Mike Bianchi: With Rays bedeviled in Tampa Bay, Orlando needs to act on Pat Williams' vision

If only Pat Williams were still alive.

We need him now more than ever.

The beloved Orlando dreamer, the sports visionary who co-founded the Magic four decades ago, told us this was going to happen years before he passed away in July.

He told us that if we’d just get off our butts and get to work, we could lure the Tampa Bay Rays to Orlando.

“The Rays have been trying to get a new stadium in Tampa Bay for decades and it’s not going to happen,” Williams told me five years ago. “Tampa Bay will never build the Rays a new baseball stadium. That’s why Orlando needs to be ready to pounce.”

Instead, Orlando has fallen asleep in the dugout while the game is passing us by.

Is nobody in this city willing to fill the shoes and carry the torch that the late, great Pat Williams left behind?

Is nobody willing to step to the plate, swing for the fences and at least try to turn the Tampa Bay Rays into Pat’s Orlando Dreamers?

If ever there was a time to make it happen, now is it.

Just as Williams predicted, it appears the Rays’ latest new stadium deal in St. Petersburg is in shambles and the team and the politicians in Pinellas County are baring their teeth like two raccoons in a dumpster fighting over a soggy donut. As Tampa Bay Times columnist John Romano eloquently wrote earlier this week: “If this [new] stadium ever rises from the parking lots of Tropicana Field — and the odds seem firmly against it — we should all be grateful for the shared dislike between the Rays and the Pinellas County Commission. They’re like siblings antagonizing each other for the sheer sport of it.”

The CliffsNotes version is this: The City of St. Petersburg, Pinellas County and Rays ownership originally came to an agreement to help fund a new $1.3 billion stadium to replace aging and perennially outdated Tropicana Field. However, the Pinellas County Commission, it seems, is on the verge of reneging on its portion of the funding for two reasons: (1) Two new anti-stadium county commissioners were just elected in November and (2) The optics of spending hundreds of millions of dollars in public money on a new baseball stadium in the wake of two recent hurricanes causing massive damage to the area.

The Rays have written a tersely worded letter to government officials expressing their displeasure with the stadium delays, and now it’s gotten so nasty that the St. Petersburg City Council seems to be turning against the Rays as well. The City Council has also voted to delay funding on the new stadium and has even reversed course on whether to spend more than $23 million to repair the hurricane-shredded roof of Tropicana Field.

Translation: Just as Pat Williams said, “The Rays have been trying to get a new stadium in Tampa Bay for decades and it’s not going to happen.”

Williams never suggested Orlando build a baseball stadium without a team in place. Instead, he urged the city and county leaders to focus on attracting a team and to have a stadium plan ready if the opportunity arose.

“It all comes down to leadership,” Williams told me during one of our many conversations about bringing baseball to Orlando. “We’ve been so fortunate in this community to have strong leaders who are willing to take some risks. I was reminded of that when I read a quote from William McRaven, a retired U.S. Navy admiral who once said, ‘Good leaders tend to do things that are safe and reasonable and there’s nothing wrong with that. Great leaders take risks. They’re not afraid to fail if they think the risk is worth the gain.’ ”

Williams, of course, was the anything-is-possible torchbearer who took Orlando from being a sleepy tourist town to a burgeoning sports hub. Without him and late Orlando businessman and fellow visionary Jimmy Hewitt, the Magic wouldn’t exist, Kia Center would just be a dream and Orlando, as a sports city, would be Birmingham.

Pat, you see, understood that sports do more than just entertain; they elevate a city’s profile, create jobs and give communities a shared sense of identity and pride. He envisioned a Major League Baseball team playing in a state-of-the-art stadium near the tourist corridor, drawing fans not only from Central Florida but from across the globe.

He believed in Orlando with all of his heart, but it greatly disappointed him that the leaders in Las Vegas were pursuing professional sports with a unified zeal while politicians here wouldn’t step up and help him in his baseball mission. Vegas went from having zero pro sports franchises to now having the NFL’s Raiders, the NHL’s Golden Knights and potentially the MLB’s Athletics — all within a decade. Why? Because the city’s leaders recognize the value of sports and invested in their vision.

Williams spent the final years of his life lobbying politicians, meeting with business leaders, and trying to galvanize the community to back his dream of Orlando as a baseball town. His pleas mostly fell on deaf ears and he was dismissed as an aging sports icon chasing a pipe dream.

Williams practically begged Orlando’s leaders to take him seriously and to at least explore the possibility of luring the Rays to Orlando. He was was adamant, he was passionate and — now as we’re seeing — he was right.

Four months after his death, it’s time to bring Pat’s vision back to life.

Who will pick up where he left off and energize the community, unite the politicians and powerbrokers and convince Major League Baseball that Orlando is a big-league city?

If we truly want to honor Pat Williams’ legacy, let’s do what he would do:

Let’s stop making excuses and start taking action.

With the Rays on life support over in Tampa Bay, now is the time to make the Orlando Dreamers a reality.

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