Isaac Laquedem

Sterling characters, in basketball and football

One of the distinctions between professional basketball and professional football is that if the owner of a basketball team, Donald Sterling, privately makes a racist remark about blacks to his girlfriend, the basketball commissioner fines him $2.5 million and boots him from the sport.  If the owner of a football team, Daniel Snyder, publicly sells clothing emblazoned with his team's name (Redskins, a derogatory term for Native Americans), the football commissioner does nothing much, and in fact calls the Washington Redskins name a "unifying force that stands for strength, courage, pride, and respect."  Whether Mr. Snyder and the football commissioner would take so cheerful a view of a team nickname that stood for the same qualities in their own ancestors is a question that so far they haven't answered in public.

Fifty years ago Dr. Harding put Schmalz on his skis

Not quite 50 years ago, but close: it was in 1968 or so that Portland psychiatrist H. Clagett Harding, known to his friends as Larry, taught his dachshund to ski.  Dr. Harding and his family lived off NW Cumberland, and no snowy winter in Portland was complete with a photograph in the Oregonian of Dr. Harding and Schmalz skiing down a city street in the Northwest hills.

It occurred to me that the Zoobombers might be able to go in for winter sports: it's a bit of a hike from the TriMet Zoo station up to Fairview Boulevard, but then there's a nice downhill with a few challenging turns.  Ski MAX?  It would be a very Portlandia way to market mass transit.

Moda disOregonizes itself and the Rose Garden

Identity crises abound this month.  Paul Allen has sold the naming rights to the Rose Garden arena to the insurance company formerly named ODS Health Plans, itself struggling to reestablish its identity after changing its name to Moda earlier this year.  This has sparked a protest movement, "Rose Garden Forever," wanting Mr. Allen's enterprise to turn down the $40 million and leave the name unchanged, or at least leave "Rose Garden" in the name somewhere.

It wasn't that long ago -- only in 1995, in fact, a Laquedemian blink of an eye -- that Mr. Allen ignited protests when he announced that he would name his new arena the Rose Garden, muscling over the famous Rose Garden in Washington Park.  "How can he take this historic Portland name for himself?" Portlanders complained back then.  Ah, well, we've got over it, and have accepted "Rose Garden" for its reference to our city's nickname, the City of Roses.

The hidden joke is not in the Rose Garden's name, but in the history of Moda's name.  Before it called itself ODS, it was Oregon Dental Systems, a name it abbreviated to ODS as it moved into the broader field of medical insurance.   Having now disposed of the last remnant of "Oregon" in its own name, to advertise that quirky fact to its Oregon customers, it's paying to remove the Portland reference from the Rose Garden too.

Leon Bullier hits a bridge twice and becomes an officer

Leon Bullier (1895-1971) was one of the first to waterski on Oswego Lake, in the late 1930s.  He was a lively and daring man who treated with insouciance the boating rules enacted and enforced by the Lake Oswego Corporation, owner of the private lake.  One fine day he was towing his daughter, who was waterskiing, when he decided to run his boat under a low and narrow bridge, in violation of the corporation's safety rules.  His aim was less than true and the boat bounced off first one and then the other side of the bridge.  His daughter avoided hitting the bridge only by some fast and clever footwork.

It was not possible to hit a bridge twice in one passage and not have the corporation take notice.  Rather than fine Mr. Bullier or suspend his boating privileges, someone on the corporation's board had a better idea.  The board appointed Leon Bullier the boating safety officer, and put him in charge of seeing that everyone on the lake, himself included, would follow the rules.  For much the same reason, Mrs. Laquedem reminded me, Franklin Roosevelt appointed Joseph P. Kennedy to head the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Safety net or not, Paul Ryan is his brother's timekeeper

Yesterday my lunch date and I mainly discussed national politics and the presidential race, including the claim of vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan to have run a marathon in less than three hours instead of his one actual recorded time of four hours and one minute.  One of his defenses was that he had confused his marathon time with his brother's time, though as it turns out, his brother has never run a sub-3-hour marathon either.  In the unlikely event that I should run for office, I'll disclose that my fastest time for traveling 26 miles, 385 yards on foot is a leisurely 32 hours, including the meals, ale, pub singing, and overnight.

My lunch partner and I agreed that this situation is one where a candidate's ego has not served him well.  Instead of claiming an admirable but debunkable time -- that is, instead of passing himself off as a high achiever in a crowded field -- he might well have answered the question along these lines: "Twenty years ago I ran a marathon and I'm proud that I finished the race.  As to my race time, I finished the race the same day that it started.  Let's just leave it at that." 

The light touch is more effective than braggadocio.  For example, Gerald Ford was a strong golfer, with a 12 handicap even into his octogenarian years.  I heard someone ask him about his golf skills.  Although he could legitimately be proud of having maintained a low handicap well into his senior years, he downplayed his ability, ending with the line, "My golf handicap is a closely guarded secret."

Why all college athletic departments are failures

In the last few years there have been calls -- not only by lawyers -- to reduce the number of law schools in America, because too many law school graduates can't find jobs as lawyers.  Here's an example from 2009, by Professor Stephen Bainbridge of UCLA.  Law schools that can't place a large portion of their graduates -- at least half to two-thirds -- at a law firm, with government, or in a judicial clerkship are scorned as being failures.

