As the giddiness thickens around Major League Soccer (MLS) in anticipation of opening day, it's congealing a little more in Denver. Naturally, this has something to do with the opening of the Colorado Rapids' brand-new Dick's Sporting Goods Park - a.k.a. the Dick (and I still can't believe the folks at Dick's, who seem bright enough to run a successful business, are surprised at how readily fans abuse this name). MLSnet.com celebrates the Dick in an online feature today, which isn't surprising, but the copy contained therein is something:
"Fans can be forgiven for failing to recognize one of the newest Rapids(I never thought this would happen to me), even with the concourse's 360-degree sightlines (he smiled as he grabbed her thighs roughly, pushing up her impossibly tight, short skirt) and a video scoreboard visible from streets a quarter-mile outside the entire complex (a gasp escaped her lips without her wishing it; her head swimmed as she felt his calloused hands pulling at her thong). The goal came early enough in the evening that most were still walking around wide-eyed, (the buttons on her loose blouse sprinkled to the floor, the white beads sprawling beneath them as they sprawled on the butcher block) taking in the unique new soccer-specific stadium, brilliantly lit on the edge of the prairie, the sun falling behind the Rocky Mountains west of the luxury boxes, the huge field made intimate (they climaxed together, he with grunts that muffled against her heaving chest)by the 18,000 closely enclosed seats."
Obviously, it's a fascinating read.
More interesting, though, were a pair of articles on the complex that came out earlier in the week - notably in examining the differences between ready perception and reality in sports facilities. The first of these, an article from The Denver Post devoted to the many ways revenue flows to the Rapids' stadium, throws out figure after figure; it reads more like an annual report than a feature. One item in particular caught my eye, well enough, in fact, that I remembered it when reading something in another article.
Here's that first item:
"Kroenke Sports also will make money off the 24 lighted practice fields surrounding the stadium. The $17 million fields are already 85 percent sold out for the next five years for use by local soccer, lacrosse and rugby leagues, according to the company, which also owns the Colorado Avalanche and the Denver Nuggets."
That raises the question as to what prompted a local high school coach to make the following statement in another space:
"They are building this awesome complex but no teams will be based out of there and you have to pay to use the facilities (i.e. for a tournament) from what I understand,' [Brighton High School soccer coach J] Doehring said. 'We don’t even have a field big enough to hold any team over U15 in the city besides the high school field. There will be huge expanses of open grass with no one to play on it unless you have the funding.'"
I'm not trying to say that Coach Doehring is an idiot (not even implying it, to be honest), but this touches on one of my long-time fascinations. Clearly people, and not just soccer people, are paying for these fields; there are downtown areas across the country that would kill (I think) for 85 occupancy rates in their business district. This hardly means the Dick will be a raging, fully-erect success, or that it will necessarily do all the things that proponents of these facilities say the will. But anyone reading only the second article would think this is a problem, mainly because there's nothing in that piece about how field rentals are selling. And a local high school coach seems a credible enough source, not least because he's a likely client.
Doehring's escape clause - "unless they have the funding" - speaks to something else; that whole arrangement would appear to limit access to the park and to those with means and that does suck a bit. But that two-article exchange says something about how perceptions get built and reinforced.
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