Game Plan Changes for Ballparks

You will walk into a hall of light and magic, loud noise and instant karma.

You will eat gourmet pizza and drink fine wine, browse the Internet, sample movie previews and order new shoes. You will stay for hours, drop scores or hundreds or thousands of dollars, entertain your clients and dazzle your children.

You may even, if the whim strikes, see a game.

So goes the vision and the promise--coming soon at a sports arena nearer than you think.

At least, that’s what sports developers are hoping. In architectural showpieces that range from the nostalgic glory of Baltimore’s Camden Yards to the mountain-and-merchandising magic of Coors Field in Denver--and to many more projects in the planning stages--an extravagant building boom is sweeping the sports world.

Seeking new streams of revenue, franchise owners are planning arenas that try to lure both devoted fans and their families with striking designs, nearby malls and theme restaurants, and luxuries usually reserved for elite hotels.

Some developers and team owners want to go even further. They seek to intrigue even non-fans with venues that are as much about entertainment and retailing as athletics. Their dream: to host not just a Super Bowl but a high-profile event such as the Academy Awards and, on a daily basis, to win not just sports lovers but the shopping mall crowd.

The next great leap could occur in Southern California.

Team owners in the next few weeks expect to announce a site and possibly an architect for the new home of the Kings and Lakers, who now play at the Forum in Inglewood. They say the new facility, which either would be in that city or in downtown Los Angeles, would be a sports-and-entertainment mega-complex.

Among the top contenders to win the design contract are two of sports architecture’s trend-setters--Kansas City-based HOK Sport, the No. 1 name in the field, and upstart Seattle-based NBBJ, whose sports and architecture branch is in Los Angeles.

“We want to do this arena here very badly,” said Michael Hallmark, an NBBJ principal. “Because we think it’s going to be a real key building in the world.”

Its creators hope it at least will be a milestone in the fields of sports and architecture. The arena, which is planned for completion by September 1999, would seat 20,000 and cost $140 million to $200 million. It would be set in an entertainment hub, developers say, and could be the new Madison Square Garden--the multipurpose New York arena that symbolized modern sports when New York symbolized cosmopolitan America. Except that the L.A. arena would try to merge Hollywood with hockey and NBA dazzle with multimedia retailing.

“A lot of other buildings have had pieces of this idea here and there--an exploding scoreboard or a Hard Rock Cafe or a Niketown inside,” said John Semcken, a vice president of Majestic Realty, which is owned by Edward Roski, who co-owns the Kings with Philip Anshutz.

“We’ll have the whole pie,” said Semcken, one of the executives in charge of bringing the project to life. “Nobody’s ever done what we’re going to do with this building.”

Not everyone, of course, is enthralled with the idea of injecting a shopping mall mentality into a sports arena.

Joining Forces

For instance, the new Comiskey Park, the lucrative home of the Chicago White Sox since 1991, has elicited more than a few grumbles because of a lavish atmosphere that, to some, crowds out the pleasures of the game itself.

“It’s like they got it half right,” said longtime Chicago resident and baseball fan Dan Anderson, who prefers the simplicity and integrity of the Cubs’ Wrigley Field, which was built in 1913. “The new Comiskey basically takes it for granted that the fan only cares about his seat and how close the toilet is, and not much about the game.”

Conceding such perils, sports and entertainment consultant Larry Hitchcock said the key is “maintaining human scale in monumental projects. You don’t need to be overpowered.”

The amount of money being pulled in by the new stadiums and arenas may be the clearest indicator of their popularity. The potential earnings from luxury suites, retail stores and private club-restaurants is so great that most of the parks--once built almost solely using public funds--increasingly are being driven by private interests seeking full control of future revenue streams.

Hence, baseball has a flashy new wave of buildings--with a handful more in the planning stages. At least five NFL teams are building, considering or planning luxury suite-filled stadiums. Half of the NBA’s arenas have been built since 1988.

Developers and team owners have discovered that the most profitable formula is to make the sports arena into a mini-theme park. Get your spectators to come early, spend constantly and stay late. Have them eat lunch and dinner, buy team apparel, make a business meeting out of it. They can stay at an arena club into the late hours or watch a movie at the IMAX theater.

“Sports and entertainment are now joined at the hip,” said Tim Leiwecke, president of the Kings, who helped put together the new basketball-and-hockey Pepsi Center in Denver and is Roski’s point man on the Kings-Lakers project. “And right now, live sports is dominating the entertainment industry like never before.

