The Vine

Midway through last year’s NBA season, my hometown Sacramento Kings announced a name change for their building. What had been Arco Arena since the team’s arrival in 1985 would now be known as Power Balance Pavilion. (As in the makers of supposedly energy-optimizing wristbands popular among athletes.)

To locals, the change was sudden, clumsy and, frankly, inconvenient. Around here, “Arco” no longer signifies Big Oil, it’s simply the place where our Kings play.

It’s where, in our short-lived but glorious heyday of the early 2000s, “we” challenged—albeit briefly and unsuccessfully—the supremacy of the reviled Lakers, clanging cowbells so rabidly and obnoxiously that Phil Jackson and his coaching staff wore earplugs on the visitors’ bench. (Doing nothing to dispel Sacramento’s image as a hick town, I might add, but that’s a topic for another post on regional identity.)

So when the building signs were hastily replaced and the hardwood floors lacquered with new logos, we were resigned to the name change…and kept right on calling it Arco. (And yes, I’m well aware of the irony of rejecting one corporate namesake in favor of another. But, understand, the old name is attached to our memories now. It’s firmly established in our local lexicon.)

This is the reality of sports in the big money, corporate entertainment era, and we’re certainly not the first—or the last—fan base to wrestle with this. In San Francisco, the 49er faithful make their weekly pilgrimage to Candlestick (not 3Com, not Monster) Park. Boston built an entirely new facility and leased its name to TD Banknorth, but fans still watch their beloved Celtics and Bruins in “The Garden.”

Teams can supplement their revenue by selling the signage on the outside of the stadium. What they can’t do, not by decree alone anyway, is change our vernacular.

Who gets naming rights to our sporting complexes? We do.

Photo credit: Jocie SF

Community is a slippery thing to describe, more easily understood by its absence than presence. Usually it’s best captured through stories of people and places. Here are three wonderful examples.

(1) Wrigley Is Wrigley, and Nothing Else Is

Native Chicagoan Dave Eggers captures the communal essence of Cubs baseball at Wrigley Field—an experience soaked in history, fraternity and beer. Every so often, fans also take in what’s happening on the field.

Known as the “Friendly Confines,” Wrigley is one of the oldest—and arguably the most neighborly—of all major league ballparks. (Bostonians will make their case for Fenway Park, which is two years older, but the fierce intensity of its crowd creates an entirely different atmosphere than laid-back Wrigley.) “I grew up with the Cubs,” Eggers writes, “and I don’t remember the possibility of winning ever being high among the reasons we went to Wrigley.”

Despite (or perhaps because of) the Cubs’ perennial futility and heartbreak, fans flock to Wrigley as “[a] place that celebrates not just a team but a city—and a city’s refusal to plow the past under. [It] is the ultimate neighborhood stadium, the ultimate urban stadium, the ultimate statement that some semblance of tradition is more important than the money you could make with a hundred new skyboxes in some spectacularly soulless new stadium.”

(2) Dr. Don

Don Colcord is a pharmacist in the small, rural town of Nucla, Colorado (population: “around 700 and falling”). As proprietor of Nucla’s Apothecary Shoppe, he is, within a two-hour driving radius, the area’s de facto health care provider, dispensing medicine and medical advice in equal measures. He knows his customers’ names, and also their circumstances. When someone’s insurance has lapsed, or he or she simply can’t afford to pay, Don rings up the order anyway and sets aside the receipt for payment at a later date (if at all—each year he writes off ten to twenty thousand dollars in unpaid bills).

“At the Apothecary Shoppe, Don never wears a white coat,” the author tells us. “He takes people’s blood pressure, and he often gives injections; if it has to be done in the backside, he escorts the customer into the bathroom for privacy. Elderly folks refer to him as ‘Dr. Don,’ although he has no medical degree and discourages people from using this title. He doesn’t wear a nametag. ‘I wear old Levi’s,’ he says. ‘People want to talk to somebody who looks like them, talks like them, is part of the community. I know a lot of pharmacists wear a coat because it makes you look more professional. But it’s different here.’”

(3) Keep it up and we could solve our gang problem

(The above link opens a PDF.) The Vine’s own Chris Grant is the architect of an ambitious project in which star players from the Great Britain hockey team (field hockey to Americans) trained and mentored a group of youngsters from East London’s poorest neighborhoods.

“The scheme is quixotic, to say the least,” the writer comments. “Take 30 unsporty 11 to 14-year-olds from tough areas…, introduce them to a sport associated with toffs and private schools, organise a highly competitive fixture in three months’ time, and get star players with little or no background in coaching to teach them how to play.” Without giving away the ending, it’s a Disney-esque story of redemption for the kids and stars alike.

“Society is increasingly stratified,” Chris says. “But the hockey project showed that those barriers can be broken down very easily. People from different backgrounds need to be brought together. We need to revive the idea of the club as a focal point for communities.”

Photo credit: Seth Anderson

In a recent Sports Illustrated poll, major league baseball players named Jim Joyce (by a wide margin) the best umpire in the sport today.

If Joyce’s name sounds familiar, you may remember him as the guy whose blown call—on what would have been the final out—ruined a perfect game for Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga last summer.

With a year’s hindsight, we now know that this story has a happy ending—from the gracious, heartwarming reconciliation between Joyce and Galarraga, to the subsequent outpouring of support from fans, players, fellow umpires, and even Detroit airport’s baggage handlers. But you can imagine the torturous hours, days and weeks that Joyce endured as the healing process slowly, gradually unfolded.

