Newsday’s Jon Heyman is never as attractive as he is when jumping on the Let’s Kill James Dolan Bandwagon.
James Dolan killed the Knicks and Rangers, he ruined the Garden and he personally drove Marv Albert to New Jersey, a superfecta of sports management ineptitude that can never be duplicated.
Even if Daddy lets him keep his job a few more years.
“I don’t know what the opposite of the Midas touch is,” said Mayor Bloomberg’s press secretary, Ed Skyler, “but whatever it is, he has it.”
Already, perhaps no one has done more to devastate the New York sporting scene than Junior Dolan, chairman, president and chief executive officer of the lucky sperm society.
His leadership is so putrid, it smacks of sabotage. Now, apparently unsatisfied with contaminating half the major sports in New York, Dolan is spreading his plague by demonstrating a blind determination to kill the Jets’ goal of building a stadium on the West Side of Manhattan.
If Junior Dolan succeeds, that would leave baseball as the only major sport he hasn’t polluted. Although he tried hard. The Dolans once endeavored to buy the Yankees, and can you imagine this boob of the tube sitting in George Steinbrenner’s chair? Under Dolan, the Yankees would be Tampa Bay with a $200-million payroll.
If Dolan succeeds at destroying the West Side dream – and if anyone’s due for a win, it’s him – he’d be hurting not only the Jets by leaving them as second-class interlopers in the Giants’ home park in Joisey but also the City of New York by simultaneously crushing its chances of hosting the 2010 Super Bowl and the 2012 Olympics.
That the NFL consecutively awarded the Super Bowl to bland Jacksonville and frigid Detroit shouldn’t lead anyone to question the game’s enormous value. Brian McCarthy, director of corporate communications for the NFL, said the Super Bowl generates between $300 million and $400 million in revenue. With the Olympics another possibility, it isn’t hard to see how the West Side project could pay for itself.
Starting with that whopper of a $600-million bill that’ll go to taxpayers, there are some real arguments to be made for opposing the West Side project. But if anyone believes Junior Dolan is doing this for philanthropic reasons, they’ve never received a cable bill from him. His hard-to-figure motivation smacks of self-interest (and perhaps a little envy, given that he was a runner-up when Woody Johnson bought the Jets).
Besides the reported $600-million-plus bid he made for the site for what seems to be a very murky purpose (schools, housing), Dolan reportedly has spent $20 million on anti-stadium ads. That’s a mind-boggling figure, considering how little the project would seem to impact his own downtrodden organization. Anyway, it’s play money to him, as he’ll surely pass on the cost to Long Island cable customers who have no way out.
“He wants to protect his monopoly. He’s said that,” Skyler said. Beyond that, Skyler said, “We’re at a loss, and so is the rest of New York.”