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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A disturbed silence overtook the executives. McLane had indeed been pressuring Adams to stay in the ’Dome, which he had been trumpeting as a “first-class facility” since his purchase of the Astros at the end of 1992. Yet at the December 1993 meeting at Lanier’s house, McLane had admitted that the ’Dome was “tired and old and needs a new look.” Furthermore, McLane had visited Baltimore’s state-of-the-art Camden Yards in 1993, and the impression he was left with, he would later tell me, was that of “a magic feeling, like going to Yellowstone . . . The multipurpose stadium began with the Astrodome, but everything changed with that one in Baltimore being all tailored for baseball.” But as late as February 1995, McLane was letting it be known through his surrogate that he didn’t care whether the ’Dome made good business sense for the Oilers. He didn’t want to lose the Oilers’ $3 million lease that the Oilers arrangement brought him, and that was that. Unlike the numerous baseball owners in other cities who had parted amicably with football tenants over the years, McLane wasn’t going to go down without a fight.
These kinds of antics were at variance with Drayton McLane’s well-groomed public persona. The wealthy Temple grocery distributor and amiable Baptist deacon was a bona fide Houston hero, the man who had bought the Astros from the pernicious John McMullen (under whose ownership Nolan Ryan had been allowed to depart to the Texas Rangers) and had pledged to win a World Series. McLane was everything Bud Adams wasn’t—a rock-ribbed, sharp-eyed, articulate pitchman who personified the bygone wholesomeness of professional sports. It was McLane’s misfortune to purchase the team just when the league’s network television deal was dissolving, and on the eve of a ballplayer strike that would prove catastrophic to league revenues and demolish pro baseball’s public image. Valiantly the new owner had done all he could—player trades, a new manager, spiffier concessions—to make the Astros the hottest act in town. But McLane had committed more than a few mishaps of his own. He had alienated one front-office executive after another; spent thousands of dollars trying to grow flowers in the horticulturally hostile ’Dome; thrown tens of millions of dollars at three native Texas pitchers (Doug Drabek, Greg Swindell, and Mitch Williams) who proved to be past their prime; and finagled tax dollars for ’Dome “improvements” that turned out to be hokey and ineffectual.
Still, Drayton McLane saved his most onerous misdeed for the 1995 legislative session, when he spent somewhere between $50,000 and $150,000 on lobbying fees to sink the sports facility bill. “The only issue we had there,” he says now, “is that the bill would have taxed our events at the Astrodome to pay for events at other facilities.” In fact, under the provisions of the bill, the ’Dome’s events would have been taxed only if McLane requested that the ’Dome be given “qualified sports facility project” status—in which case the ’Dome would also have received money to aid in renovations. The bald truth is that, between the strike, the lost television revenues, and McLane’s own misjudgments, the Astros were losing some $20 million annually, and McLane couldn’t bear to see another $3 million leave his pocket.
McLane got his wish. The sports facility bill was defeated in the state House. With that, the Oilers lost their last opportunity to play in another Houston facility. To many local observers, and perhaps to McLane as well, this meant that Bud’s Oilers—now without Warren Moon and coming off a 2–14 season—would languish forever at the Astrodome. Who else would want them?
Now we know.
EVEN BY TODAY’S INFLATED STANDARDS, the $292 million Nashville package was a sweetheart deal: a new stadium, complete with 140 luxury boxes, and a $28 million relocation fee thrown in. Never mind that Nashville was a smaller media market than Houston. NFL owners shared all the TV revenue anyway, and besides, the Oilers’ new town had a higher per capita income than their old home—which meant higher attendance, more concessions purchased, and those high-priced luxury seats filled to capacity. No longer would Bud Adams have to endure the pity of his peers for suffering tenancy at the Astrodome; now he was the envy of them all.
