Sports

Voting for the Fates of Seattle’s Leading Sports Figures

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 08:00:00 -0800

Did you vote? No, not in that election. The one that allowed Sounders FC season ticket holders to decide whether the club’s general manager, Adrian Hanauer, gets to keep his job. The one that ends December 7. The only one of its kind in pro sports. Hanauer is safe—winning three U.S. Open Cups doesn’t hurt—but what if we could control the fate of other local team leaders?

Jack Zduriencik
The shiny-pated onetime scout became the Mariners’ GM in 2008, after the team’s worst season in nearly 15 years. He had a reputation for spotting young talent, but sure-thing acquisitions like weak-hitting Justin Smoak went bust. Z’s future will hinge on the success of highly touted pitching prospects Danny Hultzen and Taijuan Walker.
Verdict One more year

Hiroshi Yamauchi
It’s hard to knock an 85-year-old, but here goes: The Mariners’ longtime majority owner (and chairman of Nintendo) has never seen his team play in person. He put one of his lieutenants from Nintendo—Howard Lincoln, who’d never had a position in baseball—in charge of the team. And in the 20 years he’s owned the M’s, they’ve had just nine winning seasons.
Verdict Game over

John Schneider
Almost three years ago, when the -Seahawks GM started his tenure with the team by picking up one no-name player after another (cornerback Brandon Browner came from the Canadian Football League), fans thought he was nuts, desperate, or a little of both. But he’s turned the Hawks’ defense into one of the most-feared in the NFL.
Verdict Three more years

Pete Carroll
The Seahawks coach’s rah-rah style has never fit in on the NFL sidelines. The team has fared better under him than it did in Jim Mora’s one disastrous season, but Pom-Pom Pete’s future rests on the shoulders of Russell Wilson, the untested rookie QB who Carroll chose as a starter this season over the more experienced Matt Flynn.
Verdict One more year

Scott Woodward
The University of Washington athletic director oversees all school sports, but Woodward’s tenure, which began in 2008, will be remembered for the turnaround of Husky football and his ability to find funding for the $260 million renovation of the team’s stadium in tough economic times.
Verdict Four more years

Heckle Like a Red Sox Fan

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 16:24:31 -0700

Compared to fans in the rest of the major league, Mariners supporters are a polite bunch. Boston Red Sox fans, on the other hand, turn invectives toward opposing players into an art. Like most New Englanders, super fan Tim Robie’s Red Sox allegiance was not a choice. It was a birthright. Robie, pictured, hails from Concord, New Hampshire, and is now a second-year Seattleite. And he cheers on his beloved team when it plays at Safeco and trash-talks the M’s. The Red Sox come to town this month for a three-game series against the Mariners (September 3–5). To stick it to the opposing team, take these tips from the enemy within.

	Strike early. Before the game, stand above the bullpen and unleash on the starting pitcher as he warms up. “Gettin’ that arm nice and warm to throw them fruitcakes, huh?” When the guy throws a 12-pitch walk and gives up a homer in the first, you can say, I had a part in that.
	Do your homework. An amateur heckler will shout something like, “How many outs, A-Rod?” But do a little research and you can really throw a player off his game. In 2006, for example, Alex Rodriguez allegedly patronized a high-priced New York prostitution outfit. So your line: “Hey, A-Rod! Why don’t you give your call girl a ring. At least you’ll get to first base with her!”
	Pick your spot. At Fenway, you’ll find hecklers from behind the dugout all the way to the nosebleeds. It’s part of the culture there, and fans have a natural respect for the enthusiasm. At Safeco, hecklers can get the hook. So watch where you set up shop and stay on the move—and no f-bombs around little kids.

Darryl Baines, Running Man

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 10:49:00 -0700

Image: Courtesy Otis Embree

FIRST THERE WAS A CRASH. No squealing brakes, just the dull crunch of a car caving in a home’s front porch and shattering the predawn quiet. And then nothing. No cries for help, no movement in the vehicle, nothing to suggest anyone was behind the wheel. It was as if the car, a red 1974 Plymouth Duster, had driven itself up over the curb, aimed for the front door, and hit the gas.

The sun was still hours from rising on October 20, 1988, when Tacoma police and fire units pulled up to the scene of the accident, at the corner of 13th and South I. In almost any other part of the city a car-on-house collision would set neighbors buzzing, but it was tame for the gang-controlled Hilltop neighborhood. That very morning a man was beaten to death one block away in an abandoned house. Police raided crack houses on these streets all the time. This thing with the car? Probably just a local burnout who got drunk and passed out behind the wheel.

There the Duster sat, no signs of life inside, steam rising from the busted radiator. As police approached, emergency lights splashing red across the lawn and lighting up the car’s interior, they saw an African American man slumped over in the front seat. Sir? You’ve been in an accident, sir. Are you hurt? No response. Sir? Then they saw it: the small hole in his sweatshirt and the blood that saturated the fabric around it. Suddenly the car, the lawn, the street—they were all part of a crime scene. The man was still alive—barely—but by the time paramedics transported him four blocks to St. Joseph Medical Center he was dead. He was ID’d as Darryl Baines, and, once word started to spread around the police department, officers realized this wasn’t just another dead gangbanger.

Wait, Darryl Baines. Wasn’t he…?
Yep. Star wide receiver at Lincoln High School.
Didn’t he…?
Yep. Got a chance to play up in Seattle last year, for the Seahawks.
Man. That kid could run.

THE ROPE WAS ROUGH, FRAYED STRANDS poking into his palms, but the fearless eight-year-old gripped it harder and pulled it close to his chest as he swung out off of the bridge. There were train tracks below—a long way down—but he didn’t see them. He was looking straight ahead, toward downtown Tacoma. Maybe even beyond that, to some place and time where people looked up to him, instead of the other way around.

As a kid, Darryl Willie Baines would race his brother Jessie through the neighborhood to swing on that rope hanging from a tree near the 43rd Street Bridge in Tacoma. Jessie was older by four years, and they’d compete to see who could swing farther away from the bridge. Darryl never blinked. The challenge made it interesting, but the freedom of floating out above the tracks—the thrill—made it exciting.

He was born in Tacoma on April 11, 1960, the ninth of Hezzie and Burnetta Baines’s 10 children. The Baines’s door was always open to the kids’ friends, and even though they didn’t have much money—Hezzie cut hair at Fort Lewis, and Burnetta was a building inspector for the city—there was always a spot at the dinner table for someone from the neighborhood. Darryl never lacked for playmates, but he and Jessie were closest. They went everywhere together, at first because Jessie was instructed to take his little brother with him and then, later, because they became best friends. They did “dumb things that brothers do,” Jessie says now, like riding go-carts and looking for mischief in the fields near their home. Their grandfather had a small farm, and when they visited him they’d chase the horses through the tall grass.

The Baines boys—there were seven of them—might as well have been born in a locker room. They inherited a passion for sports from Hezzie, who’d played baseball in the Negro Leagues. More than that, they loved competing with each other. Eddie, the oldest, ran track. Hezzie, named after his father, was a boxer. And for the rest it was football. They played, they watched each other play, they fought for the unofficial title of Best Baines in a Helmet and Pads. Ron, the fourth oldest and
Darryl’s senior by 14 years, was the first to have any success outside of the city, first when he earned a scholarship to the University of Montana and then when he was selected by the Buffalo Bills in the 10th round of the 1969 NFL draft.

Ron never played in a professional game, but the idea that a Baines could make it to the NFL at all flipped a switch inside Darryl. He was a quiet kid, partly because he had a slight stutter and partly
because, as the youngest boy, he was the easiest target for the standard brother-on-brother ribbing that was bound to get passed down the ranks in a family with that many kids. And the sibling rivalry that had pushed him to keep up with his brothers motivated him to one-up Ron by actually playing in a pro game. “I’m gonna be better than all of you guys,” nine-year-old Darryl boasted to his brothers.

Darryl was big. He was strong. He was fast. And by tagging along to his brothers’ practices and games, he soaked up their coaches’ instructions, like how to find the sideline when he was running with the ball on offense. But as a wide receiver at Lincoln High School he didn’t run away from defenders, he ran them over. Otis Embree, a high school friend, remembers sitting in the stands with Darryl’s parents and watching him lower his head and charge at anyone who tried to wrap him up. “He wasn’t a finesse guy,” Embree says. “He would hit you so hard if you tried to tackle him. He actually punished tacklers.”

Off the field, though, Darryl started getting into trouble. By the time he graduated from high school he’d racked up 11 traffic tickets and been arrested for lifting a CB radio from a local electronics store. Maybe it was the fearless streak that made him hard to stop on the football field. Most likely it was that no one bothered to rein him in. Hezzie was nearing 70 when Darryl was in high school—ancient from a teenager’s perspective—not to mention in poor health. Burnetta, a decade younger than her husband, had heart problems. They hadn’t given up on parenting by the time Darryl came of age, they just couldn’t keep up with him the way they’d been able to with his older siblings. Darryl’s a good boy, Burnetta told police. He just can’t stand up to peer pressure.

But the arrests kept mounting. In July 1979 he and a friend broke into a home and stole a TV, stereo, and $500 in change. Darryl might have gotten away with it, too—if his friend hadn’t left fingerprints at the scene, got pinched, and ratted him out.

In a letter to the judge before his sentencing the next year, he pleaded his case and acknowledged he’d been running with the wrong crowd: “I am now trying, in the best words I know, to explain to you…that I have learned my lesson, and that I need the chance…to prove that being locked up is only depriving [me] of trying to finish college and become more than a jail inmate.” He’d straightened himself out since the burglary and played for the Wenatchee Community College football team in fall 1979, and now he was begging for a light sentence that would allow him to work and “pay for summer school classes so that I can play football this season so that I may be able to earn a scholarship.”

