ELItorial: Where have all the best fans gone?

By Albert Chen

When I was home in Maryland for winter break, I thought the highlight of my holiday would be going with my friends to see the Washington Wizards play in the new MCI Center. I hadn't been to an NBA game in years, and I was looking for ward to getting my first glimpse of the new arena, hailed by Washington columnist Tony Kornheiser as "the greatest building in the history of Western Civilization, which will elevate downtown Washington to cultural heights not seen since Paris in the days of Louis XIV."

But when we found out that the cheapest tickets to the game were $32, plans for the evening quickly changed. We considered watching the game--a rather meaningless December contest between the Wizards and the Toronto Raptors, a squad whose greatest accomplishment this year has been their premature clinching of a lottery pick--on TV in my basement.

We eventually decided to go see Titanic, which turned out to be a damn good movie, and a hell of a lot cheaper.

Really, it should be an exciting season for Washington, D.C. basketball fans. After all, during the off- season, the team got a new name and a new building. And, in its final season as the Washington Bullets, the team made the playoffs for the first ti me in almost a decade.

The Wizards are now a handful of games over .500 and are looking like they're going to make a serious run at a high seed in the NBA playoffs. Chris Webber and Juwan Howard have emerged as two of the league's top young stars. Yet, despite having a winnin g team and the glorious new MCI Center in downtown Washington, some of the truest Washington basketball fans have never felt more detached and angry.

This is happening everywhere in America. The reasons are really quite simple. For one thing, people that used to go to games just can't afford them anymore. It's also hard to root for a team full of players that are more interested in padding personal statistics to land lucrative contracts in the offseason free-agent wars than in their team's record.

Even the Baltimore Oriole baseball franchise, well-known for its passionate and loyal followers, is slowly losing its best fans. It wasn't so long ago that I drove 20 minutes to Oriole Park at Camden Yards after school, stood in line for half an hour, and got $4 tickets to watch a pennant race game between two American League leaders. That was about five years ago, when the ballpark first opened. Now, those exact same tickets cost $9. The average ticket back then cost $10.87. Next season, it'll be $18.93. In just six years, ticket prices have leapt 74 percent.

I guarantee that Camden Yards will see just as many sell-outs as it did last season, and the season before. But when you look around, you won't see nearly as many kids and average Joes wearing Cal Ripken jerseys, screaming at the top of their lungs when Mike Mussina strikes out another batter. Those loud, crazy fans have quietly been replaced by men in suits far less interested in the actual games. With higher and higher ticket prices, the number of corporate ticket buyers will continue to increase.

Nevertheless, Oriole fans are luckier than most. They can still root for players like Ripken, Mussina, and Brady Anderson, the rare kind of professional athlete who has, in recent years, accepted a contract considerably lower than market value to stay in a town they love. Sadly, there aren't many who would.

Just look at the professional basketball team a mere hour from Baltimore. A couple of years ago, Howard quietly left town and headed for the Miami sun when the Heat offered him a $100 million contract. He signed and left his fans in the dust. Several days later, the NBA ordered Howard back to Washington when they realized that Miami had committed a salary cap violation in trying to grab the forward. An embarrassed Howard still got his $100 million, this time from a team that he once proclaimed he would never leave.

Both the owners and the players have a lot of thinking to do. It seems that they have forgotten the most important aspect of professional sports--the relationship between the athletes and the fans.

Owners need to be more concerned about keeping the die-hard fans at home games than about how many luxury boxes are in their stadium. Ten years from now, when the novelty of the MCI Center wears off, you can be sure that those luxury boxes will be hard t o fill unless the team turns into a league powerhouse.

Whether or not the franchise survives will depend on that loyal fan base, still in it for the love of the team. In ten years, it may be too late to lower ticket prices to get those original die-hard fans back.

For now, I'm just hoping that there are some good movies playing over spring break.

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