CIAA tournament breaks up with the Queen City

Remember in the Oscar-winning movie Brokeback Mountain when an anguished Jack told his tearful pal Ennis “I wish I knew how to quit you”?

Those are words some of us always expected the CIAA wanted to say to the city of Charlotte but never would.

Glory be, though: the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association has finally broken out of its exploitative love affair with the Queen City and will, beginning in 2021, take its lucrative tournament to Baltimore, a.k.a. Charm City.

You didn’t need to be a professor of Psychology to see that the CIAA was ensnared — voluntarily and repeatedly — in a one-sided relationship that went something like this:

We’ll bring to your city 150,000 people who will spend about $50 million directly and indirectly in your hotels, restaurants and shoppes — stuff costs more when you add that extra “pe” - and you’ll give us $1.4 million in return.

Oh yeah, and you can disrespect us by, among other things, raising the price on everything, preventing our friends from visiting us in our hotel rooms, kicking us out of the hotel lobby - which is always where the real fun is anyway - and shutting down the city’s side streets so that we have to drive five miles out of town in order to make a left turn.

Okay, perhaps CIAA Commissioner Jacqie McWilliams didn’t sit down and agree to a contract with those stipulations spelled out, but anyone who has visited the tournament during its soon-to-be 15-year-run in Charlotte knows that is what the conference accepted.

You don’t reckon the negotiators were victims of Stockholm Syndrome, do you?

I swear, at a press conference years ago announcing that the tournament was remaining in Charlotte despite being courted by several other cities, it looked like the commissioner was blinking out a “Please help us” signal.

The CIAA’s board of directors must’ve noticed.

“Charlotte just wasn’t bringing the love,” board of directors chairman Dr. James Anderson told thesaundersreport.com recently.

Dr. Anderson broke it down as it has never before been broken. Anderson, chancellor of Fayetteville State University and a professor of Psychology, said the city and the Spectrum Center “made some decisions that really didn’t benefit the CIAA, so we asked ourselves ‘Why should we stay somewhere that really doesn’t care for us to be there?’”

Halleluyer!

Those decisions included visiting such indignities upon the tournament as abruptly reducing the number of days vendors could sell their stuff at the arena - from six days to two - and for the first time bringing in Charlotte Hornets basketball games and rasslin’ to the arena right smack dab in the midst of the CIAA Tournament.

“Spectrum management acted like they didn’t want us there, anyway. They never asked us if we were okay with that. How are you going to do that and we never had any discussions?” he asked.

“Mayor (Vi) Lyles and the CRVA (Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority) did their best, but there was really nothing they could do. They don’t control the Spectrum Center,” Anderson said.

Baltimore, he said, has agreed to increase the amount given in scholarships each of the first three years from $1.5 million, to $1.7 million to at least $1.9 million.

“That,” Anderson said, “shows that Baltimore is at least moving in the direction we want to go.”

Al Hutchinson, CEO of Visit Baltimore, said in a Baltimore Sun interview that the CIAA tournament “is our Super Bowl,” and the city is acting like it.

You know how hotels in Charlotte have been busted over the years for price-gouging, adding mystifying “CIAA surcharges” to bills and generally treating their CIAA guests like interlopers who were to be tolerated rather than celebrated?

Anderson said Baltimore has assured them that won’t happen there.

“Because the city owns a couple of the hotels, if they say that the hotel rate is going to be a certain amount, that’s what it’s going to be. All the other hotels were okay with saying they weren’t going to price-gouge...

“In Charlotte, many of the alums would negotiate a rate four months in advance, then when they get there find out it’s more” than the agreed upon rate, he said.

I know he ain’t lyin’, because some of those people complained to us over the years, too - and brought the receipts.

Laura Hill White, director of communications for the CRVA, said the city is “disappointed” that the tournament is leaving and has “cherished” it.

Not enough, obviously.

Barry Saunders, a former News & Observer metro columnist, is publisher of thesaundersreport.com.