Despite a review from Baines’s probation officer that labeled him a “marginal candidate for probation,” the judge sentenced him to three months in jail and 10 years of probation. He’d get his chance to prove his mother right.

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Image: Courtesy Otis Embree

Man at Rest Baines, pictured in the 1987 Panthers team program

A SHOTGUN WAS THE FIRST thing Darryl Baines saw in his rearview mirror. He couldn’t see the face of the man holding it, just that it was poking out from behind the open driver’s side door of a police car that idled behind him. Then he heard the distinctive shk-shk as the gun was cocked and a shell loaded into the chamber. Then a voice: “Put your hands on the windshield, palms out!”

He didn’t think. He just reacted. It had barely been a year since his burglary conviction, and he’d already proved his probation officer right by assaulting a DJ at a club. And here he was again, drawing heat—but this time he had no idea why. Fear, anger, resentment, they all mixed together in his chest and then exploded down his right leg and into his foot. He stomped on the gas pedal in his red Camaro, leaving that cop kneeling on the side of the road with the shotgun on his shoulder.

Baines didn’t know where he was going. Didn’t have a plan. But the more distance he could put between himself and the law—and the faster he could do it—the better. He held his foot to the floor, gunning the Camaro up to 100 miles per hour along 40th Street West toward South Tacoma, diving into and back out of oncoming traffic. He shot through one red light. Then another.

As Baines peeled away, officer Bruce Ramsey of the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office jumped back into his cruiser and took off after him. He didn’t know anything about Baines’s past when he pulled him over that afternoon, on June 1, 1981. Ramsey only knew that the Camaro Baines was driving matched the description of a vehicle seen two blocks away leaving an armed robbery at the United Mutual Savings Bank.

Baines was running out of road; up ahead 40th Street ended in a T. He’d have to turn—left or right, it didn’t matter—but his brain had gone dark minutes earlier and pure adrenaline was guiding him now. It was the way he’d carried the ball for the Lincoln High School football team: No scanning the field for holes, no plotting a course to the end zone. Just running where his feet took him. He yanked the wheel to the right, skidding onto South Orchard Street, and then leaned hard into a countersteer to bring the sports car under control. Traffic was thick and moving slowly, so he took the center turn lane and blew through three more intersections, forcing one car after another off the road.

Ramsey was keeping pace, but just barely. He looked at his speedometer: 115 miles per hour. And Baines was starting to pull away. Help was coming, though. Two more officers from the sheriff’s office were pulling on to Orchard a few miles down the road and speeding back toward Baines to box him in. Baines saw them as soon as their flashing lights came into view. Without slowing down, he jerked the wheel left and pulled a U-turn in the middle of the road, cutting off cars on both sides of the street. The sound of squealing brakes were drowned out by the Camaro’s muscular engine as Baines revved it and sped back in the direction he’d come from. Ramsey, unable to slow down in time, flew past. Another few quick turns and Baines ducked into a residential neighborhood and roared by an elementary school where kids laughed and chased each other on the playground.

And then, as if his brain suddenly lit up again and he realized this wasn’t a football field and there was no end zone, he just cut the engine and got out of the car. Ramsey and the other two officers pulled up, and Baines surrendered without a fight. Only then did he bother to wonder why they were chasing him in the first place, and when they told him about the bank robbery he was incredulous. “I didn’t rob any bank,” he insisted. “All I did was run, and I wouldn’t have done that if that cop hadn’t pulled that gun on me.”

That’s what they all say, but in this case it may have been true. It was a coincidence that he happened to be near the bank after the robbery, Baines said. He’d driven through the parking lot on the way to a nearby gas station to inquire about an oil change. And in fact when police searched his car they found just a baggie of marijuana—no guns and no money, nothing to suggest he’d had anything to do with the hold-up.

It didn’t matter, though. Baines pleaded guilty to felony pursuit and a Pierce County Superior Court judge sentenced him to five years in prison. It was the only way anyone thought they could keep him from running.

THE CALL WENT OUT TO THE Thurston County Sheriff’s Office at 5:57am on October 4, 1981: Two prisoners had escaped from Cedar Creek Correction Center. One, identified as Randy Dewitt, was a 19-year-old white male. The other, a 21-year-old black male, was Darryl Baines.

Cedar Creek is located in Littlerock, Washington, a tiny town 15 minutes southwest of Olympia, that’s mostly flat, save for a stretch of lumpy landscape known as the Mima Mounds Natural Area Preserve. The facility is classified as a minimum security prison, but it’s more of a work camp, and being assigned there was considered a privilege because of its comparatively lax environment. Inmates worked hard on Department of Natural Resources forestry crews, though it wasn’t hard time in the Shawshank
Redemption sense of the term.

Baines had been especially lucky to land at Cedar Creek after the high-speed chase in Tacoma, and it took him just a week to start wearing out his welcome. He was at odds with his DNR foreman from the start, thanks to the fact that he spent more time horsing around than working. He hadn’t adapted well to the prison’s culture either—he was suspected of bullying the younger inmates—and officials were already considering transferring him. And on top of that, he’d received a letter from his high school girlfriend telling him in no uncertain terms that they were through. Baines wasn’t about to let her go that easily, though. He was young and in love. He had to talk to her. In person.

Cedar Creek wasn’t designed to keep inmates from leaving; the opportunity to serve time there—as opposed to being locked up in a more traditional prison—was all the motivation most inmates needed to stay put. At the time there was no perimeter fence, there were no guard towers, and inmates slept in dormitories that were often unlocked. So Darryl didn’t need an intricate plan for escape. He simply waited patiently in his bunk until after the nightly count on October 3, and then slipped out under cover of darkness.

By 6:21am, two hours after Baines had been discovered missing and less than a half hour after local police had been alerted, he’d covered nearly nine miles, on foot, to I-5. Along the way he’d hooked up with Dewitt, and now the two of them were trying to thumb a ride. Instead, they spotted a cop, Deputy Ed Littlejohn, a 13-year veteran of the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office, driving to work in the opposite direction. Littlejohn spotted them, too, and as he whipped his car around in pursuit they ran into a cornfield along the interstate and disappeared among the tall stalks.

Baines put as much thought into what he’d do after he left Cedar Creek as he did into leaving it. He made it to a bus station and then back to Tacoma, but rather than lie low, he went to his parents’ house, where Burnetta threatened to call the police. From there he ran again, this time to the girlfriend’s place. It must not have gone well, because two days later, he called his mother and asked her to tell the police where he was. Within 45 minutes the authorities arrived, and once again he was headed to jail.

Another impulsive act. Another bad decision. Baines wasn’t a bad kid—he wasn’t violent—but he was making it hard for anyone to argue anymore that he was a good one. “Mr. Baines was
selected for minimum security before he was ready for it,” a Cedar Creek supervisor wrote in his file after he was apprehended. “He did have a chance to do his time in a more comfortable, relaxed
environment, and he blew it.”

Over the next five years, as he wound his way through the Washington State Department of Corrections—from minimum security to medium, then to maximum, then back again—he tried to straighten himself out. He attended community college classes while incarcerated and made plans to get a two-year degree in physical education after he was released. In a handwritten letter to prison officials, he assured them he’d changed. “My goal in life is to become a recreation leader and play the game that I’m best at, football,” he wrote in immaculate, looping cursive. “I don’t want people to see me as no tough, big black man. I would much prefer being seen as Darryl Baines, who plays football.”

But he was changing in other ways, too. Periodic reviews show he was developing a “widespread reputation for being an intimidating personality which…he employs to his full advantage.” For the most part he had a good relationship with the guards—one called him “congenial,” even—but to the other prisoners he was someone to avoid. He was denied early release in March 1984 after he and another inmate tried to force a third to give them sexual favors.

Jessie Baines says that when Darryl transferred from Cedar Creek to the rougher medium- and maximum-security facilities, he went into survival mode, shedding any semblance of the playful kid he’d been and replacing it with an aggressive, menacing persona. Darryl learned early, after another inmate stabbed him in the arm and sent him to the infirmary for 10 stitches, that it was better to be feared than fearful in a place where weakness was an invitation to a beatdown. “He had to take on that mentality to take care of himself,” Jessie says. “In there, you have no one. You’ve got your own back.”

Darryl finally walked out of the McNeil Island Corrections Center for the last time on March 26, 1985, nearly four years after the high-speed chase in Tacoma. Jessie barely recognized him. His little brother had grown up to be a big man. Just shy of his 25th birthday, Darryl weighed 210 pounds and at six-foot-one, stood a full four inches taller than Jessie. And with little else to do inside, Darryl had hit the weights. Hard. “He had a body on him,” Jessie says. “He looked like a pro running back. But his mind was just not there.”

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Image: Courtesy Otis Embree

With teammates at the Sports Page in Tacoma

WHATEVER BAINES’S mental state was when he left prison, there’s no question that in almost every other way he had a chance to make a smooth transition. His family, which had supported him however they could while he was inside, welcomed him back without reservation. He had a job lined up with his father’s landscaping business. And most important there was football. A year earlier the Auburn Panthers had begun play in the Northwest Football Alliance, a semipro league that at the time consisted of nine teams predominantly from Washington, and they were always looking for capable running backs.

Semipro conjures up images of broken-down has-beens and starry-eyed never-will-bes, but the Panthers treated it as anything but beer league football. The team’s owners, Michael Highsmith and Phil Pompeo, had stacked it with solid high school and college players who, for whatever reason, had never made it to the next level. The players weren’t getting paid—any ticket proceeds from games went toward equipment and renting Troy Field on the Auburn High School campus—so their compensation was playing time and exposure to get to that next level.

