Stadiums in America: A Case Study (Part 2)
A historical take on the city of Hartford, Connecticut and both the positive and negative ramifications of our infatuation with sports.
We last left off painting the socioeconomic picture of the city, and how the “silver lining of Hartford” — wealthy suburban neighborhoods — was the driving force behind keeping professional sports in Connecticut. You can read Part 1 of “Stadiums in America: A Case Study” here.
The Most Popular Team That No Longer Exists
While the hashtag does not prove to be incredibly active, in the last month alone, fourteen different people have posted a tweet ending with #BringBackTheWhalers. Puff pieces, throwing jabs at the franchise that would go on to become the Carolina Hurricanes, are posted constantly. “In the 30-team league,” one hopeful resurrector grumbles, “during the past 15 years, Carolina has been among the league’s bottom-third in average attendance eight times, and the bottom-half every season but one…in the Whalers’ final season in Hartford, 1996–97, attendance at the Hartford Civic Center had grown to 87 percent of capacity, with an average attendance of 13,680 per game,”. Connecticuters hope, no, believe, that an NHL team will return to Hartford. “Any place that shows they can support it deserves to be looked at,” as one fan puts it.
This flood of optimism remains nineteen years after the Hartford Whalers departed in 1997, “packing their bags, pads and sticks and moving to North Carolina[.]” So why do Connecticuters hold on to the desperate belief, that they are indeed relevant enough to be entitled to another NHL team? Because the Whalers were their team, the team that grew up in Connecticut, captivated a fan base, and ultimately abandoned the state. To understand the emotions at play here, the history of the franchise must be traced back to its original New England roots.
The Hartford Whalers have a nostalgic twang associated with the brand, but there was no correlation between the team’s popularity and product. The Whalers made the NHL Playoffs eight times in eighteen years, with seven of those playoff runs coming as the fourth-place team in their division. Before these struggles, the Whalers were a dominant franchise in the upstart World Hockey Association (WHA). In November of 1971, the WHA awarded a franchise to businessmen Howard Baldwin, John Colburn, Godfrey Wood and William Barnes; in two months time, the franchise looked very promising when they hired Jack Kelly, a former Boston University coach with a winning pedigree. This New England team, named the Whalers because of the dangerous job many New Englanders had managed proficiently, played second fiddle to the Bruins, Boston’s NHL team that leased the Boston Garden to the new team. While in Boston, despite the Whalers winning the first ever WHA Championship, due to scheduling conflicts with the Bruins, the New England Whalers decided to move to the newly constructed Hartford Civic Center in 1974. Winning garners fan support, and under the New England moniker, the Whalers had built quite the fan base in Connecticut. They continued to flirt with the World Trophy under the new Hartford Whalers brand, but soon after changing their name in 1979, the WHA folded and the Whalers joined the NHL. Herein started the Hartford Whaler’s run at mediocrity.
There were some bright spots during the Whalers stay in Hartford. The Civics Center played host to the 38th NHL All-Star game in 1986 and featured a sellout crowd of 15,126 hockey fans. Although ultimately knocked out of the playoffs in the first round, 1987 saw the team clinch first place in the Adams division. Star players, such as Joel Quenneville, would reminisce about the small-town appeal: “It was a small community, and we were the only game in town. It was a real good experience and a nice place to play hockey.” Additionally, Brass Bonanza, the quirky fight song that became a beloved tradition of the belittled franchise, remains well-known and popular.
Like all businesses, owning a sports franchise is ultimately about one thing- profit. Howard Baldwin, the original owner of the Whalers, sold most of his ownership in the team in 1988, and the team was left in ownership purgatory, with multiple groups such as Aetna and CIGNA buying majority ownership over the years. It was not until 1994 that Peter Karmanos, Jr. bought the team and seriously started looking into upgrading the franchise’s arena. Karmanos threatened to leave the city due to what he claimed to be “lackluster fan support,” with the team never reaching the 11,000 season-ticket benchmark that qualified as successful for an NHL team. Governor John Rowland kicked off the “Save the Whale” ticket campaign in 1996, an attempt aimed at doubling season ticket sales and reaching the 11,000 season-ticket threshold, but Karmanos announced his plans to leave Hartford after two months of negotiations with the city. Citing differing ideologies on several issues, the main sticking point being a new arena, Karmanos held a press conference in Raleigh on May 6, 1997, which officially announced the end of the Hartford Whalers and the birth of the Carolina Hurricanes.