So:  why is it that a law school that places only (say) 50% of its graduates in law jobs is a failure, but a football program that places only 5% of its graduates in football jobs is a success?   Maybe it's because only 1.7% of NCAA college football seniors even get drafted by an NFL team, a remarkably dismal placement record that would get any non-athletic department laughed off campus.

$90,000 a year isn't enough Oregon income tax to make Chris Dudley an Oregonian, say his detractors

I read with great interest this post at BlueOregon by J. Graber, in which the author calls Chris Dudley an "artful tax dodger" because when Mr. Dudley played for the Trail Blazers, he chose to live in Washington.  The tax dodging (says Mr. Graber) is because if Mr. Dudley had lived in Oregon, he would have paid more in Oregon income tax.

Mr. Graber's understanding of the state income tax system is a little hazy, and it seems to me that his argument is unsound.  But first, the facts as he reports them.  Mr. Dudley earned about $12 million from the Trail Blazers from 1993 to 1997, and during that time he paid about $440,000 to $460,000 in Oregon state income taxes.

That sounds about right, and it isn't a tax dodge: it's the law.  Professional sports players occupy a peculiar place in the income tax laws: they are treated as earning their salaries based on where they play their games, and allocate their income among the states in which their teams play games based on the number of games in each state.  Oregon has only one NBA team, and half its games are away games and thus out of state.  A Trail Blazer who does not live in Oregon thus pays Oregon income tax on half of his Trail Blazer income, after deductions and tax credits.  A player who earned $12 million over several years might reasonably have about $2 million of allowable deductions over the same period, yielding about $10 million of taxable income.  Half of that, or about $5 million, would be taxed by Oregon.  Oregon's top tax rate at the time was 9%.  Nine percent of $5 million is $450,000, which is about what Mr. Dudley paid in Oregon taxes.

It's true that if Mr. Dudley had lived in Oregon during those years, Oregon would have taxed him on his worldwide income, not just on his Oregon-source income.  The Oregon tax would have been about $900,000 on a taxable income of $10 million.  However, Oregon would also have given him a tax credit for income taxes he paid to other states on his basketball income.  Only three states (I think) of those in which he played did not have a personal income tax; they were Washington, Texas, and Florida.  They accounted for perhaps 15% of the away games that Mr. Dudley played, meaning that about 85% of the "away" half of his income was taxed by other states.  This would be about $4.25 million of taxable income, which at an average rate of six percent (Oregon's income tax is high) equates to an Oregon state income tax credit of about $250,000 if Mr. Dudley had been an Oregon resident, for a net tax to Oregon of $650,000 compared to the $450,000 that he actually paid. 

I suppose I'm not seeing what the big issue is in a professional athlete choosing to live where he will pay less in tax; indeed, I'd be surprised if someone with a degree from Yale in economics didn't work that out for himself.  As Lord Tomlin said in a famous British judgment of 1936: "Every man is entitled if he can to order his affairs so that the tax attaching under the appropriate acts is less than it otherwise would be," Mr. Dudley among them.

Major League Soccer? Not to Seattle sportswriters

Last week the Seattle Times ran a story in its sports section -- it was the lead story -- on the collapse of what the writer described as Seattle's three major sports teams.  What are Seattle's three major sports teams?  Before I started the article itself, I surmised that the Times meant the baseball Mariners, the football Seahawks, and the basketball Super Sonics.  I then recalled that the Sonics left town a few years back and now play in Oklahoma City, under an assumed name.  So what is the Emerald City's third major sports team?  Not the soccer Sounders.  According to the Times, the third major team is a college team, the University of Washington's football Huskies.

"Major League Soccer" may be major league in its own mind, but it still has a ways to go before it convinces the Northwest's sportswriters.  Maybe the City should be renovating PGE Park for Portland State University instead of for soccer.

A Sounder example of mass transit

Difficult as it is for me to admit, I think I've caught a mild case of soccer fever, not from anything going on in Portland, but from watching the Seattle Sounders' opening game from a skybox at Qwest Field.  It's a fine facility that serves football and soccer, My hosts claimed that soccer outdraws baseball in Seattle, at least in attendance per game.  It's a stadium with a lot of visible sponsors and it's remarkably easy to get to on foot or by car, train, bus, or light rail.

I was also struck by Seattle's bus/rail tunnel.  I had first seen it when it was bus-only, before the rails were installed.  Now, with buses and trains sharing the tunnel, it's an efficient way for mass transit to pass through downtown.  The thought occurred to me that instead of replacing the Interstate Bridges with a new 10- or 12- or 16-lane bridge (I'm not sure where the count is today), we could build a bus-rail tunnel underneath the Columbia and not do anything about the bridge and car traffic.  With a massive park-and-ride on the Vancouver side, light rail between Portland and Vancouver might become faster than driving, something that should have been the goal of our rail system in the first place.

Oregon State University misses a basket

If I were on Oregon State's basketball team, I'd be concerned that the proofreaders at my school's advertising agency missed this particular typo.