Slate's Bizbox
sports nut: The stadium scene.

Fail to the RedskinsWhat's wrong with Washington's sports teams?

By David Plotz
Posted Thursday, Sept. 6, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET
Redskins owner Daniel Snyder

The end of summer is a special time for Washington, D.C., sports fans, our moment of giddy anticipation. The Redskins open the regular season Sunday, prompting us to wonder: Can they really play as lamely as they have in preseason? Can they choke even more grandly than they did last year?

Meanwhile, the NBA Wizards are heading to training camp. They haven't won a playoff game for 12 seasons. Can they make it lucky 13? Smart money says they can!

And the Baltimore Orioles—for masochistic reasons, Washingtonians still think of the O's as our hometown team—are engaged in their usual nail-biting contest for fourth place, and not even Cal Ripken's retirement tour can make them worth watching. (The second-tier teams are doing their part, too: The Washington Mystics finished their WNBA season in last place again, missing the playoffs for the third time in their four years in the league. And D.C. United is the caboose of Major League Soccer for the second season in a row.)

In my three decades as a fan, Washington has degenerated from one of America's best sports cities to the worst. It's true that Washington doesn't have the comic hopelessness of a Tampa or New Orleans. What we have is worse. A city like New Orleans wears its ineptitude like a comfortable old bathrobe. They know nothing but losing, so it never surprises them. They don't understand that 8-8 is not a winning record. We do. Washington suffers more because we have something to remember. In the '70s, the Wizards (then Bullets) won one NBA title, almost won two more, and contended every year. From the late '60s through the mid-'80s, the Orioles compiled the best record in baseball, played in six World Series, and won half of them. And the Redskins, my darling Redskins, took home three Super Bowl titles between 1983 and 1992.

Besides, these other benighted cities have an excuse. Tampa and San Diego are small media markets, and they have (relatively) poor owners who can't afford free agents. Washington has a big TV market, scads of fans, and owners with piles of money. What happened?

Fans tend to divide into two camps. Nostalgists long for the good old days of loyal owners and stars who spent their entire career playing for one team. Modernists insist that free agency, ultra-rich owners, and astronomical salaries have made pro sports more exciting than ever. Washington is proof that both models are flawed. The Wizards have the most loyal and traditional owner in pro sports, yet they are unredeemably rotten. The Redskins and Orioles, meanwhile, have ultra-rich owners who have paid platinum salaries to bus-loads of free agents, and they still can't win. (Notice that I leave one team out of this dismal survey, the NHL's Washington Capitals. Click here for more on them.)

Wealthy, meddlesome new owners—the kind who are supposed to spend their way to championships—have dragged the Skins and Orioles to the bottom. Daniel Snyder of the Skins and Peter Angelos of the O's brought huge bank to their teams, spent millions fast on free agents, generated monster buzz, and promised wins immediately. The Skins of the '80s under Joe Gibbs were patient, loyal, and stolid, an organization of disciplined, lovable veterans: Art Monk, Darrell Green, Monte Coleman, the Hogs. The new Redskins under Snyder funneled zillions to Deion Sanders and other free agents. Loyalty doesn't interest Snyder: He dumped a respectable quarterback in Brad Johnson for Jeff George and unloaded passionate old-timers who wanted to stay, notably Brian Mitchell. (Not that throwing the geezers overboard is such a bad idea: The NFL punishes teams that stick with their vets with 6-10 records.) The Skins jacked ticket prices to infinity and abandoned their small but fabulous downtown stadium for a lifeless suburban monstrosity. (The stadium, to be fair, predates Snyder.)

Snyder set expectations Super Bowl-high, and, spoiled by the Gibbs era, we actually believed. When the team could barely manage eight wins, committed moronic penalties, stank on special teams, and consistently got outhustled, fans were outraged. We were repulsed by the new gang of unfamiliar, overpaid, lazy stars.

The Orioles have taken a similar path to hell. In their heyday, the Orioles trained their minor leaguers in the "Oriole Way." Their farm system, baseball's best, fed a steady supply of fundamentally sound, hard-working ball players to Baltimore. Angelos all but jettisoned the farm system and stacked the lineup with free agents (including horrors like Albert Belle). Promising young players were dispatched in trades. The "Oriole Way" became: Earn $10 million a year, hit .260, miss 70 games with an injury, and whine about the fans.

Angelos, who can't bear any challenge to his fat ego, dumped a superb manager, Davey Johnson, then alienated or refused to pay market value for the best players on the team: Mike Mussina, Rafael Palmeiro, and Roberto Alomar—the core of what could be a World Series champion—fled town after Angelos slighted them. It's only now that the best players have left that the Orioles are tolerable again. It's much easier to watch journeymen hustle their way to 95 losses a season than it was to watch surly ex-all-stars stroll their way to the same record. (Angelos' ego has also prevented D.C. from landing a MLB franchise of its own. In other words, he has kept D.C. from having a good baseball team twice.)

The Redskins and Orioles have been ruined by the blights of modern sports: unsentimentality, overreliance on free agents, and obnoxious rich owners. But the Wizards prove that the reverse is just as bad. They have been degraded by too much loyalty. Longtime owner Abe Pollin is one of the treasures of Washington, a philanthropist and a sweetheart. His greatest charity, however, has been employing the kindly but woeful Wes Unseld for decades as a Wizards chieftain. Pollin adores Unseld for his brilliance as a Bullets star in the '70s and views him as the heart of the basketball team. But as coach, director of player personnel, and general manager, Unseld drove the Wizards further and further into the ground.

