A Pre-Emptive Strike Against Corporate Re-Naming of the Rose Garden

Between college football, NBA basketball and English Premiereship soccer, I watch a lot of sports. And each year I see more arenas and stadiums (or is it stadia?) named and renamed for a succession of corporations that purchase the naming rights. I thank my lucky stars that Portland’s primary arena, the Rose Garden, is a bastion of sponsor-free integrity.

Admittedly I’m being somewhat earnest and Puritan about the matter. After all, venues like the Rose Garden are chiefly home to overpaid athletes and a host of lowest-common-denominator entertainment acts. Nevertheless, I think of a city’s large public gathering places—its concert halls and ballparks alike—as places where something quietly sacred happens. These are buildings where many thousands of people gather with one shared interest. Even if that interest is something frivolous like sports, music or, God help us, monster trucks, I hate to see these sites of secular congregation tainted by a name that, with no disrespect to the sponsoring companies involved, by definition doesn’t mean anything beyond advertising. We're making one of society's last destinations for communal passion into a billboard.

What’s more, when we devote all the resources necessary to build these massive arenas and stadiums, often in part with public funds (although not in the Rose Garden's case), we expect them to endure—maybe not for millennia like the great Coliseum in Rome, but at least for a generation. Besides the sellout inherent in a name such as (just to pick randomly from an exhaustive supply of examples) the Pepsi Center in Denver, Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, or the RCA Dome in Indianapolis, these corporate names of venues so often change. And it makes these huge pieces of architecture feel as disposable as a paper plate.

In Houston there is the embarrassment of Enron Field hastily being hastily renamed Minute Maid Park after the former company imploded in scandal. In San Francisco, there is a beautiful downtown baseball stadium that opened in 2000 as Pacific Bell Park, last year changed its name to SBC Park, and now that SBC has bought AT&T and usurped its name, the stadium will soon take on a third name in its short history. Then there are other stadiums whose original sponsor names represent companies that don’t even exist anymore. For some reason I always remember an interview with Baltimore Ravens star linebacker Ray Lewis in which he was excitedly proclaiming how well his team would perform, “When we get back to PsiNet,” their home stadium. Somehow it just doesn’t quite conjure the same notions of gridiron glory as, say, the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field.

With its parent Oregon Arena Corporation declaring bankruptcy last year, I’m sure selling the Rose Garden’s naming rights has at the very least been bandied about. For one reason or another, it hasn’t happened…yet. But I’d like to advocate that it stay that way.

Maybe you think it’s naïve or antiquated to think of a place like the Rose Garden as being above sponsorship. True enough, one musn’t ignore business realities; the naming rights would bring a lot of money to an arena that hasn’t filled to capacity as often as had been expected, either with the Blazers or with concerts (especially with the competition brought increasingly by the Clark County Ampitheater and Gorge Ampitheater). But even though it’s cookie-cutter stadium architecture, even though the big business of sport often makes me sick, even though the surrounding transit center is a colossal mess, I take a lot of pride in the Rose Garden having resisted selling its soul when so many other places have succumbed.

Comments

[Jenni Simonis]

I've actually discussed this with my husband recently. I too was worried that now the Rose Garden has new owners that it might end up being renamed.

My home town is a small rural town in the Houston area, so I've seen the stadiums & arenas there undergo many name changes. The one that made people the most mad was the renaming of the Astrodome.

There the naming of things has gotten so out of hand that not only is the basketball arena named the "Toyota Center," but the adjacent parking structure is the "Toyota Tundra Garage." I could not believe it when I visited home earlier this year and saw the parking garage (you can see it from the freeway).

[MarkDaMan]

I actually heard an arena name on the news a couple days ago and about died laughing. I looked over and said to my partner, at least we have the Rose Garden and they haven't named it something silly.

Anyway, I think it would be okay to have a tactful name like the Adidas Rose Quarter (insert Nike, Columbia Sportwear, or any other respectable local company name if Adidas doesn't fit for you) as long as the profits from selling the name go into improving the arena into a more world class venue; or into a re-improvement bank for the Memorial Coliseum.

At least we aren't the Cleveland Cavaliers playing in the Quicken Loans Arena!

[Chris Brown]

As a small act of resistance, I continue to call Civic Stadium by it's original name, rather than acknowledging its sponsorship by former Enron subsidary PGE.

[Rich]

How about Piggie Park? Who's to say we can't come up with our own more appropriate names for these places?

[pdxstreetcar]

theres SBC Center which is an arena in San Antonio not to be confused with SBC Park the ballpark in San Francisco

FedEx Forum an arena in Memphis and FedEx Field stadium in Washington DC

anyhow as much as i dislike these corporate named stadiums i wouldnt really mind in Portland since we are lucky enough to have one of the few privately owned arenas

[andrew]

maybe Sweatshop Park for Nike and the other apparel companies? I'm sure Phil at least would go for that, being the respectable guy he is.

[pdxstreetcar]

oh one more to add that even worse...
American Airlines Arena in Miami
American Airlines Center in Dallas
Both are active NBA arenas

[Richard]

I've never been inside the Rose Garden, so I wonder, what are the sight lines like in the Rose Garden? Is everywhere you look an advertisement? I know that this is true for GM Place here in Vancouver, B.C., which is generally regarded as a hockey arena--and, for a time, basketball--with the same " lowest-common-denominator entertainment acts". So it's nice to think that the naming of an arena is the most important part, but regardless of that, what about the thousands of people in the audience and the hundreds of thousands of people watching on TV who are shown commercials for a full 2 1/2 hour stretch of time?

[MarkDaMan]

I've never felt bombarded with advertisements at the Rose Garden. I haven't been to a Blazer game this year since Global Spectrum started running the show, but in the past I actually thought the advertising was rather lean.

I was wondering if they were selling the name when the Blazers started arguing that they didn't want the arena name on the court anymore. I am pleasantly suprised that months later it's still the Rose Garden.

[Jane Jarrett]

I wonder if all the bad press that PGE Park has garnered hasn't cast a shadow over corporate consideration of the Rose Garden. I realize, the private/public ownership makes some difference there, but we can hope.