Your room is ready, Mr. Elephant

Different time, same old thorny issues … this illustration says three things: (1) the digital
iteration is locked away in a storage device I can't get to any more, it's so old, so this is a
photocopy of the archived issue; (2) I had Adobe®™ Illustrator©® and wasn't afraid to use
it; and (3) money makes the world go 'round …

How's everything out your way?

We here are terribly, terribly excited! Terribly! We are over the moon! — or so I'm told — because now the Sacramento Kings™® of the NBA©® can finally have its new stadium right downtown!

The Sacramento City Council™ voted 7-2 Tuesday for the $477 million stadium and financing plans to make it possible!

Key to the plan is that we as citizen/drivers need to pay more for parking downtown — and park much, much more frequently!

Sacramento's mayor, former NBA player and three-time All-star Kevin Johnson™, called the vote Sacramento's finest hour!

Now cancer will abate, everyone will have good jobs, and rain will fall precisely on our lawns and between the farm rows each early morning!

Meh.

The stadium issue has been going on for a long time. This hot mess of an illustration (above) is from 11 years ago, and the hue and cry for a new stadium was already an old and familiar sound. Since then the Kings and their arena have starred in a constant melodrama, pushed over and pulled from the brink many times, mere days away from leaving for Anaheim, then Seattle.

The specter of the arena has been moved around like a king on a chess board, inciting this and that political force to mess with the city. Now it's about three miles north of downtown in the floodplain called the Natoma District. Proponents say the stadium, called Sleep Train®™ Arena, is old and small and past its usefulness.

The proposed new stadium, which can also host concerts and ice hockey games, has been moved over the years to the abandoned railyards, slowly being gussied up … out to the state fairgrounds … and now right next to Interstate 5 and the chokepoint of the city's major freeways, where proponents say it will cause absolutely no congestion problems for games and concerts. None at all!

Past owners became villains, outside forces got caught trying to manipulate votes, the whole schmear. Most people, I'm guessing, stopped listening and caring long ago.

Now it's done. Opponent groups will block and parry once more with lawsuits and allegations — misuse of public money, hidden financial bombshells if the economy goes south — but it's done.

New Kings owner Vivek Ranadive has said the new stadium — a chrome-plated crown-shaped thing, judging from the renderings — will become a California icon, as memorable on postcards as the Hollywood sign and the Golden Gate Bridge.

It won't, of course, but Ranadive condenses the whole. Damn. Problem:

Sacramento is forever trying to be what it's not.

By forever, I mean since the Gold Rush, when Sacramento became a boom service and supply town for the mining camps, but never eclipsed San Francisco's might with its perfect port and gateway to the world.

Even after it became one of the greatest railroad cities in the world, Sacramento still served other regions' growth, and most of the Big Four (merchants Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins) who created the great Central Pacific Railroad chose San Francisco for their ostentations.

Maybe for the heart of the 20th Century Sacramento filled its suit nicely, a place of industry and military bases and government, a walkable place with trolley cars. A big small city. I'm judging from what I read and see in books. But the bases closed and industry has shrunk.

Sacramento is, of course, the capital, the hub of government, its mainstay, but I've heard outsiders many times say, "This is the capital?" They're expecting the height of San Francisco or the breadth of Los Angeles, not Sacramento's pale copy of each.

And that's OK with me. It's never been OK with Sacramento, which is really a small Midwestern city nestled at the confluence of two Midwestern rivers out here in California. It can be a fine Midwestern city, promoting small-town ideas of caring for its own, or trying to.

But people in power and money want it to be Seattle, a truly great port city, with amazing centers of culture and entertainment that seem organic — and amazing heartbreaking problems.

Sacramento has the heartbreaking problems, of chronic crime and dearth of services, especially for its poorest communities.

The arena is supposed to solve all, and that's where the city's attention has gone for years. It'll become the keystone for its Seattle-ization. More likely, though, it'll be the same small Midwestern city, but with a chrome dome.

Once the arena is finished, the city will look around and say, "Hey, where did all these problems come from?" They were here all along; they'll still be here, exacerbated by neglect and diverted resources.

