Imprudent tales about the Mile High club

Beyond the obvious freedom-of-the-press issues, I don't have much trouble taking sides in this one. Woody Paige and I have been friends and colleagues for going on a quarter of a century now, and in fact had already made plans to hook up on the Isle of Man 10 days from now for a weekend of golf on our way to the Open at Lytham. On the surface you'd have to say that the news that somebody has decided to sue Woody is a dog-bites-man story if ever there was one.

"Tell him to get in line," Woodrow laughed when I reached him in London two nights ago. "I've been sued eight times before, and they've gone 0-for-eight." A day earlier the chairman of Invesco Funds Group, the money-management firm which ponied up $60million to secure the naming rights for Denver's new football stadium, announced his intent to take the columnist and his employer, the Denver Post, to court over a column Woody wrote last Sunday.

On the other hand, the entire issue paints a cautionary tale whose aspects will be familiar to anyone caught up in what has seemingly become a worldwide phenomenon - constructing new sports stadiums at public expense, and then augmenting the windfall by auctioning off the naming rights.

Even though Mile High Stadium has been sold out for every football game played there dating back to the Jimmy Carter administration, the voters of metropolitan Denver were bludgeoned into approving a bond issue in which they would underwrite three-quarters of the cost of a new $400 million facility for the Broncos. And although it was not binding, the voters in a separate referendum overwhelmingly voiced their hope that the new stadium would retain its venerable (and unique) "Mile High" name.

The lure of the almighty dollar was persuasive, however, and for $60million Bowlen agreed to re-christen the new state-of-the-art coliseum which opens for business this fall "Invesco Field at Mile High." As unwieldy as that title might be, the people in Denver can probably count themselves fortunate. The New England Patriots, whose new stadium is scheduled to open a year after Denver's, sold their naming rights to an Internet conglomerate called CMGI.

The Patriots were to receive $7.6million a year for the next eight years. The ink on the agreement was barely dry when CMGI stock went into free-fall. The company is now worth a mere fraction of what it was when the deal was struck. Were CMGI to go belly-up, it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing for the Patriots, who would presumably be able to pocket what they've received and hold another naming rights auction.

What present (and former) CMGI employees think about the Patriots deal remains unlearned, but thanks to a chance encounter between Paige and a man he described as "an empty-suited key executive of Invesco Funds Group," we do know that back in the head office, enthusiasm for the company's financial involvement with the Broncos was not exactly unanimous.

"Most of us thought it was a mistake," the executive told Paige. "Too much money, too little return, and too many people don't like it. But it's Mark's baby, and that's what he wanted." Mark would be Mark Williamson, Invesco's chairman and CEO. And if Williamson was displeased that the dissent in the company ranks had been publicly aired, he was absolutely outraged that the sniggering executive also told Paige that insiders at the company, having decided that Invesco Field resembles a giant version of a female birth control device, have taken to describing the new facility as "the Diaphragm."

The talkative executive had been introduced to Paige at a Larimer Street pub. God knows who the guy thought he was speaking with, but he was obviously unfamiliar with the work of Woody Paige. When he found out what Woody did for a living, his disdainful response was: "I don't read the paper." (He will read today's paper, wrote Paige.) At the conclusion of the conversation he attempted, retroactively, to take it off the record.

"You can't write that," he told Paige. Woody's response: "Watch me." During one Super Bowl week in New Orleans 20 or so years ago, Woody stumbled back to his hotel, where he encountered in the lobby a fetching young lady of the evening, who breathlessly informed him, "for $100, I'll do anything you want." Woody looked her up and down. "Can you write a column and a sidebar?"

He might never have been successfully sued, but Woody accomplished a journalistic milestone of sorts five years ago when he became the first (and, thus far, only) sportswriter to be barred for life from the Copper Bowl. Woody was in Arizona to cover the Fiesta Bowl, in which the national championship would be determined, and, while he was there, a game down the road in Tucson between Wyoming and Mississippi State in which considerably less at stake.

Tickets for the Nebraska-Florida Fiesta Bowl were $500 on the street, while Copper Bowl sponsors were desperately trying to paper the house to produce a respectable crowd backdrop for the television broadcast. Woody wrote that a man finding himself in Arizona with $500 in his pocket had two choices. He could either buy a ticket to the Fiesta Bowl, or he could take himself and 249 of his friends to the Copper Bowl.

Copper Bowl officials were not amused. They informed Woody of the ban and demanded the return of his complimentary Copper Bowl shirt.

Mark Williamson wasn't amused, either.

"We don't tolerate that kind of talk," he told Paige. "This is not about stadium naming rights. This is about the values of a company and its employees." The Invesco CEO was particularly displeased by the controversy "Diaphragm" references. (Thank goodness the stadium isn't taller and skinner, Woody had written. Imagine what some Invesco executive would have called it.) The next day Invesco announced its intent to sue.

While the legal action would implicitly suggest that Paige made up the whole episode, not even Williamson really believes that. Plainly, taking the columnist and the newspaper to court is a bald-faced attempt to ferret out the disloyal executive by trying to force Woody to give up his source, and that isn't about to happen. Before leaving for Wimbledon, Paige did give the man's business card to his newspaper, and Post editors confirmed the accuracy of the conversation with an eyewitness -- the man who introduced Woody to the Invesco big-shot in the Larimer Street bar.