Hypocritical Stance Taken by Owners

Worse than turning away Howard Milstein and Daniel M. Snyder is the reason, which the NFL owners are too gutless to give. The owners who object to the purchase of the Washington Redskins can talk financing until they’re blue in the face, but that’s small potatoes. The fact is, there are a number of owners who simply don’t want Milstein and Snyder in their private club and are too cowardly to say so publicly because they know how distasteful that appears.

That’s what this is about, because Milstein and Snyder have more than enough money to operate any professional sports franchise. The trustees of the Jack Kent Cooke estate recommended an ownership group the other NFL owners didn’t want, so they won’t have ‘em. And the question has to be raised: Will the owners find anybody acceptable other than John Cooke? If it’s Cooke they want, then they ought to stop this stupid charade, front Cooke the money, if necessary, to buy the team, and try to work a solution with the trustees. It’s a private club and its members have every right, unseemly as it may appear, to control who comes in.

But I hope the NFL doesn’t expect us to believe its current members are somehow more worthy than the people they just turned away. I mean, it’s not like the current members are all model owners. I’ll bet you three-quarters of them couldn’t successfully withstand the scrutiny they subjected Milstein and Snyder to. Nor could many of them meet the financing guidelines, or keep the skeletons in their closet away from private investigators. Talk about living in glass houses.

Let’s take a moment to review the NFL owners roster. The NFC East owners alone are a piece of work. You’d have to start with the Cardinals’ Bill Bidwill, whose teams have been dog meat for 40 years. Oh, and the Bidwill family has moved the franchise twice, from Chicago to St. Louis to Phoenix, the last time swiping a prime expansion location. How about the fact that the Mara family, which owns the Giants, first won the franchise in a card game? Or Jerry Jones, who thumbed his nose at half the league’s sponsorship deals, after throwing one of the league’s patriarchs--Tex Schramm--out on the street?

You know my idea of an embarrassing ownership situation: How about the McCaskey family in Chicago, where Mike McCaskey has been thrown out by his own mother for turning a Super Bowl winner into a shambles?

As we continue to play “Which Owners Are Least Worthy?” there are so many candidates it’s hard to know where to start. You can start with Georgia Frontiere, who bolted the second-largest market in America when she moved her Rams from Los Angeles to St. Louis. How about the Bay Area, where the very mention of the owners’ names makes you shiver: Al Davis, Eddie DeBartolo. Ooooooooh. One sues his own league every couple of years (and the NFL was worried about Milstein being litigious), and the other is under suspension (for his part in an alleged bribery scheme) while his sister runs the team.

With owners like this, you want to be righteous?

In Denver, owner Pat Bowlen was opposed to Milstein-Snyder primarily for one reason: Bowlen doesn’t actually own the team. His mother does. He doesn’t want somebody to come in and offer the family $800 million one day because he might not be able to raise the dough to buy it. In Cleveland you’ve got another Milstein-Snyder opponent, Al Lerner, who provided the plane that Art Modell negotiated his deal on to come to Baltimore. And down the road in Baltimore you’ve got Modell, a sweetheart of a man in my book, who nonetheless walked out on probably the best professional football fans in the country.

And what Modell did was almost forgiveable compared to Bob Irsay slinking out of Baltimore for Indianapolis in the middle of the night. The Irsay family still owns the Colts, who’ve had one notable on-field moment in the 15 years they’ve been gone. The owner of the Carolina Panthers also owned a restaurant chain, Denny’s, that has been involved in racial discrimination lawsuits. Oh, and I dare not forget Miami Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga.

You know one of the things the NFL owners admit to holding against Milstein? That since Milstein bought part of the NHL New York Islanders, the team has been a bust. I guess the NFL people don’t know that one of its own, Wayne Huizenga, has done the single worst thing an owner has ever done in the history of professional sports: he auctioned off a World Series champion. How many of these people could apply right now, today, and be acceptable candidates? You think some of these people aren’t leveraged to the moon? Please. Just have the guts to say, “We don’t want you” and this whole ugly affair could have been averted.

And the trustees can’t be let off the hook without a good smack upside the head either. They know how these NFL owners operate; or they should have. The trustees should have known better; should have been working with the league every single step of the way, so the NFL wouldn’t be able to come up with these excuses now.

In the meantime, the Redskins still don’t have an owner. I’d argue personnel hasn’t gotten any better because big-time free agents aren’t coming here with this much uncertainty. If there is to be another round of bidding, who’s to say this won’t play out similarly, with another man or group being jerked around. The long winter of discontent has now dragged into spring, with no relief in sight.