The mayor, whose platform has been the NBA®© — he was instrumental last month in representing NBA™® players for the lifetime ban on Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling for racist comments he was caught making — will likely be off to higher office by then.

Sure, it colors my view that:

• I'm not a basketball fan, or a hockey fan or a goer to concerts or whatever else is planned. We took our kids once to a Kings game through a Scouting promotion, and calculated afterward that we could have bought the tickets, the promoted McDonalds™® Happy Meal®©, even the promotional miniature non-bouncing basketball, for much less on our own. And
• I have no civic pride.

For 27 years of living here, I still feel like I'm passing through. Sacramento's got some things I love — a century-old bike trail along the rivers that couldn't be built in today's fierce real-estate hunger, my wonderful Lake Natoma — but the city has never entranced me.

I have never thought, "I want to go downtown," and I rarely go.

That's just me. I'm weird. It's just where I live. Sorry, Sacramento.

The stadium will replace a has-been downtown mall, which is good. It'll spark a downtown revival, I suppose, and developments are underway already to anticipate the arena's catalytic conversion.

But it's a great big want for a monied minority, and the city has great big needs — not least of which are the needs of those whom the arena will displace downtown — and serious attention must be paid.

From my perch as a permanent tourist, I'm still trying to figure out what Sacramento's trying to pull.

Terribly, terribly exciting!

Best logo ever, now-it-can-be-told division

Sacramento sports finally gets it right!

After a long and ho-hum history of generic, mix-and-match, meaningless team names (what in hell is a River Cat, anyway?) Sacramento has rooted one in its barbarous soil.*

Long may it grow.

Granted, "Sacramento Republic FC" is derivative of European soccer club names, but its parts are pure Sacramento, forged from the city's strange and wonderful history.

Those responsible unveiled the team name and logo last week in front of a sell-out crowd at Raley Field, where the Minor League Baseball River Cats play.

Between exhibition games, the latter a "friendly" between Norwich City FC in the English Premier League and Dorados de Sinaloa from Mexico, (with fine logos of their own — fun fact: a dorado is a fish, which you might know better as mahi mahi!) the team owners showed a video designed to pump up the people with the Sacramento team name and logo.

Sacramento Republic FC is set to join the United Soccer Leagues, which serves as a professional development program for Major League Soccer. Long range, the team owners want to turn Sacramento Republic FC into a Major League Soccer expansion team.

With MLS teams a healthy distance apart (San Jose Earthquakes south and Portland Timbers north) and people mad for soccer (a couple of the nationally ranked high school teams are here), the time and place feel right.

Until the logo unveiling, our household were co-conspirators, sworn to secrecy.

That's right, we knew about it. Read and weep, suckers!

Our daughter interns at the company that created the film, going off to undisclosed filming locations these last few weeks. She asked us to be extras in crowd scenes at Sacramento City College's football stadium, but told us not to blab about it.

Plied with ice cream on a warm summer evening, we did what extras do, hurried up and waited. I couldn't see how the filmmakers were going to turn fewer than 200 people into a packed stadium, but the promotional commercial proved me of little faith. It sure looks like a wild riotous crowd. Don't blink.

The film company and the pro soccer promoters and the president of the ownership group were extremely pleased for our help, told us so many times. During lulls, the big cheeses took questions from the faux crowd. When and where will the team play? Will you hold tryouts? Will there be a women's team?

Then one guy in the stands asked if anyone is concerned that the big red star in the crest might provoke people to think of the Soviet Union or communist China.

Pause.

I forget the diplomatic answer because I was still choking on the question. My answer would have been: Seriously? Have you checked the California flag lately, not to mention the U.S. flag? Stars!

Geez, let's rethink "Republic" while we're at it. Plenty of sinister governments go by that name.

(On the other hand, so what? Intrigue never hurt marketing.)

Still, I'm sure that's why the star on Sacramento Republic FC's crest is brick rather than bright red. The club says the crest, designed by AugustineIdeas advertising firm in nearby Roseville, pulled the colors from the California flag, thus the muted antique tones. It also took the grizzly bear, California's state extinct animal, for the crest.