Regardless of how fans manipulate attendance statistics, the same conclusion must always be drawn. Hartford was ill-equipped to support an NHL team in the long term, dancing an awkward dance in an attempt to poach from the Connecticuters who are New York Rangers and Boston Bruins faithful. Those who steadfastly rooted for the team remain upset with their exit to this day, but vilifying Karmanos in this whole endeavor is a faulty affair. Sports team owners demonstrating loyalty is charming, but owning a team in Hartford was just not a good financial investment, and the franchise’s owner capitalized on his first attempt to get out of town.
However, the attempt to #BringBacktheWhale, a campaign featuring a petition with over 3,000 signatures, should not be completely delegitimized. Whalers-branded merchandise “still has a cult following not only among fans in Connecticut but around the country,” with celebrities such as Snoop Dogg, Megan Fox, and Nate Robinson driving the insane love for the kelly green and royal blue. In fact, the Whalers’ logo remains so popular that Reebok claims it to be their top-selling non-current NHL team. A visit to the NHL’s online store reveals brands such as Zephyr, Mitchell & Ness, and New Era sporting new and updated designs for the timeless logo. Optimistic fans pointed to the city’s plans in 2009 to build a new arena in order to lure a team; fans such as Al Victor claimed that the city’s chances of getting another team were “maybe 70 to 75 percent”.
Despite the cult following, Hartford’s economy has not been in a suitable position to host a franchise since the Whalers skipped town. What became of the 2009 arena plan? It was scrapped due to Mayor Eddie Perez being arrested on bribery charges, with no other legitimate arena plan surfacing since. Even if the clothing sales appear encouraging, many think it is so popular due to its trendy presence and fantastic logo. The real fans of the team, who actually watched the team in person, are getting longer in the tooth, and there is no reason to believe that the younger generation would pick up the slack.
In essence, Hartford got its shot at a professional sports franchise, and ended up striking out looking. The team’s flight proved that the city does not deserve a professional sports franchise, as it does not have the necessary infrastructure to support it. While the Hartford Whalers appears to be a good idea, history shows that the brand is easier to sell through a market niche, not season tickets. Fortunately, the city still wound up with the Wolf Pack, a minor league hockey team, and a renovated version of the Civic Center, renamed the XL Center. The new venue has proven to be perfectly adequate as Connecticut’s largest arena, holding concerts, sports games, and other types of events, sized to meet the market in which it resides. Connecticuters still focused on their feeling that they deserve to get the Whalers back fail to appreciate the fair consolation prize derived from the team’s departure.
Robert Kraft Took Hartford on One Grand Ride
It may be hard to believe now, but at one point in recent memory, the New England Patriots were, in fact, not a good football franchise. And that is just mincing words — Robert Kraft’s team was seen as the joke of the NFL, having never won a Super Bowl until the wombo-combo of Tom Brady and Bill Belichick came to town. The team reached such a low point in 1999 that Kraft considered moving the team to Hartford, Connecticut, away from New England’s only real media hub in Beantown.
But Kraft was desperate for a good deal, and he found the perfect group of susceptible citizens. The city of Hartford, recently losing the beloved Whalers in 1997, felt slighted and deserving of a professional sports franchise, even if, with a population under 150,000, it would have been the second-smallest market to have a professional football team. However, unlike Wisconsin, where diehard fans bleed Green Bay Packers green-and-gold and own the team, Connecticut will always be split between the two New York teams (Giants and Jets), and the Patriots. Even if Hartford wanted a deal to move into the thirty-two city tier of football teams, Kraft still had his work cut out for him in order to secure his deal. And work he did. In 1998, Kraft secured “one of the richest stadium deals any sports mogul had [ever] negotiated,” as David Halbfinger noted in his recap article for the New York Times. Kraft, having only owned the Patriots for four years, was inexperienced in the cutthroat business of NFL ownership; nonetheless, the traits that landed Kraft at 8 on Forbes’ “Self-Made Score” helped broker this ridiculous deal at the time.
Kraft grew up the son of a prominent Jewish leader in the Orthodox community of Brookline, a wealthy suburb of Boston. Kraft’s family was so observant that his father wished for him to become a rabbi, but Kraft had different plans — he served as class president while attending Columbia on scholarship and went on to graduate from Harvard Business School with an MBA. Kraft’s decision was correct. Before purchasing the Patriots, he planted the seeds that would eventually become the Kraft Group, a holding company with assets in paper and packaging, sports, entertainment, and real estate, among other things.
