Shakedown

I don't know which is worse: professional athletes pillaging and plundering though local bars or the slimy extortion tactics used by executives of local sports teams. Confronting a professional athlete might leave you toothless and in pain but the team's financial representatives will definitely swipe your wallet faster than a Mexican in need of rent money.

The Chiefs and the Royals are showing some impatience with Jackson County and Missouri, KMBC's Michael Mahoney reported Wednesday.

Up until now, lease talks between the teams and county and state have been courteous. But with the county and the sports authority asking for another deadline extension to make repairs to the stadiums, Royals owner David Glass told a Kansas City newspaper, "If you continue to defer, you don't get anything done you need to get done. . . Last Saturday, Chiefs General Manager Carl Peterson complained about the inaction of Missouri state government with the new training facilities the state of Wisconsin paid for."

Let them go. Let them run to Johnson County with the rest of the money grubbing, soulless flock. The days of jocks shaking down people for cash should have ended with Columbine.

Kansas City is a great town without the sports teams. Look in the stands or at all those dumbasses hanging out in a parking lot "tailgating." Those are JoCo folks fresh off the highway and they scurry back to their hinterlands as soon as the game is over. It just doesn't make sense for taxpayers of KC to grab their ankles for sports teams anymore. A study from the CATO Institute reveals that, "The lone beneficiaries of sports subsidies are team owners and players."

KC simply doesn't need the Chiefs for the Royals. This city is awesome because of its people and not the professional pay check collectors that fly in to collect their fee and disappoint fans every year. The same twisted logic that gives real estate developers every tax break in the books is also behind the effort to mindlessly cater to sports franchises. While it's clear that KC needs every penny for infrastructure and public services, this town's leaders are too busy playing games with vanity projects to understand the needs of the unglamorous, unwashed masses of KC.