AS I SEE IT COLUMN: The template all pro-sports owners should follow

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/10/2024 (198 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When the NBA’s LA Clippers open their brand-new arena on October 26, they will be doing something that almost never happens in the world of professional sports. They will be playing in a facility entirely bought and paid for by their owner, without a nickel of public money.

The Clippers owner, former Microsoft top dog Steve Ballmer, didn’t pull the classic billionaire blackmail move – he didn’t threaten to move the team if he didn’t get public tax dollars to pay for his stadium.

Unlike Edmonton Oilers owner Daryl Katz, who did threaten to move to another city, blackmailing residents and politicians into spending millions of public dollars to keep the team from leaving, Ballmer stepped up and paid for whole thing himself.

Ballmer paying for the stadium out of his own pocket reveals that he has the moral courage to do the right thing – use his own money. Most owners in the NHL, NBA, NFL, MLS and MLB want government handouts in the form of public tax dollars to pay for a building that will make the already rich owner even richer.

Not Ballmer.

In addition to footing the bill for the $2.49 billion Canadian arena himself, the other aspect of his ownership that his fellow owners should follow, is his concern and investment in society at large.

Besides owning the Clippers, Ballmer runs an organization called USA Facts. He believes government data should be easier for people to access, so his organization provides citizens with facts, rooted in solid, unbiased data, that allows people to make informed decisions based on empirical, provable truths (aka “data”), instead of making decisions based purely on feelings and emotions and non-sensical conspiracy theories like so many people in Trump’s cult do.

For a timely example, sports fans (and non-sports fans) wanting a neutral, objective look at the difficult topic of immigration should go to usafacts.org/just-the-facts/immigration.

It is beyond impressive that an owner of NBA team, or any professional sports franchise for that matter, is so deeply concerned about the future of democracy.

At a time when one of the two people running for president is a convicted criminal who uses fascist language pulled directly from Hitler’s Nazi rhetoric in Germany in the early 1930’s by calling immigrants “vermin” and stating that immigrants “are poisoning the blood of our country”, a rational, commonsense discussion on immigration – exactly what Ballmer does in his educational videos – is welcome and much needed in an American society where millions of people make up facts that are entirely untethered to reality.

Like the cliché says, you are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts.

The Clippers new arena sits on 26 acres and has some very cool features. Each seat has a device to record the decibel level of the person sitting in the seat. To encourage crowd noise, the fan who cheers the loudest will get a free burger or pizza. The jumbotron, which they are calling the Halo Board, is two-sided, the biggest in any arena in North American and nearly a full acre in size. A nice touch is having a basketball jersey from every high school team in California visible in the arena.

And for those of you who hate waiting in line at sporting events to use the washroom, the Clippers new arena (which will hold 18,000 fans) has 1,160 toilets and urinals, three times the NBA average.

For context, the Winnipeg Jets play in an arena that holds 15,000 fans and has 75 stalls for men and 57 for women.

Steve Ballmer’s willingness to pay for his arena with his own money rather than building it on the backs of hardworking citizens – combined with his desire to help people better understand the critical social issues of the day – makes him the role model all other pro sports owners should follow.