Throughout the whole process of creating an empire, Kraft never forgot his Jewish roots. To garner support in Hartford, Kraft initially pitched his idea to wealthy and influential Jewish families in the Greater Hartford area. Kraft was well-respected among Jewish donors because of his personal commitment to donating to Jewish institutions, such as building the Hillel center of Columbia and Barnard, endowing Jewish chairs at Boston College, or creating the artificial-turf athletic field near the main entrance to Jerusalem. Kraft’s charitable efforts in the Jewish community ingratiated him to wealthy Jewish investors.
Competition brews a bidding war, and a learned businessman such as Kraft knows exactly how to exploit the capitalist law of supply and demand. When Kraft bought the team in 1994, he immediately sought out a splashy new stadium deal. Hartford appeared viable to the casual fan following the breaking story; when the Massachusetts legislature failed to finance a stadium for the Patriots in July 1998, talks with Connecticut heated up. Governor Rowland offered his seemingly incontrovertible package, leading Hartford beat writers to refer to the talk of Boston politicians as “psychobabble”compared to Rowland’s offer. And then, as he shrewdly predicted, the Massachusetts native got his deal from his preferred home state. “Hartford was used as bait,” wrote Boston.com Correspondent Bill Speros, “to get the State of Massachusetts to kick in $70 million in infrastructure improvements in Foxborough, NFL loan guarantees, and commitments from the Boston-area business community for luxury suites.” Reporters such as Denis Horgan, a Courant reporter who had publicly laughed at the “fools in Boston”, were left recounting their words in bitter follow-up pieces.
What exactly was the deal that forced Foxborough’s hand in keeping the Patriots in Massachusetts, leading to the creation of Gillette Stadium? Halbfinger summarized the deal, stating: “The Governor… was promising to build him a $350 million stadium in Hartford, to guarantee up to $17.5 million a year in sales of luxury seats, to let him keep all stadium profits without paying any rent, even to pick up the tab for the insurance[.]” Though the added benefits Governor Rowland promised provide insight into how monumentally bad this deal would have turned out, the $350 million stadium ($509 million in today’s money) does not appear too damaging on the surface. However, this $350 million dollars was fully guaranteed public money, an absolutely absurd figure in even today’s money. By comparison, the San Diego Chargers just recently asked the city of San Diego for the same number (but in today’s money); however, the two sides have yet to reach a decision on whether that is a fair figure or not. Also, the Chargers, at the time, were looking to build a $1.1 billion stadium, so this public money is a much smaller fraction of the total cost compared to the publicly-funded Hartford stadium. No matter how much San Diego politicians have been slammed in recent months, it does not compare to the idiocy of those Hartford politicians.
What did all this mean for Hartford at the time? Some of the optimism for building a stadium had merit. From 1992 through 1999, every industrial sector except agriculture reported increases in their respective wages. Four thousand new jobs were produced for the city from 1998 through 1999. New housing permits were reaching healthy levels, and the city looked to have a bright economic future.
Nevertheless, under the shiny surface, there was reason for concern. The economy seemed promising, but more and more people with high-paying jobs were moving into the suburbs around the city. And since these people no longer lived in Hartford, they were not footing nearly as much of the stadium bill as those who remained in Hartford. When the increase of urban sprawl in Hartford starting in the 1970s and the worst case of polycentric dispersion in the entire United States is considered, Hartford’s long-term problems loomed large. The individuals who were to be entertained by the stadium would just be helping a rich man get richer, and the residents of Hartford would be down $350 million, a sum they could not afford.
Yet, the people of Hartford county all supported this stadium- they would be relevant again, they would create a loyal fanbase, they would…, they would…, they would….What they would have done in reality is sink a sinking economy even more, but all the media focused on was grudgingly referring to Robert Kraft as “a man of no honor”.
Maybe Robert Kraft was unintentionally a man of honor. Maybe he prolonged the city of Hartford’s decay a little bit longer, gave it a slight glimmer of hope that they could spend the money effectively elsewhere.
Or maybe he just knew that the future “Worst Capital in the United States” was no place to house your professional football team.
You can expect the final part of “Stadiums in America: A Case Study” sometime in the near future.