It was the perfect situation for Baines. He’d have a chance to demonstrate his skills to pro scouts. And he’d be among friends: Ron was a player-coach there, and Otis Embree, Darryl’s buddy from high school, began playing with the team the year before Darryl’s release. But even better, no one thought twice about his criminal past. “The kid could play football, and that’s all we cared about,” Highsmith says. “If the players treated the fans okay, if they treated their teammates okay, we didn’t have any problems.” And Baines didn’t have any problems, at least not with the Panthers. On the field he was all business, and he was a good sport, too, always offering to help up the defenders he ran over. Off the field, like when he’d have a couple postgame beers at a bar with teammates, he was quiet. Friendly—affable, even—but quiet.

The uniform was like a hazmat suit for Baines, hermetically sealing him off from the negative influences that had brought him down in the past.

All that time away from football had done nothing to diminish his skills. In fact, his constant weight lifting in prison had made him that much harder to stop. Just before halftime in the sixth game of the 1986 season, the Panthers found themselves trailing the Eastside Express 10-0, until Baines ripped off a 45-yard touchdown—the first of three scores—to spark a 28-10 come-from-behind victory. By the end of the year, in which Auburn beat the Chicago Cowboys of the Metropolitan League of Chicago for the national championship of semipro football, Baines was the fourth-leading rusher in the NFA. And that was after missing five games. “Football was his savior,” Embree says. “Football was the place where he could shine.”

Baines was attracting attention, too, and for one of the first times in his life it was for good reasons. College coaches started attending Auburn games to get a peek at his explosive play, and a few wanted to offer him a scholarship. But he was holding out for a ticket straight to the pros. That kind of jump wasn’t completely unheard of in semipro ball, but it was uncommon. Even Mike Oliphant, a one-time Panther who went on to play in the NFL, had made a stop at the University of Puget Sound first. Baines was either blind to reality or willfully ignoring the truth: He needed a miracle if he wanted to play on Sundays.

And then, as if the football gods believed he’d earned a second chance, he got that miracle. On September 21, 1987, the NFL players voted to strike. Suddenly 28 teams needed to fill their 53-man rosters. General managers and their assistants called former pros who had washed out. They called middling college players who’d shuffled off the field and into office park cubicles. They called Darryl Baines.

Less than a week after the strike began, Highsmith, the Panthers owner, drove Baines to a hotel just off of Highway 520 in Bellevue to meet with a member of the Seattle Seahawks front office. Together, they looked over the contract that the team was willing to offer: $3,000 a game, for as long as the strike lasted. Baines signed his name, and just like that he was an NFL player. A replacement, a strike-breaking scab who’d be spit at and cursed by the real players as he crossed the picket line at the Seahawks practice facility, but still an NFL player. He called his big brother Ron and announced the news: “You ain’t the only pro in the family now.” Darryl’s first chance to step onto a pro field, against the Miami Dolphins at the Kingdome, would be on October 4—six years to the day after he ran from Cedar Creek. And those who knew his talents had high hopes. “If this strike lasts a long time,” Highsmith told the press, “Baines might be the Super Bowl MVP.”

He never played a down, though. Three days after the game against Miami, the Seahawks released him. Baines didn’t get cut for a lack of talent, though. He got cut for allegedly stealing shoes.

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THERE WERE A FEW GAMES left in the Panthers’ season after Baines lost his job with the S-eahawks, but he didn’t bother to go back. It might have been a soft landing for him, a chance to stay straight. The uniform was like a hazmat suit for Baines, hermetically sealing him off from the negative influences that had brought him down

in the past. If he could have played all day, every day, he might have been okay. But eventually he had to take it off, and then he was exposed.

Highsmith, Embree, Baines’s other teammates—none of them heard from him again. And he only popped up on his brothers’ radars sporadically, so it’s hard to piece together what happened in the last year of his life. In fact, the only way to build a narrative is through police reports and accounts from the cops he crossed paths with. He stayed out of trouble for a few months before being involved in two domestic disputes in January 1988. Then a month later he was charged in Pierce County Superior Court for robbery in the second degree.

“Oh sure, I remember Darryl—hell of an athlete,” says Marcus Mann. In 1988 Mann was the public information officer for the Tacoma Police Department. He also worked on the K Street Task Force, which patrolled the Hilltop to beat back the LA-based gangs that were infiltrating the neighborhood. Mann knew Baines by name because he’d see him every shift, hanging out at the same bars on K Street. “It saddened some of the officers and shocked others that Darryl had so much potential but put himself at risk,” Mann says. “We’d tell him to his face: ‘You know you’re at risk, hanging out up here.’ ”

Baines was still friendly to those who knew him, but his intimidating physique and his hair-trigger temper—remnants of the warrior’s mentality he adopted in prison—made him a target. When Ron saw him, he’d try to warn his little brother to take it easy, that Tacoma’s streets weren’t like McNeil Island. “Darryl, nowadays these guys out here, they don’t fight—they shoot,” Ron remembers telling him. “People are afraid of you, and somebody’s going to shoot you because they’re afraid of you.”

Ron’s words were oddly prophetic. Darryl was still awaiting sentencing on the robbery charge when he was killed on October 20, 1988. At the time, police reported that he ran into a known crack house at 1420 South I Street, grabbed some rock cocaine out of a dealer’s hand, and tried to run. He was shot as he reached his car, police said, where a girl was waiting, ready to drive him away. She was so distraught, though, that she ran the car into a house, and then fled the scene.

Ron canvassed the neighborhood after it happened, looking for answers. He didn’t believe his brother was desperate enough to try something that stupid. He interrogated anyone he could find. They told him Darryl got into an argument with someone in the house—“Y’all little gangbangers with your guns, I’ll kick all y’all’s asses!” Darryl supposedly yelled—and then got shot in the back from a second-story window after he left.

No one really knows for sure, though. Tacoma Police never found the shooter. And the initial official reports of what happened early that morning weren’t borne out. According to a source in the Tacoma Police Department who couldn’t speak on the record because the case is still open, there was an altercation in the house, but it’s not entirely clear that Baines was involved in it. And he was most likely already in the car when the shot was fired.

Darryl Baines was one of 33 people murdered in Tacoma in 1988. But his death was front-page news in the News Tribune a day later: “Bullet Ends the Troubled Life of an Athlete,” read the above-the-fold headline. Next to it is a photo of Ron sitting at his dining room table, looking dazed, hollowed out by the realization that Darryl’s athletic potential would go unfulfilled. “He was living his life,” he told the paper. “The way he lived, maybe that’s the way he was supposed to go.”

SAVE FOR GAME DAY PROGRAMS and a few articles in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and regional papers, the Panthers didn’t leave much of a paper trail, little to document their phenomenal success—they set a semipro record with 57 straight wins—or Darryl Baines’s talents. Video is even more scarce.

There’s one VHS tape, though, that’s made the rounds among former players. It’s just a bunch of raw footage from the Panthers’ national championship victory over the Chicago Cowboys on November 29, 1986, that would later be edited down for a report on the local news: pregame warm-ups, locker room pep talks, in-game highlights. It’s been dubbed again and again, to the point that the screen rolls every few minutes and a grainy line of static frames the bottom of the picture.

The camera pans up, and there are the players, running out of the tunnel at Troy Field, their shadows long in the late-afternoon sunlight. There’s wide receiver Harry Washington, sprinting down the field with the ball for one of his three touchdowns that day.

And then there’s Baines, lined up in the backfield on the Panthers’ 40 yard line, midway through the second quarter. He crouches in a three-point stance, leaning forward and bracing himself with the first two fingers of his right hand, a spring ready to uncoil. The ball is snapped, and he darts straight for quarterback Roy Medley, his arms open, ready to receive the ball and tuck it close to his body.

He’s got the ball now, and for less than a second he disappears into the mass of bodies slamming into each other at the line of scrimmage. Almost as soon as he enters the scrum, though, he’s out, blasting through a hole that he saw before it opened. A Chicago defender lines him up and runs straight for him. Baines charges right past him, though, and the defender slips and falls as he tries to reverse course.

He’s in the open field now, pursued only by shadows. Arms pumping, his shoulders lurching with each stride, as if he’s trying to throw his upper body forward to keep up with his legs and feet. He crosses the goal line and holds the ball above his head. There isn’t another player within 15 yards of him. They’ve given up.

They know they can’t catch him.

Inside Seattle’s Unsuccessful Bid for the 2012 Olympics

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 05:00:00 -0700

Image: Alex Nabaum

On July 27 in London, the 2012 Summer Olympics will strut onto the world’s stage in a predictably over-the-top opening ceremony that will cost as much as a Hollywood blockbuster to produce. For the next 17 days, local commuters will simmer in gridlock as clueless out-of-towners clog the roads. After the athletes, dignitaries, and Bob Costas abandon the city, Londoners will be stuck with expensive—and suddenly useless—sports complexes. And when the staid Seattleites who cringe through the tape-delayed broadcast sniff to themselves, Thank god that didn’t happen here, they won’t know how close we came to hosting it.

Fourteen years ago this summer Bob Walsh and his private nonprofit Seattle Bid Committee were politicking in cocktail lounges around the world, selling Puget Sound as the premier site for the 2012 Games. And they almost pulled it off. It’s difficult now—in the wake of the Sonics’ exodus and UW’s fight to renovate Husky Stadium—to imagine Seattle ever having the ambition to pull off a sporting event so massive, but Walsh had momentum and well-placed friends. The longtime sports promoter had produced two successful NCAA Final Fours at the Kingdome and, in 1990, the second Goodwill Games, and he was close with Dick Schultz, then the head of the U.S. Olympic Committee. “We had a lot of really strong people who really loved Seattle,” says Walsh, who still works in promotion. “And they wanted this event to be here.”

