No.

I’m taking some heat from a few long-time friends that I’m not in the middle of the fight to keep PGE Park as a combination baseball/football/soccer venue. But really, it’s not worth fighting for.

It’s never been a ballpark. It’s been a stadium. And I’m just not going to settle for a stadium any longer. If we have to lose baseball yet another time, in order to get a real ballpark built, I’m all for it.

The University of Oregon, for $21 million, has built PK Park, a gem of a ballpark — a facility that may be the best ballpark anywhere between Seattle and San Francisco. And Portland, in like 100 years, can’t build a new ballpark? Ridiculous.

And I sit back and watch politicians criticize Randy Leonard and Sam Adams for what they’re doing with PGE Park, well — at least it’s SOMETHING. I mean, if you’re against the current plan for PGE Park, what exactly is your plan for professional sports in Portland? That’s what I thought — you really don’t care. You have no plan.

Am I big soccer fan? Obviously not. But for me, it is serving a purpose. It’s forcing this city to face up to its sports future. Will we ever build that ballpark, that gem, here? Maybe not. Probably not. At least not in my lifetime.

But at least we’re no longer fooling ourselves into thinking PGE Park is a real ballpark. It’s a stadium. And if you don’t know the difference, well, that’s maybe why we’re in the fix we’re in.

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I’m hearing a lot of grumbling from my baseball fan friends who are really disturbed that it appears the city will once again lose the Portland Beavers because PGE Park is going to be modified for soccer and football, with no further configuration for baseball. And of course, no obvious sites for local baseball relocation.

And I’m having to tell them that this time, I’m not on their side.

While I’m not a soccer fan, I understand this city’s romance with the sport. In many ways it is the perfect sport for Portland — all-inclusive, European, Yuppie, rowdy. It’s perfectly Portland, actually. And it’s an easy sport to garner fan support because there just aren’t many games. Perfect for a “mid-major” city like this one.

But the bottom line for me is real simple: Is PGE Park as a baseball venue worth fighting for? The easy answer is: No way. I was there as a little kid for the very first baseball game there, in 1956. It was poor then and it’s still not a good spot for baseball.

Yes, a lot of great players have played there. But if anybody ought to be nostalgic about the joint it’s me. I practically grew up in that place, as a batboy for the Beavers and later a clubhouse boy, pressbox boy, PA announcer, scoreboard operator, official scorer and even a director of group sales. Later, I covered the team for many seasons, starting when it returned to Portland in 1978. I do not think there are many people on the planet who have watched more games there than I have.

But I’m not feeling much of a connection there. It was always a very cold-feeling stadium and never a “ballpark.” Ever. It’s pretty much an inadequate place for baseball, from having too many seats to having way too many poor seats. The concourse is too small, the restrooms too scarce and the seats are difficult to get to. And when you get more than about 7,000 people in there, it’s a very uncomfortable place to be.

I long for a day when the citizens of Portland can have a real ballpark. Not a football stadium pretending to be ballpark, like PGE Park, which is still a venue better served as a greyhound race track than a ballpark.

But oh yeah, we don’t want to spend money in this town to build even a minor-league park. Mostly that’s because a great many people here don’t know how nice those cool new minor-league ballparks are — and what they would do to spark interest in the team.

And hey, we just remodeled old PGE Park a while back, didn’t we? Well, yes — but it was an overall catastrophe, for sure. And we have to admit that and move on. It was poorly designed and not well-thought-out — a project I will always believe should never have been chosen in the city’s request-for-proposal process — but that’s another topic for another day.

Yes, we did fund a poor stadium remodel. But it’s not as if this city has been investing a whole lot of coin in sports venues over the years. Sports fans, you’re living in a city that has NEVER, and I’m including old Vaughn Street Ballpark, funded the construction of a new baseball stadium. It has NEVER funded the building of a new football stadium.

EVER. I mean, is there another city in the world of at least moderate size that can say that? Yes, we funded Memorial Coliseum for peanuts, about half a century ago. That’s pretty much it for all of sports. And of course, the collective ego in this city dictates that a lot of people here think we’ve taken the right path in that regard — and the entire rest of the world is wrong. Yeah, sure.

In the last few years, Seattle has spent more than a billion bucks on football and baseball venues and while you heard a ton of grumbling about it at the time, you’re not hearing it now. People up there are ecstatic with what the Mariners and Seahawks and their venues have done for Seattle.

But that’s the difference between a big-league city and a bush-league town. And so don’t come at me asking to save PGE Park for baseball. I’m not down with that. We’ve lost the Beavers before — twice. And maybe being without them again will finally spark an interest in building a new ballpark. If it doesn’t, well, that’s fine by me.

