It's a good bet that a book called Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love might contain a chapter on one Bruce Ratner, the owner who ran the Nets into the ground in pursuit of a real estate deal.After all, ESPN, in its Ultimate Standings, recently ranked Nets ownership, led by Ratner, at 121, the second-worst in all of sports, behind only Donald Sterling of the Los Angeles Clippers, who paid $2.73 million last November to settle a housing discrimination lawsuit.
A DDDB connection
And it's a good bet that author Dave Zirin, who writes with left-wing, populist force about sports, knows about Ratner.
After all, Zirin's listed on the Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn Advisory Board, a group with a number of members who've done little more than lend their names.
Who's in, who's out?
But Zirin, as far as I can tell, never wrote about Ratner, neither in his Edge of Sports column nor the book. (This May he did write about new owner Mikhail Prokhorov.)Donald Sterling gets a chapter in Bad Sports. So do George Steinbrenner of the Yankees and James Dolan of the Knicks.
Ratner deserves one too.
Count it as a missed opportunity.
(Click on graphic to see Table of Contents)
Hi Norman. Thank you for posting about Bad Sports, As you correctly wrote, I didn't write about Ratner in the new book. The reasons were entirely about timing. During the books production, the Prokhorov sale was in flux, the stadium move was in flux, Ratner looked like he was going down in flames, and I didn't feel comfortable writing about something whose conclusions were either up in the air or could be profoundly different by the time the book was released.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, the book is still a tremendous opportunity to raise the issues of Atlantic Yards, Ratner, and DDDB. I've been asked about it on multiple occasions in interviews for the book and I always say that I'm on the board of DDDB and I give them all hell. If DDDB wanted to do an event in Brooklyn, I could come up from DC and to a presentation on "the missing Ratner/Prokhorov chapter" now that the tea leaves are clearer.....
Oops.
ReplyDeleteThat previous comment was written by me, Dave Zirin.