I'm not a big one for using the leak of the San Francisco 49ers' misogynist, homophobic, racist, pornographic internal training video as simply the latest platform for bashing advocates of a new football stadium in general, and their patrons at the San Francisco Chronicle in particular. Hell, Matier & Ross landed a hilarious scoop -- give them credit for opening their mail and publishing it.
Verily, I share the goal of activists to prevent the team from ever building a new cathedral to its greed on the public coin. It's just that I'm not so sure that the farce of fired 49ers general manager Terry Donahue's probable act of treachery and revenge so neatly fits the paradigm. You see, I have an alternative to the alternative analysis
I admit that the theory is both stupid and simple. It can be summarized as follows: The mastermind of the video was not 49ers PR guru Kirk Reynolds. Rather, it was owner John York himself. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!
This is stupid, first and foremost, because it's wildly speculative. Then again, when you tap into corporate resources to hire a film crew, do location shoots at the mayor's office and the Mitchell Brothers Theater, and leer like a white Terrell Owens wannabe, you open yourself up to a certain legitimate level of speculation. (Memo to the 49ers' personnel department: Make sure Reynolds' successor is African American.)
Take it from your humble correspondent, though. The stupidity extends far beyond Reynolds, beyond Donahue, beyond me. All the way to the guy with the equity.
That John York is a bozo need not be belabored. What's often overlooked in the narrative of the decline and fall of the 49ers' empire, however, is that York's now-sanctified in-law, Eddie DeBartolo, was never any Oxford don himself. DeBartolo inherited hundreds of millions from the family business, bought a National Football League franchise, hired Joe Thomas, and got busted carrying attache cases full of cash to Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards. DeBartolo got himself arrested for fighting with boozy out-of-town fans. He got himself in hot water for sexual harassment, or worse. So we're not talking about the House of Windsor here. (OK, bad example ...)
Oh yeah. Somewhere in there DeBartolo had the wisdom to hire Bill Walsh. The wisdom, or the luck?
And when you start thinking about things that way, you start asking another key question. What's so different about "Dr." John York, who has already hired his Joe Thomas but not yet had a chance to find out whether he can trip over his Bill Walsh?
Mario Puzo and Frances Ford Coppola were the artists who showed us how the Mafia was a metaphor for American business. In the last half-century, first Pete Rozelle, and now Paul Tagliabue, have shown us how the NFL is an all-purpose clinic in the existential triumph of bozomania. Indeed, that is the league's genius, its indelible contribution to the history of capitalism and American culture. With their ruthless network television machinations, the commissioners have created such a vast, shared cash cow that their employers, the owners, are utterly insulated from failure. With the possible exception of a radio or TV station, is there a more foolproof license to print money for dimwitted millionaires?
Yes, York is a bozo. But even a bozo has a nose for profit. Right now, if he has any pulse at all -- enough to know that a smarmy video of strippers rubbing their titties together might be slightly ... controversial -- he knows that he has no chance of maximizing profits in San Francisco. The city's -- excuse me, The City's -- stadium politics are too hopelessly shrill and concatenated and Byzantine, for reasons both good and bad. York also knows that his predecessor bozo is a legend (albeit nearly a legend behind bars). Meanwhile, the warp and woof of his industry is so out of synch with his current home base that - in the wake of the controversy a couple of years ago over Garrison Hearst's anti-gay slurs -- he still can't depend on his on-field talent goons to refrain from defending the Reynolds video.
What's a bozo to do under these circumstances? Well, a few hundred miles to the south there's a market, Los Angeles, the second-largest in the country, that has been an NFL vacuum for a dozen years. After getting burned in rapid succession by Al Davis (Raiders) and Georgia Frontiere (Rams), the pols and the voters stand to be more congenial marks for the classic stadium-cum-luxury-box shakedown scam that has become the basic operating principle of sportsworld.
But how to get out of San Francisco, a town with a deep, if almost accidental, pro football tradition? Why, that would be like the New York Yankees threatening to move to New Jersey! (OK, another bad example ...)
One way out: You don't sneak out of town, like the owners of the Baltimore Colts did when they backed up the trucks in the middle of the night and high-tailed it to Indianapolis in the eighties. Instead, you get yourself run out of town.
So thank you, Kirk Reynolds.
Not just from the opponents of a new stadium in San Francisco. But also from the big boss himself. The guy who sat on your video for months. The guy who hasn't even bothered to fire you yet while you pursue "other interests."