By Any Other Name …

Yes, yes, like many of you out there, we grow weary with the fast-spreading habit of naming sports venues after the corporations which wholly or partly subsidize them. There’s Synergy Field in Cincinnati (formerly Riverfront Stadium), and Pro Player Stadium (formerly Joe Robbie Stadium) in Miami, for example. There are Pepsi Arena in Denver and Molson Center in Montreal. (Hmmmm. Wonder what beverages get served there.) Thus far we’ve been spared Steinbrenner Enterprises Arena in New York or Hair-Club-for-Men Park to accommodate Bud Adams’ Oilers in Nashville.
Yet, tell the truth, we don’t mind the name AutoZone Park at all. In fact, we rather fancy the name – announced at a ceremony Monday – for the new baseball stadium being built in the heart of downtown Memphis for the Triple-A Memphis Redbirds. By generously helping to underwrite numerous civic blessings – of which the National Civil Rights Museum may be the best-known example – and by locating the lustrous new headquarters of his internationally prominent AutoZone company downtown, local philanthropist Pitt Hyde has already been instrumental in holding the fort for Memphis’ urban core. The $4.3 million which Autozone has committed to filling out the new stadium’s long-term financing package takes the commitment even further.
For the record, our favorite stadium name may be Fenway Park in Boston, home of the sad-sack Red Sox. Fenway isn’t named after a local hero, some hypothetical General George W. Fenway. Nothing like that. The Fens is a large quasi-pastoral area, surrounded by the spires and buildings of downtown Boston, in the middle of which the venerable old park sits. The Fen Way, get it? Hence, Fen-Way Park. It sounds downright archetypal, when you think about it.
So does Hyde Park, for that matter – which, come to think of it, might have been an option for the Redbirds’ new playground. If not that or Dean Jernigan Field (after the franchise’s owner), AutoZone Park could well be the next best thing. There is certainly a case to be made that downtown Memphis, currently undergoing a revival which it owes in some measure to the aforementioned Pitt Hyde’s decision to pitch his tent – and his destiny – on the river, is an AutoZone zone.
So, as commercial honorifics go, AutoZone Park ain’t half bad. n

Crossing the Line

We can’t be as sanguine about another ongoing commercial overlap. Frankly, we’re somewhat horrified to see our old friend David Brinkley – a newsman we trusted as much for his arch, skeptical wit as for his dedication to the facts – now straight-facedly shilling for the Archer Daniels Midland Corporation between segments of This Week, the ABC-TV Sunday-morning show which he anchored with distinction for so many years.
ADM executives currently face price-fixing charges, and the corporation itself has already paid $100 million in fines for participating in international cartels in food and feed additives. Outside the courtroom, the corporation’s agricultural policies are, to say the least, controversial and may conflict with legitimate national policy.
We can look the other way when CNN’s Bernie Shaw and Larry King lend their images to this or that potboiler movie. But that’s make-believe. Archer Daniels Midland’s potentially monopolistic ambitions are real, and, to his discredit, Brinkley has put himself – and his reputation as an oracle – unabashedly at their service. n