Gambling not biggest issue with Colts deal

Five hundred million bucks? Hang on a sec. Lemme check my other pocket. A dime, a Chuck E. Cheese’s receipt, a couple hundred large ... Come again? You say the price tag for the Colts’ new stadium could now top $687.5 million, according to the Indianapolis Star? I don’t mean to complain here, but that’s a lot of coin just to make a few Mayflower jokes disappear. Yet now the artist’s renderings are all over the papers, and the deal, announced Sunday night, is on the table – and if this is Jim Irsay’s shot at clearing the family name, we should trade on that. Let’s take advantage of his big heart. Let’s use his desire to prove he is not his father’s son, packing up the Mayflower vans to escape yet another fleeced and hurting city. Let’s build this thing. But let’s ask some questions about it, too. Let’s state the obvious, first of all: $687.5 million is a chunk to spend on a football stadium when you could spend it on education or law enforcement. Despite what the NFL wants you to believe, it doesn’t create jobs. The only way it does this time is if they make the new stadium’s retractable roof manual, and hire a bunch of laid-off steelworkers to crank it open on balmy September days. No, having an NFL franchise in your town is about image, not employment. It’s about quality of life, and all those fabled intangibles. And so, yeah, let’s plunk down that $687.5 mil, and not waste energy grumbling about how it ought to be going to cops and teachers. Let’s quit wringing our hands over the prospect of paying for it with gambling money – or at the very least, let’s wring our hands over it for the right reasons. We need to be concerned about this deal, we need to ask questions, but none of them should be about besmirching the holy image of the NFL with gambling money. That’s already happened. The NFL’s weekly injury report is nothing but a thinly veiled service for gamblers. Daily newspapers, including this one, run the league’s point spreads. A Googling of “NFL” and “gambling” will get you more than 2.1 million hits. Gambling and the NFL are Batman and Robin. So cut the phony moralizing. Instead, let’s talk about the wisdom of spending $687.5 million to build a 63,000-seat stadium when the existing stadium seats just 7,500 fewer. Let’s talk about spending money on a retractable roof that, in central Indiana, doesn’t figure to be open for more than two or three dates a season. Let’s talk about using state-sanctioned gambling to pay for a stadium not because it’s gambling, but because as a financing vehicle it will indirectly suck dollars out of communities that have no stake in it. All those new slot machines Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson wants to cram into Union Station aren’t just going to take the money of people who live in Marion County, after all. People from Fort Wayne will play them. People from Evansville will. People from Gary and Bedford and Columbus and South Bend. Please tell me why their money should go to finance a stadium whose revenues will largely benefit only Indianapolis. Yes, I know, the Colts are Indiana’s team – regionalizing their appeal is a priority, I’ve been told more than once by Colts officials – but if that’s the case, the team itself should be kicking in a little more for their new digs. The bargain the Colts cut with Indianapolis is a sweetheart deal plus: the city is footing more than 90 percent of the cost, roughly 25 percent higher than the average NFL stadium deal. Six-hundred eighty-seven million bucks? Is that the price tag? On the one hand, that would buy you two B-2 bombers, or almost 42 million pizzas, or more than 171 million six-packs of Bud Light. On the other, it buys you Peyton Manning ’til the end of time. Hmm. Anybody got change for this five? Ben Smith has been covering sports in Fort Wayne for 16 years. His columns appear four times a week. He can be reached by e-mail at bensmith@jg.net; phone, 461-8736; or fax 461-8648 or at the “BenSmith” topic of “The Board” at www.journalgazette.net.