“I think when you go to a movie today, you expect more out of the movie,” Leiwecke said. “Look at this summer’s big movies . . . where it takes more to capture people’s emotions and imagination. It’s the same with these buildings. It’s just the reality of our society today.”

And owners crave blockbuster cash infusions.

For the past several decades, the profits generated by league and local television deals have, in the main, outpaced gate receipts. But salary costs are escalating and the price of franchises skyrocketing. Without money also flowing in from luxury suites and major sponsorships (starting at the top with companies paying millions of dollars a year to name a park), the huge investments that owners sink into their teams could go for naught.

“We are a suite-driven industry now, as much as we are TV-driven,” Leiwecke said.

The Cleveland Indians did not become hugely profitable until Jacobs Field opened in April 1994. It and the new Comiskey are among HOK’s baseball jewels, along with Camden and Coors. Now, the Indians are one of the richest teams in baseball, thanks in part to better performance on the field but also to the new stadium. The Indians sold out every seat for 1996 before the season started, which means $50 million in ticket revenues and a projection of up to $50 million more in suite and concession revenues.

(By comparison, the old Cleveland Municipal Stadium brought in $6.5 million in ticket revenues in 1985.)

Jacobs is considered to be almost a baseball theme park. The amenities include picnic areas and exhaustive concession menus. There are higher-scale club seats that include waiter service and access to semi-private clubs and VIP parking areas, and, at the top end, plush luxury suites that mostly are used for corporate entertaining.

“I could almost go as far as saying that [the new park] is the most impactful thing that’s ever happened to this franchise in its 100-year-plus history,” Indian Vice President Bob DiBiasio said.

The Milwaukee Brewers, with one of the smallest fan bases in the league, believe they can double their annual revenues in the inaugural year of their $250-million stadium, according to one executive. Designed by NBBJ, the new Miller Park is set to earn $40 million from the start, money Miller Brewing Co. plans to pay for the right to name the stadium.

Last month, the project was delayed because state legislators killed a $50-million state loan to help fund the park. Recently, team owner Bud Selig announced that he had arranged other means of financing, but it is unclear if the Brewers can meet their Opening Day 1999 target.

Milwaukee already has sold about 60 of the 75 planned suites. Mike Bucek, team vice president for new ballpark development, said they cost from $75,000 to $100,000 a season.

“What is consistent with all clients is that nobody wants what was just done,” Hallmark said. “And that’s not easy. You just set a high jump record and you want some praise for that.”

Maximum Return

Stephen Christopher Carver, the HOK architect whose designs include the Pond of Anaheim, the Bradley Center in Milwaukee and the Pepsi Center, points to HOK’s new Nashville Center--scheduled to open this year--as an example of the future. It will feature a country music hall of fame, multiple stages and still will be compatible for an NBA or NHL team.

“The sports and entertainment industries are kind of merging into a single building type,” Carver said. “Sort of pre-1980, I think everybody sort of thought of these buildings as sports designs--’Go watch a ballgame and you go home.’ ”

“In Nashville, where the new arena is being built to attract a professional franchise, it really is a building being shaped by the music industry,” he said. “I think the same thing is very much true in L.A, on a bigger scale, because they have the movie industry, the recording industry. . . . Those elements could definitely be played out in an arena to make it a tourist destination even when there isn’t a sporting event going on.”

The scramble is on, from New York to Houston, to build the ballparks so the cash will come.

“You have to maximize the revenues,” Hallmark said. “I mean, you have to. That’s the real reason they’re building new buildings, because of the salary issues and just needing to get as much revenue out of the building as possible.

“I’ve said to people, ‘Don’t build one square foot unless indirectly or directly you get some return on it.’ ”

How costly can it be to ignore the potential? The Los Angeles Clippers reportedly receive zero dollars for advertising inside the antiquated Sports Arena.

In contrast, the Portland Trail Blazers start off with $6 million a year thanks to the innovative advertising ideas built into their new Rose Garden Arena, which was designed by Hallmark.

In each of the Rose Garden’s four corners, for example, stands a giant metallic pole. Advertising rights for each pole costs several hundred thousand dollars a year.

“It’s a great bonus for the sponsors, because the value in guests telling each other to meet at the ‘Coke’ [pole] or the ‘Panasonic’ [pole] is apparent,” said Hitchcock, the consultant.

The Rose Garden also is experimenting with installing online kiosks, he said, where spectators can examine new equipment and software--basically an additional round of test marketing for computer companies.

