City sells out tradition

Recently, many sports fans became enraged over the sale of the name of the sports facility located on that foggy and rainy point just south of San Francisco.

Candlestick Park, which became as famous for weather patterns as for the many sports events that have happened there over the past 35 years, unceremoniously dumped its name in favor of the sterile-sounding "3Com Park."

The motivation behind the move is the old standby -- money. It seems that San Francisco promised the NFL that they would make $26 million in improvements to the stadium if they could have the 1999 Super Bowl, but as is usually the case with these deals, The City doesn't have the cash to make the improvements.

Their solution was to sell the right to rename Candlestick to a Santa Clara based company for $500,000. That $500,000, which is about what Barry Bonds makes each month, guarantees that the stadium will be called 3Com Park until the end of the 1995 football season. After that, they have an option to continue the deal to the end of the century. This would garner The City an additional $3.5 million to put toward the promised renovations.

Naming stadiums after companies isn't a new trend -- we have Busch Stadium, Coors Field and Wrigley Field. But there is one small difference; all of those companies own, or have owned, some part of the team that inhabits the stadium. In the case of Busch and Coors, they are both major-name beers that millions of sports fans identify with. And the average fan in the stadium has probably sampled their products many times.

I think basically, it comes down to the sound of the name. Busch and Coors are synonymous with sports, and Wrigley has been around so long that nobody dares mess with it, but 3Com is a wimpy-sounding name. I imagine a candlestick as a tool used to help someone blaze a trail in the depths of the night, while 3Com sounds like the place I plug wires into my PC.

It seems that local sports fans agree with me. In a recent telephone poll taken by the San Francisco Examiner, 93 percent of the people thought the park's name should remain Candlestick. I have spoken to many fans who don't even acknowledge the name has been changed, just ignoring what they don't want to hear.

Even though I am not from the Bay area and do not support either of the sports teams that play their games in 3Com Park, I feel that fans lose some of their identity with the name change. Candlestick was named after the chunk of land upon which it sits, and it should not be renamed just because some high-tech company decides to float the city a few bills.

Hopefully, the contract will not be renewed at the end of the football season. But until the name is changed back, Chronicle writer John King has found a solution to the moral dilemma which works for me. He decided to refer to the stadium as The Park Formally Known as Candlestick.

[ back to Golden Gater Online September 19, 1995 ]

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