Star Sports Columnist Orders A New Stadium For Indy Eleven Be Built Downtown

I don't know who the hell this Gregg Doyel guy at the Indianapolis Star thinks he is other than he's some guy who showed up about seven months ago to fill the big shoes of the newspaper's former sports columnist, Bob Kravitz, who like any self-respecting journalist got away from a publication completely lacking any journalistic integrity as fast as he could. His name appears in bold headlines on the newspaper's website more than the president, governor or mayor or anyone else for that matter, which is indicative of how much emphasis The Star puts on sports above its news coverage, which has virtually become non-existent.

Doyel wades into the debate over where a new stadium should be built for the Indy Eleven. The answer is downtown Indianapolis, naturally, not the suburbs. Yes, for some of us, the debate should still be focused on whether there should be any new stadium built for the minor league professional soccer team at all. We think Carroll Stadium is more than adequate for a new franchise its shadowy Turkish immigrant owner, Ersal Ozdemir, picked up for $750,000. The Star and Doyel long ago skipped over that question and went directly to the question of where the new stadium should be built and how much taxpayers should spend to build it. Yes, naturally The Star and Doyel don't believe Ozdemir is under any obligation to put any of his own money towards a new stadium.

If there were any real journalists at The Star, they would be writing Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative stories about a guy moving to Indiana from Turkey, starting a construction company, going bankrupt and then less than a decade later is somehow wallowing in so much cash he can build a multi-million dollar home in a gated Carmel community while buying off our local officials by showering campaign cash and gifts on them, even while a former business partner is suing him for fraud for allegedly beating him out of his share of a company that purportedly never made any money. There must be some intrigue in knowing more to the story about how Ozdemir became the chief financier of the Marion County Republican Party after its prior financier, Tim Durham, got convicted of running a massive Ponzi scheme while he was entertaining the state's top politicians, business and community leaders at lavish parties he threw at his Geist mansion offering guests the best scantily-dressed Playboy models Hollywood has produced.

I realize The Star has no ethics governing the conduct of its employees, but just because Indy Eleven's Ozdemir and Peter Wilt get to entertain your reporters and staff to write press releases for his sports franchise doesn't give a guy who was living in a suburb of Cincinnati until seven months ago to show up and order us to build a more than $80 million new stadium for their source of entertainment dollars. Incredibly, Doyel, who lives in Greenwood, not Indianapolis, claims he never once went to downtown Cincinnati during the decade he lived there other than for work-related purposes because there was no other reason to go downtown other than to see a Reds baseball game or a Bengals football game. Really? So Indianapolis needs to dump close to a hundred million dollars on yet another new sports stadium because the Colts' Lucas Oil Stadium, the Pacer's Banker's Life Field House and the Indians' Victory Field just aren't getting the job done. Never mind that the City can't afford to fix its streets and sidewalks, install street lights in darkened neighborhoods, take care of its parks or any of the other basic city services it's legally required to perform. Give us another sports palace--at any cost. Here's my advice to non-resident Doyel: Butt Out!