But then there were the people who didn’t want the event to be here—namely, Nick Licata. Licata was a freshman on the Seattle City Council in 1998 and, although he’ll cop to occasionally watching Olympic fencing, he made snuffing Seattle’s bid to host the competition a pet project. It was an issue of money. The USOC, still smarting over what it believed was Atlanta’s poor handling of the ’96 Games, now required any host city to cover all cost overruns. And that was too big of a risk for the notorious fiscal conservative. “If the USOC were smart, it would have dropped that clause,” Licata says. “In that case, we might have gone forward, for better or worse.”

Instead of twisting arms and fanning the flames of support within the council, Mayor Schell was vacationing in France.

Maybe. Then-mayor Paul Schell backed the bid, but a majority of Seattleites didn’t; in a Seattle Times poll 55 percent of respondents groused that the city would be overrun by extra pedestrians and cars. The Times itself pooh-poohed the Games in a snooty, unsigned editorial: “The Olympics will do fine in another city. Seattle will do even better by passing on this overblown extravaganza.” Then in October, when it came time for the city council to decide whether to endorse the bid—another new USOC requirement—council president Sue Donaldson punted by shelving the vote, all but killing Seattle’s Olympic hopes. It didn’t help that in the three weeks prior, instead of twisting arms and fanning the flames of support within the council, Mayor Schell was vacationing in France.

The Seattle Bid Committee persisted into the winter, even enlisting the support of U.S. Representative Norm Dicks, until the city council officially rebuffed it in December with an 8-to-1 vote to oppose the proposal. Of the nine U.S. cities that had initially shown interest in hosting the games, Seattle was the only one that failed to get the go-ahead from local government.

Walsh was mortified as he told his friends at the USOC that his city wasn’t interested—they eventually chose to enter New York City for consideration—and you can still hear the shame in his voice today when he says Seattle has long since ceased to be “relevant in the world of major events.” But there is one consolation to be taken from the Olympic dream deferred: The budget for the London Games, originally set at a modest $3.9 billion, has since ballooned to a reported $14.5 billion. Just think of all the transportation projects we can debate building with the money we saved.

Meet the Players in Seattle’s NBA Arena Proposal

Fri, 18 May 2012 05:00:00 -0700

If He Builds It…

The Sonics will come back. Maybe. This June the Seattle City Council and King County Council will likely vote on Seattle native Chris Hansen’s proposal to put up $290 million for a $490 million pro-sports arena in SoDo. But that’s just one of the hoops he’ll have to jump through to return the NBA to the city. Follow the bouncing ball as we examine the rest.

Click here to follow Hansen’s potential journey.

Bike Crashes Along SLU Streetcar Pit Cyclists Against City

Fri, 18 May 2012 05:00:00 -0700

Image: Andy Reynolds

The streetcar was coming and Amanda Currier had a decision to make.

Just seconds earlier, at a little past 1pm on June 15, 2009, she’d left work on her bike and started pedaling north along Westlake Avenue to her Queen Anne apartment. It was an unseasonably cool day—low 60s—in an unusually cool summer, but at least it wasn’t raining. Wet roads always made the 20-minute commute through traffic that much trickier.

It was Currier’s first time riding this direction on Westlake since the South Lake Union Streetcar began running—she was trying out a new route—and as soon as her tires hit the street just north of Pacific Place, she was pinched in a sort of urban cycling no-man’s-land: Along the curb to her right was a line of parallel-parked cars, and to her left were the streetcar tracks. Edge too far to the right and she risked slamming headlong into a suddenly opened car door. Scooch too far in the other direction and she could be clipped from behind by an oncoming trolley.

Things got dicey for her quickly that afternoon. Two blocks back the streetcar was leaving the Westlake station, accelerating to 25 miles an hour. And one block ahead Currier could see that the sliver of asphalt she had to navigate was about to get slimmer still. Her options were few and the time she had to weigh them was short. Seventh Avenue, which she could use to cut west to Dexter, was just ahead, so she looked over her shoulder, signaled to give drivers a heads up that she was changing lanes to turn, and banked left.

But she never made it out of the right lane. As Currier began to cross the streetcar tracks, her front wheel dropped into one of the channels and wedged itself there, bringing the bike to a sudden, violent stop—as if an invisible hand had grabbed it from behind—and catapulting her over the handlebars and onto the pavement. The sound of screeching car tires cut through the din of midday traffic as a taxi traveling the other direction on Westlake slammed to a stop in front of her. The streetcar was still coming, though, and as Currier sat dazed in the middle of the tracks, the cab’s driver and two pedestrians ran to help her. Together, the three Samaritans scooped her up and rushed her to the sidewalk just as the streetcar whipped past.

Almost one year later, in late May 2010, Currier and five other cyclists—Patricia Lenssen, Joseph Pomerleau, Emma Levitt, Jason Dean, and Laura Humiston—sued the City of Seattle. Each had wrecked somewhere along the South Lake Union Streetcar line, and all had sustained serious, though not life-threatening, injuries: broken jaws, broken arms, broken teeth. Among other things, they alleged that the City had “breached its duty to keep its streets in a reasonably safe condition for bicycle traffic” by placing streetcar tracks in the road. On the surface it was a classic case of tort law run amuck, the two-wheeled equivalent of suing because your coffee was too hot. But the plaintiffs’ argument went beyond “We got hurt and someone needs to pay”: They had evidence that the City’s engineers actually expected cyclists to eat concrete and did nothing to stop it.

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“Come here.” Bob Anderton waved me over to one of the picture windows in his 10th-floor office in Pioneer Square, where he was looking down at the bike lane that runs along the east side of Second Avenue. “If we stand here long enough, we’ll probably see someone get hit.” (We didn’t. Thankfully.) Anderton is the personal injury attorney representing the six cyclists who were injured along the South Lake Union tracks. He’s an avid rider himself, and for the last 20 years he’s focused on bicycle-accident cases, but the more garden variety types: cyclists who get clipped by cars, cyclists who get “doored” by passengers exiting parked cars, that sort of thing.

And those cases—many of which start on the street right outside his building—are typically about money, helping the biker recoup medical costs or fight insurance companies. The day in mid-April when we spoke, he was debating whether to file suit on behalf of a man who was struck in the bike lane on Second by a car that turned into him in an intersection. The cyclist had the right of way and knew the car was coming up from behind—even blew a whistle to make his presence known—but the car plowed into him anyway. Adding insult to injury, the cyclist received a ticket for "inattention," even though an independent witness heard the whistle. “I can’t imagine more clear liability, but the driver’s insurance company was like, ‘Nope,’ ” Anderton said, rolling his eyes and shaking his head. “So this is what we’re up against.”

He says the situation in South Lake Union is different, though. “The reason we took this case is that we thought the city should act consistent with its rhetoric,” Anderton says. “Everybody thinks that Seattle’s super pro-bike, but then they did this.”

Planning for the streetcar, a pet project of then-mayor Greg Nickels, began in 2004. The line would run 1.3 miles, connecting Westlake Center to the burgeoning South Lake Union neighborhood. And virtually from the beginning Seattle Department of Transportation engineers, along with consultants from engineering and construction megafirm Parsons Brinckerhoff, decided against laying the tracks down the middle of Westlake—which would have been the more traditional alignment—in favor of placing them in the right-hand lanes in both directions. The city’s attorneys have since explained that the driving force behind that decision was, naturally, money: Underground utility lines would have had to be moved to accommodate a center-running line, and everyone involved, including major funder Vulcan, wanted to fast-track the $56 million project. (It’s worth noting, though, that at the time the project’s manager told The Seattle Times that SDOT didn’t put the tracks in the middle of the street because the city would have had to eliminate parking spaces.)

But for bike commuters from the north end of the city who preferred that route into and out of downtown because of its relative flatness, the decision to place the lines on the right was akin to creating a 1.3-mile booby trap. Not only would cyclists, typically expected to ride in the right lane, be squeezed into a narrow space between the streetcar and parked cars, but the channel between each rail and the concrete—called a flangeway gap—was also just wide enough to catch a road bike tire. In other words, the slightest swerve could result in an over-the-handlebars, bone-snapping wreck. Tom Fucoloro, a bike commuter and the founder of the influential Seattle Bike Blog says he avoids Westlake “at all costs” specifically because of the hazard. “You ride over gaps and bumps all day long, so people like to say that riders who crash on the tracks are just being stupid,” he says. “But it’s completely reasonable if you’ve never seen anyone crash there to think that you can just ride over them like you ride over everything else.”

Her front wheel dropped into one of the channels and wedged itself there, bringing the bike to a sudden, violent stop and catapulting her over the handlebars and onto the pavement.

The streetcar line began ding-dinging its way up and down Westlake in December 2007, but its tracks started tossing cyclists while the project was still under construction. Patricia Lenssen, one of the plaintiffs in the South Lake Union lawsuit, broke her jaw and two front teeth the previous May, when she got caught in the tracks while trying to turn from Westlake onto John Street. And in the months before the line was completed cyclists bit it on the freshly laid tracks so often that a throng of protesters crashed the streetcar’s unveiling on December 12—not just to rail against the City’s apparent disregard for rider safety, but to alert everyone to the hazard. Lenssen was there holding a sign that read “Watch for Injured Cyclists.”

Certainly some of the early wrecks could be attributed to the newness of the tracks and the fact that many riders just didn’t know they were there. But even with the warning signs that SDOT has since installed along Westlake and an acute awareness of the danger that’s spread throughout the biking community, the flangeway gap still snags tires regularly. Cyclists self-report accidents from across Seattle at bikewise.org, dropping virtual blue pins on a Google map of the city to designate solo crashes; Westlake, from Fifth Avenue to Mercer Street, is a solid blue line. One of the most recent reports is from a rider named Tim, who wiped out on April 3, not far from where Amanda Currier was thrown from her bike. “Was riding along Westlake and my back tire was caught in the trolly [sic] tracks,” wrote Tim, who described himself as an advanced cyclist. “There is very little room for error next to the trolly stops….”

