Ding Dong, The Stadium's Dead

With any luck State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's no-vote on state financing of the Jets West Side stadium should sink the project faster than Chad Pennington's gimpy arm will sink the Jets' playoff chances this year.

About friggin' time.

My father has owned Jets season tickets since 1966 when they were the New York Titans. He watched nascent murderer O.J. Simpson rush for 2,000 yards against them in the snow of Shea Stadium in 1973. He'd grease the ticket-takers $5 so I could sit on his lap at games there when I was 4 years old. We were at the last game in that stadium (a loss) when fans almost tore it apart. We followed them to Giants Stadium in 1983 for that first game (a loss) and I've probably seen upwards of 120 games there since.

Any Jet fan will tell you how demoralizing it is to be tenants in a building with the name of another, usually better local team glowing in red and blue. It's one of those sports absurdities that can hardly be stomached, no matter how much green and white bunting they drape the place with for Jets home games.

In a perfect world, the Jets would have their own stadium. In no world is a stadium in Manhattan perfect.

Setting aside for a moment the impropriety of New Yorkers partially funding a stadium for a billionaire and his sports team when almost every other aspect of city finances cries out for this money, the proposed (hopefully dead) stadium screws the fans.

Football fans tailgate. Grilling, drinking, tossing footballs, blasting music, soaking up the sun, huddling around fires. Tailgating is one of those things that makes football different from most other sports. Sunday is the day for truly devout families to shun church and dedicate their time and effort to make a full day of NFL worship. The party atmosphere will vanish if the stadium sits in midtown Manhattan. Jet owner Woody Johnson envisions cars parked in New Jersey to tailgate with ferry service taking them to the stadium. As though all Jets fans come from New Jersey.

And can anyone imagine what traffic will be like when fans flood out at 4 or 8 PM after another agonizing Jets loss? Even if 75 percent of those attending took some form of public transportation (not likely, considering how far folks will need to travel from Jersey, Queens, Westchester and Long Island), the glut of pedestrians, cars and buses would turn the West Side Highway, 10th, 9th and likely 8th Avenues into parking lots. Returning to the city from Jets games on game days from six miles away in New Jersey often presents a traffic nightmare. And if everyone were already in New York fighting to get out for a good night's sleep before returning to work on Monday? Show me a civil engineer who thinks this is a good idea and I'll show you a dude with Mike Bloomberg's ass hairs caught in his teeth.

And who will these Jets fans be? Not the same blue-collar, bitter, violent, lovable drunks that currently bat around inflatable sex dolls and burn giveaway hats at Jets games. Woody Johnson, who is still in debt after purchasing the team for $635 million in 2000, faces a growing price tag on his dead dream stadium, balooning beyond $2 billion. And although Jets president Jay Cross continues to huck and jive, the team will certainly need to charge season ticket holders thousands of dollars in personal seat licenses for the "right" to fork over more thousands on ticket prices they will certainly raise to the retractable roof.

Add to this financial hurdle the fact that the new stadium would feature 14,000 fewer seats than Giants Stadium, and it's clear that this eyesore on the Hudson will price out the average fan and host a crowd of corporate cronies and button-down jerks like those who can still endure Knicks games.

But Silver hit on the biggest travesty of this boondoggle. Why should the city and state of New York pay $300 million each to finance a private stadium when city teachers have worked for two years and city cops have worked six years without a contract. The NYPD is the most highly trained and worst paid major city police force in the country. They actually have to pay for their uniforms. Cops in Westchester and Long Island get almost double the pay for a fraction of the work and risk. The city transit agency projects deficits that could rise to $1 billion in a few years, while the 100-year-old subway system rots and much-needed projects (like the pipe dream 2nd Avenue subway) languish without funding. But Woody Johnson needs a new stadium?

And Silver's constituency in Lower Manhattan clearly sees the city's biggest hole, literally, in the dormant World Trade Center site. And the Olympics that New York will never get and no New Yorker I've ever spoken to actually wants? How about first healing the biggest, still raw wound the city and the country has ever suffered.

If every local team itching for a new home had its way, the year 2010 would see the Jets playing on the West Side Rail Yards, the Giants in a new stadium in the Meadowlands, the Nets in a new arena in Brooklyn, the Devils in a new arena in Newark, the Yankees in a new stadium in The Bronx and the Mets in a new stadium in Queens. That's six new buildings in five years. Right now, it looks like the Devils (remember hockey?) and the Nets have the best shot.

Wouldn't it make sense for the Jets and Giants to share a stadium in New Jersey? As a Jet fan, I wouldn't care, as long as it isn't New Giants Stadium or some such travesty, and they sell the naming rights to some egotistical corporation. Call it Preparation-H Stadium for all I care.

In fact, that would be my first preference. This whole process has been a real pain in the ass.