Stadium drumbeat beginning to grate

What price for this?

Maybe it's unhealthy for a product to be as popular as NFL football.

Baseball seemed king for a very long time. The Minnesota Vikings didn't even exist in the 1950s. Today the Vikings have such stature, they absolutely loom at the state capitol and over our lawmakers (many of them anyway, most notably our governor, sad to say).

The drumbeat for a new stadium is starting to grate. This fear of the Vikings leaving is a specter that hovers and irritates.

Teams seem to need new stadiums the way restaurants redecorate. The comparison isn't so far-fetched. Football is pure entertainment and it fears getting stale. It needs new frills now and then to keep fans curious and fired up.

All this is absolutely fine if it could stay in the private sector. But not only is it seizing the attention of our politicians like Governor Dayton, it is causing gambling to be thrust in our face.

No, Rudy Perpich is not turning over in his grave.

You might say "Governor Goofy" gave us this state of affairs. Perpich was a mentor for Dayton once. I hope there's no natural affinity between Democrats and gambling.

Perpich seemed like a quite upright man himself. But the expansion of gambling didn't make him flinch at all. I wonder if he had any real experience doing it. Did anyone ever give him the message it was dangerous and ought to be considered only on the most sober and measured terms?

Gambling was driven out of Minnesota in the late 1940s. It had crept into places like resorts.

The Perpich era seems distant but let's be reminded it lasted ten years. The once-taboo activity of gambling came into the daylight. Whereas we once only put up with low-stakes bingo in church basements, we came to almost embrace a "Pottersville" type of model.

The trend began at about the time I graduated from college. Charitable gambling stretched its legs beginning in 1978. How can you argue with something that's "charitable?" Five years later we saw the die cast for Canterbury Downs. Racetrack betting was there to tempt us now.

I remember picking up a brochure for Canterbury that had your All-American family, pure as the driven snow, on the front, with dad holding up a betting slip as they all rooted. The heading was "you bet it's fun."

Remember how Canterbury was ballyhooed at the start? It was considered a new part of our "big league mix" in Minnesota. I'm sure there was a special section in the Star Tribune at the time of its opening. We read how this was "the sport of kings."

Canterbury went through a decline that was also treated as a big deal by the media. Up through today, when we seem barely aware of Canterbury's existence but somehow it continues.

I went to Canterbury with a friend several times and it felt like spending a whole day in a Perkins restaurant. Not even the quarterhorses with their sprint could really thrill me. We might write this off as innocuous entertainment if it were not gambling.

The purpose of gambling is not for its sponsors to give money away. It's the opposite, you fools. It's going to play a big role in the construction of our Emerald City Vikings Stadium, unless the public registers enough skepticism. We should be holding our breath this week.

No one's liberty or property is safe when the legislature's in session. I think that's how the saying goes.

Our elected leaders find it proper to hold hands with an entertainment business that hardly looks like it needs subsidies. With owners who are clearly part of the "one per cent."

And Democrats are a party to this? Does Dayton, who generally doesn't seem "goofy," think pro football is some sort of opiate and that our withdrawal would be catastrophic?

We read that Governor Dayton, standing at the podium with his revenue commissioner (a la Gotham City officials making some sort of pronouncement), said allowing electronic bingo and pulltabs in the state's bars and restaurants would produce $62.5 million annually to finance the state's total $398 million for stadium construction. I read an analysis that suggests the numbers are far more daunting than they seem.

But let's not get bogged down in the numbers. We know there's a selling job going on now and our officials have been yanked into this, many with feet of clay that might be appropriate for Gotham City, where the Joker's minions sneak about.

I imagine electronic gambling is more efficient than having to support a horse racing industry. It's more efficient than "analog" gambling of the type that gave Las Vegas its famous imagery - a casino worker spinning a "wheel of fortune," for example. (I have read that the "wheel" is a very poor-odds game.)

I suppose we can dispose of the casino workers now that we have electronic tools. Welcome to the rest of the economy. The days might be numbered for grocery store checkout clerks.

Rudy Perpich made gambling palatable. He saw that the doors got swung wide open. He claimed it was just the people's will.

Whatever, then-State Senator Dean Johnson of Willmar said at the end of the 1989 legislative session "the gambling floodgates are open."

A state planning report stated in 1992 that "Minnesota was the largest casino gaming center between Nevada and New Jersey."

So much for the reserved nature of Minnesota Lutherans. Howard Mohr, author of "How to Speak Minnesotan," might have had to modify his thinking. The stereotype was threatened.

But I suppose we have learned how to rationalize gambling. We can go on with our Minnesota manners, maybe with a wink.

Meanwhile we see headlines about employee theft. It seems this has happened in Stevens County, and it doesn't always make headlines. It happened where I was once employed. That wasn't prosecuted, although the person in question - rest in peace, dear - reportedly signed some sort of document acknowledging it happened.

It wasn't the worst thing I was around in my career. I'd say adultery was the worst. We are so human an animal.

Gambling is a regressive tax. We all know people who will tell a tall tale about gambling success. I don't doubt these people have had success on isolated occasions. Without this lure, gambling would die. They play us like a piano.

I visited Las Vegas several times in the 1980s so I could tell you a story or two about raking some money in. We don't talk so readily about the "outgo" (of money).

The outgo will help build the palatial Vikings stadium, if the current proposal or something like it gets shepherded through our legislature. The shepherds are the "one per cent." Or as my friend Glen Helberg would say, "money talks and bulls--t walks."

State Senator Johnson was prescient. Of course he'll always be remembered for the terribly awkward flap over his surreptitious conversation with Minnesota Supreme Court members. His political stock dropped thanks to a minister with a tape recorder. Ah, the lot of politicians.

But Johnson was right on principle when he indicated concern about gambling's expansion. Native American tribes got a lucrative monopoly type of arrangement in 1989. They had better preserve their windfall from that. Because we're steadily becoming "Pottersville" with gambling becoming about as ubiquitous as people saying "you betcha" or "heckuva deal."

The camel's head isn't just poking into the tent now. The legalization of electronic pulltabs would build on the dubious legacy given us by "Governor Goofy."

Fortunately there appear to be some reservations about the stadium proposal beyond the gambling aspect. Let's have a push for a moratorium on "new stadium proposals."

It's starting to make us look ridiculous, like the Joker and his minions are taking over.

Click on the link below to read some more of my stadium thoughts which are on my companion website which is called "Morris of course." Here's the permalink:
http://www.morrisofcourse.blogspot.com/2012/03/new-vikings-stadium-revives-allure-of.html

- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com