My favorite part of the crest is "Urbs Indomita," the city motto adopted in 1863. "Indomitable City." The team wanted to honor the city's past, born of the Gold Rush and made manifest by the city's collective stubbornness. Despite years of floods (it was built in haste at the confluence of the American and Sacramento rivers) and fires and terrible disease, the city survived largely by lifting itself nearly 10 feet on average, clear of the raging rivers.

Sometimes I invoke the motto when I lead tours of the Old Sacramento Underground, unveiling the story of the city's rising.

I'm pulling for the soccer team because it's pulling for the city. It really wants to intertwine.

The Sacramento Kings could still leave and become the Something Something Kings, Anywhere USA. It's a generic name, also used by the National Hockey League in Los Angeles. Sacramento got the team from Kansas City nearly 30 years ago, and despite the Sacramento's herculean effort to keep the team, the Kings could still take its name and run without a dent in our psyche.

The River Cats used to be the Vancouver Canadians baseball club in British Columbia. Kind of a dumb name; the team still exists up there as a lower level minor league club.

The River Cats ownership organized a name-the-team contest, giving us one chance to tie the team inextricably to the area. After all the kerfuffle, "River Cats" is the winning name, following the hollow marketing trend of naming minor league teams River Something Somethings. We have River Bats, River Dogs, Riverhawks and River Bandits. Anywhere there's a river, the River Cats may move without much modification.

The baseball team rejected my proposals: Sacramento Robber Barons (after the Big Four railroad magnates and most politicians today) and the Sacramento Americans (a twist on Vancouver Canadians that would also pay homage to our two rivers).

Damn right I'm bitter. My world, my blog, my rules.

Sacramento has suffered with a string of so-so team names, including the Sacramento Surge (what?) and the Sacramento Mountain Lions for pro football attempts. The Kings ownership group had an indoor pro soccer team, the Knights, and a Women's National Basketball Association team, the Monarchs, which made for a matching set with the Kings, but still had nothing to do with Sacramento. (Fun fact: One of the Knights' charismatic stars was Antonio Sutton, who plays the No. 10 striker scoring the header in the Sacramento Republic FC video.)

Sacramento's longtime Pacific Coast League baseball team before the River Cats was the Solons, the nickname headline writers in the 20th Century sometimes called lawmakers in the state's capital.  Solon was the name an Athenian lawmaker. Yeah, you have to look it up, and the discovery doesn't excite.

Jump-starting the new soccer team's debut, Sacramento Republic FC has already penned a team chant, sung to the tune of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," and invented a cheer squad, called the Tower Bridge Battalion (the city's golden bridge linking Sacramento and West Sacramento across the eponymous river). Waving banners and blowing vuvuzelas, the burgundy-clad battalion marched onto the field after the logo unveiling last week.

The Portland Timbers seemed to pull off the same feat, putting team chants and cheer squads in place even before the community could embrace the team, creating instant ancient tradition.

I hope it takes root here. Grow, team, grow.

*Rooted in Barbarous Soil, a great collection of essays about California's gold rush.

Will they stay or will they go?

The Sacramento Kings will remain the Sacramento Kings, not the Anaheim Royals or the Anaheim Anything. For Now. Maybe. We'll see. I dunno.

That's the gist of the story so far. The city of Sacramento with mayor and former NBA star Kevin Johnson, majority Kings owners and developers are all coming together, hats in hand (the hatless have even bought hats to have them in hand), resolving to build a new arena so the Kings will stay forever, and the majority owners say they may pay for more of the new arena. I guess. I dunno.

What I do know, and this cover I drew for the Sacramento News & Review is proof, is that the new arena, and who pays for it, have haunted Sacramento for years; long before this cover, even; probably the day Power Balance Pavilion (nee Arco Arena) was built. Once the last rivet was hammered and the last bin of dust scooped, someone on the construction crew must have said aloud, "No, this is not it at all! What were we thinking?" Or some such.

Anaheim apparently is holding out hope no good thing will come of another year for the Kings in Sacramento: One site even has what appears to be a countdown for when Anaheim might be eligible again to host the team.

Rabid fans of my work (thank you for your foamy loyalty!) will notice I savaged another illustration, with portraits of Lincoln, Washington and Franklin on their respective dollar bills, to build this arena made of money. Ethical? I dunno. I guess. Maybe.