Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [79]
“Red, if that’s the problem, the dome holds about 64,000 people, doesn’t it?” He said, yeah.
I said, “You have ten home games, counting preseason, that are all sold out.” He said, yeah.
I said, “Okay, that makes it easy. We can multiply in tens off the top of our heads. If you raise your ticket prices ten dollars a seat, and you keep selling out, that’s $640,000. Do that over ten games, it’s $6.4 million. Doesn’t that put you right in the middle of that average the other owners are making? In the spirit of true capitalism, Red, when your product is selling out, you have the ability to raise the price until it doesn’t. I don’t think ten dollars a seat, or even twenty, would upset the apple cart that bad. Why a new stadium? I would think you should look at all other options first. A stadium is a huge investment, and there may be fixes we can do here to get you happy.”
“Governor,” Red replied, “I can’t simply just put this on the backs of our most loyal fans.”
I responded back, “Red, my wife couldn’t care less about football. In fact, my wife frankly couldn’t give a rat’s ass about football.” (I always figured it was smart to use language a wealthy Texan would understand.) “My wife pays taxes to the state of Minnesota. So do a lot of other people who think just like her. And I have to represent all of these people, and all of their interests.”
That was pretty much the end of the meeting. From that point on, any time he could, Red would tell people: “Minnesota was great until we got this character Jesse Ventura as governor.” For my part, I called upon the Vikings to open their finances to public scrutiny, in order to help taxpayers make an informed decision on whether they deserved public funding.
My last year in office, Red put the team on the block. Three years later, in 2005, he found a buyer who agreed to pay him about $625 million. Since he’d bought the team for about $246 million back in ’98, I’d say Red made out—for lack of a better phrase—like a bandit. With or without Jesse Ventura and a new stadium.
On our way out of Guerrero Negro, we pass a brick-and-concrete complex with a sign—ESSA, which stands for Exportadora de Sal. This was headquarters for one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of industrial salt. It turns out there are some 14,000 uses for salt, everything from making plastics and paper, to glass, aluminum, and fertilizer. According to our guidebook, the company’s founder back in 1954 had been none other than Daniel K. Ludwig, a reclusive American billionaire who at one time was the richest man on the planet. Always looking for new commodities to transport in his lucrative shipping business, Ludwig had sailed down the Baja coastline and bought the rights to extract salt from the nearby lagoons. In 1973, he’d sold out to Japan’s Mitsubishi Corporation.
“Guess it’s hard to escape from billionaires out to make a few extra bucks,” I tell Terry, and put the pedal to the metal into Baja’s Vizcaíno Desert, among the high cardón cactuses and the thick-tangled cholla.
CHAPTER 10
The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same
“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.”
—Theodore Roosevelt
Above the many miles of scrub and cactus that line the desert plains, the Sierra de San Francisco mountains appear suddenly. The Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve we’re driving through stretches across more than six million acres, and is the largest protected area of its kind in all Latin America. It’s the last habitat for more than one hundred peninsular pronghorn antelope, here called berrendo. Terry and I are keeping our eyes out for these deer-like animals, one of the fastest in the world, with the capacity to sprint at speeds of 55 miles an hour.
Some eighty miles south of Guerrero Negro, we approach the old mission town of San Ignacio. You need to turn off the main highway for a mile to reach