Madison Square Garden - New York Magazine
Give A Gift
Displaying all articles tagged:

Madison Square Garden

  1. it just happened
    Dolans Finally Take Their Cable Company (and Their Garden, and Their Knicks, and So Forth) and Go HomeIf taking public companies private is the hot new thing in megabusiness, the Dolans just became the most fashionable billionaires out there: After three years and three failed attempts to privatize Cablevision, Chuck and Jim have just worked out a deal with their company’s board that will restore the family’s total control over their lumbering brainchild. Cablevision, which comes complete with holdings like the Knicks and the Rangers, Radio City Music Hall, and over $12 billion in debt, will change hands for $10.5 billion in cash. With the liabilities worked in, that adds up to almost $23 billion. The Dolans pledge to cash out the current shareholders at $36.26 a share, which is their highest offer yet — a hearty 11 percent over the stock’s actual value as of yesterday. We learn all this from the Times, of course, where the Sulzbergers are no doubt paying attention. One hopes. Cablevision Agrees to Sell Itself to the Dolans [NYT]
  2. gossipmonger
    Saddam Lives?An agent claims to have forensic evidence and government documents that allege Saddam Hussein is still alive and well. Former CBS News reporter turned professional CBS basher Bernard Goldberg takes shots at Les Moonves and Katie Couric in his newest book. The relationship between 77-year-old Barbara Walters and 80-year-old Robert N. Butler is heating up. Arianna Huffington broke her cheekbone and got stitches after fainting in her office from exhaustion. Taxi tycoon Andrew Murstein bought a suite at Madison Square Garden for $500,000. The man accused of shaking down Oprah Winfrey claims he was set up by her lawyer, according to Radar. Exes Tom Arnold and Roseanne Barr continue to dislike each another.
  3. in other news
    MSG Brawl Was Best, Worst Thing to Happen to High-School HoopsThree distinct developments are, uh, developing in the wake of Sunday night’s Lincoln High–versus–Boys and Girls High postgame brawl (riot cops! 21 arrests! girls whaling on boys!) outside Madison Square Garden. In the first move, Garden management says it may refuse to host high-school basketball championships in the future. In the second, spooked school officials propose moving the big games from the evening to the afternoon. And in the third, CBS has announced its purchase of MaxPreps, an online sports network that tracks 500,000 high-school basketball games each year. Presumably because they don’t want to have to sue you for using YouTube the next time. MSG Considers Policy Change After Brawl [WNBC] CBS Buys Online High School Sports Site [Crain’s]
  4. in other news
    That Basketball Brawl Is in Reruns When we read today that a brawl at last night’s PSAL basketball championships at the Garden had spilled out into the streets — only to be caught by WCBS’s cameras — we thought to ourselves, Haven’t we heard this story before? Well, we had, sort of. In an episode of Aaron Sorkin’s much-beloved-but-nonetheless-canceled Sports Night, the show’s crew captures footage of a mêlée at a fictional high-school basketball game at, yes, the Garden. (Presumably, unlike Sports Night character Natalie Hurley, no one at Channel 2 refused to hand over the tape because of a bad breakup.) Coming up next week on Aaron Sorkin Controls the Universe: SNL is forced to scramble when its star ends up in a Nevada prison just hours before a live taping. —Joe DeLessio Police Arrest 21 in ‘March Badness’ MSG Brawl [WCBS-TV] Sports Night, “And the Crowd Goes Wild” [YouTube]
  5. the sports section
    The Knicks Have Made Progress, EvidentlyCablevision honcho and Madison Square Garden chief Jim Dolan announced today that he’s giving Knicks coach and president Isiah Thomas a multiyear contract extension based on the team’s “evident progress” — a term that seems destined to join “mission accomplished” in the Optimist’s Hall of Fame. Let’s review what’s evident, shall we? On the positive side, the Knicks have won 46 percent of their games this season (compared to just 28 percent last year) and are fighting for a playoff spot. On the negative, they’re still the highest-paid team in the NBA (for which Isiah is largely to blame), winning even 46 percent of their games still means the Knicks are losing more than half, and they’re playing mediocre ball against historically weak competition. In other words, the team’s progress seems roughly on pace with that of the Second Avenue subway or the Freedom Tower. So while it’s true they haven’t measurably regressed, Dolan’s use of the prefix “pro” strikes us as a bit much. If we were him, we might have played it safe and gone with “evident gress.” There are definitely clear signs of gress. —Sam Anderson
  6. photo op
    Hotel Pennsylvania Proves Exhausting Sherman the English mastiff and his friend Mouse the short-haired Chihuahua (top) waited for their human to check into the Hotel Pennsylvania across from Madison Square Garden yesterday afternoon. Sherman was in town for the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, which is happening today and tomorrow at MSG.
