I have seen a lot of hard-to-believe things in sports. Things that make you wonder. Things that make you question. I once saw Chase Peterson fire U. of U. football coach Jim Fassel 11 months after he'd given him a longterm contract extension and unwavering support. I saw the tape this winter of Bob Knight kicking his kid. I've seen Little League parents. I once walked through downtown Detroit and saw Tigers fans celebrating winning the World Series by burning police cars.
I know strange fan behavior. I've been to Yankee Stadium in July.But this latest outcry against Larry Miller leaves me apoplectic. New depths have been plumbed right here in Salt Lake City.
They're saying Larry Miller, the man who sold the Eagles, doesn't care. They're saying we should boycott his auto dealerships and his Pro Image sporting goods stores and even his Jazz games. They're saying we shouldn't watch KJZZ anymore.
Larry Miller?
Larry H. Miller?
This is a man who runs on pure emotion. If he doesn't care then neither does Nelson Mandela. This is a man who cries when he talks about Utah's National Parks, let alone his sports franchises. This is a man who makes Mother Teresa look disloyal. Just ask Jerry Sloan. Or ask Elden Campbell.
And this is the man who bailed out Art Teece five years ago when the Eagles were in about the same shape as Keating's Savings & Loans. And the bailing out was closer to $1 million than the $200,000 or so Teece said the franchise was in debt - and Miller paid off Teece's note without question so Teece's life savings wouldn't be gone forever.
There's irony here. All of a sudden Art Teece, the former Eagle owner and former baseball owner, is Salt Lake's sports savior and Miller isn't. At least not in the minds of hockey fans. And yet it was Teece who lost triple-A baseball for Salt Lake a decade ago if you want to look at it that way. Teece was the one who sold the Salt Lake Gulls to Dennis Russell for future concession profits. As both an owner and a concessionaire, Teece knew full well that that was like approving a home mortgage for someone who didn't have any foreseeable source of income. When foreclosure came, Teece had to be the least surprised baseball fan in Salt Lake City.
Don't get me wrong. I think Art Teece is a great man in Salt Lake sports history. He did what he had to do. But so is Larry Miller a great man in Salt Lake sports history. Without Miller, the Jazz are in Minneapolis, or Florida, or Las Vegas, or Denver. Without Miller, the softball congress never comes here for its nationals and Utah doesn't have one of the country's top softball teams. Without Miller, the Delta Center isn't here, and probably not Franklin Quest Field either.
Without Larry Miller, Salt Lake is a smalltime sports town without anything other than CBA basketball and the Salt Palace drum is still an eyesore in the middle of downtown.
And without Larry Miller, hockey isn't here the past five years. This is the man who kept hockey alive in a non-hockey town five full seasons after the body was pronounced dead. That has to be an all-time record for CPR, and maybe deficit spending too. You call this a hockey town! Minneapolis is a hockey town. And Minneapolis lost a hockey team too. Salt Lake is a basketball town. We don't freeze our driveways. We put backboards at the end of them.
If sports fans in this town want to vilify somebody, Larry Miller's the last guy on the list. This is a man you'd want next to you in a fox hole - and he'd dig it first. This is a man who's never begged for anything. When the city put him on hold about a new building he built it himself. When the fans stayed away from the hockey season in droves, he sold the franchise. This is a man who doesn't lecture people on where they should go and what they should spend their money on. If they don't want to watch hockey in a state-of-the-art arena where the tickets are cheaper than lunch at Taco Bell, that's their prerogative.
Don't tick him off. This is a man who just might take his $80 million profit on the Jazz and run.
There. I got that off my chest. Now I'm going to go buy a Toyota, a Hyundai, a Chrysler, a bunch of baseball caps, and a Lexus. And I'm going to send the bill to the Screaming Eagles, the big crybabies.