So who's advising Dave Checketts?
Karl Malone? Cosmo Kramer?
Checketts needs new PR help and fast. Did you follow the latest row?
Just when you thought all would finally be quiet on the Real Salt Lake front now that the team got its way with public funding, Checketts and the boys delivered more controversy and dispute last week.
It was a banner week, even by RSL standards. It began with news of a memo from Checketts to Mayor Rocky Anderson in which he tried to turn a $7.5 million donation for a youth sports complex — part of a campaign promise to secure public funding for its stadium — into an "investment" that included parking and concession money, naming rights, etc. Oh, and team CEO Dean Howes reportedly floated the idea of being released from the commitment completely.
Anderson and legislators lashed out at Checketts in the media, claiming the public was deceived and how dare he, and right then you knew it had happened again: Pull up a chair; this was going to be good. Checketts was in another dispute, this time with his political pals. It was almost heartwarming — after all, don't these guys deserve each other?
This prompted an emotional Checketts news conference in which he claimed his integrity had been smeared, that he was the only one who understood the true nature of the promised $7.5 million, and everybody else got it wrong, followed by the usual righteous indignation, blah, blah, blah. In the end, he promised to donate the money with no strings attached, after all, and we were right back where we started. He made an about-face to his about-face, but it was too late to save the goodwill he hoped to generate from the original offer of the donation.
Checketts then ended the week by firing the head coach and general manager of his winless team and replacing him with — ta-dum! — one of his players.
Doesn't this guy ever get tired of or embarrassed by such drama, played out publicly over and over. Memo to Dave and Friends: Take a week off. Feel free not to be in the news cleaning up some mess.
The week ended with a story in the Salt Lake Tribune that noted that Checketts' now-defunct SportsWest TV network's old debt of $300,000 was now paying 40 cents on the dollar and some creditors still haven't been paid after more than a year of waiting.
Yep, that investment of public funds looks like it's in good hands, all right. Do you think Greg Curtis, Gov. Huntsman, Tom Dolan and John Valentine are squirming in their seats? Let's hope so.
For almost three years, Checketts has conducted a clinic in how to alienate people and lose friends, whether it's running to the governor and his wife to get public funding for Dave's Big Soccer Stadium when he didn't get his way, calling Salt Lake County politicians names, taking nearly eight months to produce financial records for the county to review, ripping Larry Miller in the media, threatening to take his team to some mysterious buyer in St. Louis, getting into a war of words with not one, but two mayors. In the end, Checketts always swoops in from the East and says, "Wait a minute everybody, I'm the good guy and the smartest kid in the class; everybody else is wrong."
Now it has been reported that he is hinting that he might take his sports academy, which was supposed to be built near the sports complex, elsewhere.
Gee, where have we heard that before?
There was one wonderfully ironic moment last week when RSL demanded to review the business plan on the proposed sports park as a contingency to its $7.5 mil donation — this from the same outfit that refused to deliver its books to Salt Lake County for eight months so the county could do the same thing.
This thing just keeps getting better and better.
Has anything ever made a bigger pain in the arse out of itself than RSL? It's been 2 1/2 years of hand-wringing, of legislators arguing, opinion polls, referendums, audits, threats and name calling, and all this for a professional soccer team; and not just a soccer team but one that plays in a feeder league for the big boys in Europe and barely registers on the consciousness of American sports fans. If you can name three teams in the MLS, or two RSL players not named Freddie, then you have an I HEART SOCCER sticker on your car.
Even when Checketts and Real get what they want — public funding — even when they have a powerful ally — Mayor Anderson — they manage to screw it up. If they run the team the way they have run their stadium campaign, it's going to be a long, rough ride.
E-mail: drob@desnews.com