AMERICA AT LARGE:Why don't sports bodies cut ties with the biggest corporate polluter in US history, writes GEORGE KIMBALL
LESS THAN two years ago, the National Football League Giants and Jets had reached an agreement with the German insurance firm Allianz, which was prepared to pay $25million (€20.8m) annually over six years to attach its name to the teams’ new stadium in the New Jersey Meadowlands. Once word began to circulate of the company’s unsavory history of coziness with the Third Reich, the football teams gave Allianz the boot, on the very sensible grounds that the unwelcome publicity could in the end be so damaging that it wasn’t worth $150m (€125m).
During the brief window the matter was still open for debate, the New York Daily News ran an editorial cartoon depicting the new stadium emblazoned with a Giant-sized swastika.
It goes without saying that there’s not an organization in the world that would willingly associate itself with the swastika, but sporting ventures around the world currently find themselves locked into arrangements involving a symbol almost as universally loathed: The BP logo.
A three-game weekend set between the White Sox and Cubs that commences at Wrigley Field tomorrow afternoon has seriously taxed the imagination of Chicago headline-writers, who have at various times described it as the “Expressway Series,” “Red Line Series,” the “City Series,” the “Crosstown Classic,” and the “Windy City Showdown.”
In the buildup to the regular-season confrontation between the two old rivals, Chicago newspapers appear to have gone to great pains to avoid using its official, bought-and-paid-for title, which is “The BP Crosstown Cup.”
A few hours earlier in Soweto, South Africa and Mexico will have kicked off in the opening match of the World Cup. Unless there is a power outage at Soccer City Stadium you might not hear much about this, but BP also happens to be the “Official Fuel Sponsor for the 2010 FIFA World Cup.” (What, exactly, does an official fuel sponsor do? We were curious, too. Here’s the lowdown: “All stadiums will run off BP Ultimate diesel-powered generators for the duration of each game. In addition, all broadcast power used during the month-long event will also originate from these BP-fueled generators – ensuring uninterrupted viewing worldwide. The massive mult-million litre fuel sponsorship deal by BP – the biggest in the petroleum giant’s 100-year history – will guarantee power to all the stadiums at all times.)
Now, if I read this correctly, the company that just left the competition in the dust as the biggest corporate polluter in United States history is going to spend all these millions to keep auxiliary generators running throughout each match just in case they are needed. You might suppose that a company that was still preposterously boasting of its “environmentally-friendly” policies even as it churned millions of gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico might put the money to better use.
By the time the World Cup has run its course a month from now, the first gooey globules transported by the gulf stream could be washing up on European beaches.
By the way, in another of those unfortunate coincidences, when the host nation inaugurates World Cup 2010 tomorrow, its team will be kitted out in yellow-and-green uniforms that look as if they had been crafted with the ubiquitous BP logo in mind.
BP also happens to be a major sponsor of the 2012 London Olympics. And this past February, during the Winter Games in Vancouver, BP and the United States Olympic Committee convened a press conference to announce a partnership in which the oil giant agreed to pony up $15m (€12.5m), or approximately 7% of the USOC’s entire operating budget.
We have a few questions here.
First of all, doesn’t BP have better things to do with its money right now? Beyond that, there’s the blood money issue. When a corporate sponsor has been rendered a pariah in the eyes of the world, does it make sense, economically as well as morally, to continue the association? The other question is: By the time BP gets through plugging the leak in the Gulf of Mexico, paying for the cleanup, and settling all the claims for an environmental disaster that was, by most reasonable accounts, at least in part precipitated by cost-cutting measures that skirted safety regulations, is there going to be anything left when, say, the bill for London 2012 comes due?
From a public relations standpoint we have already seen the flip side of this coin. Tiger Woods’ image became so sullied that a whole host of corporate sponsors were elbowing each other out of the way in their haste to leap off the bandwagon.
It’s hard to imagine that either the White Sox or the Cubs is so strapped for cash that they wouldn’t have told BP where they could stick their Cup before this, but the teams seem committed to proceeding with this weekend’s arrangement.
Even as the residue of BP’s engineering disaster spreads its way up the Eastern seaboard, politicians on both sides of the American political spectrum continue to point fingers.
Republicans delight in referring to the crisis as “the Obama Administration’s Katrina,” which is an interesting position coming from people whose clarion call in the 2008 presidential campaign was “Drill, Baby, Drill!”
But this much can be said with certainty about the calamitous mess down in the Gulf: Nobody is for it. Which makes you wonder why all these people – the Chicago baseball teams, the FIFA marketing people, and the Olympic Committees of at least two nations – didn’t cut their ties to BP while they still had a chance.