After agreeing to take the case, Anderton filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the City, seeking any and all documents related to the streetcar’s planning. He hoped to find evidence of negligence but resigned himself to the possibility of finding that SDOT had actually exhausted every option for mitigating the danger to cyclists. What he discovered, though, shocked him. In March 2005, a technical report submitted to SDOT by Parsons Brinckerhoff noted that the danger presented by placing the tracks in the right lane would be so great that “cyclists will be required to use alternate routes.” One year later a city engineer sent an email to the project’s coordinator, among others, stating, “falls by cyclists are highly foreseeable. We see this as an issue of safety and liability.”

In fact the issue of potential liability was so widely acknowledged and of such concern within SDOT that throughout the entire design process the department’s engineers planned to restrict bicycle travel along the streetcar’s route. “Installation of track in Westlake Avenue will eliminate the street as a bike route,” read one set of planning comments distributed in February ’05. “To keep cyclists away from the tracks, the street would probably be signed ‘No Bikes.’ ”

Yet somewhere along the way—presumably shortly before the tracks were laid, but even SDOT employees say they’re not sure—talk of prohibiting bikes on Westlake just stopped and without any real explanation. From the City’s perspective, it would be business as usual for bikes in South Lake Union. Signs warning cyclists of the danger didn’t even start going in until December 2007.

But still. Rider beware, right? You could argue that cyclists brave enough to ride on city streets—in traffic, no less—know they’ll have to contend with hazards every day. Wrecking on the tracks is no different than wrecking on a pothole. But Anderton doesn’t buy that. “I’ve crashed on a pothole on City of Seattle streets—that’s an issue where the City has a limited amount of money and lots of streets to maintain,” he says. “But with the streetcar, they affirmatively and knowingly created the danger. This isn’t something that just snuck up on them. They knew about it. And they chose to let people crash on it.”

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Reaction to the lawsuit was harsh. “What a bunch of a—hats,” wrote one reader on seattlepi.com. “The entire world does not have to be made safe for bikes. Get over your selves.” Wrote another: “My first reaction when I saw this article was, these people are too brain dead to be allowed outside the house without adult supervision.” Hundreds more weighed in, there and at The Seattle Times site, most with similar sentiments. The online name-calling got so nasty that two weeks after suing the City, Anderton filed a motion to have the case moved to Kent, where he hoped to find a less biased jury. The court denied his request. He had anticipated the backlash—he knew before suing that he’d probably have to ask for a transfer—but he says his clients hadn’t. All of them declined to comment for this story through Anderton; he says they just don’t want to put themselves out there again and invite more name-calling and invective.

The less said about the vitriol-spewing trolls who hang out in the comments section of the local news sites, the better. But their spiteful, nasty shots at the plaintiffs provided a window onto tension that’s grown for years between those who don’t ride bikes and those who do. For the most part, the conflict has manifested itself in honked horns, raised middle fingers, and incendiary rhetoric. In January 2010, David Hiller, then the advocacy director of the Cascade Bicycle Club and now a transportation advisor to Mayor Mike McGinn, infamously told The Stranger he’d love to hang drivers who hit cyclists “by their toenails at the edge of town and paint ‘Killer’ across their chest and let them hang there until the buzzards peck their eyes out.”

But it’s a political issue, too. Mayor McGinn, who courted and won the progressive vote in 2009 in part by wearing buttons emblazoned with the slogan “Mike Bikes,” has been the target of antibike scorn ever since. Last November, when he presented to voters Proposition 1, a $60 car-tab fee that would have raised more than $200 million for transportation infrastructure, critics screamed about the comparatively tiny portion—$14 million—that would have gone toward striping bike lanes and building neighborhood greenways. And its subsequent thumping at the polls was hailed as not just a rejection of overreaching government but also as a referendum on “Mayor McSchwinn” and his biking buddies.

And let’s not forget the occasional physical clashes between cyclists and noncyclists. In an incident that illustrated just how quickly the two sides can come to blows, two bike riders were arrested in July 2008 for attacking a motorist on Capitol Hill during Critical Mass, the monthly rides-slash-demonstrations that clog streets to assert cyclists’ rights. The driver tried to leave a parking spot only to be blocked by a group of people on bikes. When the driver started yelling, the cyclists sat on his car. When the driver yelled some more, the cyclists started to rock his car. When the driver lost his cool, gunned his engine, and struck a handful of the cyclists? Well, they retaliated by smashing his windshield, slashing his tires, and punching him through his open window.

“This isn’t something that just snuck up on the City. They knew about it. And they chose to let people crash on it.”

Part of that jostling is simply due to a sharp increase in bikes on the streets. According to SDOT, as many as 8,000 cyclists commute into the city each day, which, as biking advocates will remind you, is 8,000 people not clogging the roads with cars. Not only that, downtown bike trips were up 35 percent between 2000 and 2011. And when you’ve got that many groups competing for the road, there’s bound to be some head-butting. “But I think it’s because we’re afraid,” says John Mauro, Cascade’s director of policy, planning, and government affairs. “When you’re driving around in your car and you see somebody on two wheels, you realize, ‘I could actually hurt that person.’ But you don’t want to, and that fear translates into other things.” Like raised middle fingers and honked horns.All of which begs the question: Why? How did Seattle, known across the country as one the cities most accepting of bikes, become so antagonistic toward the people who ride them? First of all, we’re not alone. “It’s happening all over the world,” says Seattle City Council member Tom Rasmussen. He chairs the City’s transportation committee and says he regularly commiserates with civic leaders from other regions who see the same tension on their streets. “Whether it’s in Auckland, New Zealand, or Portland, or Seattle, everyone—transit users, pedestrians, people who drive cars, and bicyclists—seek to use the same right of way. And it’s limited.”

To its credit, the city council has recognized the demand for better bike infrastructure and begun to address the need and, by extension, reduce the conflict. The City’s 10-year Bicycle Master Plan, unveiled in 2007, laid the groundwork for nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in improvements. Other cities’ bike-safety innovations—including cycle tracks, or bike lanes separated from traffic by concrete dividers—spotlighted a need to update the plan shortly after it was written, though, and the council hopes to publish the update by spring 2013.

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Concerns of a jury pool tainted by antibike bias aside, Anderton liked his chances when he filed the suit. For starters, he was in familiar territory. In 2001, he sued the City for negligence after several cyclists crashed on an awkwardly positioned set of train tracks beneath the Ballard Bridge. Three years later he won the first judgment for his clients.

And the evidence demonstrating that the City failed to mitigate a hazard it knew it created in South Lake Union weighed heavily in his clients’ favor. SDOT’s own employees had so effectively made his case for him—Peter Lagerwey, then a senior transportation planner for the department’s Pedestrian and Bi-cycle Program, called one section of the streetcar line “fatally flawed for bicyclists”—that Anderton didn’t even bother hiring his own expert witnesses to argue the danger of the tracks. Besides, he says, “If you speak to any lawyer, they’ll tell you that you can always pay someone to say what you want to hear.”

Yet the City slowly chipped away at his case. In July 2011, one year after the suit was filed in Superior Court, assistant city attorney Rebecca Boatright asked the judge to throw out a portion of it. Legislative and executive decisions, such as then–SDOT director Grace Crunican’s call on where to locate the streetcar line, are immune to liability, Boatright argued, thereby rendering moot the plaintiffs’ argument that SDOT was negligent in running the tracks through the part of the street where bicyclists typically ride. Judge Gregory P. Canova agreed on September 2, 2011, effectively flattening one of Anderton’s tires.

Ironically, though, Boatright seemed to concede the war to win the battle. “To be clear, the City does not dispute…that streetcar tracks in the roadway can present hazards for bicyclists who fail to negotiate the tracks at an appropriate angle,” she wrote to the court in her motion for partial summary judgment. “The concerns are well reflected in various reviewers’ comments to the proposed design plans, and in approving the project with a right-running track configuration, Ms. Crunican especially was aware of these concerns.”

Boatright is an 11-year City employee, and she’s been biking to work daily, year-round, for nine years. The only time she leaves her bicycle at home is when there’s ice on the road. She’s ridden alongside the tracks in South Lake Union—she has to go that way to get to her home in Fremont—but typically sticks to Dexter Avenue North, which separates bike lanes from the street with a two-foot-wide buffer zone and concrete islands at bus stops. Which is to say that acknowledging the potential for accidents on Westlake was an odd strategy for someone who benefits directly from bike-friendly roadways. But she sees the wrecks as unfortunate collateral damage in the on-going struggle to accommodate all forms of transportation. “The City very much wants to promote bicycling, but it can’t put in facilities exclusive to bicyclists on every street in the city,” she says. “There are multiple considerations that you have to look at when planning for a multimodal environment. And it’s a fact of transportation that tracks and bicycle wheels aren’t compatible.”

The City hadn’t designated Westlake a bicycle facility by painting in bike lanes, so it believed it had no obligation to pay special attention to the needs of cyclists.

She took that line of thinking one step further last March, when she filed another motion, this time requesting that the court throw out Anderton’s case altogether. “A distinction must be drawn between the City’s aspirational goals for promoting alternative transportation options and its legal duty of care with respect to the engineering and maintenance of its roadways,” she wrote in the brief. In other words: State law requires a city to keep its streets reasonably safe for “ordinary” travel, and because Westlake was now home to a streetcar line, cycling was no longer “ordinary” on that street. The City hadn’t designated it a bicycle facility by painting in bike lanes, Boatright said, so it had no obligation to pay special attention to the needs of cyclists.