I mean, really — this is Portland. And it’s about time we started holding out for something better than just the constant attempts to turn a cow’s ear into a silk purse.

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He was the mostly absent guy who owned the Portland Beavers and Timbers for a while prior to selling them to Merritt Paulson. My understanding is that he made a lot of money when he flipped the franchise to Paulson.

But it didn’t seem to do him much good. His financial problems have put a LOT of people out of work at TGI Friday’s restaurants all over Oregon and Southwest Washington.  (Thanks to Clueless Vince for the tip!)

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Merritt Paulson is trying to get a ballpark. He’s trying to see if some community in this area is willing to build a real baseball stadium in a public-private partnership. You realize, perhaps, that the ONLY stadium or arena of any size that this area’s ever built with public funds is Memorial Coliseum — which was done about a half century ago.

The Rose Garden, PGE Park (Multnomah Stadium when it was built), Vaughn Street Ballpark — all were done privately. My point is, we’re kind of due, aren’t we, to do some sort of arena or ballpark?

Anyway, Paulson, who had no connections here, moved into the area when he bought the Portland Beavers and Timbers and is in love with owning pro sports franchises. He’s been villified, made fun of and derided because he’s asked the public to help fund a ballpark that IT will own.

He’s willing to pour millions of his own money into this operation. Millions. And for anyone who thinks he’s got a great chance of even earning all that money back, well, you’re nuts. I just don’t think it pencils out. The fact is, he’s a wealthy guy who loves owning and operating a sports franchise.

Just like Paul Allen.

But Paul’s taken a lot of hits over the years, too. Yet the contributions the Trail Blazers have made to this community are too many to count. Seriously, with all of our job and economic problems here, the constant rain and the idiocy of some of our politicians, it’s the only thing a lot of people find themselves feeling good about when they pick up the morning paper.

And you know what? Paul has lost tens hundreds of millions on the Trail Blazers. Can you imagine? It’s never been a profitable operation. The people of Portland owe him a standing ovation every time he walks to his seat in that arena. Has he made mistakes? Of course, and we’ve always called him out on them. But on balance, Paul Allen has been GREAT for the city of Portland.

Traditionally, we’ve not had wealthy people who live in our area step up to own franchises. The closest I can come is Harry Glickman, but he wasn’t rich enough to own the team — he just was farsighted and creative enough to put a group together that had enough financial clout to buy a team in the NBA.

I think Merritt Paulson is trying very hard to be great for the Portland area, too. Certainly, to anyone who believes he’s here to make his fortune is sadly mistaken. If they think that ballpark in Beaverton is going to benefit only Paulson, they’re seriously deluded.

That ballpark will be a gathering place and a focal point for Beaverton that the city has never had. An identity and a soul. Just wait. What really bothers me is the whole political side to this. Some people don’t like Paulson’s father, Hank, the former secretary of the treasury, so they don’t like his kid. I mean, man, the guy was a REPUBLICAN — which is pretty much always a crime around these parts. And man, he’s from the EAST COAST! How terrible.

All I’m saying is that we ought to be thankful that people like Paul Allen and Merritt Paulson have chosen Portland as the home for their teams. Nobody around here is wealthy enough or willing enough to do it.

And we’re better off for what they’ve done.

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Rachel Bachman did a very good job with this story about the selling of soccer to the hooligans and punks of America. She got the money quote from a former commissioner of the MLS:

Forget the kids. The future of Major League Soccer is in young, scarf-snapping, mostly male rowdies, former commissioner of MLS Doug Logan says.

“Soccer audiences at their best have got to be a little dangerous,” said Logan, now CEO of USA Track and Field. “It’s three guys with a beer cursing at the guy on the field. It’s not a family activity.

“If you want a family activity, go to the circus.”

And then there’s these quotes, too:

“There was always this expectation, which has turned out to be fallacious, that as kids who grew up playing soccer as children, as they grow up, they’re going to be fans to go buy tickets for soccer at a professional level,” said Marc Ganis, president of Chicago-based sports consulting firm Sportscorp Ltd. “It hasn’t worked out that way in huge numbers. It just hasn’t.”

When the MLS launched in 1996, a faction of team owners thought the key to success was to attract the nation’s soccer moms and their kids, said Logan, league commissioner until 1999.

“And nothing could be further from the truth,” Logan said. “Team sports is tribal — and, unfortunately, male. In its finest heyday on ESPN, on ESPN2, the audience (demographic) for the WNBA was 71-72 percent male.

“Women don’t turn television sets on to watch stuff except maybe gymnastics, swimming — you know, on an Olympic year — and skating. You can’t force something there that isn’t there.”

