‘For the District?’ Yeah, right; Ted Leonsis will take Wizards, Capitals angst across the river

WASHINGTON – The Prince of Potomac Yard spoke of water.

“When I first came to this site,” Ted Leonsis said Wednesday, “and stood on top of the roof of the building next door and looked over, we forget the power of two rivers that flow right into this community. And iconic real estate is incredibly important. We have access – you can see the Washington Monument from here, Washington, DC, the border a mile and a half from here.

It must be cool! So nice that the billionaire owner of the Wizards and Capitals will have a beautiful view of the Potomac and Anacostia confluence from his soon-to-be floor-wide offices in Alexandria, where he will center his entertainment and sports empire. It would be unfair to say he literally will look down on the people who fund his JerryWorld, his BallmerVille, in Crystal City, or National Landing, or whatever name they choose for their community across the river. But it will be a lush view.

Nevertheless, it is a view for one, for an audience of one. This is ultimately how anyone who cares about and loves the District of Columbia this seemingly imminent departure of the Wizards and Capital letters for Virginia.

Some of us old enough to remember the “negotiated deal” between Jack Kent Cooke and Virginia’s state representatives a generation ago on that very property for a new football stadium fell apart like cotton candy. So, perhaps, the Virginia General Assembly will raise objections to this new project that will be too big to overcome. Maybe NIMBYs in Alexandria will make their voices loud and annoying enough to force reconsideration.

But, I doubt it.

“Hold me accountable,” Leonsis said Wednesday. OK.

It’s about one man’s greatness, and readiness to leave when the city that provided him with so much over the past decades needed someone with his voice and influence to say, post-COVID, and post-Jan. 6, and grappling with crime sprees across the city that have so many sick at ease, “You know what? Some things may be bad here right now. But I am blessed enough to be financially secure enough to ride it out with you. I want to be part of the solution. So, I will be slightly less rich. I stay.”

Don’t tell me rich men don’t. That’s exactly what Abe Pollin did when he built what is now Capital One Arena in 1997 and changed the city – mostly with his own money.

By contrast, Leonsis went for the money. Which, as I’ve said and written dozens of times over the years, owners of pro sports teams are perfectly within their rights to do. They can play where they want their teams to play. They can pocket any deals, allowing them to create the kind of mixed-use “entertainment districts” that will bring the wealthy and well-connected to their new playgrounds. No one doubts that Virginia will build Leonsis an arena that is forward-thinking to be envied and admired.

But it will be hard to take any future talk from Leonsis about his love for the District at face value.

Knowing what the Wizards, regardless of their current fate, mean to generations of basketball fans in DC, I’m well aware that the Wizards were once the Bullets, who once played in Baltimore — and before that, Chicago. I am well aware of the history of franchise roulette, in many cities, with many teams. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, deeply, when your team leaves town. When the Senators left, first, for Minnesota – and then, when the team that replaced them left for Texas, it hurt this city badly. Some of us then followed the Orioles because they were the closest team. We didn’t love them.

And then the then Redskins moved to Landover, Md. departure, even though it was only a few miles from the DC line, felt horrible. It still does.

Add it to the ledger.

Because Leonsis knows, more than anyone, that the crowds that come to Wizards games, and have come to them for the past 25 years, are some of the most diverse in the NBA – racially, economically, socially. Can be Atlanta have similar types of crowds for Falcons games. Most of the league’s buildings are full again these days, post-COVID. But in the main, their fan base is very white and very rich. That hasn’t been the case here since I started covering the team, when I played at Capital Center in Landover in the late 80’s. Wizarding mobs look like the District – at least what it used to look like. They will not do this when the team is moving across the river.

(I’m not mentioning the Capitals’ crowd because the Caps regularly sold out Capital One. Caps fans have represented for nearly two decades. I can’t imagine they won’t continue to do so in Virginia.)

Each owner swears that his or her fans will follow the team “just down the road” to the new location. The Warriors swore that light rail and rapid transit would mean most of their middle-class fans would come from Oakland, across San Francisco Bay, and follow the team to the new Chase Center in downtown San Francisco.

They didn’t.

To be sure, Chase is full — but not with the people who filled what is now Oakland Arena for three decades. You have to pay for a $2 billion arena; you don’t do that with $15 tickets. You do it with six-figure suites and five-figure court seats. If John Salley, who won four championships back in the day playing for the Pistons, Bulls and Lakers, noted when the Pistons moved 31 miles north from downtown Detroit to the Palace of Auburn Hills in the late ’80s: “We used to play in front of the auto workers. Now we are playing in front of the executive officers.”

