Nashville hot with sports fever

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 3, 1998 | by Keith Russell

Though best known as the center of country music, Nashville is sharpening its cultural acuity as it prepares to give the big leagues the keys to the city. So who's crazy here?

Coy Shultz, a 40-year-old boat mechanic, is a Nashville native -- a dwindling species in this booming Southern city that draws more Rust Belt transplants to its neighborhoods than it does aspiring singers to Music Row. With its country charm and newfound cosmopolitan bustle, Nashville supports a lifestyle residents such as Shultz hold dearly.

But as an avid professional-sports fan, Shultz's options in Nashville always were limited to the region's college athletic programs at Vanderbilt University and Tennessee State, to minor-league attractions such as the Sounds, Nashville's AAA baseball team, or to sports televised from other regions. "Nashville never had anything," he says, sitting with his son, also named Coy, at a recent Sounds home game.

Shultz grew up a Miami Dolphins fan. But thanks to a determined effort from local city leaders, a little luck and a lot of investment on the part of the area's taxpayers, Coy Jr. won't have to watch the tube to enjoy big-league dreams. Starting this fall, he and other Nashvillians will be able to call not one, but two, major-league sports franchises their own.

On Sept. 13, Nashville will host its first regular-season National Football League game when the Tennessee Oilers host the San Diego Chargers at Vanderbilt's football stadium, where the team will play its home contests this year before moving into a new $292 million stadium in downtown Nashville next season. For the Oilers and their owner, Bud Adams, next season's opening will be the culmination of a pilgrimage that saw the team lured to Nashville from Houston, its home for 30 years, the product of a sweetheart relocation deal the team owner brokered with city officials.

About six blocks away from the Oilers' future home, meanwhile, the Nashville Predators will begin their inaugural season as a National Hockey League, or NHL, expansion franchise on Oct. 10 when the team faces the Florida Panthers in the 2-year-old Nashville Arena. All the buzz has fans like Shultz and his son salivating.

"Oh, it's going to be great," says Shultz. "I like it. Heck, I love it!"

This is a sentiment shared by thousands of Nashville's other sports fans, says George Plaster, the host of WWTN-FM's "Sports Night" the city's No. 1 sports talk-radio program. "I think it's going to have a great impact on this city," he says. "We really have a lot to be excited about."

Indeed they do. In less than five years Nashville has transformed itself into a full-fledged member of the club of American cities that can boast "big-league" status. After living for years with just one pro-sports franchise, Nashville now has five which soon will call the Music City home. In addition to the long-established Sounds and Oilers and Predators, Nashville fans also look forward to cheering the Kats, an Arena football team which plays during the summer, and (beginning next year) a new American Basketball League women's team.

Like other cities in recent years, particularly booming Southern counterparts such as Charlotte, Nashville has parlayed its economic good times into lucrative offers designed to reel in much-wanted professional sports franchises. But while cities such as Charlotte gradually incorporated their new home teams over several years, no city has ever performed the feat faster -- or with more gusto -- than Nashville. Nor, one might argue, has any city gone to so much trouble to get there. Since 1994, Nashville has committed to building not one but two state-of-the-art sports complexes, costing a total of more than $400 million -- much of it either funded with taxpayer dollars or paid for with taxpayer-guaranteed bonds. And while the final result has most citizens caught in the contagion of their town's sports fever, some wonder whether all of this good luck has gotten the city in over its head.

"The thing that struck me most about this was that we were ignoring all of the scholarly research and articles in first-tier newsmagazines about how the public is taking a bath in funding all of these new professional sports teams," says David Kleinfelter, a member of Nashville's city council who has been a leading skeptic of the Oilers deal.

That $292 million deal is one that even its supporters admit made them step back at first. "It sort of took your breath away at first blush," recalls Ronnie Stein, an at-large city councilman who was one of the deal's main backers. Brokered in the fall of 1995 between team officials and Nashville's mayor, Phil Bredesen, the deal includes construction and development of land surrounding the new downtown stadium, plus $28 million to pay for the Oilers' actual relocation. About one-fourth of the funding for the project has been raised from the sale of permanent seat licenses, or PSLs, which give a fan a lifetime right to purchase season tickets for a particular seat in the new stadium.