  7. it just happened
    Dems Say No to MSG Convention And so the 2008 Democratic National Convention goes the way of the 2012 Olympics: Despite Bloomberg’s best laid plans, it won’t be coming to New York City. Moments ago, the Democratic National Committee announced that it will hold its next presidential- nominating convention in Denver. This is no doubt a strategic move, a way to try to attract Coloradans and other Western voters to Big Blue. (New York will no doubt remain safely in the good guys’ column even after this snub.) And after living through the GOP convention here in 2004, did we even want to put up with all that mishegoss again, anyway? Plus, you’ve got to consider it from the Dems’ point of view: The last convention they held at Madison Square Garden, in 1992, nominated Bill Clinton. Wouldn’t want to follow that precedent, wouldja? Democrats Pick Denver as Convention Site [The Caucus/NYT]
  8. intel
    Madison Square Garden Was Full of Bull The Professional Bull Riders came to New York this weekend to kick off their 2007 Built Ford Tough Series, bringing four rounds of bull-riding, featuring the country’s top 45 riders and some of the industry’s best bucking bulls in four rounds of excitement. New York’s Rima Suqi — you know her as the magazine’s Best Bets editor, but she’s also, as it turns out, a major bull-riding fan — was there, and, after the jump, she reports back on the fifteen ways this weekend at the Garden was different from all other weekends at the Garden.
  9. in other news
    A Brief Catalogue of the Aesthetic Sins We Believe the Dolans Wish to CommitThis morning brought the news that Empire State Development Corporation honcho Charles Gargano thinks James Dolan is behind the effort to delay the conversion of the historic James A. Foley Post Office on Eighth Avenue into the new Penn Station. Why would the Dolans — the family that owns Cablevision, which owns Madison Square Garden — mess with a very popular and once seemingly ironclad plan? Because they want to build a new Garden on the Post Office spot and use the current Garden space for more-lucrative office buildings. Let’s consider, shall we, the number of awful consequences that would be wrought by that single construction project.
  10. in other news
    Dolans to Take Their Cable Company and Go HomeThat crazy, Oedipal media-mogul family, the Dolans of Long Island, seems determined to take Cablevision private. For the second time in sixteen months, chairman Charles and his CEO son, Jim, are offering their shareholders a buyout, this time upping their offer to $27 a share. (Shares in Cablevision — which includes not just the cable company but also trophy properties like Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, and the Knicks and Rangers — rose on the news.) We at Daily Intel don’t claim to be financial experts. But we’re not bad at reading between the lines of a public statement. “We continue to feel that succeeding in this fiercely competitive environment requires a long-term, entrepreneurial management perspective that is not constrained by the public markets’ constant focus on short-term results,” the Dolans said, and it seems likely that this buyout is the senior Dolan’s bid to keep sinking money into his pet satellite venture, Voom, which has already lost over $600 million and whose launch almost tore the family apart — as chronicled by Joel Siegel a year and a half ago in a March 2005 feature for New York. Sadly for the Dolans, though, this long-term investment strategy might be a boon only to Charles’s Voom. As for Jim’s pet project — throwing maximum money at the Knicks with no discernible positive effect — we have a feeling fans will always retain their constant focus on short-term results. Oedipus at the Garden [NYM] Dolans Try New Bid to Take Cablevision Private [NYT]