A Sporting Chance

Last April, as the battle raged over whether the NBA’s Seattle SuperSonics would stay in town or leave, a former Sonics star and a public-relations executive unveiled a bold new proposal that they believed at the time was a game changer.

They wanted to build a sparkling new professional sports and exhibition center along the south end of Seattle’s scenic waterfront, some of the state’s most valuable real estate. The new entertainment mecca was dubbed “the Emerald City Center.” Its cost? Oh, about $1.1 billion.

Wait, how much? That’s right, $1.1 billion. But in this economic climate, who’s got the bank for that?

“We do,” says Fred “Downtown Freddy” Brown, one of the greatest perimeter shooters in Sonics history, captain of the 1979 championship Sonics team and a former vice president at Bank of America. “The response we’ve gotten from the private sector has been overwhelming.”

Emerald City Center is nothing if not audacious. The plan calls for the creation of a sports center that would include exhibition halls, open spaces, restaurants and lots of stores.

The facility would be anchored by a massive sports arena, which in artist renderings resembles a horseshoe crab. It would house teams from the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League and, perhaps, even the Arena Football League. There would be exhibition centers on the site to spotlight the region’s technology sector, the aerospace industry, the agricultural sector, the area’s Native American heritage and a Pacific Northwest sports hall of fame.

And the best thing about the proposal, according to Brown? It won’t cost the taxpayers a single penny; the entire project would be completely financed by money from the private sector. While Brown says there has been widespread interest from a variety of investors, none has come out publicly in support of the idea.

While the complex is obviously the longest shot of Brown’s career, he and his business partner in the deal, Dave Bean, senior director of integrated strategies for WongDoody, believe that this project can be done and that it actually makes financial sense.

Of course, several things would have to happen before such a grand vision can start to become a reality. The first, most obvious and most difficult hurdle would be to find an NBA team to replace the Sonics, who have departed Seattle to the wilds of Oklahoma after 41 seasons. As die-hard Sonics fans will always remember as a day of infamy,

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