Game Over 
Spoils Sports
Think loyalty means anything in professional sports these days? Ask fans in Houston, where the owners of the Oilers, the Astros, and the Rockets are scheming to jump ship if taxpayers don’t bow to their demands.
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Houston fans were aghast. Bottom-Line Bud was sticking it to them again! Pay for a second Astrodome and a hundred more luxury boxes? Like hell they would! In the meantime, Astrodome landlord McLane and Kenneth Schnitzer—who owned the Summit, where the Rockets played—swiftly hired lobbyists to persuade the Houston city council to block such a move.
A few interested parties prevailed upon the mayor to ease the conflict. In December 1993 Lanier invited the three owners, along with their lieutenants and a few intermediaries, to his home at the Huntington for lunch. After the host and his wife, Elyse, had served coffee, Oilers executive vice president Mike McClure carefully explained why the team needed to leave the ’Dome, and why the new facility was the answer. “Our payroll was $47.5 million last year,” Adams chimed in. “If it weren’t for the expansion fee [the several million dollars each NFL owner received for agreeing to give Jacksonville and Charlotte pro franchises], I would’ve lost money.”
The Oilers’ owner turned to McLane. “Drayton,” he said, “now’s the time for you to quantify what you need for things to be okay for your Astros. We’ll see to it that your building and your franchise don’t suffer.”
The Astros’ owner seemed taken aback. He hadn’t expected such a forceful presentation. “I need to take your numbers and analyze them,” McLane said. The meeting ended with a feeling of disquiet. It would be well more than a year before McLane spoke again to his tenant.
FOR HIS PART, ROCKETS OWNER LES ALEXANDER said little during the meeting. The Florida investor was new in Texas and a rookie in the world of pro sports, yet it had to be dawning on him that he was in the catbird seat. The Summit needed the Rockets, and now, so did Bud Adams. Shortly after the December 1993 meeting at Lanier’s home, Alexander met with Oilers’ vice president McClure and said he would accept a sixty-forty investment split on the new facility: He would kick in the forty, as long as the Rockets’ annual lease would be $2 million. “Sounds doable,” McClure said. But both sides waited before inking the deal—and waiting turned out to be a very good thing for Les Alexander.
His Rockets began to win. As early as February, with Michael Jordan retired from pro basketball, the possibility of an NBA championship was distinct. Bringing a winner to long-suffering Houston fans meant more bargaining chips for Alexander; and on the subject of chips, the owner was closely following the prospects of casino gambling in Texas. He spoke to friends about how thrilling it would be to secure one of the first licenses in the state. To Lanier he declared, “If you help me get a casino license in downtown Houston, I’ll build the arena myself!” Lost on the new owner was the likelihood that the image-conscious NBA would strangle such a venture in its crib.
In any event, Alexander was feeling sufficiently buoyant about his prospects that he offered the Oilers another proposal. Under the modified deal, Alexander would run the new facility by himself, pay no rent, and collect all of the advertising revenue after paying Adams a negotiated fee. Adams was indignant, and the two sides parted acrimoniously. Not long after that, Alexander informed Houston Chronicle reporter Eddie Sefko that the Rockets would have no part of the “Bud Dome.”
The Oilers’ owner turned to the mayor for support, only to find that Bob Lanier’s enthusiasm had chilled considerably. At a meeting in May 1994, Adams presented Lanier with a letter from NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, assuring the city that the proposed new facility would ensure that Houston would host a Super Bowl by the end of the decade. Lanier, of course, had seen such a letter written to his predecessor eight years earlier. “That doesn’t mean anything to me,” the mayor reportedly snapped.
Somewhat cowed, Adams and his lieutenants presented the mayor their completed financing plan for the Bud Dome. Lanier leafed through the pages restlessly. It was clear that he wasn’t impressed. “Mayor Lanier,” Adams beseeched him, “years from now your legacy will be a lot stronger for building this facility than for putting five hundred policemen on the street.”
It was as if Adams had stayed up all night trying to imagine the best way to rankle Lanier, whose pledge to upgrade the police force had been the hallmark of his administration. Shortly after the ill-fated meeting, Lanier began to make public statements about greedy owners and their lust for sports palaces with luxury boxes. To those who knew him, it was a case of the famously headstrong mayor not wanting some outside federation telling him how to select his city’s priorities. Still, Lanier sent word back to Adams that he would be willing to engage in a little field research. In the summer of 1994, Lanier’s secretary informed Adams that the mayor and his wife were vacationing at Martha’s Vineyard. Would the owner pick the Laniers up in his private jet and fly them to Cleveland and Indianapolis to tour the sports facilities there?
Adams and his associates flew to the Vineyard and whisked the Laniers away to Cleveland, where the mayor toured the city’s new state-of-the-art baseball stadium, Jacobs Field. Unbeknownst to the Oilers’ executives, that visit only hardened Lanier’s cynicism about pro sports. “The Indians told me they cut the stadium down to size from eighty thousand [at Cleveland Stadium, where the team previously played] to forty thousand and increased the number of luxury boxes,” he says. “They told me that to my face, that all they cared about was more luxury boxes.”
The contingent then moved on to Indianapolis, where they sat in Mayor Steve Goldsmith’s office and listened to him describe the Hoosier Dome’s dramatic impact on the economic development of downtown Indianapolis. But Lanier had had enough talk of stadiums. He gestured toward a window and asked, “What’s that water over there?”
“He was more interested in the downtown canals and apartments than their sports facility,” McClure remembers. “At that point, we realized we must look like damn fools.”
THE OILERS WITHDREW THEIR DOWNTOWN dome proposal in September 1994. Then Gary Bradley paid a call to the Oilers’ executive offices and spoke with McClure. Bradley, an Austin developer who owned a minority share of the Rockets, was making the rounds among the Texas pro sports executives, trying to organize a statewide association that would lobby for franchise-friendly legislation. In recent years, states like Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Washington had taken legislative measures to help fund new sports facilities—for example, by rebating stadium sales taxes or auto-rental taxes to localities. Thus far, the State of Texas had never contributed a cent to sports franchises, and Governor George W. Bush had gone on record stating his opposition to taxpayers being shaken down by pro teams. (This from a general partner of the Texas Rangers, whose new baseball field, the Ballpark in Arlington, was partially financed by a city sales tax.) But state participation was clearly in vogue; and in light of state comptroller figures indicating that only 16 percent of state revenues from pro sports come from stadium-related sales taxes (the remaining 84 percent come from merchandising), the state coffers would sacrifice little by rebating those taxes to finance new facilities.
In February 1995 representatives of the Oilers, Rockets, Astros, Aeros, Cowboys, Mavericks, Stars, and Spurs convened in Austin. Meetings with comptroller John Sharp, Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, and the Speaker of the House Pete Laney encouraged the sports executives to help craft a sports facility bill that would include tax rebates and other creative funding provisions. But at a separate meeting among team officials, an Astros executive stood up. “I’m sorry,” the executive said, “but I have to tell you this. I don’t think Mr. McLane wants to see any legislation pass that would enable the Oilers to get out of the Astrodome lease.”
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