A sport that chooses to market itself to people who want to behave this way is asking for some major trouble.

First, you’re not going to have much of a chance, in this country, of ever gaining mainstream acceptance. Second, at some point somebody is going to get seriously hurt or die and then your whole league is going to end up in a courtroom trying to prove it didn’t encourage the very behaviors that caused the death.

And losing a lawsuit like that, which you would, could shut your whole league down.

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I don’t think so. Not from the metro area, at least. Yes, soccer and baseball have been disconnected in the latest effort to ensure a conversion of PGE Park to a soccer/football only stadium.

Either the Beavers will end up in Lents Park or somewhere in the suburbs, is my guess. Merritt Paulson isn’t going to let go of the one sure thing in his portfolio. People in Portland refuse to come to grips with the fact that minor-league baseball is successful, financially, just about everywhere and is here, too. Paulson’s made more money off the Beavers than he’s ever made off soccer.

His move to bring the MLS to Portland is a big financial crapshoot, too. It SHOULD be successful, but who knows? Meanwhile, the Beavers will continue to throw off a tidy profit every season, whether they’re in Hillsboro, Vancouver or Troutdale. And a new ballpark, nicely done in a pastoral setting, will be a bigger draw around here than people realize.

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. . . the idea this city is probably most in love with: The idea of turning it into some sort of athletic club. This, from our comments section:

Now we can pick up the pieces , starting with recalling sammy , and fix up a fine work of Architecture. The idea of turning it into a Community Sports Center is STILL a great idea.

I could puke. I mean, there aren’t enough athletic clubs and community centers in Portland as it is? They’re everywhere — plush ones, too. There are rock-climbing gyms, weight-lifting gyms, basketball-court gyms and several places with a combination of all things necessary to a fitness center. There are so many a lot of them are losing money. To even imagine what it would take to convert that old rat-infested barn into some sort of “community athletic center” and keep it running is mind-boggling.

But typically Portland. Again, an idea fostered by people who don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.

I love the premise, too, that there’s no point in building a new Triple-A ballpark because the Beavers “only draw 5,000 a game.” Seriously? Man, if PGE Park were any worse for baseball, the Beavers wouldn’t draw that many.

The whole point of a new ballpark is to make the experience of going to games more rewarding. PGE Park has been rejected as a baseball stadium at this point. Just as Civic Stadium and Multnomah Stadium were rejected in previous years. It’s NEVER really been a ballpark — yes, Portlanders, there is a huge difference between a ballpark and a stadium — and the previous renovation did not address the problems with access, concessions, rest rooms and sightlines. PGE Park is still just a football stadium you can play soccer in.

If you’ve seen any of the modern Triple-A ballparks around the country, you’d know why one here would be a roaring success. The one in Sacramento has been a huge attraction for the community.

I used to get upset about how this town didn’t think big. But nowdays, it doesn’t even think medium. It thinks small. An athletic center? Seriously? The old idea of building a roller coaster is better than that. Especially if that coaster is the world’s biggest, or fastest, or the only one that’s covered to protect it from rain — ANYTHING that’s unique and fun.

Not in my city, though. Our big dreamers here would rather put up one more athletic club or just leave it as it is. Let someone else worry about it, is really what they’re saying. Put it off. Think about it sometime in the future.

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Watching the lacrosse LumberJax run off to another city shows just how difficult it is in this town to run a professional sports team.

The lesson learned from the Jax applies just the same to about all the other franchises that have fled this city. Luring fans into the Rose Garden for indoor lacrosse was difficult, but the fan base was growing. Attendance was really not the problem for this franchise. Sponsorships and big-ticket sales were the real culprit.

Fact: There’s not enough corporate support in Portland for another major-league team. There is barely enough for the Trail Blazers and the assorted minor sports we support. I’ve always been the biggest advocate for bringing Major League Baseball to Portland — but right now, I’d say it can’t work. That’s not because of the potential fan base, either. Such a team would draw extremely well from all over the Pacific Northwest. It wouldn’t be a problem to find people to buy tickets.

The real problem is that the unfriendly attitude in this state toward big corporations has driven most of them out of here. Oh, yeah, that’s also why we have such a high unemployement rate, but that’s another topic for another blog.

When it comes to supporting a professional sport, the fan base is necessary, but it’s imperative you also have businesses willing to sponsor games on television and radio, to buy suites and high-end season tickets, to buy signage in the arena and once in a while, to even buy into the team itself. We just don’t have enough of that in Portland right now.

