August 3: This Day in TV History

[radioman148]

It's still weird to me about Oklahoma City having a pro team, and yet L.A. has had no NFL for how long now?

I almost had to laugh about some of those sites on that early NBA list.

On the flip side of this is Las Vegas. No shortage of finding people saying how they believe thatcity "needs" a team..yet it seems major league sports has always had this "funny feeling" about the idea of putting a team there.

Could it be about gambling/betting? It is one of the few places (other than race tracks for horse racing) that allows betting on sports (mostly football that I ever hear about).

It is incredible that LA has remained without an NFL team for this long.

 

[Stanislav]

On a similar note, I can remember when Memphis and Nashville had got their major sports teams. I think it was ESPN who had said at the time that many people in those cities were actually excited about having thier cities being the home of a major league sports team because many of them expected those high end retailers like Saks Fifth Ave. and Neiman-Marcus would be "on the way" only because of those teams.

Or like Jacksonville, with the Jaguars. For years, Jax hungered for an NFL team, hoping it would be the stimulation to put them in the big time, having long suffered an inferiority complex to more popular Florida destinations like Miami, Tampa, and Orlando. (And also hoping to diversify their economy beyond the traditional pillars of the Navy, insurance companies, and paper mills.) Several teams used this as a bargaining chip over the years, threatening to move to Jax if they didn't get what they wanted. (Most famously when Oilers owner Bud Adams landed his helicopter in the Gator Bowl to tour the facilities and hold discussions with local business and government leaders. All a media stunt and charade as Adams was simply trying to scare Houston into renovating the Astrodome.)

So, ultimately, Jacksonville got an NFL team. But outside of a few high-profile projects like the Riverwalk, not a whole lot up there has changed -- it's still very blue-collar, very "old" Florida, and very much like what some of the locals used to call it when I lived there: "The World's Biggest Small Town." The Jaguars couldn't even sell out their stadium, eventually closing off and covering a large section of seats, reducing the official seating capacity to a more realistic level. And holding the Super Bowl in Jax was a debacle due to lack of rooms (they tried to augment the available rooms with docked cruise ships), a general dearth of anything much to do outside of the football events (a lot of folks just hung around the Riverwalk and drank...a lot), and lousy weather (rainy with temps hovering in the 40s and 50s) that, while not unheard of in North Florida, was hardly the sort of "Florida" weather visitors were expecting.

 

[The King Bee]

Louisville (population 720,000 in merged city/county; 1.4 M CMSA) was the first AAA baseball city to draw over one million in attendance in a season (1983 attendance 1,052,438) and even now regularly lead the International League in attendance. Also, we would've already be in the NBA after the ABA merger if our Kentucky Colonels, one of the most stable and well-run ABA franchises, had been accepted into the merged league.

The Colonels were in the top ten in combined NBA/ABA attendance and had recently won the ABA Championship, but the strong player roster (Artis Gilmore, Maurice Lucas, et al) was coveted by the NBA clubs. Dirty-dealing and collusion were the order of the day as the NBA skirted anti-trust laws in order to get as many ABA players as possible into a dispersal draft insted of accepting the ABA teams intact. Today, Louisville is well underway with several huge downtown building projects, including a 22,500-seat riverfront arena to replace venerable 20,000-seat Freedom Hall, where the University of Louisville Cardinals men's basketball program is annually in the top five in attendance nationally. And the city is beautiful, surprisingly diverse (the only thing wrong with Louisville is that it's in Kentucky, I say) and growing.

We've got the fan support...we've got the venues...we're the best-kept secret among American cities. So, let's wait until the NBA comes up to OUR standards!

 

[Tim from Springfield IL]

1940: Actor Martin Sheen ("West Wing") is born (as Ramón Gerardo Antonio Estévez) in Dayton, OH.

 

[RadioDaze]

Austin, Texas is the biggest city and Norfolk/Portsmouth/Newport News, VA-NC the biggest MSA without teams, and both are most mentioned as the two areas most likely to get teams in the future. The whole gambling thing in Las Vegas is definitely a deterrent to their getting their own team. Not too familiar with the Austin situation, but the Hampton Roads region's relatively close proximity to the Washington market and its high military population (lots of moving in and out) have been cited as deterrents. Virginia Beach kind of came into its own in the last half of the 20th century, becoming Virginia's most populous city, though Norfolk is still culturally and financially the core city in the region. For example, Virginia Beach's lone interstate is the three-digit Interstate 264 and that designation only made it out there in the last decade or so.