determined," reads the FAQ section of the plan's website at NBA.com, before trying to quash fears of being priced out by stating they "know Warriors games are special, and we want all of our fans to continue to enjoy that experience."
This Warriors "Bridge to SF" plan — like the $357 million AT&T Park before it, and the adjacent Mission Park Development project — is being funded by private money. That is to say, rich folks. Which: Yes! Of course! That's the way it should be! The rich people who own these teams should be paying for the places in which they play. Enough studies have shown that cities get screwed when public funds are siphoned off for what's essentially a private business HQ masquerading as a bastion of local pride; in 2012, Judith Grant Long, a Harvard urban planning professor, estimated that U.S. taxpayers lost $10 billion more than originally forecasted in stadium deals. So, private over public investment is all well and good. The bad is a bit more murky.
But when a mayor claims his "legacy project" is a sports arena, and that arena's being funded by big business, something seems off, doesn't sit right, leaves one thick splinter in the old tush. In other words, an elected official wants his constituents to look back upon his time in office and consider the moment when he decided to allow a business to conduct their business on a large swath of valuable land as his sacred and epochal civic contribution.
One of the political neophytes opposing Lee in the past mayoral election, Amy Farah Weiss, tabbed at this misaligned compass by claiming her own "legacy project" would be an "eco-district that integrates [...] current and future buildings, programming, and job placement." That vision seems more fitting of a proper city servant. Then again, Lee does look fetching in his Giants orange-colored blazer.
(The Giants' Mission Bay real estate development is interesting, too. Essentially, it's being billed as a way for the team to hedge its bets. If the Giants have a lousy season, or if ticket/concession sales dip, the ballclub's budget won't necessarily be lopped with it because, oh look, here's another source of income. The development was sold as badly needed housing, with a "no one's doing anything with the land anyway" shrug: which, fair enough. But the approval also gives team ownership carte blanche to do what they will with waterfront property. While there was a great stink made about the plan calling for 33 percent of its 1,000 to 1,950 residential units reserved as "affordable" for low- and middle-income households, those are vague terms and wide-ranging numbers. More importantly, the plan merely says the city would "encourage" ownership to hit those goals: which, c'mon. In any case, 74 percent of city voters saw enough to approve Proposition D last November, so this is moving forward.)
Across the bay, the stingy ownership of the Raiders and A's has been testing the resolve of new Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf during her first year in office. She's long been on the record guaranteeing public funds won't be used to construct stadiums to save the Raiders/A's from their current decrepit, yet lovable, digs at the publicly-owned O.co Coliseum. But after A's owner Lew Wolff's repeated attempts to relocate to San Jose, and just before the Raiders' stadium lease ran up, Schaaf changed her tune. In a presentation with top NFL brass in New York last November, Schaaf opened up the possibility that "public bonds" could be used to finance the stadium. (It should be noted that, during the NFL owners' meetings this past January, Schaaf declared, once again, that no public funds will be used on stadiums, while simultaneously touting a new waterfront ballpark for the A's at a Port of Oakland container terminal.)
That New York meeting wasn't good enough for Raiders owner Mark Davis, who still applied to relocate his team to L.A., before the ghost of his father, legendary former Raiders owner Al Davis, apparently scared the other NFL owners into chilling refusal. (It remains to be seen where the Raiders play their next home game; latest news has Mark Davis flaunting previously-purchased land in San Antonio for a possible move.) Meanwhile, Wolff presumably continued his days relaxing in a gold-encrusted barcalounger in his spacious L.A. home, waiting for his stadium lease to expire in 2024, or for Schaaf or her successor to cough up some of those sweet public funds, and also laughing, just so much laughing in the Wolff household, how could this man not.
Schaaf's "maybe public funds could be used" mindset shouldn't appeal to Oakland's fans and citizens, since the city is still paying off the last mistake.
In 1995, as part of the deal to bring the Raiders back to Oakland after a 12-year stint in L.A., not-yet-undead owner Al Davis strong-armed the city into issuing bonds to build the 11,000-seat "Mount Davis" expansion of de rigeur luxury suites, a monstrous design that cut off the Coliseum's view of the Oakland hills and gave the arena a feeling of dire claustrophobia. The bonds were intended to be repaid by some of that personal seat licenses money, but when the team failed to sell enough of those, Oakland and Alameda County had to cover the discrepancy — a debt that East Bay taxpayers have shouldered and will continue to shoulder for the next decade, to the tune of $20 million a year.
Then again, maybe all these stadium machinations, land grabs, back-room government negotiations, questionable practices, and business shenanigans are business as usual.
A San Francisco Chronicle feature from Oct. 2, 1984, states in big, bold lettering: "Giants Put Up for Sale — The Team May Move." This referred to then-Giants owner Bob Lurie's attempt to force then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein into publicly financing a new stadium because the team "can't draw in Candlestick Park." (And not, you know, because the team lost an embarrassing 100 games that season.) Feinstein's counter was to consider partial public funding for a modestly-sized stadium in the China Basin area, a stone's throw from where the Giants' foray into the landlord business at the Mission Rock Development will soon break ground. Voters blocked this proposal four times, until Lurie finally sold the team in 1993. Three years later, voters approved the privately-funded building of PacBell Park (now AT&T Park, although it was on public land).
A few months after that Oct. 2 story, the Chronicle published an article about a community of SoMa artists fighting landlords to stay in their long-time homes. The story appeared right after a photo of 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr., on the field slapping hands with joyous fans of his championship team in the front row.
Thirty-one years later, it's the same as it ever was.
Why do we watch paid professionals play a game? There's no great answer, but a bunch of glancing swipes that get us in the vicinity.
We see humans who've practiced their entire lives to achieve greatness. That's inspiration. We second-guess mistakes and ridicule errors of both players and those damned idiot coaches. That's happiness through illusory superiority. We debate free agent signings and roster cuts. That's avataristic role playing. We relax in front of the game after a hard day at the grind. That's meditative refreshment. We drink with friends, banter with neighbors, find a sliver of common ground with our socially awkward co-workers. That's bonding. We mock other cities, have a window back home when we're away, listen to the ghosts of former greats echo through the stadiums where they once reigned. That's pride, that's heritage, that's home.
Over the next few weeks, when San Francisco hosts the parties celebrating the largest and most extravagant sporting event of the year — the pièce de résistance down the road in Santa Clara, not far from where Apples cradled asses three decades ago — none of that matters. Super Bowl 50 is a corporate event, and we're not on the exclusive guest list. The rich will converge on our peninsular hotel, trash the joint during their epic shindig shit-show, and leave us with a $5-million-plus bill. The troublesome part is that, as recent stadium kerfuffles hint, the real raucous party may just be getting underway.
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