Legally speaking, the argument may have been sound, but the City was contorting itself to protect its position and threatening to alienate the cycling community it had worked so hard to embrace. Even SDOT’s communications manager Rick Sheridan, who would only take my questions via email because the case was ongoing, seemed to have difficulty addressing the issue head on. When I pointed out the irony of an otherwise bike-friendly city arguing that cycling isn’t ordinary travel, he went into Bill Clinton depends-on-what-your-definition-of-is-is mode: “The term ‘ordinary’ can mean different things to different people, and it has both a vernacular and a legal meaning,” he wrote. “This is a question that is better asked of the City’s legal department.”

In the end, the City Attorney office’s decision to throw cyclists under the bus—metaphorically speaking, of course—may have been an example of needs trumping wants. The South Lake Union Streetcar was an expensive piece of transportation infrastructure, and one that can’t just be picked up and moved. So had Boatright not employed every argument available, including the ones that contradicted the city’s stated desire to promote bicycling, she risked losing the case and spending the next several years settling lawsuits from every bike rider who’s fallen—and will fall—on those tracks. Boatright herself will even cop to that, although not in so many words. “If we’re going to incur liability because some bicyclists have fallen on the tracks, then maybe we’re going to have to consider the draconian measure of telling bicyclists, ‘You don’t get to decide for yourself how to get from point A to point B,’ ” she says. “And we wanted that guidance from the courts.”

Once again, the judge sided with the City in early April, this time throwing out the suit entirely. But his reasoning had nothing to do with bikes or their place on Seattle streets. Instead he ruled that the plaintiffs had failed to make their case by not hiring any expert witnesses. Anderton was floored and responded by filing a motion for reconsideration—basically asking the judge to take a minute and think things over. The court denied his request, though, and as of press time Anderton and his clients were still mulling an appeal.

“This is not just a bike issue,” Anderton told me. “This is an access to justice issue. If the rule is that you need to be able to hire experts before you can get to a jury—when the evidence is, we think, really clear—that’s not the kind of judicial system that I think most people hope we have.”

Boatright’s argument that cycling isn’t ordinary travel really gets him fired up, though. “That’s just so wrong,” he says. “The City is encouraging people to ride bikes, and yet they’re saying they can put a trap for them in the street?” And he doesn’t buy the argument that SDOT has atoned for creating the hazard in South Lake Union by improving bike access elsewhere, including along Ninth Avenue, where it added bike lanes in April 2008. “We’re not saying that they have a special duty to make the streets as bicycle friendly as possible,” he says, practically shouting. “We’re not saying that we must have our own physically separated bike path wherever the heck we want to go. All we’re saying is, you owe us a duty of care.” He takes a breath. “Okay, I’ll calm down.”

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It was mid-April, and the sun was shining. The temperature threatened to break 70 degrees for the third day in a row—the kind of Seattle spring surprise you hate to love because it’s just a tease—and Mayor McGinn was all smiles. “It’s a good day here in Seattle, and not just because of the weather,” he said to a crowd of a couple hundred gathered near Swedish Medical Center in Capitol Hill. Behind him, 12 gold-tipped shovels were planted in a mound of dirt. He was here—along with more than a dozen other dignitaries, including King County executive Dow Constantine, state senator Ed Murray, and former mayor Nickels—to break ground on the First Hill Streetcar. The two-and-a-half-mile line will run from Cal Anderson Park to Pioneer Square, just north of CenturyLink Field, and begin operation in two years.

McGinn squinted into the sun as he waxed on about a new era in Seattle transportation. The line is just the next link in a system that will one day make it possible for Seattleites to get out of their cars and get to know each other as they ride into work together on mass transit, he said. And even better? The streetcars themselves will be built right here in the Emerald City. It’s a win-win for McGinn.

He spoke for several minutes, highlighting the $133 million project’s every benefit, except the one that you’d think a guy who got his nickname from a bike would want to crow about: Along Broadway this streetcar will run closer to the center of the road, making room for a brand-new 10-foot-wide, two-way cycle track along the curb, the first of its kind in downtown Seattle. The concession to rider safety was by no means a gimme—cycling advocates had to remind SDOT engineers of what happened in South Lake Union early and often in the planning stages for the First Hill extension—but it was proof that the City was capable of learning from its mistakes. Sometimes you have to walk before you can ride.

The Redemption of Ryan Leaf Will Be Televised

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 05:00:00 -0700

Image: Chris Whetzel

WITH NOWHERE TO GO, HE RAN. Just packed up and fled twelve hundred miles to the dust-caked scrubland of West Texas without leaving a forwarding address. A guy his size—six feet six inches, 245 pounds, biceps like HoneyBaked hams—could never truly disappear, but the wide-open Southern sky had a way of shrinking a man. And down there anonymity cost as much as a Stetson and a new pair of cowboy boots. Maybe he could at least blend in, he thought, throw them off of his scent long enough that they’d forget about him. But he should have known better.

If a stranger asked, Ryan Leaf would say he left Montana behind and moved to Canyon, Texas, home of the West Texas A&M Buffaloes, to teach young men how to throw a football. But that wasn’t true. Not entirely. He came here in 2006 to bury the old Ryan Leaf. Carve out a shallow grave in the dry red dirt and dump the body of the cocky, combustible kid who finished his football career at Washington State University as the school’s greatest quarterback, only to flame out spectacularly in the NFL—a supernova of rage and petulance. The new Ryan wouldn’t be better. He’d just be normal. The kind of guy who read the sports page instead of worrying if he’d be in it.

Except just like he’d done so many times before, he made a mistake. A big one. And that was all those people with the tape recorders and the cameras and the vans with satellite dishes needed to sniff him out. They’d caravanned out to the brush country and started stabbing the dirt with spades, and after the fields were scarred with hastily dug holes and they’d finally found the body, they’d whooped and hollered and dragged it back through the streets of Canyon. And then they broadcast the footage to the rest of the country.

Now, in November 2008, he sat alone in the dark of his home, watching the news of his latest failure scroll across the bottom of a flickering television screen. ESPN’s Joe Schad reports West Texas A&M places QB coach Ryan Leaf on indefinite leave for asking a player for a pain pill, the ticker read. In that moment he knew two things. First, he was addicted to Vicodin. He couldn’t deny that anymore. He’d started taking it to numb a throbbing in his wrist, but the physical pain had long since subsided. Now he was popping pill upon pill just to block out the self-loathing that had tormented him for a decade.

And second, the new Ryan knew that no matter how deep he buried the old Ryan, someone would always find him.

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DO NOT CRY for Ryan Leaf. He wouldn’t want you to. And besides, he had his shot at greatness. In 1997 the 21-year-old from Great Falls, Montana, led the WSU Cougars—who had been picked to finish seventh in the Pac-10—to their best season in nearly 70 years. And the biggest game of his career came right here in Seattle on November 22. In front of more than 74,000 people at Husky Stadium, and in need of only one more win to earn a trip to the Rose Bowl, Leaf calmly picked apart the University of Washington defense, adding to a barrel of conference passing records that would later earn him Pac-10 Offensive Player of the Year honors. With the score tied 7-7 in the second quarter, he dropped back, caught sight of wide receiver Chris Jackson sprinting down the sideline, and hit him in midstride for a 57-yard score. WSU never lost the lead, and Leaf racked up 358 yards and three scores that day. When time ran out, hundreds of the Cougar fans in attendance streamed from their seats, holding up roses and blanketing the field in crimson. Those who didn’t celebrate by trying to rip down the goalposts flocked to Leaf and lofted him onto their shoulders. After a year of carrying the school on his back, its fans were carrying him. (Leaf has chronicled his glory years at Washington State in 596 Switch, an auto-biography that will be released by Pullman’s Crimson Oak Publishing in October.)

Three years into a prolific college career, Leaf was already a hero in the tiny town of Pullman. But now pro scouts across the country were salivating at the prospect of adding him to their roster. Guys who get paid to yammer with authority about the likelihood a college athlete’s skills will translate to the pro—guys like ESPN’s draft analyst Mel Kiper and his heavily moussed huckster’s haircut—mocked anyone who didn’t believe that Leaf would carpet bomb the NFL with touchdowns. So with one year of college eligibility remaining, Leaf left WSU and entered the draft. And just as predicted, on April 18, 1998, the San Diego Chargers selected him with the second pick in the draft and signed him to a $34 million contract that included a $12 million signing bonus.

But not long into the 1998 season, those talking heads were gagging on their words. The cannon arm that had served Leaf so well in college was failing him in the pros. Physically, he looked the part of an NFL quarterback, but his decisions on the field proved he was overwhelmed and unprepared. By the end of the year he’d thrown for just two touchdowns, while being intercepted 15 times. For the next three years he was plagued by injuries and never played a full season, and by 2002, after a brief stint at Seahawks training camp, Leaf had washed out of football altogether at the age of 25. The analysts who had once pegged him as a future Hall of Famer were calling him the biggest bust in NFL draft history.

“When your confidence, self-esteem, and abilities don’t match the moment, you’re dead meat,” says T. J. Simers, a veteran sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times. “There’s a long list of those guys.” And it’s a list that includes a lot of quarterbacks. Take Heath Shuler (drafted third overall by the Washington Redskins in ’94), Tim Couch (drafted first overall by the Cleveland Browns in ’99), and JaMarcus Russell (drafted first overall by the Oakland Raiders in ’07). All three came into the pros carrying similarly stratospheric expectations, and all were just as woefully ineffective as Leaf was. Yet none got tarred with the “biggest bust” label, and there’s a good chance it’s because they lacked the two things that Leaf actually had: an ego that dwarfed his talent and a relationship with the media that bordered on nuclear.