And, bit by bit, other teams are beginning to see hundreds of new ways to milk the cash cow. Hallmark’s current idea, not yet in effect, involves projecting an image onto the NBA floor or NHL ice during breaks, an attention-getter that could be worth hundreds of thousands to advertisers.

“You’re starting to see teams making millions and millions of dollars this way,” said Jeff Wymann of the Levy Corp. The company owns or manages restaurants--such as Dive! or Planet Hollywood--that are placed in the sports buildings and cater food service to the suites.

“I think team owners are just seeing a little sliver of it,” he said. “All of a sudden, these little slivers add up, little tiny areas they never thought of before, and they’re able to add revenues in some buildings of up to $10 million, $11 million, $12 million a year” in upscale catering alone.

Jumping headfirst into the trend means designing areas for private clubs or super-suites. It means installing fiber-optic wiring into the club seats as was done at the Rose Garden so spectators can punch up their own replays on their own TV screens or order food or play music. And it means that the building easily is converted from a hockey rink to a rock music stage to a basketball floor in hours.

Maximizing every inch, programming every moment.

“I think the boom we see in stadium construction is very much related to luxury loges and other stadium bells and whistles, stadium clubs, all the new things,” said economics professor Robert Baade of Lake Forest College in Illinois. “To be competitive on the field, you have to generate the same revenue streams everybody else has.”

According to industry estimates, current arenas with on-site shops and clubs can keep their spectators spending money for an average of an hour after the game.

Future buildings could aim for even more: Luring the fan and the non-fan to the site even when there is no game, possibly by building a Universal CityWalk-like shopping area or by putting up movie theaters in the area.

The planned Laker-Kings arena, because of its location, would have special potential: It could host an Academy Award show, it could stage super-premieres, it could be the home to an entertainment museum, it could host major concerts that might be broadcast around the world, it could be sponsored by a major studio.

For those spending millions on sports, the greatest fear is to end up with a Miami Arena. It opened in 1988, still is in debt and, because of poor planning, has been a white elephant almost from the start.

Next Generation

There have been plenty of other grand concepts in sports architecture that eventually have led to bad--or passe--buildings. The domed stadium boom, which began with the Houston Astrodome in 1965--and the accompanying introduction of synthetic grass--produced a handful of large, stuffy buildings that, in general, no longer are considered either novel or cost-efficient.

In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, four huge multipurpose stadiums went up in the East and Midwest, all built in symmetrical designs and with Astroturf for easier maintenance. They later were written off as cookie-cutter parks, aesthetically displeasing and not very conducive to the new wave of luxury suites and club seats.

What team owners and developers now are looking toward are mini-Disneylands. Instead of Goofy and Mickey, the characters involved are Dennis Rodman or Ken Griffey Jr.

The great architect Philip Johnson said that sports stadiums, with their majestic size and dedicated flock of true believers, would be the cathedrals of the next century.

This next generation of mega-complexes represents quirky versions of Johnson’s prediction: These are sports cathedrals, with a catch.

“Cathedrals,” said Hallmark, “are never expected to pay for themselves.”

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The New Wave of Stadiums

New stadiums are becoming more than just ballparks--featuring shopping areas and theme restaurants--as sports entertainment and retail concerns pool their resources.

THROUGH THE YEARS

Here are some important moments in the history of America’s sports arenas:

1910: Comiskey Park opens in Chicago. (It is demolished in 1991 after the new Comiskey is built.)

1912: Fenway Park in Boston and Tiger Stadium in Detroit open, followed by Wrigley Field in Chicago a year later. They are World War I-era urban classics.

1923: Yankee Stadium opens in New York. (It underwent major renovation in 1975.)

Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum opens. It played host to the 1932 and 1984 Olympics.

1962: Dodger Stadium opens in Los Angeles. The dream that pulled Peter O’MalleyTK away from Brooklyn.

1965: The Astrodome is completed in Houston. It is the first of the domed multi-purpose stadiums with synthetic-grass.

1966: Busch Stadium opens in St. Louis. It is the first of the major symmetrical, multi-sport, Astroturf outdoor stadiums.

1987: Joe Robbie Stadium opens in Miami. It is the NFL’s first privately-financed stadium loaded with luxury suites.

1988: The Palace of Auburn Hills opens in Michigan. Its luxury seats and suburban location make it a model of the new high-end NBA marketplace.

1989: The Skydome is built in Toronto. It is the first of the mega-complexes, complete with a hotel, a Hard Rock Cafe and a retractable roof.

1992: Oriole Park at Camden Yards opens in Baltimore. It is a much-praised return to the classic, urban-style stadium of baseball’s past.