A look at the relationship between city governments and professional sports teams.
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For months, the billionaire owner of the Washington Wizards and Capitals had been pressing the D.C. government to pay at least half the cost of modernizing his aging downtown arena. Now, in an email on Dec. 10, a Sunday afternoon, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser was offering just that — $500 million toward an $800 million project to keep his basketball and hockey teams playing in the city for decades to come.
They spoke for an hour before the Democratic mayor brought up the elephant in the room. She said she had heard chatter that Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin was about to announce a deal to build an arena for the teams on the other side of the Potomac River. She asked Leonsis if it was true.
Leonsis spun 360 degrees in his chair. Nothing had been signed, he said, but he acknowledged he would be joining Youngkin for an announcement the next day.
Suddenly, it became clear: He hadn’t invited the mayor to his offices to discuss her offer. He’d done it to tell her she was too late.
“If you would have offered this to me earlier,” he said, “I would have accepted it.”
Leonsis’s decision to pull his teams out of the city represents a consequential rupture in what has been a successful partnership between a three-term mayor and an owner who had invested in the District for more than two decades and pledged to stay there. If local and state officials in Virginia sign off, the move could also stall an economic engine that has drawn more than 2 million visitors per year to Chinatown, an area that has lately struggled with empty storefronts, office vacancies and crime.
