Bleeve-It! Why Louisville Isn't a Contender

I was going to write this column about the Braves' shopping of relief

pitcher John Rocker. I wonder what GM John Scherholtz's salesman schtick is.

"He's not that bad, once you get to know him."

"Barely more than half of his teammates despise him."

"Take my closer, please [rim shot]."

The fact of the matter is, Rocker will get another chance. There aren't too many left-handed pitchers who throw mid-to-high 90s and have a put-away pitch like his slider. He'll also come for cheap, reportedly $250,000.

That's not bad for someone who is one of the top five closers in baseball.

Furthermore, this is America, and ultimately, there's not much you can do

about what a person says. It might be horrible and offensive, and he might

deserve to be shunned from polite society--which he has been--but the First Amendment is the reason we all say, "It's a free country."

I was planning on writing about 600 more words--almost three response

papers worth!--about John Rocker until I saw that Louisville, Ky., is wooing an NBA franchise. Possibly the Houston Rockets/Comets/

Thunderbears franchise, which had an arena proposal voted down last November.

Sorry, Louis-villains, or whatever people from Louisville are called-- compared to Houston, Louisville is not an NBA city.

It's barely a WNBA city. An arena football league city, definitely.

Louisville doesn't even have a spot on digitalcity.com. It trails such luminaries as Roanoke, Hampton Roads, and Harrisburg in that department.

Putting an NBA franchise in Louisville would be a terrible mistake. The college basketball fans are great, although Denny Crum's program hasn't done much recently. But come on, it's Louisville. What a downer, to go from the fourth-largest city in the country, with an estimated population of four million, to Louisville, 1998 estimated population of 999,267.

J. Bruce Miller, whom the city of Louisville retained to help woo an NBA franchise, said that Louisville is one of four cities that an unnamed franchise is looking at. The Rockets currently play in the smallest arena in the NBA, and their owner, Les Alexander, has said he needs a new arena to stay competitive.

Stay competitive? He thinks the answer is to move to Louisville? He might get that short-term boost from merchandise sales, although it's hard to

think of what the Louisville team name might be. (We'll assume that Louisville Rockets won't work without the geographical connection--a leap of

faith I'm willing to take despite the existence of the Utah "Jazz.")

The Louisville Bluegrass? Hmm, not much precedent for flora in the NBA.

Insects, dinosaurs, and quadrupeds of all sorts, but Bluegrass won't work.

Too passive and wind-blown.

The Louisville Horses? Lacking also, for obvious reasons. The Louisville

Mares? Stallions? Geldings? I'm pretty sure those jerseys won't be flying

off the shelves either, although I think a Gelding jersey would at least have gag-gift potential.

The Geldings wouldn't be as competitive as Alexander thinks.

Superstar-to-be Steve Francis, who left Vancouver for Houston because he

hated the city so much, surely will be overjoyed to be in Louisville. So

overjoyed he'd leave the second his contract was up.

In reality, given the NBA's current salary structure, which caps even the

superstars' contracts, moving will not give Alexander and his Geldings a

competitive advantage. He will be far more competitive if he waits in

Houston for another year, mounting an intense political campaign and hoping

that the year eases voters' inhibitions.

He has to realize that Houston just

OK'd a huge amount of money to build the Astros a new baseball field and is

about to pour a huge amount of money into helping build the city's NFL

expansion team a new stadium.

His proposal lost not because the voters don't love the Rockets, which

brought the city its only two major-sport championships, but because the people of Houston wanted a little break from handing money to billionaires

to build playpens for their millionaires. Bringing up the specter of moving

to Louisville is only going to remind Houstonians of the despicable Bud

Adams, who moved the NFL's Oilers to Tennessee, which is essentially Kentucky.

It's possible that Alexander fully realizes this. If so, he is using the

people of Louisville, San Diego (the Rockets' home before they moved to

Houston), Baltimore, Las Vegas, St. Louis, and the other cities being

mentioned as pawns in his game. That's not nice but at least makes some sense.

We'll know whether Les Alexander is a sane individual on May 1. If I were

J. Bruce Miller, I'd be focusing my wooing on something else--getting an XFL franchise.