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April 15, 2010
Byrne to Run: The (New Jersey!) Nets Exit the Meadowlands
The Awl
by David Roth
A long-time (New Jersey) Nets fan laments all the errors of the Bruce Ratner and Brett Yormark era.
All those cartoonish "Tales of Jersey" villains—Jersey City's Frank Hague and his 30 years of graft-intensive mayoralty; clowns like Hague's successor, "The Little Guy" John V. Kenny; venal flyweights like Joseph Vas and a dozen others like him—turned out to be nothing compared to Nets' owner Bruce Ratner and his marketing guru, Brett Yormark. Those slick motherfuckers came across the river to Jersey, bought the Nets from the gaggle of hapless millionaires that had mismanaged the team for decades, and showed a state that knows from ruins how ruination is done. On Monday, in a swamp-bound, half-empty arena dwarfed by the nearby hulk of a failed "destination mall" called Xanadu, an embarrassingly outsized chapter in my life closed with a half-assed Nets loss to the mediocre Charlotte Bobcats. I was too worn out, both by the experience of the game and Ratner's tenure as Nets owner, to even feel bad about it.
...Ratner bought the Nets in 2004, in order to make a new Nets arena on Flatbush Avenue—originally one of those crashed-UFO Frank Gehry designs, then a widely derided pseudo-fieldhouse, and now a compromise between the two: the centerpiece of his plan to redevelop Atlantic Yards. If it ever gets built, the arena will be a very lucrative revenue source, but for the past six years Ratner has been stuck actually paying rent to the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority for the privilege of playing in the erstwhile Byrne Arena. With his debt reaching levels untenable even for real estate developers, Ratner will soon sell the Nets to Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, unless Prokhorov's dealings with Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe derail the sale. So, yes: a class act all around. And yet still, somehow, something both sully-able and sullied by Yormark's assaultive marketing.
Posted by eric at April 15, 2010 11:55 AM