When it was announced yesterday that the X Games were heading to Austin instead of Detroit, you probably didn't say to yourself: Well, I wasn't worried about Detroit's inability to fund basic city services and also fully repay its $11.4 billion in unsecured long-debt obligations, but losing the X Games makes me think it's time to get serious about this.
Nonetheless, Freep business columnist/Serious Person Tom Walsh is thinking the X Games loss should get you filthy peasants to finally buy into Detroit's emergency management process.
His argument starts a syllogistic fallacy: Detroit is essentially bankrupt. The X Games aren't coming to Detroit. Therefore, Detroit missed the X Games because it is essentially bankrupt. From there, it spirals into a mess of broad assertions and shallow reasoning. Let's deconstruct.
Detroit Free Press: For those who seek to minimize Detroit’s fiscal crisis, those who would kick the can of crippling indebtedness further down the road, look no further than Wednesday’s loss of the Summer X Games for proof of the urgent need for action.
If there exist people who weren't convinced about the "need for action" by Detroit's ineffective policing, nonworking streetlights, and inefficient city government, the X Games won't roust them from their apathy. A premise this false is sufficient reason to stop reading, but then you'll miss the vast richness of tortured logic that follows.
To those who continue to resist the imposition and authority of an emergency manager, or the filing of Chapter 9 bankruptcy, please come forth with a better, quicker fix to stop the financial hemorrhaging that threatens to: (1) stunt the promising revival of Detroit’s downtown and Midtown corridor; and (2) leave the city disconnected from the broader economic recovery of Michigan.
EM opponents, et al (1) are likely unconcerned with downtown/Midtown because they (fairly or not) see that "revival" as a subsidized city-within-a-city program that neglects the vast majority of Detroit residents; and (2) already feel disconnected from the broader economic recovery of Michigan. Whatever one thinks of opposition to the EM, those against the process do represent an underclass largely ill-served by...wait a second, did Tom Walsh really say Michigan is in the midst of a recovery? Because his own paper reported just yesterday that Michigan's unemployment rate rose by 0.3% in June. Granted, unemployment is a funky stat but (1) it tends to go down during recoveries; and (2) Michigan continues to have unemployment numbers significantly higher than the national average.
Make no mistake, the specter of Detroit teetering on the brink in fiscal collapse did matter in ESPN’s final decision to choose Austin, Texas, over the Motor City as host for the Summer X Games competitions from 2014-17 in skateboarding, BMX biking and motocross.
Well, sure, potential bankruptcies tend not to help in these thing but how much did it "matter"?
Was it the deciding factor?
Doesn’t matter, really.
Getting kind of loosey-goosey with what does and doesn't matter here, aren't we?
When asked whether Detroit’s precarious financial condition and potential bankruptcy was a consideration, Scott Guglielmino, ESPN’s senior vice president in charge of programming and the X Games, put it this way: “Certainly from a volatility perspective, sure, that’s something we’ve got to factor in ultimately when we make a decision like this.”
ESPN’s desire to award the games for a multiyear period meant it wanted stability, not volatility.
“One of the things we’re looking at here,” Guglielmino added, “is to put this thing down and to grow it out over several years. That’s clearly one of the factors that we weighed.”
Here's the problem with this. ESPN spokesmen have as much credibility as a Tass report that a Soviet leader in "resting." This is a network that cites its falling ratings as evidence more people are watching their programming.
If an ESPN flack told me it was raining, I'd walk outside and see if I got wet. Maybe Detroit's financial issues were factor or maybe Guglielmino saw that question as an opportunity to justify ignoring the public input they solicited. If it is the former, it raises an obvious follow-up question as to why ESPN considered the financially troubled Detroit as a finalist. In other words, it was probably the latter.
Were there other reasons to choose Austin over Detroit?
Sure. The Texas capital has a new 1,500-acre Circuit of the Americas sports and entertainment complex. It’s also a university town with a cool music scene and entrepreneurial culture.
Wait, so Detroit may not have hosted the X Games even if the books were balanced? Screw it then.
"I'm good with the busted streetlights and cops who don't come when you call 911" is what someone would say if the X Games was only motivation to care about Detroit's finances. Fortunately, those people don't really exist.
Detroit’s bid was a powerful one, though, aside from the threat of bankruptcy.
The revival of a gritty but battered industrial town in America’s heartland was an appealing story for the X Games and its core audience. Detroit also handily won ESPN’s X Games host city Facebook poll, with 23,334 votes to Austin’s 15,565.
