Designing, building and financing sports facilities isn't just any ol' business — not anymore.
It's also show business.
Well, sort of.
For instance, a baseball stadium project in the fictional city of Steelton turns out to be a critical element in "Dark Lady," a mystery novel by best-selling author Richard North Patterson.
The heroine in Patterson's tale of murder, sex and corruption is a dogged city prosecutor who, among other things, unravels serious skullduggery in the stadium's construction — imaginary subcontractors handing over money to organized crime figures, bloated cost estimates leading to ill-gotten profit and so forth.
To Patterson's credit, the entire tale of how and why the stadium project was initiated — to help revive a dying downtown and restore civic pride in a Rust Belt city — rings fairly true.
In the book's acknowledgments section, Patterson recognizes several sports industry sources who helped him give the stadium project the feel of reality.
The author specifically cites Tom Chema, former executive director of the Gateway Economic Development Corp., who was front and center in Cleveland's push to build Jacobs Field; and for a contractor's perspective, Patterson sought out Michael Kerr, president and chief operating officer for Hunt Construction's Eastern U.S. region.
Show Biz, Part II: It might be stretching things a tad to say that HOK Sport was featured in the hit TV show "Law and Order," but the Kansas City-based architects did contribute to one memorable episode.
Julia Roberts guest-starred in the series' 200th episode, which was titled "Empire" and first broadcast in May 1999.
The plot for that show involved a proposed sports stadium, as well, and HOK provided a model and some sketches as props.
"Everyone got a kick out of watching the show because one of the characters put a coffee cup down on [the stadium model], which would really be a no-no here," said Carrie Plummer of the HOK marketing department. "Eventually, we got it back, coffee ring and all."
HOK executives weren't nearly as concerned about their model being stained as much as they feared giving away proprietary information, however, and thus they sent the "Law and Order" producers a pretty generic-looking stadium.
"Same thing with the sketches," Plummer said. "They were really pretty old."
If it weren't for football coaches, sports architects would be the most paranoid souls on the planet.
But at least they'll admit it.
LET US STAY: The decision to boot Temple University and its struggling football program out of the Big East Conference was supposed to be final.
But the school isn't letting go easily.
Temple just reached an agreement in principle to sublease the Philadelphia Eagles' new stadium, which is scheduled to open in 2003.
One of the reasons given by Big East administrators when they voted to ditch Temple was that the Owls didn't control the use of a stadium.
That technically wouldn't be the case under the lease agreement with the Eagles, either, but Temple would be in a much better position than the one it has endured for the past several seasons in Veterans Stadium.
At the Vet, Temple football often bumped up against Phillies baseball on Saturdays in September, forcing the Owls to play at Franklin Field. In the new stadium, Temple would have Saturdays to itself.
"It's not over until it's over," said Chip Marshall, counsel to the Temple president's office, "but we think we have a deal.
"We're clear to meet all Big East criteria concerning football."
PLAYING THROUGH: Golf courses are being built at a breakneck pace, yet fewer people seem to be playing the game.
Go figure.
According to the National Golf Foundation, 20 new courses were opened in the first quarter of this year. In that same period, construction began on 98 more courses and 92 were put into the planning stage.
Sounds like there must be millions of new hackers out there, scrambling for links on which to take their cuts.
Not exactly: Stats kept by Golf Datatech show that actual rounds of golf were off 15.3 percent nationally for the first quarter.
In other words, we're working on a third straight year of booming course construction matched by flat or negative numbers of rounds played. That figure was down 1.8 percent last year from 1999.
Searching for possible explanations for this odd imbalance suggests a couple of scenarios. Maybe most of these new courses are being built as centerpieces for expensive real estate developments, or as exceptionally high-end daily fee venues.
Of course, there might be plenty of golf course operators fixing to go broke soon, too.
If you have news, updates or anecdotes about any sports venue, contact Steve Cameron at scameron@amcity.com.
