Idiots Write About Sports

What’s in a name? A multi-use sports facility by any other name would still smell like garlic fries.
Nevertheless, the home stadium of the Oakland Athletics will soon change. Fare thee well, Network Associates Coliseum. Hail and welcome to McAfee Coliseum.
That’s not McAfee as in Bill McAfee, a veteran of five major league seasons in the 1930s who enjoyed his finest years with the Washington Senators in 1932 and 1933. Rather, that’s McAfee as in the new corporate name Network Associates is adapting for itself. Thus, as the name of the company changes, so does the name of the stadium.
According to The San Francisco Business Journal, Network Associates has a five-year naming-rights deal that runs through 2008 and generates about $1.2 million a year that gets divided between the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Authority and the Oakland Raiders. Since the Athletics don’t see a dime from this deal, I’m not sure why they should bother calling the stadium anything.
Then again, it’s not like the name change — the third since 1998 after a brief, unhappy period as the UMAX Coliseum — affects me one iota, since I still call it the Oakland Coliseum. That’s what it was called when I was growing up, and no one — not Network Associates or whatever they want to call themselves — is paying me to call it anything else.
Of course, that’s not to say that someone can’t pay me to call it something else. I can be bought, and I can be bought rather cheaply. I’m not ashamed to say it.
So if you’ve ever wanted to live like a corporate bigshot but lacked the millions of dollars to spend on ill-advised stadium-naming-rights deals, here’s your chance to get something named after you on the cheap. Inspired by our friends at Networks Associates nee McAfee, I am putting the naming rights of the Oakland Coliseum — or what I call the Oakland Coliseum at any rate — up for bid.
No, the owner of the winning bid will not see his or her name up in lights or in newspaper accounts or mentioned by Hank Greenwald at the start of every A’s telecast. What you will get is the small tingle of pride of seeing the words [Your Name Here] Coliseum in every blog post I make about the A’s for the remainder of this season (with the right of first-refusal to renew for 2005!). And if the right to see your name appear over and over again on a little-read sports blog isn’t worth a modest amount of American dollars, I don’t know what is.
We’ll start the bidding at $1. Please respond below. And good luck!