Under the direction of Unseld and his equally incompetent colleagues, the Wizards wasted draft picks on freaks—Manute Bol, Gheorghe Muresan—and head cases—John "Hot Plate" Williams. The Wizards became notorious as a team other franchises wanted to trade with, cheerfully dealing players who then blossomed elsewhere: Tom Gugliotta, Rasheed Wallace, and—sin of all sins—Chris Webber. In exchange, the Wizards received creaky veterans like Mitch Richmond and Rod Strickland. Obsessed with having players who were good citizens, Pollin and Unseld unloaded troublemakers Wallace and Webber, even though they could have won the Wizards a championship by now. (They didn't dump just the talented players; they dumped the exciting ones. The Wizards play basketball that is both bad and dreary.) Pollin finally agreed to shelve Unseld when Michael Jordan bought into the franchise in 1999, but it will take years to undo all his mistakes.

(The Washington Post's cheerleading sports section also bears responsibility for our decline and fall. Its unwillingness to criticize hometown teams even when they stink has allowed rotten coaches and players to linger far too long. A good tabloid would have tarred and feathered Unseld and Skins coach Norv Turner and gotten them fired five years sooner.)

The greatest tragedy of the D.C. decline is this: Washington, thanks to its brew of politics and media, is a most cynical city. But sports have always been officially off-limits: Genuine enthusiasm was not merely permitted at Skins and Orioles games; it was required. The collapse has brought a bitter joylessness to fans. In the D.C. disintegration, we see the corrosive impact of money, the triumph of the individual over the team, the constant, mendacious spinning that everything really is all right. Our teams, in other words, have been afflicted by exactly the same miserable qualities that foul Washington politics. So it is no wonder that we are becoming as cynical about our Skins as we are about our senators.

Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
David Plotz is Slate's deputy editor. He is the author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. You can e-mail him at .
Photograph of Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder by Joe Giz/Reuters/Corbis.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

Reader Comments From The Fray:


[Notes from the Fray Editor: Nothing gets them going in The Fray like the claim that something is the worst (except an attack on a popular sports icon, like, oh just for example's sake, Ichiro or Cal Ripken). No, says Guido, Boston is the worst place for sports "look in the [dictionary] under loser." There were a lot of votes for Boston; also mentioned were LA, Dallas, the whole country of England, Waco, Atlanta, Birmingham, Philadelphia, Houston… no, it may be quicker to list nominations for the best sports town: Canton, Ohio. Nathan Hodge defends the Redskins here. Adam Masin looks at some of the other possibilities in a very even-handed way (is he really a sports fan at all? Does he understand the point of Sports Nut and its Fray?)]


The Orioles are not now nor have ever been DC's baseball team. I was born after the Senators left, and while we would take occasional field trips up north to see Cal Ripken and Eddie Murray play, they were never our team, not anymore than the Colts or Ravens are. The Wizards...well, you get no argument from me there. And leaving the Capitals out of your argument was wise because they are actually a successful franchise, and they've just landed Jaromir Jagr, the league's leading scorer. Finally the Redskins. Yes, Daniel Snyder is a moron, but at the same time, if you or I bought our favorite football team, and had a megalomania problem, then wouldn't you have done the same thing? Built the best fantasy football team possible? I know I would have. Getting rid of Brad Johnson was a great thing to do. Every time we were behind for the past three years, I'd hitch up my pants and utter the words "comeback time". And then on the next play, Brad Johnson would throw a pick. A stupid pick. Now I'm no Jeff George fan, but watch Tampa this year and I think you'll see just how lame he really is. Also, the skins have been hampered with a horrible head coach for at least 5 years too long. One playoff appearance in 7 years? Are you kidding me? But you can't not say DC is the worst team for sports, because Skins' fans are psychotic, and will always be that way

--Sean McGinty

(To reply, click here.)


Washington, DC, with a metro area of 7.5 million people virtually from everywhere but the DC area, couldn't support a home town baseball team if its livelihood depended on it. With 80 home games per year, the support for a professional baseball team would be lackluster at best. It's difficult to garner support for a team when most the citizens' hearts belong to another city. Besides, traveling to Baltimore to see a baseball game is an event in itself and has become something of tradition for Washington area residents. All those shlumps living in the DC area who hail from places like Ohio and North Carolina love making the trek to Baltimore, a city with tall buildings and expressways. And since the DC/Baltimore area is now considered one metropolitan area, what difference does it make if you have a team in Baltimore or Montgomery County? Even if DC did get a team, chances are most Washington area residents would have to travel a distance just as far as, if not further than, what they currently travel to see the Orioles in Baltimore. And please don't talk about a team being placed in Northern Virginia and being named after Northern Virginia. That is nauseating. People in Southern Illinois have no problem routing for the St. Louis Cardinals, so people in Northern Virginia should have no problem cheering on the Baltimore Orioles. I know it's difficult for people living in Virginia to have to step foot on the rancid soil of Maryland everytime they want to see a professional sport; but that's the way it is--deal with it. People in Northern Virginia aren't any more special than anyone else, despite their high opinion of themselves. And if the Redskins (another Maryland-based team) can't get you excited, then just travel the extra 20 miles to see the reigning Super Bowl champs Baltimore Ravens. After all, the Baltimore/Washington Metroplex has much to offer, including sports teams

--Anthony

(To reply, click here.)

 (9/6)


Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
A Grand Tour
David Broder | While the stars align for Obama, McCain is looking like the odd-man-out on foreign policy.
Annette Heuser: A Honeymoon