Wheelock Whitney: Will the Vikings be the next asset this state loses?

In the last several decades, our beloved state has suffered some serious blows: Honeywell, Pillsbury, Northern States Power, the St. Paul Companies, Northwestern National Life, Northwest Airlines and Norwest Corp. no longer have headquarters here. Their departures have cost Minnesota thousands of jobs, and the losses have hurt our state pride.

Will the bell toll next for the Minnesota Vikings? Can we endure another body blow by losing the most popular sports team in our state’s history (even before Brett Favre)?

Maybe I’m an 83-year-old romantic fool with a lifetime of memories of when Minnesota was a model of success in so many different ways. We had leaders who thought outside the box with progressive ideas and compassionate concern for all our people. We pioneered. We took risks. And our citizens boasted about the special quality of life we enjoyed.

But times have changed. It seems to me that we don’t think enough about the long-term future. What must we do today to preserve our quality of life so that our children and grandchildren will have the same pride in Minnesota we used to have?

Think of Minnesota as a quilt with many patches. Think of education, business, the arts, philanthropy, government and sports as some of the patches in the quilt. We need them all. Our citizens have made huge investments in all of these areas and have received huge benefits back.

I’ve lived my entire life as a citizen of Minnesota, and I’ve shared in those benefits. Today, I’m a retired businessman with a great love of sports and a belief that sports make a huge contribution to our quality of life. For full disclosure, I was a part owner of the Vikings for 12 years and president of the Vikings for five of those years. While I no longer have a financial interest in the Vikings, I remain a devoted fan.

I am convinced that Zygi Wilf is one of the best — if not the best — owner the team has ever had. He’s stepped up to the plate to sign players other owners couldn’t or wouldn’t sign. He’s made an enormous investment in the team. His commitment should be welcomed, not dismissed.

I hear all of the arguments against asking the public to invest in a stadium for the Vikings. It’s bad timing. Other patches in the quilt will have their funding cut, especially education and health care. I, too, care about these important issues. But I reject the premise that one problem can be addressed only at the expense of another. Setting state spending priorities need not deprive vital, although not critical, parts of our state’s well-being from being funded. We can and must balance needs. In doing so we strengthen the fabric of our state, and we build community.

Public involvement in Minnesota-based companies is nothing new. Remember the state support of Dayton Hudson Corp. to prevent a takeover of the company?

Now the Vikings deserve our help. In the two stadiums where the team has played for the past 50 years, the citizens of Minnesota have invested practically no money at all. But Minnesotans have benefited enormously. Vikings fans live in every corner of the state, and are of every age, occupation and gender. They attend games, listen on the radio, watch on TV. And when they are out of town, they find a way to discover whether the Vikings won or lost on Sunday.

Indeed, these are hard economic times for our state. But in my long life, I’ve seen many hard times and many good times. Just because we’re going through a tough spell, I don’t believe we should stand by and watch the Vikings move to another state. Five or 10 years from now, we’d look back and feel ashamed of ourselves. It would be decades, if ever, before we could get an NFL team back in this market — and it surely would require a new stadium.

I began this piece with a list of just some of the companies that no longer have their headquarters in Minnesota. There’s really nothing a citizen of our state could have done about that. Those decisions were made behind closed doors in corporate board meetings, and we read about them after the fact in the newspaper.

The Vikings situation, on the other hand, is something every citizen of Minnesota can do something about. Contact your legislators. Write the governor. Political leadership is desperately needed. It’s been said that the voice of one is louder than the silence of 10,000.

Wheelock Whitney is a retired business executive and educator.