The nonbinding agreement to move the Oilers to Tennessee was struck on November 15, by which time Drayton McLane was himself negotiating in earnest to sell the Astros to Virginia telecommunications magnate Bill Collins for about $150 million. When word of his doings leaked out, McLane seemed unprepared for the outrage. Showing a side of himself that Houstonians hadn’t previously seen, the Astros owner gave the city two weeks to agree to pledge 25,000 in season ticket sales in each of the next five years, find some local businessmen who would buy out 30 percent of McLane’s ownership, and—surprise, surprise—agree to finance a new stadium with a retractable roof. The demands were outlandish; the best the city could do was promise 17,200 season ticket holders over the next two years. McLane clucked that the response was “very disappointing,” but that was nothing compared with the disappointment he felt when baseball officials informed him that he could forget about letting the team move to Virginia—at least for the time being.
Houston has one more year, McLane says today, to prove to him that “it can host a major league baseball team that’s successful at the level it needs to be competitive.” The Oilers may serve out the end of their ten-year ’Dome lease before moving to Nashville, though such a lame-duck scenario has prompted negotiations for a lease buyout. In any event, both owners have looked beyond Houston because other teams in other cities are making more money through better revenue-producing facilities. Make no mistake: It is not merely the owners who have driven up the price of franchises. This year Adams had to cough up $28 million to sign rookie quarterback Steve McNair. McLane offered his star second baseman, Craig Biggio, $20 million and Biggio turned it down. More money means better players; better players mean championships; championships mean more money.
By now, this cycle of greed should surprise no sports fan. The question is what to do about it. Lanier emphasized that he doesn’t “hold Adams a bad guy for all of this. He’s just in the system. This is the way the system works.” Lanier made clear his loathing of sports monopolies. But as one Houston sports insider reminded me, “One city can’t remake the world.” Astute as Lanier may be, his mayoral legacy now includes the imminent loss of one pro franchise, and possibly a second.
And possibly a third. Dismayed by the recognition that he made a mere $500,000 in luxury box revenues last year while the Chicago Bulls cleared $16 million, Les Alexander is apparently convinced that the Summit will eventually prevent the Rockets from remaining “competitive.” After the first championship, a Florida businessman offered to buy the Rockets from Alexander for $125 million—a $45 million return on his investment. Alexander brushed aside the offer; despite about $20 million in earnings last year, a good part of that figure came from expansion fees, and Alexander has made public his concerns that the Rockets will soon top out if they continue to stay in the Summit.
What Alexander has not made public, according to two sources close to the owner, is his interest in Las Vegas as a future destination for his two-time world champions. And why not? Las Vegas is the nation’s fastest-growing city; its casinos could finance a new stadium, replete with the coveted luxury boxes, in a heartbeat. Unlike Adams or McLane, Alexander has no allegiance to Texas. (His wife, Nancy, a devout animal-rights activist who has sought a ban on leather basketballs in the NBA and a ban on furs in the Summit, has never felt altogether simpatico with Houstonians.) And, as is documented by the Rockets’ heinous new uniforms, the owner has an appetite for kitsch that perhaps only Las Vegas could sate.
Lanier has heard the Vegas low talk and will only reply tersely, “He’s got a lease in the Summit till the year 2003.” But as Lanier himself pointed out in his Senate testimony, “In terms of breaking leases—man, they’re experts at it.” And Alexander has litigious impulses. Adams and McLane have made their plays. Now, says one confidant of the Rockets owner, “The guy that’s lying behind the log is Les Alexander.”
And what would all of this do to Houston? To any town? It is true, as the Greater Houston Partnership has pointed out, that the Oilers make up only 0.1 percent of the local economy. It is further true that cities like Baltimore and St. Louis did not suffer either economic or psychic collapses when their teams abandoned them. If the Roman Empire can expire, so can the NFL. If the Colosseum can become obsolete, so can the Astrodome. And without speaking for Cleveland, if the Oilers and Astros and Rockets leave Houston’s life, I imagine that Houston will go on living.
Already, a Canadian Football League team—the Baltimore Stallions, now looking for a home given their likely displacement by the former Cleveland Browns—has visited the ’Dome. At this writing, no deals had been struck. Still, we can hope. There aren’t many stallions left in Houston; then again, there aren’t many oilers left either. There also isn’t much innocence left; but maybe a game played semi-competently by the low-paid and unendorsed, in a creaky old dinosaur of an arena, would do us all some good. Bring on the Houston Stallions.
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