FACE IT, we knew what we were going to get when baseball named Bud Selig its commissioner. The fix was in from the start. His only constituency would be team owners.
The same, however, couldn’t be said of Paul Tagliabue after he was chosen to succeed Pete Rozelle.
Sure, Tagliabue was selected because he was perceived to be “strong on marketing,” which was a polite way to say he was a good guy to service the buy-in debts of the NFL’s newer team owners. But he at least demonstrated that he paid some attention to – and regard for – the league’s lifeblood: its fans.
Now? Well, we’re just not sure anymore. Tagliabue has shown himself to be disturbingly similar to Selig in that NFL team owners have given themselves the “steal sign” while the commissioner provides tacit approval through a series of look-away passes.
Take, as a prime example, what has been going on in Philadelphia, where taxpayers paid $200 million to help build the Eagles their new stadium. That was just the start.
Next, the Eagles instituted personal seat licenses (PSLs), a detestable double-whammy through which patrons are first forced to buy the right to buy tickets. Next came increased ticket prices.
Last month the Eagles announced that for the first time in their 70-year history no food or beverages could be brought into games. It would have to be purchased on the inside, from the Eagles.
Naturally, the team cited post-9/11 security concerns as the reason. But this was a highly suspect position, considering that two seasons had passed since the terrorist attacks.
To question the Eagles’ motives – to suggest that they were exploiting the horrors of 9/11 to pad their bottom line – brought an indignant scolding from team president Joe Banner:
“It is patently irresponsible in this day and age to question the motives behind a policy driven by and recommended by security experts. There historically are a miniscule number of Eagles fans who bring their own food to our games.
“To suggest that for this miniscule number of people and dollars we would create a policy that will require additional security and time-consuming searches – just to possibly make a couple of dollars – is, in our opinion, totally irresponsible. There is no basis for any such accusation.”
Hmmm.
Of course, to best prove that removing food and drink options was not a profit-driven decision, the Eagles might have knocked a few cents off the concession stand prices. Yeah, sure.
The Eagles also claim that their failure to install public drinking fountains in their new ballpark – a violation, revealed last month, of public code – was just an oversight. Oops, our bad.
The only water fountains installed in Lincoln Financial Field – a title that brought the Eagles $139 million in naming rights – could be found in the club lounges, accessible only through the purchase of premium ticket packages. So it wasn’t a complete oversight, was it?
Last week, the Eagles, having been fully and loudly identified by the citizenry of Philadelphia as a team that now specializes in fan abuse, rescinded their no-outside-food decree. Food stuffs carried in see-through plastic bags and containers will be allowed.
Of course, this could have been the Eagles’ new, security-conscious policy from the start. Or were their security experts ignorant to similar policies enacted at other ballparks immediately after 9/11?
Just as Banner claimed that it’s “patently irresponsible” to suggest the Eagles were looking to profit from a national calamity, it seems patently clear they were.
After all, if the Eagles were smitten by their sense of patriotic duty in banning outside food, it would stand to reason that their new stadium would carry the same name of the old stadium: Veterans Stadium.
Not that any other NFL team would behave much better.
The time for commissioner Tagliabue to stand up and take a few swings, in public, at those NFL teams that annually take extortion to a new and uglier level – the time to embarrass the teams that make suckers out of the NFL’s best customers – has long passed.
Then again, it’s never too late to do the right thing. Who knows, maybe the next time a team considers the implementation of the next institutionalized rip-off – say, 75 cents for security-approved mustard packets – Tagliabue will give them pause to think twice.
But until that day comes, we’re stuck with the terrible feeling that Paul Tagliabue, like Bud Selig, is just another commissioner who knows – whether it’s purchased inside or carried in from home in a clear plastic bag – who butters his bread.