The Kings move to Anaheim for next season is almost certain. There are details to be hammered out, approvals needed, but there is a lot of momentum.
But the fans of Sacramento are not giving up.
Through a twitter campaign — #herewebuild — started by local sports radio show host Carmichael Dave there are about half a million in pledges from local fans and businesses to keep the Kings in town and build a new stadium. That may be a drop in the bucket of money — the Kings are getting a $50 million loan from Anaheim and $25 million in refurbishments to the Honda Center — but that’s not what the movement was really about at its core.
Carmichael Dave spoke with Aaron Bruski at Rotoworld about the effort.
The goal was to fix the tenor of the conversation here locally in Sacramento, which was extremely negative, with the towel pretty much thrown in not just by our city council but by our mayor himself in many senses. A lot of negative publicity has turned over the last three, four, five days into positive publicity. We’ve been on the front page of the Sacramento Bee, we’ve been on every TV station here in town, numerous blogs, the New York Times, and with you guys – and instead of the focus being ‘the Kings are leaving, the Maloofs and the city council are fighting, and Sacramento’s going to be without a team in two weeks,’ it’s now turned to ‘well that still all may very well happen, but in the meantime the fans are speaking up and they’re putting their money where their mouths are and trying to make a difference.’
It’s a Hail Mary pass, it’s the bottom of the ninth, it’s the 15th round – whatever sports analogy you want to use. But we’re going down with a fight, which is a lot more different than things were going just a few days ago
.
Today there is a rally at City Hall as the HereWeBuild people try to shake up the powers that be and mayor Kevin Johnson (the former Suns player). That’s a step. Turning those steps into something concrete is the next goal.
Now we have all these pledges out there but its Monopoly money, it’s not real. It’s pledges, just like any telethon, but we haven’t cashed them – and that’s gotten us a lot of good PR. The next step is to turn that into actual dollars, so what I need, and my thing from the get-go, from day one, is that we won’t collect a dollar of pledges until we have assurances that all laws are being followed, that everybody is protected, and that the goals of the movement are spelled out ad nausea, and let’s face it – we’re realists here. We know that the odds are against this thing being successful, so there’s more than a decent chance that every penny is going to have to be returned. And if the people of Sacramento and the surrounding regions that are Kings fans, when they are losing their homes and losing their jobs, and they’re still willing to dig into their piggy banks and to donate whatever they can – I need to give them assurances.
It’s a bit of a lost cause, but those can be the most noble.
The people of Sacramento will not just role over, they are trying and fighting back. Whether the battle is lost or not. Which speaks to why these fans should not be losing their team in the first place.