Of course, one thing I’ve learned over the years in Portland is that we never learn much here about the value of sports to a community. No matter how much the Trail Blazers teach us we so seriously undervalue what pro sports can do for a community’s attitude and its quality of life.

Our political and social leaders just don’t get it. When they see Portland all geeked up over the Trail Blazers, when they see the community rising and falling over the fate of its team, when they see the joy that franchise can give to our community and how it brings us all together — they never nod their head and say, “THAT’S what it’s all about. THAT’S the value of professional sports to a community. THAT’S why chasing a pro football or Major League Baseball team is a worthwhile endeavor.”

And to me, that’s why throwing a few million bucks into a stadium once every century or so is nothing to be ashamed of for a community. Here we are in Portland, agonizing over $50 or $60 million in a city where billions have been thrown at streetcars, trams, transit malls, convention centers, condos and bike paths.

Yes, I’m afraid that aside from the Blazers, Triple-A baseball and Major League Soccer are about all the business climate in Portland can support at this time. What’s wrong with doing it in a first-class manner? The last time a NEW ballpark was built in Portland was when Vaughn Street Park was constructed in 1901. And, of course, it was privately funded.

One of these days, somebody is going to realize that venues for sports are a legitimate investment in our community’s quality of life. Just about every other city in the world recognized that decades ago, but small-town Portland keeps sputtering along waiting for someone else to do it, recoiling in horror at the thought of actually putting public money into such a thing.

Can you imagine that this city has NEVER funded the construction of a new stadium? It has renovated Multnomah Stadium/Civic Stadium/PGE Park (originally built by the Multnomah Athletic Club) two or three times — which was, as Bill Cutler so appropriately put it in about 1971, “like putting silk stockings on a hog.” 

I’m tired of it. It’s time sports fans finally get their share of the pie.

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Yes, it appears a roving gang of angry, torch-wielding men with pocket protectors and T-squares is standing in front of plans to tear down the stinky old rat hotel known as Memorial Coliseum:

That brought the discussion back to tearing down the coliseum, an idea that has created an uproar in the city’s architecture community.

Basically, what the story says is that now the city is again contemplating putting the new baseball stadium in Lents, rather than at the Rose Quarter, because, uh, you know you just can’t tear down that timeless architectural symbol, the Great Pyramids, the Taj Mahal… oops, Memorial Coliseum — hereafter known as the Eighth Wonder of the World.

My goodness, when you start getting an “uproar” in this city’s architecture community, it’s time to nail the windows shut, run to the bomb shelter, put on the hard hat and crawl under the bed. But really, judging from the rather uninspired look of everything that’s been built around here for the last 30 years, who knew the city even had an architectural “community”?

The Angry Architects, if they are this powerful, ought to forget about silly coliseum issues and get to work on figuring out how to save their jobs. With the economy nipping away at them, I’m stunned there were enough of them left to form an opinion on this issue.

Actually, maybe it is a jobs issue. It’s certainly going to take hundreds of architects to figure out a way to make that old dump Eighth Wonder of the World functional again.

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Now there is a blog for all the well-meaning but misguided people who want to “save” Memorial Coliseum.

Look, you can be opposed to everything Merritt Paulson or Sam Adams has proposed. You can hate soccer and minor-league baseball and you can be against baseball evacuating PGE Park. But I’m telling you this right now: If you think Memorial Coliseum hasn’t outlived its usefulness to the city of Portland you simply don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You obviously haven’t been inside it for an event in the past 10 years.

The old barn was fine for its time, a half century ago. In today’s world, nobody wants to be a tenant there — even the Winter Hawks, who are smartly just working this thing to try to get the best possible lease at the Rose Garden. The coliseum is empty most of the time — with good reason — because it’s inadequate as a spectator facility.

The concourses are too small, the bathrooms too few and the concession stands too outdated.

Don’t talk to me, either, about somebody’s ridiculous plan to turn it into some sort of athletic club on steroids. There are athletic clubs all over town and a good portion of them are losing money. We don’t need another one.

And please, don’t talk about it as being sacred because it’s a memorial to fallen veterans. The “memorial” part of Memorial Coliseum is a dank, usually empty pool on the northeast corner of the building, located below ground where nobody ever sees it and it’s been in disrepair for decades. It’s an insult, rather than a memorial.

Hey, nobody has better memories of that building than I do. I was at the first Portland Buckaroo game. The first Blazer game. Watched the Dream Team’s every game there. Saw the Blazers win a title and play for two others there.

But it’s over, folks. I don’t care what plan you choose for that area, the building has got to come down. Its time has come and gone and don’t insult its proud heritage by using it as a hostage because you don’t like the Paulsons, or the mayor or soccer.

Just let it go.

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