County Tags Sports Park Out At Home

By DANIEL RUTH

Published: Oct 4, 2007

For a minute there, that big lug Jim Norman looked like he had just been mugged by Santa Claus, Mother Teresa and Billy Graham.

The Hillsborough County commissioner's much-beloved proposed Championship Park, a sweat lodge of a public works debacle, was going down in flames as his colleagues lined up one by one to note they would rather have shards of broken glass shoved up their noses than vote to approve a $40 million vanity project.

"I gotta tell you," a visibly shaken Norman whined, "the kids lost today."

Uh, despite the commissioner's best effort to become the Captain Kangaroo of the Community Investment Tax, the tots of our fair village lost absolutely nothing, unless you count being spared from a pol's conceited indulgence in legacy building.

Without exception, Norman's fellow commissioners - Mark Sharpe, Ken Hagan, Brian Blair, Al Higginbotham, Kevin White and Rose Ferlita - all expressed doubts about the massive sports complex's financial viability, its size and its location.

Spoiled Sport

Left unmentioned were concerns about Norman's sanity in pushing a $40 million mega-playground in an era of government belt-tightening, employee layoffs and declining revenue.

That would have been like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe calling for a national Pheasant Under Glass Day celebration.

Alas, instead of simply reading the political tea leaves and understanding Championship Park had less of a future than Aileen Wuornos, a petulant Norman decided to become more of a spoiled brat than Paris Hilton meets Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Citing other civic projects such as the Tampa History Center, The Florida Aquarium and the Tampa Museum of Art, Commissioner Pouty Pants wondered how those efforts could be supported by many of his fellow board members and not his glorified amusement park.

"People from Idaho are not going to come here and go to the aquarium, but they'll come here for a ballgame," Norman, in full Zelda Fitzgerald delusion, opined.

The Sliced Bread Of Life

Despite the artistic shortcomings of the Tampa Museum of Art and its world class collection of erasers, what Norman doesn't grasp is that venues such as museums and aquariums and zoos are designed to leaven and complement a city's cultural life.

By 2009, a Children's Museum is scheduled to open. Children will be able to take advantage of the Tampa Bay History Center when it opens in 2008. And even a new Tampa Museum of Art and its collection of PEZ dispensers will be accessible to children when it opens in 2008.

That may come as a shock to Norman, but maybe so many of the area's recreational spaces are so cramped because of society's goofy notion that unless a kiddo is involved in some manner of organized teams, tournaments and leagues, the experience of sport is in some way diminished.

At the risk of committing jockstrap heresy, nothing spoils the sheer joy of a perfectly batted ball more than the intrusion of grown-ups.

Children, if left to their own devices, are quite capable of walking out the back door and playing baseball, or football, or basketball, or soccer - all by themselves. It's true!

So the kiddos hardly lost on Wednesday. This was a rare upset win for - common sense.