EDITORIAL
The New Jersey Nets and Miss America have something in common these days.
No, it isn’t the fact that the Nets have turned into quite an attractive basketball team, boasting a quintet of participants from California, Utah, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Washington who thrill the audience with their talent and poise although, remarkably, that happens to be a fairly accurate description of this suddenly not-so-mediocre franchise’s performance this season.
But the team, for all its character and finesse, has a corporate parent that likes to play hard ball. YankeeNets, the sports conglomerate whose holdings include not only the Nets but hockey’s Devils and baseball’s Yankees, as well as cross-marketing agreements with the football Giants and Manchester United of the English soccer league, wants a new arena for New Jersey’s National Basketball Association entry and if it doesn’t get it, it’s threatening to move the Nets across the river to Madison Square Garden.
It will surprise no one to learn that a principal owner of YankeeNets is George Steinbrenner, no stranger to the fine art of bullying. He has evidently convinced his New Jersey colleagues, Raymond Chambers and Lewis Katz, that bombast is the best strategy for convincing New Jersey to build a new arena in downtown Newark. Thus the threat: If New Jersey doesn’t get its act together, and soon, to come up with $190 million in state funding for the Newark arena, the Nets are Big Apple-bound.
To which acting Gov. Donald DiFrancesco, Gov.-elect Jim McGreevey and legislators of both houses and both parties, grappling in an already uncertain period of transition with a stagnant economy and an ever-growing budget deficit, ought to rise up and respond in unison: "Don’t let the door hit you on the way out."
It isn’t that building an arena in Newark is necessarily a bad idea. In fact, it appears that a clear majority of lawmakers in Trenton, Democrats and Republicans alike, support it, and they’ve been trying to hammer out the details for several months. But there’s no 24-second clock in the political arena; these things take time, and the impatient sports moguls of all people should recognize that the devil is often in the details. (In this particular case, so, it seems, is the fate of the Devils.) Threatening to leave the Garden State for the Garden because the wheels of government aren’t moving fast enough to suit their fancy is a strategy unbecoming the YankeeNets brass, and state officials should not allow themselves to fall victim to this sort of extortion.
Which brings us to Miss America. Pageant organizers, claiming the Atlantic City mainstay is running a $600,000 annual deficit, want the city and/or the state to kick in an operating subsidy or they’re threatening to pack up and move the pageant elsewhere. Connecticut’s Mohegan Sun casino and Florida’s Disney World are mentioned as possible destinations.
The Atlantic City Convention & Visitors Authority would surely like to see the Miss America pageant stay right where it started back in 1921, as the Miss Inner-City Beauty Contest, and where it has remained and blossomed into a late-summer spectacle ever since. The pageant, which Atlantic City Mayor James Whelan appropriately characterizes as "a delightful anachronism," brings national attention and a week’s worth of sold-out hotel rooms to the city that made Monopoly famous (or was it vice versa?), but that hardly qualifies it as a treasure worthy of ransom.
Neither authority members nor state officials should be taken in by this boorish bit of blackmail on the Boardwalk. If Miss America wants to move to Connecticut, Florida or any other venue, New Jersey’s message to the grandmother of puerile pageants should be a simple one: Bon voyage, baby. We’d be more than willing to help organize a suitable going-away party, capped by an entourage at the foot of the Atlantic City Expressway, singing: "There she goes, Miss America."