Playin' Ball
🏀 The WNBA in Nashville · Kelsey pardoned · Rock departure for General Hospital CEO · Illegal of the week · Much more!
Good afternoon, everyone.
Two quick things off the top. Belle Meade Cigar opened its new location in Sylvan Park next to Star Bagel. Decent chance of running into me there.
The Dali Lama proclaimed in his new book that he would be reincarnated in the “free world” outside the boundaries controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP has an issue with that.
“The rebirth of ‘living Buddhas’ must ‘comply with Chinese laws and regulations’ that mandate his spirit stay within Chinese borders,” writes Timothy Nerozzi on the matter.
This is a worse law than the US government taxing the “worldwide income” of American citizens.
Onward.
There are women’s sports I enjoy watching and there are women’s sports I don’t enjoy watching. The same goes for men’s sports, of course, but the quality gradient in women’s sports is more severe. Gymnastics, figure skating, track and field, and tennis top the list. Way down at the bottom is basketball—even despite the Caitlin Clark hype.
As former governor Bill Haslam and his wife nurse a bid to bring a WNBA team to town, the media campaign to bring awareness to the fact that people actually like women’s basketball continues. The most recent push has been about Athletes Unlimited, a spring circuit designed to give professional women’s basketball players somewhere to nurture their skills in the offseason.
“Athletes Unlimited Proves Nashville’s Appetite for Women’s Basketball” reads the headline of a Scene article on the league. Whether or not you agree with that assessment, AU announced at the end of last month a multiyear deal to make Nashville the league’s home for the foreseeable future.
According to the release from AU, attendance grew by 77 percent, merchandise sales by 97 percent, and social media engagement by 69 percent compared to prior host cities, Las Vegas and Dallas. I couldn’t find hard attendance numbers to contextualize these increases, but dang, those are big numbers. Wow.
Gripes about the actual product aside, it’s easy to understand how having a team called the Nashville Summitt (in honor of legendary University of Tennessee coach Pat Summitt) would be attractive to those who bleed the Tri-Star. Even Senators Blackburn and Hagerty are behind the effort. Mayor O’Connell agrees, too—but can you imagine him doing anything but agreeing? “I've got two daughters. I think that'd be really cool,” the mayor told Haslam when discussing the idea. He sounds stoked.
Haslam’s already a part owner of the Tennessee Smokies in Knoxville and is set to become the majority Predators owner on July 1st of this year. He’s promised that not a single tax dollar will go towards attracting a WNBA team. "Crissy and I would be willing to own 100% of it," Haslam told the Tennessean. "This is not contingent upon the city doing anything for us." Sigh of relief.
As for the WNBA’s view of the matter, commissioner Cathy Engelbert told the Tennessean last year that she was “very impressed with the young vibrancy and the music culture” of the city. “We sit kind of at the intersection of sports, culture, women, diversity, inclusion, etc.," she continued. I’m being cantankerous about this whole thing, but indulge me for a second.
The Titans stadium deal made clear to me the importance of sports franchises to the image of a city. Negotiations probably could’ve been handled better, but were the city to deny the Titans money for a new stadium, and they packed up and left, an NFL-sized crater would sit on the East Bank. The whole re-development project over there would never occur and the Beacons of Ruin would be illuminated across the country for all to see: Nashville is not a place to do business. Cities exist for commerce. Signaling an unwillingness to do commerce is the death knell of a city. And a large sports franchise leaving a city does not send a bullish signal.
During negotiations with Oracle, Mayor Cooper made a big to-do after Gov. Bill Lee signed legislation requiring that school athletes play on the team that aligns with their birth sex. "I don't want to let us become viewed as a backwater, nationally," Cooper had intoned in response. But in the end, it didn’t matter—companies prioritize financially favorable business environments over political posturing.
As far as the WNBA team goes, you have to wonder what the city gets out of acquiring an unprofitable sports franchise. Is it just to reassure the rest of the country that Nashville—a blue dot in a roaring, blood-red sea—is “not like that?” I’m not sure. Maybe the WNBA really is on the up-and-up and I’m just a disagreeable fool. Maybe there’s money to be made. Maybe it’s a passion project. I just don’t want to hear about it, to be honest. DAVIS HUNT
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🖋️ Edited by Megan Podsiedlik.
🫡 Trump Pardons Kelsey “God used Donald Trump to save me from the weaponized Biden DOJ,” former Tennessee State Senator Brian Kelsey posted on X last night. “This afternoon, I received a full and unconditional pardon from an act that even my chief accuser admitted I didn’t commit.”
The President’s pardon comes two weeks after Kelsey began serving his 21-month sentence for an illegal campaign finance charge. “Dude, you plead guilty,” Representative Gloria Johnson commented on the former senator’s post. According to the Tennessee Star, Kelsey tried to reverse his plea, “citing his ‘inexperience with the criminal justice system,’ combined with ‘the stress of simultaneously dealing with a terminally ill father, newborn twins, and a three-year-old daughter,’ when it was entered.”
