HOW SUITE IT ISN'T

By Steve Wulf

Take me out to the ball game, Take me out to the Diamond View Suites. Buy me some Dijon-marinated jumbo shrimp and Grgich Hills Chardonnay, I don't care 'cause the company will pay...

Given the current state of pro sports economics, Take Me Out to the Ball Game needs a little updating. And so does the antediluvian notion that fan support is the key to franchise success. A ball club needs not only gate receipts and a good media contract but also steady revenue from stadium advertising, sweetheart concession deals and, especially, luxury boxes. "Luxury boxes are critical these days," says Craig Simon, director of sports marketing for the Chicago consulting firm of Frankel & Co. "A stadium that doesn't have them is in danger of losing its team."

Indeed, the luxury box--or sky box, club suite, call it what you will--is such a primary temptation that both National Football League franchises in the Los Angeles area, the Raiders and the Rams, are leaving the second-largest TV market. Raiders' owner Al Davis, who abandoned Oakland, California, in 1982 after the Los Angeles Coliseum promised sky boxes but never delivered them, will be returning to the Bay Area now that the Oakland Coliseum is increasing its luxury-suite total from 58 to 175. With the Raiders getting 100% of the revenue from the sale of those suites, which fetch between $40,000 and $85,000 a year, Davis will net an extra $7.6 million a year. The Rams will be going to a new stadium in St. Louis, Missouri, thanks in large measure to the promise of 120 luxury suites, one of which is a 48-seater big enough to accommodate the baby grand piano of the Rams' owner Georgia Frontiere.

The National Hockey League is undergoing its own greed-fueled identity crisis. The Nordiques are abandoning their antiquated arena in Quebec City for a new one with lots of luxury suites in Denver next year, while the Stanley Cup champion New Jersey Devils--who, as it happened, played in Denver before they moved to the marsh across the river from New York City 13 years ago--are trying to clear the way for a move to a box-studded arena in the not particularly hockey-loving city of Nashville, Tennessee.

A luxury box is not something you give Dad on Father's Day. At New York City's Madison Square Garden, a suite goes for as much as $240,000 a year. For that money, lucky patrons get 16 seats in the box for every event (basketball! hockey! monster trucks!) save religious rallies. Patrons get to saunter in through a special VIP entrance, watch the game from a nicely appointed, glass-enclosed living room and relieve themselves in their own private bathroom. The waiter-service menu ranges from hot dogs ($42 for 12) to grilled lamb chops ($95 for 12); Dom Perignon is available at $120 a bottle. So what's the drawback? The boxes, at the top of the Garden, offer a view of the action that reduces 7-ft.-tall basketball players to ants in short pants. The biggest selling point? Corporate box-goers in New York, as in every other U.S. city, get to write off 50% of the expense for tax purposes, which means the taxpayers down in the cheap seats are footing part of the bill for the alleged client wooing going on upstairs. And in the case of arenas and stadiums built with public funds, hoi polloi are having their pockets picked twice.

At the brand-new United Center in Chicago, where basketball's Bulls and hockey's Blackhawks play, 216 suites sell for between $55,000 and $175,000 a year. "The luxury suites are the financial engine that offsets the cost ($175 million) the Bulls and Blackhawks incurred in constructing the facility," says Steve Schanwald, vice president of marketing for the Bulls. Jack Kent Cooke, owner of the N.F.L.'s Washington Redskins, is so enamored of luxury boxes--and the Washington lobbyists are so eager to buy them--that the joke around the Beltway is that the new Redskins stadium, which is planned for Landover, Maryland, will have 850 luxury boxes, with a handful of standing-room spaces left over for normal people.

But the concept of luxury seating just isn't funny in Quebec City. Or in New Jersey, where, last Wednesday, 25,000 Devils fans gathered outside the Brendan Byrne Arena both to celebrate their team's Stanley Cup victory and to implore owner John McMullen to leave the team be. (NASHVILLE DOESN'T NEED ANY MORE TOOTHLESS MEN, read one sign.) The show of support was nice. But nowadays it hardly seems to matter.

--Reported by Julie Grace/Chicago, Elizabeth Kauffman/Nashville and David E. Thigpen/New York

With reporting by JULIE GRACE/CHICAGO, ELIZABETH KAUFFMAN/NASHVILLE AND DAVID E. THIGPEN/NEW YORK