How Suite It Is

Last week, Mayor Kay Barnes made her long-awaited downtown arena financing announcement, and The Kansas City Star wasted no time revealing whether it would get behind the effort to build the Sprint Center.

The next morning’s paper reported news of the plan with a front-page banner headline the likes of which are normally reserved for natural disasters and declarations of war.

Not that the Strip can blame the paper of record for its excitement. This meat patty can’t help quivering a little, too, over the way Kansas City’s heart gradually seems to be coming back to life. But we still have a lot of unanswered questions about how an arena with no NBA or NHL team will get birthed without taxing the locals, particularly when an operator like Phil Anschutz is involved.

But the Star seemed to have few qualms about the deal. Particularly on its sports pages, where columnist Jason Whitlock could hardly contain himself, declaring Barnes a “playa” and gushing as if the lack of such an arena were the only thing keeping this city from joining the ranks of New York and Paris for sheer excitement.

Nice to see such an endorsement for a $250 million sports arena, paid for in part by public funds, from the one person in town who never has to shell out money to see a game.

Whitlock’s been bellyaching about Kemper Arena‘s rundown condition for weeks. Obviously, it’s torture to report from such a drab place instead of the new sports entertainment palaces he sees on his travels.

Is the game any different at a high-tech wonder like the American Airlines Center in Dallas? Nah. The free throw line is still 15 feet away, the rim 10 feet off the ground, the court for college hoops 84 feet long.

The game in the stands has changed radically in recent years, though. And sportswriters are directly effected.

A while back, this brisket attended an NBA game as a member of the press at a gleaming new arena. Arriving an hour before tip-off, the Strip was surprised to find the town’s scribes working hard at their pregame workout.

Dashing back and forth to the buffet line.

Yep. Cover City Hall or the cops, and you have to fend for yourself. But write about the local ball club, and you get as much free food as you can stuff down your gullet. You get seats in a cozy section with a great view, and you even get stats reports throughout the game, supplied by runners employed by the team. (Team owners, after all, never forget that their industry is the only one with a separate section of the daily paper devoted to giving it free publicity.)

No wonder Whitlock is salivating for a new stadium and the sort of culinary variety it might offer to journalists.

If sportswriters and athletes have enjoyed the upgrades to stadium architecture, someone else is really the intended beneficiary of the new stadium ideal. The success of a venue appears to be measured solely by how well it caters to its wealthy patron.

An example: As part of its curing process, this side of beef spent some time in Los Angeles, where it had its first encounter with a Phil Anschutz outfit. At the time, the Strip had managed to become friends with a millionaire, which isn’t that hard in L.A. — the city is lousy with them.

One of the benefits of this association was an invitation to a basketball game in a luxury suite at the Staples Center. Arriving at the stadium, we bypassed the large crowd of poor saps waiting to get through a regular entrance. We were whisked through a VIP door and into a waiting elevator with some other bigwigs. (This is when the Strip learned that in person, Dustin Hoffman resembles an aging hobbit. He couldn’t have been even 5 feet tall.)

We tried not to stare as the elevator hit our luxury level. From the walkway, we could see the intricate system of escalators and catwalks that carry people to their assigned seats. The layout had been carefully planned so that luxury-suite people and bleacher folks would never mix.

The Staples Center, we realized, was the most segregated public space we’d ever been in.

In our luxury suite, several rows of seats faced the court. Behind them was a sort of living room with couches, televisions, cabinets and an attentive manservant.

Wine and cocktails flowed. In the refrigerator were bottles of several kinds of beer — the real stuff, not the 3.2 suds fans were served from taps at the food stands. (This was before glass bottles were eventually banned; in 2000, some rowdies in a luxury box forgot their station and hurled bottles at the stands below, nearly putting out a woman’s eye.)

The third quarter meant that the dessert tray was coming around: decadent chocolate creations stacked on a cart and wheeled into our suite.

This was living. The game was exciting, too. But the Strip couldn’t help itself. It shared some of the details of luxury box life in print and wasn’t invited back.

The Staples Center takes the private suite concept to an extreme. In Los Angeles, a city built on celebrity and stark differences of wealth, it’s an arrangement that works. For a few hours, the beautiful people and the working Joes who love their Lakers and Kings gather, though they’re kept carefully away from each other. And when the game’s over, they abandon the neighborhood as quickly as possible.

The Staples Center was built next to L.A.’s convention center in a grubby part of downtown that had little distinction except that it was where a couple of freeways came together. Despite the success of the Lakers, the immediate neighborhood didn’t benefit from the sudden influx of traffic. It’s still an ugly corner of the city, but it has a shining arena in the middle of it. Soon, we’re told, it’ll be saved by a new convention hotel surrounded by entertainment venues, restaurants, new lofts and condos and office spaces, a development called Los Angeles Live!

Hey — our new, H&R Block-anchored entertainment district is called Kansas City Live!

That must mean we’re in the big leagues now, a peer to other burned-out cities where more master planning comes off as so much life-support.

This meat patty also spent time in Phoenix, another city whose leaders have been seduced by the same downtown dream of big arenas and convention centers that promise to bring in outsiders like cowboys to a chuck wagon. Phoenix recently moved past Philadelphia to become the fifth largest metropolis in the country, and it’s a few years ahead of Kansas City in its own redevelopment of a dead town center. Phoenix already has a gleaming arena (home to its basketball Suns) and a superb downtown ballpark (home to its baseball Diamondbacks). It’s also expanding its convention center and has designs on becoming a biotech center. However, with all of that in place or planned, downtown Phoenix is still a ghost town after dark.

That’s because the people who design these big-box downtown schemes, and the people who patronize them, tend to be boring suburbanites who like to be home in time for the 10 o’clock news.

In fact, Anschutz already thinks our entertainment options are a bit too wild. The rich Christian crusader is so concerned that our movies are unwholesome that, when he’s not building new sports temples, he’s committing more than $300 million to film projects that eschew violence and dirty words. (The religious but squeamish billionaire actually turned down an offer to help finance Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ because it was sure to get an R rating.)

Perhaps this cynical steakburger is being too pessimistic. With a little luck, our tax-accountant-anchored downtown entertainment complex might capture some of the flavor of authentic street life.

Or it may not, becoming instead an overblown shopping mall that empties even before fans stream out of the Sprint Center following the Yanni concert.

But at least when a college basketball tournament comes to town, we’ll know that one person, a certain sports columnist, will have had a good meal.