It will be impossible to forget what now feels like appropriation of the city’s culture, by nicknaming Washington’s G-League team the Capital City Go-Go, and centering DC at every opportunity – “For the District” and “The District of Columbia”. on your Twitter feeds and the jerseys of Wizards players, or peddling this year’s alternate jerseys with breathless history over the city’s Boundary Stones, or slapping “DC” on caps and apparel – just to step away from it all , for the sweetheart deal the river, you Braves New World.

And if there is any truth to the reporting that Leonsis was annoyed by teenage kids performing… Go-Go music, outside of Capital One? Well, it’s hard to know how to process it. Buskers? It is a problem?? Good Lord

(After it was initially published, I was informed that Leonsis’ issue was not about the street musicians who perform in front of Capital One on convention nights, but there is concern about one person in particular who was aggressive with passers-by, both in front of the arena and others businesses in the area.)

If you’re not from here, you might not understand why a Wizards/Capitals move to Virginia is especially hard for DC residents to accept. It’s only four miles from Capital One, Leonsis said Wednesday.

It feels like the Grand Canyon psychically.

First, traffic. The dance of a 20,000-seat arena, practice facility and new restaurants/entertainment in an area surrounded by Reagan National Airport, Amazon II and a large, busy mall, with many inbound and outbound roads currently one or two . -laners, are scary. Sources involved in the discussions said on Wednesday that significant improvements to the roads around the proposed site, along with increased light and heavy rail services, were part of the deal. Nevertheless, it will be a much longer commute for many – if they choose to come.

Will fans who took a 30-45 minute subway ride from the Maryland suburbs to Gallery Place downtown be willing to add another 20-30 minutes of drive time round trip to get to and from Alexandria? For 7pm starts for Wizards or Caps games?

Second… well, put it this way. Closer to the way many Virginians feel about coming to the District for a night out when they have One Loudoun or Reston Town Center available? District residents feel the same way about going out to Alexandria for a night out, when we have Penn Quarter or Columbia Heights or NoMa to patronize. Don’t feel safe coming up here? Many of us don’t feel safe going out there. You have your reasons. We have ours.

It just feels like the District has been kicked in the gut again – to blame, because COVID has reduced the number of offices operating downtown like a scythe, leaving restaurants and bars with fewer customers for lunch or dinner. Make no mistake, though: Mayor Muriel Bowser takes a capital L here. Her job was to prevent something like that from happening, because you can’t replace the Caps and Wizards, and the energy they brought to downtown. I know it was hard to find the kind of money needed to keep Leonsis from wandering. That’s the job though. They cannot leave on your watch. They leave on hers.

I have no doubt that the decision was difficult, perhaps even painful, for Leonsis. So it would have been helpful for him to express his feelings Wednesday to reporters who asked to speak with him after the press conference, rather than rejecting them. And he and his team have ideas about how to transform Capital One, now freed from carving dozens of potential days off the calendar each year for Wizards and Capitals games, to keep the building busy more often than not. Ice shows. Concerts. Activities in tandem with the DC Convention Center, and/or Events DC The return of the Mystics to Capital One, after playing at the Entertainment and Sports Arena in Southeast. (Speaking of which: what exactly does Leonsis plan to do with ESA, which he talked about so grandly just a few years ago?)

But nothing replaces a sports team in a city’s soul. Nothing.

You know one of the big reasons I came The Athletics in 2018? I was in San Francisco in the spring of that year watching the Capitals the Penguins in the Eastern Conference semifinals, in my hotel room, watching the Warriors and Fire arrows. If you’re from DC, you knew, whether you rocked the Red regularly or not, how much of a pain in the butt the Penguins were to the Caps for a decade, how desperate Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backström wanted, had to, beat Sidney Crosby and the Pens. It was Town Business.

So when Yevgeny Kuznetsov scored on that breakaway overtime goal to seal the series over the Penguins, and the broadcast did something to the cheering crowd outside Capital One, in Penn Quarter, wildly happy, and young and diverse, after finally killing the beast around me I said to myself, in that hotel room, “look how happy the city is. It’s incredible. I would like to be part of the chronicle of that.”

And I was, as I saw first hand the Nationals who won the World Seriesand the Mystics win the WNBA title back to back “Playoff Emma,” within weeks of each other in 2019. And the joy those franchises brought to my hometown was immeasurable, and forever.

I love this city, my city. And my city was wounded, seriously so, on Wednesday morning, when men and women across the river basked in their prosperity, made good their deal, and didn’t seem to give a damn about the pain that was left behind .

(Photo of Ted Leonsis and Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin: Win McNamee/Getty Images)