King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Rename Wrigley Field? The horror! Ah, go ahead. Plus: Bob Knight, longtime admirer of TV analysts, becomes one.
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Feb. 29, 2008 | New Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell caused a little storm this week by saying he wouldn't hesitate to sell the naming rights to Wrigley Field, part of his plan to sell off the team and stadium separately.
The rival Sun Times, of course, pounced upon the opportunity to stand up for the beleaguered fan in the face of corporate greed, and its readership pretty much followed the script. But USA Today reported a somewhat mixed reaction, quoting bleedcubbieblue.com founder Al Yellon saying, "Everybody I know will still call it Wrigley Field."
It is a little hard to get too exercised over the corporate renaming of Wrigley Field, technically named after team and stadium owner William Wrigley Jr., the chewing gum magnate, though it wasn't lost on the old man, a marketing titan, that the Wrigley name on the park wouldn't hurt gum sales.
We can all ball up our fists and wonder aloud if there's anything at all in the sporting world that's not for sale. Or we can sort of live with it. The naming rights era has been going on for a while now. There's even been time for a slump and recovery in the naming rights economy. As I noted happily last month as I celebrated the dawn of a new year in front of the Rose Bowl Game Presented by Citi®, the world has gone on.
It's an overly commercialized place, that's true, but there are bigger and more important battles to be waged in that war than whether some company's name is going to get stuck in front of "Wrigley Field" for everyone to ignore, as Web proprietor Yellon notes. What do you call the Rose Bowl?
There are two stadiums and an arena where I live, the homes of the Oakland A's, San Francisco 49ers and Golden State Warriors, that I frankly do not know the name of anymore without looking them up, or at least sitting still for a few seconds and really wracking my brains about it. Monster Park? I have yet to hear a single person say those words without saying them into a microphone.
Within recent memory, haters of crass commercialism have beaten back advertising on the bases and, while the ramparts may be weakening, have more or less held firm against ads on uniforms in the major North American sports, sportswear logos and season-opening baseball series in Japan aside.
Let 'em call Wrigley Field whatever they want and cash their checks. The rest of us can call it whatever we want. I'm through getting upset about ballpark names.
I mean until they try to rename the Staples® Center. Tradition has to mean something somewhere.