The city of Charlotte looks poised to give the Carolina Panthers $650 million for stadium renovations. WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, says that’s an unfortunate part of the cost of having big-time sports.
Given the state of the Carolina Panthers these days, giving them millions of dollars in taxpayer money feels like buying a Ferrari for a teenager who just totaled his Ford Focus.
The Panthers had the worst record in the league, which would have earned them the No. 1 draft pick, except they traded that pick last year to draft the quarterback who led them to the worst record in the league. The team is on its seventh head coach in six seasons. As the late Skip Caray used to say in the bad old days of the Atlanta Braves, a lot of fans come disguised as empty seats.
Now the city is getting ready to give the Panthers $650 million for renovations to Bank of America Stadium.
And here’s the brutal truth: They probably should.
If you want pro sports in your city, you have to get in bed with billionaires. And they didn’t get to be billionaires by spending a lot of their own money.
The problem is, we don’t get to choose our billionaires. The Panthers’ first owner, the late Jerry Richardson, was a grumpy billionaire who turned out to be a creepy billionaire. The current owner, David Tepper, is an arrogant billionaire who has turned out to be a thin-skinned billionaire.
Regardless of their character flaws, they’ve had the ultimate leverage over the city: They can threaten to move the team.
Long-timers in Charlotte know that’s not an idle threat. George Shinn moved the Charlotte Hornets to New Orleans in 2002. (Shinn, FYI, was just a multimillionaire, and turned out to be a sleazy multimillionaire.)
The point is, it’s not out of the question for the Panthers to move … even the whisper of it would be a potent threat. Some of you might say “good riddance,” and that’s a reasonable response. Multiple studies have shown that pro teams’ economic impacts are far less than teams and their cities claim. You can make a case both financially and morally that we shouldn’t support Tepper and the Panthers.
I’d go so far as to say that we don’t need pro sports in Charlotte the way we used to. Landing the Hornets in the '80s, and the Panthers in the '90s, removed a big chunk of that chip on our shoulder that we carried for decades. I still hear occasional rumblings that we need this or that to be a world-class city. But it feels like our bigger problem now is managing how world-class we’ve become.
Part of that management is being honest. City officials weren’t honest about the public feedback they got about giving the Panthers money for stadium renovations. As WFAE’s Steve Harrison reported, economic director Tracy Dodson soft-pedaled the volume and intensity of opposition recorded in their own survey of residents.
The honest thing for the city to do is stand up and say that the Panthers are a civic good, even when they’re terrible, and this is the cost of keeping that civic good in Charlotte. Like it or not, that’s the way the NFL’s off-the-field game works.
Maybe, one day, if it’s too much to tolerate, we just let the Panthers go.
But for now, cut the best deal you can with our arrogant thin-skinned billionaire and move on.
Tommy Tomlinson’s On My Mind column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org. It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section below. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org.
