← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · jay
Thread ID: 4642 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2003-01-27
2003-01-27 16:44 | User Profile
[url=http://www.sptimes.com/2002/02/02/TampaBay/Are_they_really_so_ba.shtml]http://www.sptimes.com/2002/02/02/TampaBay...lly_so_ba.shtml[/url]
Are they really so bad? The Buccaneers have thrived and the Glazers have been charitable, but the fans are still cold.
By CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD, Times Staff Writer é St. Petersburg Times published February 2, 2002
TAMPA -- If football is Tampa Bay's religion, Malcolm Glazer might be its favorite devil, and his dutiful sons demons-in-training. Hearing the Bucs' First Family vilified on talk radio or in local pubs, at least, it's easy to imagine they rule from a cruel, sulfurous perch high atop One Buc Place.
Seething fans reel off their most notorious crimes.
It was the Glazers who held Tampa's schoolchildren hostage for the price of a lavish new stadium. It was the Glazers who threatened to move the team out of town. It was the Glazers who made the Bucs feared contenders, but keep failing to deliver a Super Bowl.
Now they have sacked the beloved Tony Dungy. And after allowing Dungy's would-be successor to snub Tampa Bay publicly, they've left us languishing in coachless limbo.
Behind the ill-will, however, lie more than the predictable passions of fans for owners in a rough-and-tumble business. In a town with aspirations of old-school warmth, the Glazers' personal vibe feels distinctly chilly. They avoid ribbon-cuttings and civic chicken-lunches. Guests invited to the owners' luxury box say the Glazers mostly sit by themselves and leave the social niceties to a hostess.
"They're not personality-type people," said Tampa Mayor Dick Greco, who greets strangers with kisses and arm-squeezes. "They don't have the personality that I have. But then, they're multimillionaires, and I'm not."
In the six years since they brought the franchise for a boggling $192-million, pouring money into top talent and bedecking players in hip colors, the Glazers have made the town love the Bucs. But despite donations that put teddy bears in local kids' hospital beds and footballs in the hands of amateur athletes -- despite what their public relations arm estimates at $1-million in charity work a year -- they have failed to make the town love the Glazers.
**For the Glazers, who are Jewish, the welcome was never that warm to begin with. When they were negotiating to buy the team, the city received dozens of anti-Semitic letters, many scrawled with swastikas, deploring the idea of their ownership. It's a sentiment still heard on talk radio.
But what role bigotry may play in the Glazers' general unpopularity is tricky, if not impossible, to gauge, since it's not clear how many of their detractors are even aware of their ethnicity. **
Bucs general manager Rich McKay, who said the Glazers deserve a parade down Kennedy Boulevard for what they've done for football, believes the rancor surrounding the building of Raymond James Stadium continues to taint perceptions of the family. ** With the Glazers threatening to take their franchise elsewhere if they didn't get a new, cash-generating home for the Bucs, Hillsborough County voters in September 1996 approved a half-cent sales tax increase. It linked funding for a spectacular new stadium to improvements in schools, roads and public safety. Resentment ran high; critics called it electoral blackmail.
As the criticism grew, McKay said, the Glazers laid low because they didn't want the issue to be about them.** It was a strategic error, McKay acknowledges now, because "we allowed all those people to have a free shot."
"Go to any city and read about their (team) owners, and you're not going to read about the positives," McKay said. "People perceive them as very wealthy individuals who are running sports teams and making money off them."
True, but the Glazers also suffer accusations of absentee ownership. The family patriarch, 73-year-old Malcolm, who started out poor by selling watches from a suitcase but made a fortune investing in mobile home parks, continues to live in his mansion in Palm Beach. While sons Joel and Bryan have homes in Tampa, spotting them on the town is considered a rarity. They did not return calls for comment on this story.
"People who know them well, you can count on one hand," said Patrick Manteiga, publisher of La Gaceta newspaper and a member of the Tampa Sports Authority, which runs Raymond James Stadium. "I think this leads to people speculating about them, because nobody knows them."
During his 21/2 years on the authority, Manteiga said, he has rarely seen Bucs representatives come to discuss stadium issues, and he has never seen the Glazers come.
"I don't think they're bad people," Manteiga said. "They're cordial, but when you're done meeting them, you don't feel closer to them."
As chairwoman of the Hillsborough County Commission several years ago, Jan Platt said she wrote the Glazers a letter at the board's behest, requesting a meeting to discuss stadium taxes. No response came back.
"I was amazed that they didn't at least send a letter out of courtesy," Platt said. During press conferences, Platt said, the Glazers' expressions offer no window on their real feelings. "They might be heartbroken, they might be happy, but you can't tell," she said.
Mayor Greco described the Glazers as "very nice, very honorable" people, but added: "They're private people, and they bought into a boisterous business."