That kind of makes it sound like Detroit's dysfunction was helpful to our X Games bid. "Gritty but battered industrial town[s]" tend to, you know, not be in the best financial shape. It's part of the package.
Even more persuasive, potentially, was enthusiastic backing for the Detroit bid from some of the nation’s most influential and wealthy sports team moguls:
■ Dan Gilbert, majority owner of the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers and founder of Quicken Loans, a huge advertiser on sports programs.
■ Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor, also a huge advertiser on sports telecasts, and vice chairman of the NFL’s Detroit Lions football team.
■ And Roger Penske, perhaps the biggest name in all of automobile racing.
Yes, a lot of important people rallied behind a grassroots effort to bring a cool event to Detroit. That's what civic leaders do. Important local figures rallied behind Austin, Charlotte, and Chicago's bids as well. Google the name Bobby Epstein. Kudos to Gilbert, Ford, and Penske for stepping up because Detroit once lacked this kind of leadership, while other cities have benefited from champions of similar stature for decades. We're catching up. Good for us, but let's not mistake civic leaders as special snowflakes beloved the world over.
Anybody who thinks those three names don’t carry some serious weight with ESPN doesn’t know much about the sports Business, with a capital B.
With a capital B! This guy kills me. Excuse my ignorance, but how does one decide if something is small-b business or capital-B Business. I checked with Investopedia. They have nothing.
Despite such strong backing, Detroit was a runner-up.
That’s no reason to be despondent, as Gilbert declared soon after the verdict. “The amount of passion, energy, creativity and determination shown by so many to bring this event to the city is just more confirmation that the spirit of Detroit is not only alive and well, but burning bright,” he said.
I don't often agree with Dan Gilbert, but he's dead-nuts right about this. And the decision by the X Games Detroit backers, Gilbert included, to attempt an ESPN-less action sports festival is a master stroke.
That plan isn't mentioned by Walsh. If an X Games-like event can be successful in Detroit -- as people like Gilbert think -- then it (along with the Orion Festival, DEMF, the Grand Prix, etc.) undercuts Walsh's argument about the city's financial predicament preventing a Detroit X Games.
It is one more reason, though, for everyone who cares about Detroit to coalesce around a speedy resolution of the city’s fiscal crisis. Personally, I don’t care if it happens inside or outside of bankruptcy court, or whether Kevyn Orr is the city emergency manager for two more days or 12 months.
We have to coalesce around a "speedy resolution," as opposed to the best possible resolution, because Detroiters have spirit? That doesn't make sense.
Speed is crucial, as we saw in the rescue and revival of Chrysler and General Motors. Despite cries that the companies would never survive, despite tough wrangling with bondholders, labor unions, dealers and other parties, Chrysler and GM not only emerged quickly from their bankruptcies and have thrived as strong, competitive companies and major employers.
The Chrysler and GM bankruptcies were expedited by billions in federal aid. Detroit isn't expected to receive similar help, so comparing the timelines of these two processes is really comparing apples to elephants.
Again, Tom Walsh should read his own newspaper, retired firemen subsisting on $1600/month pensions may have to accept the fiscal realities of Detroit's predicament, but they don't deserve to see their retirement wiped out because the process must be quick-and-dirty enough for Tom Walsh to think we have a favorable skateboarding climate.
A municipal bankruptcy differs from a corporate collapse in a number of ways, but one thing is critical in both cases when the reckoning arrived. Speed is paramount in saving the patient.
Some day, when I'm felled by an inevitable heart attack, I hope speed is paramount while delivering me to an operating room. However, once there, I hope the surgeons move at a deliberative pace to properly fix my ticker. Regardless of what it means for my personal X Games chances.
Placing Detroit into emergency management is akin to landing on the operating table. Let's allow this enormously complex process move with the speed at which the process needs to move.
Loss of the X Games is a reminder that Detroit will look feeble to the outside world until the fiscal cloud is lifted.
There's something kind of depressing that, for so many, the motivation to fix Detroit is how things looks to the outside world. Detroit should be fixed because the city simply isn't working for the hundreds of thousands of people who live and work in the city. Detroiters really don't require a sanctimonious columnist using the X Games to remind them of Detroit's tenuous situation. They live that tenuous situation every day.
Let's be sophisticated enough as a city and a region to recognize things like X Games selections and municipal bankruptcies happen on separate tracks.