🚍 Transit Ruling Appealed Last Thursday, the Tennessee Court of Appeals heard oral arguments regarding the Committee to Stop an UnFair Tax’s lawsuit against Davidson County’s Choose How You Move transit plan. In January, Chancellor Anne Martin ruled in favor of Mayor O’Connell and Metro in the case, rejecting the Committee’s claim that the plan would misuse IMPROVE Act funding and that the referendum’s ballot language and information campaign were misleading.
The Committee’s attorney, Kirk Clements, presented arguments to the three-judge panel. “The first is whether Metro’s Transportation Improvement Plan includes projects which do not fit in the definition of a public transit system project, and thus does not qualify as a transit improvement plan,” he said. “Number two, whether Metro failed to include all the information on the ballot as required under the IMPROVE act, and three, whether the plan is financially feasible as required by the IMPROVE act.”
Once again, state Senator Jeff Yarbro (D-Nashville) represented Metro during proceedings and was questioned by Judge W. Neal McBrayer. “I worry that some of these projects really don't have any connection with all to the WeGo system and in providing the connectivity…that we're talking about here,” said McBrayer. “I appreciate that affordable housing can have elements that make it easier to hop on a bus, but I mean to me, that sounds really removed from items under this definition.”
Yarbro agreed with McBrayer and said that “there's nothing in this plan that says it's going to actually use dollars to build and support affordable housing.” An interesting revelation given that the Choose How You Move campaign included the acquisition of land near transit centers for housing and parks.
The court has not set a date for their final ruling. You can listen to the full arguments here.
🏥 Rocky Departure for General Hospital CEO Members stripped Nashville General Hospital’s outgoing CEO of his authority during a special Hospital Authority Board meeting on Monday. Joseph Webb will leave his position this Friday after 10 years at the helm. During his last week, he won’t be able to enter or change any contracts, sign off on salary changes or reimbursements, and can’t hire, fire, or promote any employees.
Though there wasn’t any further discussion among board members about their decision to take away Webb’s powers, the Banner reported that his questionable tenure was “defined by accounting issues and repeated critical audit findings.” NewsChannel 5 has also discovered receipts showing that Webb used hospital credit cards to pay for his daughter to move across the country. Instead, members avoided controversy and moved on to other business, acknowledging the short timeline the hospital has to find a replacement. For now, Dr. Veronica Elders has been named the hospital’s Acting Manager and will be the decision-maker until they find an interim CEO.
DEVELOPMENT-ish
- Permit reveals next Wawa location in Hermitage (NBJ)
- Europe-based restaurant group eyes Nashville (NBJ)
- Project planned for Rutledge Hill progresses (Post)
- Upscale Mediterranean planned for Pie Town (Post)
- 🛩️ Spirit Airlines adds direct flights to Cleveland, Chicago, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Myrtle Beach, and San Antonio (Post)
✹ ILLEGAL CRIMINAL OF THE WEEK
Well, the FBI stepped into this one, so I don’t have a mugshot, and thus, cannot produce a collectible playing card. So, I’ve instead rendered the tale of twice deported Mexican national Jose Guadalupe Vazquez-Delgado drunkenly shooting someone in front of his seven-year-old daughter in Antioch in the style of an illuminated manuscript.
A federal indictment reveals he’s been charged with possession of ammunition by an illegal alien and unlawful reentry into the United States. Apropos of nothing and totally unrelated to the manuscript, an accompanying poem regaling the tale in the style of Lord Byron:
He crossed the line, once cast away,
Yet back he crept—no law could stay.
A trespasser with fate unchained,
By folly’s hand, his path remained.
A felon armed, though none should bear,
A stolen right, a state’s despair.
With reckless spite and aim untrue,
He fired—a deed he’d soon undo.
The father fell, the daughter cried,
Yet still the law stood stupefied.
Once warned, once barred, yet let to roam,
To steal, to kill, to claim a home.
Now chains too late, now justice wakes,
But cannot mend what folly breaks.
What law is law, if none obey?
A jest, a curse—our own decay.
THINGS TO DO
View our calendar for the week here and our weekly film rundown here.
📅 Visit our On The Radar list to find upcoming events around Nashville.
🎧 On Spotify: Pamphleteer's Picks, a playlist of our favorite bands in town this week.
👨🏻🌾 Check out our Nashville farmer's market guide.
TONIGHT
🪕 Tim O'Brien @ Station Inn, 8p, $20, Info
🎸 Natalie Prass @ The Blue Room, 7p, $32.36, Info
🎸 Journey @ The Pinnacle, 8p, Info
🎸 The Movement @ The Basement East, 7p, $44.97, Info
🪕 Bluegrass Night @ The American Legion Post 82, 7p, Free, Info
📰 Check out the full newsletter archive here.
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