Excerpts from Commissioner Tagliabue Press Conference
July 21, 1997 at Minnesota Vikings' Training Camp

"I’ll be here this morning. I am going over to the Chiefs camp this afternoon and tomorrow morning and then I will be over at the Saints tomorrow afternoon for the scrimmage with the Vikings. Then I’ll be at the Packers camp Wednesday morning and then back to New York for a day and then out to Canton on Friday and Saturday for the inductions at the Hall of Fame and plus the Vikings and Seahawks game. The week will begin and end with the Minnesota Vikings.

What I said to the players was basically two things; be positive and be smart. I think there is an awful lot which is very, very positive right here with the Minnesota Vikings with some of the great players...The be smart part of it is sort of obvious. We have teams who are doing well on the field and then someone does something off of the field that becomes a distraction and that ruins the season. I think with the leadership on this team, the mix is here for people to be positive, successful and smart."

Could you tell us your thoughts on the Vikings stadium?

They really need to look hard at the concept of dual purpose baseball/football stadium. People should be having a vision. They should be trying to come up with some kind of master concept, master plan so it becomes a win/win for the Twins and Vikings but most importantly for the community and not a win/lose situation where one team gets a stadium and the other team doesn’t and you just have continuing problem and debate and frustration down the road. The concept of the dual-purpose stadium has a lot to commend it.

What do you think are the problems with the Metrodome?

The problems with the Metrodome are that the Vikings cannot be competitive with the other teams in the league in light of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, the player costs that are imposed under the court decision up here and the Collective Bargaining Agreement which came after the decision in 1992. They just can’t compete with the teams that have better arrangement with their stadiums.

Is this a negotiable thing that they should be dealing with the facilities commission?

That would be a piecemeal type solution. What you are really looking for here while you are addressing the Twins’ situation and the Viking situation is some type of a master plan. I am reminded of conversations I had in Seattle with the mayor out there and it is not just a master plan for sports it is a master plan for your community in terms of where you are going to be in a decade or two decades or three decades. In Seattle they just committed to the stadium, which is a multi-purpose stadium for the Seahawks, for soccer, for other uses, they are going ahead with the baseball stadium. The key thing there is that part of the football/soccer stadium is an exhibition center/convention center and three of the buildings will become part of the core of a new downtown Seattle. That is the kind of thinking that is important. You have a lot of the facilities already, the Target Center, the Metrodome and the convention center. The challenge is how that all fits together into the next century in a way that makes sense for the community, not just amend this lease or build that building. What I am saying is that there is an opportunity now to think in a comprehensive way rather than in a piecemeal way.

Is there a master plan in the commissioner’s office for these problems?

Our effort is to work with our teams and city, county and state officials, not just to build stadiums, but to build stadiums that will serve a long-term community purpose for a number of decades along the lines that I have been talking.

Do you think the Vikings face an uphill battle in getting a dual-purpose stadium?

The single-purpose stadiums were really started by baseball. We shared stadiums in many, many cities going back to the sixties when they were all built as dual-purpose stadiums beginning with RFK in Washington and Shea in New York and moving across the country. Three Rivers in Pittsburgh, an so on. Baseball took the initiative to go to single-purpose smaller stadiums with Camden Yards and Jacobs Field and Coors Fields and some of those very successful baseball stadiums. There are medium size communities, this area is one of them, where if you have four major league franchises in the community, now that the NHL has committed to be here, it makes a lot of sense to look at the dual-purpose building. Not just the past generation of dual purpose buildings, which really didn’t work well for baseball and didn’t work well for football, but a new generation of design, a new generation of engineering, state of the art, which this new HOK model and some of the other models represent.

Is there any enticement you can offer from the league to the Twin Cities area?

I don’t think we are at that part of the process, frankly, because at this point, a lot of the discussion has been the Twins’ needs because their lease is up. Only now, with the discussion of the needs of both teams and the concept of a multi-purpose stadium, is the discussion really focused where it needs to be. As it unfolds, depending on what the concepts are, there could be a discussion of a Super Bowl. There is a lot of preliminary discussion in terms of planning with respect to multi-purpose stadiums before we get to that.

Because this is a relatively new stadium, a few years from now, within 20 years will you be looking for new stadiums all over the country?

No, I don’t think so. First of all, many of the stadiums that are going up today are being built with new concepts, new designs, new technology, long-term leases and they are being integrated into the communities in ways that they weren’t. The Metrodome is turning out to be one of a handful of domed stadiums -- the Metrodome, the Silverdome, the Hoosierdome, the Kingdome -- and the Astrodome, which are turning out to be problems for both sports that are using them and the economics of those stadiums are just not working. That is why there is a need to step back and try to say what is the total set of needs and have some kind of broader vision rather than just trying to amend this or put an ad hoc solution on that. If you look at the last decade you can see where there was an underlying vision and over time facilities were added to that vision. Baltimore is an example of that. You started with the Harbor Place concept and went to the national aquarium then Camden Yards fit in there and the football stadium fit in there. Cleveland did not just include sports but the Great Lakes Science Museum and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, the convention center. There is opportunity to look around and learn from the experience of others, which is what we have been trying to do in the league.

If the requests are not met, would they move?

I think we are a long way from that. The new stadium or concept we have been discussing is a real opportunity. There will also be other communities that will have to look at this too. We have spent a lot of time in the last 18 months with design engineering firms and architectural firms trying to push them to come up with a new generation of dual-purpose stadiums. Major firms have come into our office with presentations pushing in this direction.