Greco recalled Malcolm Glazer's nervousness at having to make a brief public speech last year, when Tampa was hosting the Super Bowl. By many accounts, Glazer bought the Bucs with scant knowledge of football itself, and Greco recalls the owner's reaction at a game when the Bucs' opponents had a touchdown overturned: "That's sad."
Greco said Glazer confided an anecdote to him that illustrates the impetus for his work ethic and ideas about money: that the first pair of sneakers Glazer owned, a $1 pair given to him by his mother, were so big he stuffed them with newspapers so they would fit. He removed the newspaper as his feet grew.
"Everything he did was work, work, work, seven days a week," Greco said. "Mr. Glazer can't change what he is."
2003-01-27 16:52 | User Profile
Jew millionaire endures second Holocaust of anti-Semitism simmering incessantly in infamous death camp known as Florida.
Uh huh. Now pull the other one.
2003-01-27 17:27 | User Profile
Isn't Zapata the company Bush owned?
To:henry jakala who started this subject From: leigh aulper Tuesday, Nov 26, 2002 4:30 PM Respond to of 1206
[url=http://biz.yahoo.com/fo/021126/a_foul_smelling_business_2.html]http://biz.yahoo.com/fo/021126/a_foul_smel...business_2.html[/url] Forbes Magazine A Foul-Smelling Business Tuesday November 26, 2:54 pm ET By David Armstrong
Malcolm Glazer's Zapata Corp. relies on an oily, bony fish for growth. What's he really fishing for? As fish go, menhaden aren't much to look at. Short, fat, oily and full of bones, they are inedible, foul-smelling, and often covered in parasites. But grind up 628,000 tons of the creatures, as Houston-based Omega Protein did last year, and you can sell the fish meal and oil to livestock farmers and food companies for $98.7 million, and eke out a $4 million profit.
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This low-margin affair is the sole remaining business of Zapata Corp. (NYSE:ZAP - News) , the onetime oil and gas company cofounded by George H.W. Bush, and now 47% owned by the family of Forbes 400 member Malcolm Glazer (net worth: $750 million). After disastrous forays into restaurants, the Internet (remember the $1.3 billion bid for Excite.com?) and junk bonds, Zapata's 61% stake in Omega Protein accounted for virtually all of the revenue and net income Zapata booked last year.
It's been a rough ride for shareholders, and now they've got more to worry about. In November Zapata announced plans to spend $14 million to buy back 500,000 shares, or 21% of outstanding, at $28 each. That was at a nice $5 premium over the previous price, but roughly half the liquidating value of the company, which has a $60 million equity stake (14.5 million shares at a recent $4.17 each) in Omega Protein, $87.5 million in cash and no debt.
The offer arrived just months after Zapata announced it was looking at "strategic alternatives" for its fish meal business. The buyback offer, coming without any disclosure by insiders of their intentions for their only business, is "a cynical maneuver designed to catch people napping," says Thomas McKay of investment firm Simplon Partners. He believes the Glazers will wait for the dust to settle before taking Omega Protein private at a lowball price. Getting access to Omega Protein's $29 million in cash and $30 million annual operating income (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) should boost the value of Zapata's shares far above the $28 offer--a boon for Zapata's largest stakeholder.
The Glazers wouldn't return calls, but they could argue that Omega isn't even worth book value. Soybeans are now giving fish meal a run for its money in the protein business. Whatever happens to the menhaden, Zapata has been kind to the Glazers. Half of the $4 million the company spends in overhead expenses goes to salaries for members of the Glazer family. Malcolm Glazer, who is owner of football's Tampa Bay Buccaneers, has paid himself $1.5 million a year in salary and bonuses for the past three years--which will continue for the next four years even though he retired as chairman in March. Something fishy here?
2003-01-28 01:39 | User Profile
The claim of anti-semitic remarks fired at Glazer when he bought the Bucs is crappola. Undocumented b.s.. It's along the same lines as reporters using the old "... source tell us," when there are no sources, the reporter is starting the rumour or story himself, right there. The Holocaustâ⢠is always used to generate sympathy, or fight off criticism as we all know.
So many jews own sports teams now without the masses even realing it. Usually the man claimed to be the owner is a front man for a group of businessmen when it comes to jewish owners. The white owners see a nice offer on the table, take it and run. The jews see the teams as a means to several ends, not just a cash cow or vanity project. Yet more control of public perceptions and attitudes can be maintained, with cash coming in besides.
2003-01-28 14:03 | User Profile
I didn't know the Bucs were joo owned until I took a gander at the Glazers Sunday night. And what a hideous clan of zhids they are, too: when Malcolm the Patriarch grabbed the Super Duper Bowl trophy in his fish oily hands, they gave us a prolonged profile shot - the most spectacular hooked schnozz since Streisand. I bet many a nigraball fan choked on their nachos when they saw that cuker.