Lambeau Field, Fenway Park—honoring tradition is a badge of distinction.
By JOSH BOYD
What's the new status symbol in professional sports? Being able to name your own stadium. When the Dallas Cowboys open their season at home on Sept. 8 against the New York Giants, they'll play not at Cowboys Stadium but at AT&T Stadium. Last month, the Cowboys became the latest storied franchise to sell naming rights (in Dallas's case, for an estimated $19 million per year), leaving even fewer professional teams in the U.S. maintaining their traditional venue names.
Unsponsored Yankee Stadium and Madison Square Garden in New York, and Soldier Field in Chicago, are part of a rapidly shrinking group. Their venue names send a message that seems to grow in volume with every "AT&T Stadium"—a message that says, "We are big enough, good enough, and rich enough that we don't need no stinkin' naming-rights deal."
It hasn't always been this way. Through the 1960s, none of the big three professional sports leagues had a corporate-named venue. Some of the earliest entrants into multiyear naming rights deals were Buffalo's Rich Stadium (1972) and Sacramento's ARCO Arena (1985), but then bigger markets joined with venues like the Great Western Forum in Los Angeles. Baseball didn't get into the act until the 1990s, and it still has the smallest number of sponsored stadium names (19 out of 30). The NFL (25 sponsored names out of 32) and NBA (26 of 30), on the other hand, have made the commemorative venue name an endangered species.
A handful of names fall into the gray area between commercial and commemoration: Wrigley Field in Chicago, Turner Field in Atlanta and Busch Stadium in St. Louis were all originally named for team owners, but those names also had close associations with corporate identities in gum, entertainment and beer. Busch Stadium (now a sponsored name after St. Louis Cardinals' ownership changed and Anheuser-Busch paid to keep its name on the structure) had a particularly hazy beginning.
Tradition holds that the Busch family, having bought the Cardinals and Sportsman's Park in 1953, wanted to rename the field Budweiser Stadium, but baseball commissioner Ford Frick wouldn't allow it. So the owners named the ballpark Busch Stadium instead, and shortly thereafter Anheuser-Busch rolled out a new product: Busch Bavarian Beer. Crafty. Or coincidence—the debate continues 60 years later.
Sports Authority Field at Mile High (Denver) tries to have it both ways, as does the BMO Harris Bradley Center in Milwaukee. But let's face it—the sponsor still gets top billing.
The stampede to sell arena and stadium sponsorships has occasionally led to unforeseen complications. Mergers and acquisitions have meant rapid and frequent name changes—the San Francisco Giants' Pacific Bell Park quickly gave way to SBC Park, and the Philadelphia 76ers' arena name was changed by corporate rearranging from CoreStates Center to First Union Center to Wachovia Center to Wells Fargo Center.
Even without name changes, sponsored deals can lead to confusion. Quick quiz: Which NBA team plays in American Airlines Arena? How about American Airlines Center? If you correctly answered the Miami Heat (Arena) and the Dallas Mavericks (Center), congratulations, trivia buff.
As baseball undergoes another wrenching crisis surrounding performance-enhancing drugs, does it strike anyone else as awkward that a sport facing allegations of "juicing" has teams playing in Minute Maid Park and Tropicana Field? I'm guessing those aren't baseball's most prized sponsorship agreements right now, though Minute Maid Park is at least an upgrade from its predecessor name in Houston, Enron Field.
Many of the teams that still have traditional names on their venues (often commemorating a team or founder or local roots) are teams with championship traditions or long histories: the Green Bay Packers (Lambeau Field), the New York Knicks (Madison Square Garden), the Boston Red Sox (Fenway Park). Granted, there are still some smaller market or newer teams clinging to commemorative rather than corporate names (e.g., Cincinnati's Paul Brown Stadium and Washington's Nationals Park), but a lot of the holdouts against sponsored names hold out because they can—or perhaps because they value the tradition and history associated with a name like Dodger Stadium.
After the NFL's most recent name change, the Cowboys now have a little less in common with the New York Yankees and the Chicago Bears, and a little more in common with the Jacksonville Jaguars (EverBank Field) and the L.A. Clippers (Staples Center). Sure, there's a lot of money involved, but there's also a cost: Maintaining control of the name of a venue seems to be a rising sports badge of distinction.
Marquee coaches and managers, high-dollar free agents, glitzy new stadiums and championship rings still demonstrate clout in pro sports, but little says "our team is important" better than a name that hasn't been sold.
Mr. Boyd is a professor in the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.
I remember when they came along and changed Riverfront in Cincy to Cinergy. Kinda of stupid taking the old Oakland Alameda County Colliseum and calling it whatever it is now.
RIGHT'S RIGHT 
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Sun Aug 18, 2013 9:31 pm
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