Simers was one of the first to document Leaf’s immaturity. In a column published August 11, 1998, weeks before the regular season started, he blistered Leaf, calling him a punk and reporting on his refusal to bus his own table at the Chargers training facility, his snide remarks about fellow rookie quarterback Peyton Manning, and his alleged advances toward another NFL player’s wife.

San Diego fans were apoplectic. Who was this hack from LA to attack their new hero? Leaf was just a kid, they sputtered. A brash one, sure, but one who would back it up on the field. But then on September 20, Simers’s prophecy of the savior-who-never-was began to come true as Leaf imploded in a game against the Kansas City Chiefs, throwing four interceptions and fumbling three times. And one day later, when San Diego Union-Tribune reporter Jay Posner asked Leaf about his postgame altercation with a cameraman, the fiery quarterback erupted. Unaware of or indifferent to the fact that he was being filmed, Leaf leapt from the folding chair in front of his locker, loomed over the seated Posner, and screamed, “Don’t talk to me, all right?” His cheeks, smooth and without a hint of stubble, flushed red. “Knock it off!” The five-second clip went national within days, playing in an endless loop in sports highlight reels and branding Leaf an arrogant, entitled child.

Thirteen years later Posner just sighed when I asked him about his run-in with Leaf in San Diego. He won’t excuse Leaf’s inability to handle criticism, but he’s convinced that the era of media saturation that started in the late ’90s is at least partly to blame for Leaf’s public image problem. “There have been physical altercations between athletes and sportswriters before,” he said. “And the incident between Ryan and myself wasn’t even physical. The difference is that it was caught on video.”

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Photo: Courtesy WSU Athletic Communications

WHO WOULDN’T LIKE TO YELL at a reporter sometimes? I got the luxury to do it in front of the world.” Had those words come from Ryan Leaf’s mouth in July 1998, they would have dripped with acidic smugness and a complete lack of self-awareness. As it is, though, they came from Leaf in July 2011 and they dripped with self-deprecation. He even grinned a little sheepishly when he said it. This was a relaxed, reborn Ryan.

That’s not to say he’s lost all of his swagger. Ironically much of his current efforts to rehabilitate his image—and to land a job in sports broadcasting—are based right here in Seattle, where just over a decade ago he was persona non grata. When I met him at his publicist’s office in the U District, just blocks from Husky Stadium, I asked if it makes his skin crawl to spend this much time so close to his old nemesis. He just leaned back in his chair and smirked. “I dominated that stadium, so I kind of like being here,” he said, recalling his 1997 Apple Cup victory in Seattle. He’s having fun, but there’s an edge to his words that makes me wonder if a poorly worded question could unleash the media-hating Ryan Leaf of old. (Now is a good time to mention that the WSU football team’s head trainer from 1978 to 1999—a man with whom Leaf is still close—was once, several years ago, my uncle by marriage.)

And yet his face didn’t flush when the topic of his eight-month addiction to Vicodin came up. His tone was measured, but he wasn’t swallowing his rage. No question was off limits, and at times the details spilled out of him without prompting. It started in March 2008, after he aggravated an old wrist injury while leading a throwing drill at a West Texas A&M practice. (Loosened over the years by a condition called scapholunate dissociation, his wrist pops out of joint easier than most.) The pain—the same pain that had ultimately forced him to retire from the NFL—was too much, so the team physician wrote him a prescription for 90 pills. With five refills. “I manipulated the situation,” Leaf said, acknowledging the size of his initial haul. “I think I signed some autographs for his kid.”

In front of 74,000 people at Husky Stadium, and in need of one more win to earn a trip to the Rose Bowl, Ryan Leaf calmly picked apart the University of Washington defense.

In the beginning he’d take one on nights when the grinding ache became unbearable, making it possible for him to watch SportsCenter after practice and focus on the highlights instead of obsessing about his wrist. But the genetic markers that blessed him with a high pain tolerance—a trait that had come in handy as he endured more than his fair share of hits in the pros—most likely raised his tolerance for the narcotic. So when one wasn’t enough, he graduated to two. When two weren’t enough, it was four. By October 2008, the throbbing in his wrist had long since subsided, but he was pounding 10 pills per night. At once. A dose that large could shut down the lungs of an average man who had never used the drug before, but in a weird way it was the only thing keeping Leaf alive.

Almost seven years after his last appearance in an NFL game—a 19-16 loss to the Denver Broncos—he was still tormented by his inability to live up to expectations, partly because he had a mean competitive streak that equated failure on the field with failure in life. And partly because the yammering analysts couldn’t help but bring up his name every April when a new crop of college kids entered the draft: “Who will be the next Ryan Leaf?” they’d ask with clinical detachment. But what Leaf heard was an indictment: “Who will embarrass himself, his alma mater, his family? Who will be doomed to a lifetime of shame?”

He was depressed. And self-conscious, to the point of paranoia. He didn’t even bother leaving the house at night, but he didn’t need to because he finally had the one thing that could shut off the part of his brain that made him hate himself. “I found what worked,” he says. “I disappeared.”

The only problem was that the numb nothingness was temporary. He didn’t need an alarm clock because a chest-tightening fear of not having enough pills for the next day would knock him out of bed in the morning. “The anxiety was overwhelming,” Leaf says. “You’re trying to contribute to a job and be good at it, but the first thing in your mind when you wake up is, ‘Do I have enough pills for tonight? If I don’t, how can I get a doctor to give them to me?’ ” Asking the team physician for another refill would raise suspicion, so when his stash ran low, he’d find an urgent care facility, show the on-call doctor his hinky (but no longer hurting) wrist, and conveniently leave out the fact that he’d already been gobbling pills by the handful for months.

Then on October 30, when he had run out of clinics to scam, he hit up an injured player, one of the 19 and 20-year-old kids he was supposed to be coaching. Uncomfortable and unsure of what to do, the young man—whose identity was never released by the Canyon Police Department—asked his parents for advice. Within a week West Texas A&M athletic director Michael McBroom called Leaf into his office and, across his desk, handed him a printed-out email that detailed the interaction between coach and player.

“This was sent to ESPN anonymously. Did you do what it says?”

A withered Leaf, who had lost nearly 15 pounds since the previous March, looked down. “Yes.”

“Ryan, would you like to resign?” McBroom asked.

“Of course,” Leaf replied. “I need to.”

Back in the U District, he displayed virtually no emotion as he finished this info dump. In fact, he almost looked entirely at ease. This was hardly the first time he’d told the story, but it’s as if each time he does, he rolls another 10-pound rock off his shoulders. “Sometimes she probably wants me to shut up,” Leaf said, referring to his publicist. “But being open and honest isn’t necessarily a bad thing for me anymore.”

• • •

WITHIN TWO WEEKS OF RESIGNING from West Texas A&M, Leaf checked into the Orchard rehab facility near Vancouver, BC. He felt relieved at having his secret exposed to those who knew him, but he was still looking over his shoulder for the men with the tape recorders and notepads. At Orchard he roomed in a lodgelike building that was about a 15-minute run from the main facility, and he dreaded the daily trek—not because he’d have to own up to his addiction once he got there but because of what might be waiting for him at the front door. “My biggest worry, the biggest stress I had was, ‘What morning am I going to come running up and find a camera crew out there?’ ” he told me, shaking his head as he recalled his scrambled priorities. “So, honestly, for the first two weeks I was still hesitant and not fully letting myself go into the program.”

The next 10 months amounted to what would be yet another bizarre, humiliating chapter in Leaf’s life. While he was getting clean, Canyon Police were building a case against him, and on May 20, 2009, a grand jury indicted him on six counts of obtaining a controlled substance by fraud. That same day, the police department issued a warrant for his arrest, but by June 11, Leaf—out of rehab but still living in Vancouver—had yet to turn himself in. (Even the manhunt for Ryan Leaf was overhyped: “He can run but he can’t hide, and we will find him,” the Randall County district attorney told reporters.) Less than a week later, he was arrested at the U.S. border as he made his way back into the country. Two days after posting $45,000 bail in Washington, he finally surrendered to police in Texas, pleaded not guilty, and posted another $15,000 bail. Then he retreated north of the border to await trial.

Once again, the shame was stifling. He holed up in Vancouver, selling chartered fishing trips for a BC company called West Coast Resorts. But otherwise he kept to himself. “I don’t want anyone to know anything about me,” he told The Canadian Press that fall, intimating that he only agreed to the interview because his employer had hired a publicist to help scrub his image. “I’m scared to talk to reporters, because I never know.”

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He was still gun-shy that September, when West Coast Resorts gave him an assignment: Make an appearance at the WSU board of trustees black-tie gala dinner in Seattle and shake a few hands. With his connections to the school, his bosses thought, he might have luck booking a few packages. Leaf cringed as he imagined walking into a room of alumni. Even when he’d returned to WSU to get his degree, he avoided campus whenever possible, opting to live for the year in nearby Moscow, Idaho—and that was in 2004, long before the drug drama. How would these people who used to cheer for him look at him now? What kind of snide comments would they make under their breath?

They didn’t glower. They didn’t whisper. They didn’t have a chance. Leaf had barely made it into the ballroom at the downtown Seattle Westin when Doug Thomas, a WSU trustee, and his wife intercepted him and welcomed him to the party. “His big fear was that everyone was going to say, ‘You disgraced us, you big loser,’ ” Thomas says. “He’d been browbeaten by the media for years and years, and what he wanted to do was get away from that noise that kept pounding on him.” The Thomases invited him to stop by their home in Bellingham for lunch the next time he was driving through town, and the invitation did more than just put him at ease. It hinted at the possibility there was still a place for Leaf among Cougar faithful.

