The McLane factor

I'm never sure how much weight to give to John Lopez columns, but he does raise an interesting point here regarding Drayton McLane and the ongoing efforts to build a stadium for the Houston Dynamo.

You have to wonder how much McLane is rethinking just how much he wants to support a new downtown sports venue that would sit on property currently operated by his Astros enterprise.

After all, if McLane knows nothing else, he knows how to corner markets.

[...]

[W]ith the Astros so bad and the Dynamo so good, could supporting a 22,000- to 24,000-seat stadium that has all the amenities of Minute Maid Park be high on McLane's to-do list?

For the record, he has been in full support of the soccer stadium. Dynamo management has indicated the same and publicly has thanked the Astros owner.

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If you don't think the thought has crossed McLane's mind that a top-notch soccer stadium with all the latest bells and whistles, luxury suites and assorted amenities would cut into his profit, you're wrong.

Put the stadium in a suburb or outside of downtown, and McLane likely would don a Dynamo jersey and do commercials for the endeavor.

But downtown? Where sports fans, even those just curious about the new facility or the growing game, could walk right past Minute Maid Park and into the Dynamo's new playground?

Already it appears some sort of fancy politicking is going on. Whether McLane is behind it, we'll probably never know.

But when the Dynamo and the city of Houston originally reached an agreement to negotiate the stadium deal, all signs pointed to a downtown location.

[...]

The Dynamo know how lucrative and successful the downtown site would be. It must be the first, second and third options for the organization.

Yet when Tim Leiweke of AEG, the Dynamo's ownership group, spoke of extending the negotiating window Saturday, he and club president Oliver Luck mentioned that some of the proposed sites now being negotiated are outside the downtown area.

I noticed that in the Sunday story but didn't give it any thought at the time. It would neither be unreasonable nor surprising if McLane has been busy calculating the effect of having the Dynamo as next-door neighbors on his bottom line. It's not clear to me what the answer to that would be - I could make a case for either good or bad if I had to. Point is, McLane may very well have legitimate concerns, and if so he may choose to take action on them. He hasn't made all that money by not sweating the small stuff. I think there are any number of ways that the Astros could turn having the Dynamo nearby into a positive, but it's certainly not a no-risk proposition.

Obviously, this is all speculation. We don't know if McLane has exerted any influence in this matter. I think if he does, at least if he does enough to affect the outcome, we'll hear about it. In the meantime, it's just water cooler chatter.

On a side note, I see that Lopez did not refer to his earlier thesis about Dynamo fans "getting theirs". Since he specifically mentioned a "backlash" against McLane by the Dynamo's predominantly Hispanic fans if McLane didn't play along, and since he made a (hotly disputed) claim in that earlier column about McLane's allegedly "less than stellar reputation" with minority groups, you'd think that might have been a worthwhile angle to pursue. But for whatever the reason, he didn't.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on July 17, 2007 to Other sports