This is Jed York's Bob Lurie moment, and because Jed was doing a phonics worksheet the first time Bob Lurie had a Bob Lurie moment, Jed might need a quick refresher on what's at stake.
Or he might not. People have been in his ear about the 49ers' stadium ballot measure since the plan first germinated, so it's hard to know what he remembers and what he has chosen to ignore, forget or disregard. After all, the blood surely rushed to his head when he recently announced he would be the last word on the football side, so things have been moving pretty fast inside his head.
But here's the deal: Bob Lurie went 0-for-5 trying to get a new stadium (or even a renovated old one) in the 16 years he owned the San Francisco Giants, and got thwarted when he tried to sell the team in 1992, and got shorted again when he finally did later that year.
And that's what he's known for. Not for being a popular boss among those who worked for him, or for being a mover/shaker in San Francisco business circles. He's the guy who got told no six times, and if that's a limited caricature of his life and a label he doesn't entirely deserve, it's still the deal.
Now maybe if the Giants had been able to steal that 1987 pennant or 1989 World Series, things would have been different for him, but they didn't, so it wasn't. He ended up being the guy who couldn't persuade people to replace or tart up Candlestick Park.
Which brings us to "The Boy King," who really isn't that much of a boy anymore. On June 8, he takes his case for a stadium to the same people who told Lurie no, and he is asking for a minimum of $114 million from the city to help build that stadium. We say "minimum" because no stadium has been built without the people who voted for it paying what they were asked for and no more. There are overrides and fine print and arm-twisting and side doors and uncontainable infrastructure costs that get slipped past the voters every single time.
In short, if he's wrong this time about the public's appetite for giving him money for his dream home, it's how he'll be remembered - unless he has some secret foolproof plan for winning a Super Bowl, at which time people will throw money at him as though he were the bride at a Neapolitan wedding.
So far, though, what he has is his parents' name (he is John E. to his father's John C., which is about as close as the bureau of records allows) and a plan to get strangers who don't have as much money as they would like to give him some of it. His argument is that his employees need a nicer place to work because his friends and business partners have employees who have nicer places to work than his employees do. It's no more involved than that.
If he succeeds at getting that money, he still has to find a lot more in a tight credit market, and has to dig substantially into the family fortune, which might be its own deal breaker. This election doesn't make a stadium happen. It simply makes a stadium about 20 percent easier, maybe even 30 or 40 percent easier when all the public costs are totaled.
But if he doesn't get this, he becomes the guy whose eyes were bigger than the voters' stomachs, and that's a hard label to shed. He is less influential now than Bob Lurie was then, and once he gets told no, it becomes easier for the voters to tell him no again. And eventually he becomes the guy who either sells the 49ers to someone who moves them, or he tries to move them himself, in which case, he becomes far more vilified than Lurie ever was.
In short, Jed's all in before his 30th birthday, which is a hell of a way to start a career. Win, and there's more heavy lifting we're not sure he can manage. Lose, and he can never get back to even.
Unless there's that Super Bowl, in which case Jed still has a shot. But we know Santa Clara, and we know the people who vote there, and he'd have a better chance with two Super Bowls.
In other words, that $300 per yes vote to which Comrades Matier and Ross alluded last Sunday might end up being one more sunk cost in a long and painful legacy for a guy who very well might find out the way his father and Bob Lurie learned what the business end of public perception feels like.