The friendship with Thomas led to one with another trustee, Glenn Osterhout. And along the way Leaf reconnected with Jack Thompson, a fellow former Cougar QB, who had played for WSU in the 1970s. A decade earlier, Thompson had tried to help Leaf navigate the pitfalls of young stardom; now he was guiding Leaf through his re-introduction to the university’s extended family. “I remember telling him, ‘You’re very lucky to have gone to Washington State,’ ” Thompson says. “There are other schools that would have cast him out.” Leaf was building a network—a social support group, really—that he could trust to look out for his best interests. Which made all the more confusing his reaction to Osterhout’s suggestion that he submit to an interview with cougfan.com, a website that reported on WSU sports exclusively. Osterhout was friends with the editor, Greg Witter, another alum, and was confident the resultant article would be fair. But Leaf was spooked. “Let’s put that on hold for a while,” he said. “I’m not sure I’m ready.”

Three months into the relationship with Thomas, Thompson, and Osterhout—whom Leaf had come to identify as his “council of elders”—he finally relented and granted the site an interview. The article, published January 27, 2010, soft-pedaled Leaf’s addiction to painkillers, and afterward he began to feel better about opening up. So he called Witter again, this time with a request for help: In March, Leaf had agreed to a plea bargain on the drug charges and his sentencing was coming up. He knew a phalanx of reporters would be waiting outside the courthouse in Canyon and he wanted to be prepared with a statement. Could Witter help him write it?

On April 10, after being sentenced to 10 years of probation and receiving a $20,000 fine, Leaf, sporting a closely cropped businessman’s haircut and dressed in a tailored, ash-gray five-button suit, addressed the media. “I want to publicly apologize to Coach Carthel and the entire staff and team at West Texas A&M,” he began. He went on, recognizing his family, the rehab center, and his friends at WSU, and then answered every question fired his way. When it was over he was buzzing. For the first time since entering the NFL, he wasn’t scared to show his scars.

Requests for interviews came pouring in, and he granted one after another. Even the one from T. J. Simers, his old tormentor from the L.A. Times. “I can’t even think of anyone else in the ballpark that might be close to my combination of disappointment and failed expectations,” he told Simers, answering a question about his failure in the NFL that just a few years earlier would have enraged him. Simers grudgingly admits he’s sold on Leaf’s transformation. “I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt right now,” he says. “I would absolutely be surprised if he makes another mistake.”

Days later, Leaf agreed to make an appearance on xx1090, an AM sports talk radio station in San Diego. He hadn’t addressed reporters there since 2001, and he’d left town a reviled man. For all he knew host Darren Smith would ambush him, commit an on-air ritual sacrifice for the sake of all the Chargers fans who still held a grudge against the kid who’d killed their hopes in ’98. So as soon as Smith introduced Leaf to his audience on April 19, Leaf interjected, asking if he could say something to the people of San Diego. “I’m very sorry for what a poor representative I was of the city and the Chargers organization in my time there,” Leaf said, his voice shaking. “For many years I wanted to pretend that it never happened, but of course it did. And I have to own that.” He exhaled audibly, and 12 years of guilt began to dissipate. “It was absolutely the showstopper of all showstoppers,” Smith says now. “For the first time, people heard genuine emotion and humility from this guy. And it was closure.”

Closure for San Diego. And closure for Leaf.

• • •

MORE THAN A YEAR AFTER RYAN Leaf’s first tentative—and, this time, intentional—steps back into the spotlight, he’s still granting interviews. Radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, it doesn’t matter. He’s even airing his dirty laundry to college athletes in hopes that they’ll learn from his mistakes. In early August, he was invited to the University of Oklahoma in Norman to speak to the football team, which in May lost one of its own to an accidental overdose of five different prescription painkillers.

What happens next for Leaf may be the strangest irony in his story, though. Throughout our conversation he dropped several hints about wanting to get into broadcasting. He could see himself moving to Seattle, he says, depending on whether a job for him might open up at the new Pac-12 network, which will begin televising the conference’s various sporting events next August. Having run from his name and notoriety for so long, he’s embracing it now. After more than a decade of being dismantled by the media—sometimes fairly, sometimes not-so-fairly—he’s finally learning to use it to his advantage.

Possibly for the first time since college, Leaf is comfortable with who he is. So comfortable, in fact, that without any hesitation, he’ll admit something like this to someone holding a tape recorder: Two days after his sentencing and mea culpa in Texas, he watched with disgust as current Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger made a terse, unapologetic public statement about his own recent brush with the law, unshaven and dressed in a sloppy long-sleeve polo shirt. Leaf called his mother in Montana. “Did you see his press conference?” he asked, ever the competitor. “Mine was better. I totally whipped his butt.”

Would It Work Here? More Skate Parks

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 05:00:00 -0700

Image: Konstantin Sutyagin/Istockphoto

YOU KNOW THAT FEELING when you hear urethane skateboard wheels thundering down the sidewalk and your shins practically ache at the thought of an impending you-versus-skater collision? Yeah, well Torontonians didn’t like it either.

That’s why the opening of Toronto’s Eighth Street Skate Park in July was a proud moment for city council member Mark Grimes. First elected in 2003, Grimes had vowed to provide the misunderstood—though thriving—skateboarding population of Toronto a place to play. “It’s a really unique community,” said Grimes. “They just need a place to apply their trade.” It took months of scouting locations, a handful of community meetings, and roughly $500,000 of the city’s budget, but the Canadian skaters got their own turf.

Seattle skaters didn’t feel so lucky when Seattle Center’s outdoor skate park shut down back in 2007; the site was demolished to make way for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation headquarters. And that could’ve spelled disaster. “More skate parks in America means fewer kids doing bad things,” suggests Charles Donaldson, a skater and employee at the Seattle skateboard shop Thirty Fifth North.

Good thing voters approved the $146 million Parks and Green Spaces Levy passed in 2008. Now three parks, with budgets totaling $1.4 million, are set to open this fall in Ballard, Beacon Hill, and Northgate, and two more parks are expected to open in 2012.

“Skateboarding is a sport full of heroes and mentors,” said Dewey Potter, spokesperson for Seattle Parks and Recreation. “And if you provide spaces where people can do positive things, there will be fewer negative things happening.”

A King’s Ransom

Fri, 20 May 2011 05:00:00 -0700

Image: flipflopflyin.com

Pixelated Pitcher Illustration from the book Flip Flop Fly Ball by Craig Robinson.

FÉLIX CAN’T CURE WHAT AILS THE M’S
Mariners GM Jack Zduriencik insists he hasn’t been shopping his flamethrowing phenom because he wants to build a playoff-quality franchise around him. But Hernández could be 30 before the M’s even sniff the postseason again. (This is a team, let’s not forget, that scored 100 fewer runs than any other team in the American League last year.) You want to speed up the rebuilding process? Get a handful of hitters for him now.

HIS STOCK CAN’T GET ANY HIGHER
King Félix is just 25. He’s the reigning American League Cy Young Award winner. And his current contract runs through 2014, meaning any team that snags him now would own him for three years. Wait another year and his value could slide.

HE’S NOT SELLING TICKETS
Trading the team’s marquee name could further alienate an already disenfranchised ticket-buying public, but it’s not as if Félix’s fans have been flocking to the 47,000-seat ballpark. He’s arguably the team’s most popular player, yet in his first two home starts attendance averaged less than 13,000.

THE MICHAEL PINEDA FACTOR
It’s still too early to call the rookie right-hander King Félix’s successor to the throne. But, through the first week of May, Pineda showed he’s got the stuff (4-2, 2.58 ERA) to be a superstar in the making.

HE’LL COMMAND A LOT IN RETURN
Two years ago, the Boston Red Sox were willing to give up five players to acquire Félix. And the San Diego Padres considered dealing Adrian Gonzalez, one of the best sluggers in the game, to get him. Trading Félix wouldn’t be a popular move at first, but when you’re as bad as the M’s, pragmatism should trump public opinion.

Would It Work Here? City-sponsored Bike Sharing

Fri, 20 May 2011 05:00:00 -0700

Image: Jeffrey Beal

“IT JUST MAKES people really happy,” says Parry Burnap, executive director of Denver Bike Sharing, describing her city’s new program. “You see someone you don’t even know and they ding their bell,” a colleague told her recently. City-sponsored bike-share programs are popping up across North America from Washington, DC, to Montreal. The concept: Rent a bike from any public docking station and drop it off at any other station when you’re done.

The benefits: healthier citizens, more interactive urban environments, fewer cars on the road.

So why doesn’t Seattle—which Bicycling magazine calls the fourth most bike-friendly city in the country—have a similar setup? “Weather, topography, helmet laws, and funding,” explains King County Metro transportation planner Ref Lindmark.

But Chris Holben of Capital Bikeshare in DC says foul weather isn’t a problem. It’s a publicity opportunity. “We had Winter Warrior contests where we gave prizes to people who rode every day between January and February.” Membership numbers climbed.

Unlike that city, though, Seattle has a mandatory bike-helmet law (see: No-Brainer ), which could require more innovative solutions, such as Melbourne, Australia’s street-side vending machines that sell $5 helmets.

Still, none of these obstacles have killed King County Metro’s yen for pedal-powered commutes. Lindmark says they’re researching designs for a bike-share program right now. “Our hope is that it’s no more than two years away.”

Sports

Voting for the Fates of Seattle’s Leading Sports Figures

Heckle Like a Red Sox Fan

Darryl Baines, Running Man

See Darryl Baines run

Inside Seattle’s Unsuccessful Bid for the 2012 Olympics

Meet the Players in Seattle’s NBA Arena Proposal

If He Builds It…

Bike Crashes Along SLU Streetcar Pit Cyclists Against City

The Redemption of Ryan Leaf Will Be Televised

Would It Work Here? More Skate Parks

A King’s Ransom

Would It Work Here? City-sponsored Bike Sharing