A lot of businesses (and a lot of us, for that matter) resist openness and transparency for fear of losing control of the narrative—what’s being said about us, and by whom. The futility, of course, is that it’s no longer something we can control, if we ever really could. Amy Levi, one of the smartest marketing thinkers I know, likes to point out that “good marketing is telling the truth…so make sure your truth is worth talking about.”

Joyce’s story is a reminder that you can screw up. In the national spotlight. On the verge of a history-making moment. With ESPN and YouTube replaying your mistake endlessly for the world to see. And in response you can conduct yourself with such humility, dignity and humanity that you become more respected as a result.

 If you’re hiding from scrutiny, it’s probably because you won’t like what’s revealed.

Super Bowl XLV between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Green Bay Packers is being heralded as an historic matchup. Pitting two of the league’s most iconic franchises, it’s the first-ever title game in which both teams are more than 75 years old.

I’d add this to the significance: you’re hard-pressed to find two sports franchises anywhere in the country so tightly woven into the culture and identity of their cities and regions. (Although you could make a strong case for the Boston Red Sox or the New Orleans Saints.)

It’s been said that there are two topics that will draw complete strangers into conversation: the weather and a winning local sports team.

“Sports are us,” observes Eric Angevine, “and we are sports.”

For better or for worse.

For the record, I’m predicting…Steelers 27, Packers 24.

Photo credit: melissajonas

Here’s a wonderful story about the power of one passionate, dedicated individual to engage a community.

After losing his grandmother to cancer, Joe LaBelle wanted to create better access to cancer-screening equipment for women in rural locations. His initial idea—staging a girls’ high school basketball game—was stifled by bureaucratic red tape. So with the support of his employer, Ashland Health Center, he went bigger.

On October 31st, a who’s who of women’s basketball stars arrived from all over the country to stage a charity hoops event in Ashland, Kansas—a town so small it doesn’t even have a hotel; players and coaches stayed in the homes of local residents.

What began as a fundraiser is now growing bigger still. Five neighboring communities and two hospitals have partnered to form WEPAC Alliance, a non-profit organization that provides resources and education to encourage local women to take active responsibility for their health. The partnership has earned national media attention and is becoming a model for other communities around the country.

“Lack of size and/or resources should not hinder [small communities],” the organization declares on its website. “With the state of the economy, it is easy to find reasons to complain or excuse low performance. These are five rural Kansas communities (totaling approx. 2,500 people) that are finding solutions instead of excuses.”

Last week I had the pleasure of spending a day here, AT&T Park in San Francisco.

I went with a friend, and we were joined by 40,000 others with a shared a connection — whether that be a love for baseball or simply a desire to be outdoors playing hooky on a workday.

It was a Ferris Bueller-esque sort of day (minus the foul ball…although we came close). Gorgeous weather. Indulgent eating. The relaxed banter of conversation with a good friend. And, oh yeah, the Giants pulled out a dramatic victory in extra innings.

As the winning run crossed home plate, we were a large, loud, euphoric crowd. But we were not a community.

What distinguishes one from the other? Plenty of theories abound (here are three). But the most significant difference imho is this:

A crowd absorbs an experience. A community actively shapes it.

Whatever business you’re in, you can attract a crowd or you can create a community. There’s value in both.

Just be sure you know which you’re after.

Two of my great passions are community development and baseball. Occasionally they come together, as with Michael D’Antonio’s soon to be published book, Forever Blue, which is excerpted here in Sports Illustrated.

For over 50 years, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley has been one of the most reviled figures in all of sport for moving his team from Brooklyn—where it was the very soul of the working-class borough—to Los Angeles. Recently, however, another side of the story has come to light: O’Malley never wanted to leave.

In what might have been a predecessor to more recent ballpark-inspired revitalization (SoMa in San Francisco, LoDo in Denver, SoDo in Seattle, to name a few), O’Malley envisioned a 500-acre redevelopment in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene district, which would have included a mass-transit hub, housing, parking garages, and an iconic stadium.

As D’Antonio writes: “If Brooklyn had held on to its autonomy instead of becoming part of New York City in 1898, O’Malley’s [political] connections would have guaranteed him his dream ballpark. Instead, his friendships brought him only to the door of Robert Moses, the most powerful unelected official ever to serve in a U.S. city.”

Moses had his own vision for a new municipal ballpark, and it was in Queens, not Brooklyn. O’Malley could not have known it, but his bid was doomed before it ever got off the ground. After years of stalled, fruitless negotiation in New York, he was courted aggressively by the city of Los Angeles, offering land and a new stadium in Chavez Ravine. The rest, as they say, is history.

It’s a fascinating story—and one that, until now, only a handful of people ever knew.

If you want to glimpse the soul of America’s cities, study our sports teams. Or, to be more specific, our relationship to those teams, which are (for better or worse) inextricably linked to our civic identity.

These days, nowhere is that more true than Detroit, where it’s hard to say who had a worse year—the automakers or the Lions, the first 0-16 team in NFL history.

But to cast Detroit strictly as a tale of woe would be incomplete and unfair. In a wonderfully written article for Sports Illustrated, author/sportswriter Mitch Albom shows us a city defined as much by hope as despair, a city of “the most downtrodden optimists you will ever meet.”

It’s easy to denounce the Big Three, link Detroit’s fate to theirs, and conclude they made their own destiny. But as Albom points out…You think this couldn’t happen to your city?

Sports fan or not, the article is well worth reading.

Photo by mashget