Will the Senior Bowl kick off in 2010 anywhere but Ladd-Peebles Stadium, where it has been played for 59 straight years?
Almost certainly not. But the mere suggestion, floated in a Tampa Tribune story that the game was shopping itself and had offered the Tampa Sports Authority a right of first refusal, arrived at a conspicuously useful moment: the Senior Bowl’s 10-year lease at Ladd has expired, and a new one has not been negotiated.
The game is about as likely to leave Mobile as the Bankhead Tunnel. That is cold comfort, though, to anyone watching how this negotiation is shaping up.
What Could Actually Walk
The uncomfortable scenario is not that the Senior Bowl relocates. It is that everything which makes the Senior Bowl valuable relocates and leaves the name behind.
The week is really four things stacked together: a pre-draft player evaluation camp; a coaches’ convention; a series of charitable and social events; and a mammoth community tailgate, with a football game almost as an afterthought. Strip out the NFL’s participation, the title sponsor and key staff, and Mobile could be left holding a logo.
The NFL wanted no part of the argument. “We really don’t know anything about this,” said league spokesman Greg Aiello. “It’s not our game to move.”
Senior Bowl president and CEO Steve Hale said there had been no contact whatsoever with the Tampa Sports Authority. “Most years at this time we get inquiries expressing interest in the Senior Bowl,” he said, “and because our contract has expired and not been renegotiated it leads to a lot of speculation that, in effect, we are a free agent.” Only the Mobile Arts and Sports Association, which owns the game, can move it.
MASA board chairman Vic Lott issued a blistering statement about “the firestorm of falsehoods and rumor mongering” touched off by what he called an erroneous story.
The Money Underneath
The rumor did not appear from nowhere. For two straight budget years the Senior Bowl asked the city for funding and got nothing.
The sore point is the Gulf Coast Classic, the Alabama State–Southern football game that Mayor Sam Jones budgeted at $450,000 — a leap from the prior year’s $40,000 — before the City Council throttled it back to $275,000. Senior Bowl officials, who feel taken for granted after six decades, watched a brand-new event collect a six-figure appropriation while their own $500,000 request went nowhere.
Councilwoman Connie Hudson, who chairs the finance committee, recalled that Hale sat through two days of budget hearings, grew agitated, was offered the chance to make his case — and declined, leaving without asking for anything.
“I would really hate to see it,” Hudson said of losing the game. “It might get lost in a city like Tampa.”
Council President Reggie Copeland was blunter about the Tampa talk: if that city lands the East-West Shrine Game, as expected, why would it want two college all-star games? “The MASA Board is too smart for that.”
Does the Game Need the Money?
MASA’s own filings complicate the case. The nonprofit reported net assets above $3.1 million for the period ending March 31, 2008, including stocks and bonds then worth more than $750,000. Hale’s compensation package runs in the neighborhood of $250,000. MASA distributed more than $200,000 to 20 charities that year, from $30,000 to USA Children’s and Women’s Hospital down to $75 to United Cerebral Palsy. And it committed roughly $1 million to buy and renovate an 1890s building at Dauphin and St. Emanuel streets for its offices and a planned Senior Bowl Hall of Fame.
Councilman Fred Richardson was unmoved by the threat. “I say if another city can beat providing the Senior Bowl a free facility with millions spent in upgrading the facility for them, then so be it.” Councilwoman Gina Gregory took the other side: the city funds events that return on the investment, and this one does.
The Real Grievances
Talk to people close to the game and the complaints are less about cash than courtesy. The Senior Bowl wants more sky boxes and more control of them. It wants faster response from stadium management. It wants, in a word, to feel wanted.
“I think we’ve got to get along better with the Ladd Stadium Board,” said Mike Maitre, MASA’s longest-serving trustee and a former Ladd board chairman. “Sometimes we don’t feel as welcome as we’d like to feel.”
The city has hardly been idle. It spent more than $800,000 on the artificial surface that allows NFL-standard practices at Ladd, and downtown now offers the renovated Riverview and the restored Battle House for the league’s hotel and interview needs. But Ladd, as one observer put it, is old enough to draw a Social Security check, and the University of South Alabama’s new football program is now competing for the stadium’s attention and its improvements.
Mobile County, for its part, put $100,000 into the 2009 game from its marketing account, advanced the anticipated 2010 appropriation, and was set to vote on $150,000 toward the Hall of Fame museum.
George Finkbohner, attorney for the Ladd-Peebles board, professed bafflement at the uproar. He had sent MASA a letter four months earlier noting that the lease had expired and proposing to negotiate a new one — routine legal work, he said, of the sort that happens every working day.
“A lease ends, you negotiate and enter into a new lease and that’s where we are,” he said. “The Senior Bowl is great for Mobile. The city has been great for the Senior Bowl. I really don’t see why this is a big story.”