San Francisco saw its Olympic dreams go down in flames this week after the 49ers announced that they were moving the team to Santa Clara.  The San Francisco 2016 committee had planned on pitching a new stadium at Candlestick Point as the home for the opening and closing sessions of the summer Olympics that year.  But by yesterday, Mayor Gavin Newsom had sent a letter telling the U.S. Olympic Commission that the city was withdrawing from the competition to be the American city recommended by the USOC to the international committee.  Chicago and Los Angeles are still in the running.  Newsom’s letter told the USOC that it didn’t make any sense to “drag out what in the end would clearly be a losing proposition.”

What is the reaction of city political leaders?  Newsom’s office is trying to prove to the public that it was the 49ers management, not the mayor’s office, which flubbed this relationship up.  As Newsom tries to decide whether he will run for mayor again next year (he says the job is hard on his social life.  I don’t think it’s his job…it’s being a gay-looking straight man in a gay city that is probably slowing him down!), this issue is a big one.  He needs to prove that his mayoral team wasn’t responsible for losing the Niners to Silicon Valley.

The 49ers management has annoyed San Francisco-centric politicians, such as Assemblyman Mark Leno and Senator Dianne Feinstein, by saying that they will keep the name “San Francisco 49ers” even when they are located in Santa Clara.  Leno says that he may introduce legislation that would prohibit any professional sports franchise that is not headquartered or play games in San Francisco from using the city’s name.  Feinstein says she’s also considering legislation that would not only ban the team from using “San Francisco” but also “49ers.”  Feinstein raised the issue at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday, saying, “When a team takes the name and in this case the heritage of a city, it causes great consternation.”  Now although I’m a product of 1970’s California public school system, I’m pretty sure that there were forty-niners all over California–not just in San Francisco–as the term refers to early prospectors who came here to find their fortune in gold in the mid-1800s.  That’s why the CSU Long Beach mascot is a 49er.  So San Francisco does not have a lock on the term  "49er."

The naming of sports teams is just getting weird in this state.  In Southern California, the Anaheim Angeles steal the name of a city in which they don’t even play and now the 49ers want to retain the name of a city where they won’t play in the future.  Following the Angels’ lead, perhaps the 49ers need to start calling themselves the “San Francisco 49ers of Santa Clara.”

In the end, both San Francisco and the U.S. Senate have bigger issues on which both Leno and Feinstein should be focused instead of worrying about whether or not the area’s football team uses the city’s name.   

But the 49ers do have some major public relations work to do.  Half of their loyal fans are annoyed at having to trek down to Santa Clara to see the team play (the half that lives in Silicon Valley are thrilled, I’m sure, to not make the trip up north).  City leaders feel that they were not given proper notice.  Worse, the San Francisco 2016 committee was given no heads up on this huge decision to move the team.  In fact, committee members were in Orange County meeting with USOC officials when the announcement was made, thinking that a new Candlestick Park–the cornerstone of the Olympic bid–was in the works.  I’m sure that there are bitter feelings from committee members who have given time and talent towards this effort, only to have the rug pulled out from under them by the 49ers.

It’ll be interesting to see how all of this plays out in local politics.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.