He was absolutely right about one thing:
Leonsis dragged the region through a four-month saga when he announced his teams would be leaving the nation’s capital for Virginia. It was an old story, with a surprise ending.
This time, the rich, White men working backroom deals didn’t get their way: The Washington Capitals and Wizards would not be fleeing the District for Virginia.
“The deal was too big to be done in the shadows,” Virginia House Speaker Don L. Scott Jr. (D-Portsmouth) said in an interview with The Washington Post last week.
The dealing began last year, when Leonsis and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) first started talking about moving the teams out of D.C. and into a super-mega-billion-dollar sportsplex at Alexandria’s Potomac Yard.
It ended last month when two powerful Black women outmaneuvered them.
Lucas, a political key to the Virginia deal as the new chairwoman of the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee, never got a visit from the two men while they were whispering their deal.
She simply stripped the $1.5 billion public debt the new arena would require out of the proposed budget in this legislative session. Game over.
Her social media says it all, with a white-haired Lucas avatar slapping away a basketball with a red “REJECTED” stamped across it. Or her face photoshopped onto a cemetery scene, mugging in front of a tombstone with “YOUNGKIN AND LEONSIS $5 BILLION ARENA” on it.
Or her social media declaration, as soon as Leonsis announced that he was staying in D.C., that this was a “freakin legendary smackdown.”
“Badass” indeed.
Bowser did it with less bravado, posting “There’s no place like home” alongside a photo of her and Leonsis shaking hands at the announcement last week.
Their triumphs were clear, their message unmistakable: The old ways are over, boys.
They could be forgiven for celebrating. This victory was bigger than women simply jiu-jitsuing men into submission. It was also about their proper exercise of authority — the way it was meant to be used.
While the two powerhouses have long since earned their way into elected office, they, like most women, have at times found themselves dismissed and discounted — regardless of rank or title.
The seeds of lessons for Youngkin and Leonsis were planted last year, after Bowser offered the Monumental Sports & Entertainment executive $500 million to renovate Capital One Arena. He had asked for $600 million, so he walked.
Then, on a cold December morning, Leonsis showed up at a news conference in Virginia with Youngkin, two guys in matching dark suits and red ties, smiling and shaking hands.
Youngkin said he’s building a “spectacular” and “historic” and “innovative” and “amazing” new home to Leonsis’s Monumental. “Our monumental ascension begins now!” he crowed.
He was confident he could iron out the details in Richmond. Turns out the details mattered to Lucas, who questioned whether it was worth the money to taxpayers that had no say in the handshake deal. She did not return an interview request.
Leonsis was gobsmacked when all that he heard and believed — that Virginia is business friendly, millionaire Youngkin is a decisive, get-er-done CEO, male handshakes mean something — fell apart.
“My experience was that I had a better experience on the business side in D.C. than I just did in Virginia which was really, really surprising and eye-opening,” he told The Post.
Bowser’s no stranger to staring down the old boys’ network.
When a frightened President Donald Trump tried to silence protests against police brutality and racism in 2020 by militarizing the streets of the District, Bowser clapped back in a language Trump understands, with a message that could be seen from space.
She authorized city workers to paint “BLACK LIVES MATTER” in traffic-safety yellow letters large enough to be seen by satellites and renamed the spot where Trump ordered protesters to be hit with rubber bullets “Black Lives Matter Plaza.”
She knew how to hit him where it hurts.
But when it came to Leonsis, Bowser took a different, low-key approach. She didn’t bad-mouth him as he announced he was leaving D.C. She kept meeting with him and negotiating as the Virginia deal went up in flames.
In the end, she won him back with a $515 million offer, less than the $600 million he asked, but with an extra $15 million to save face and acknowledge that this is a deal that D.C. needs.
And, in a refreshing admission rarely heard from the male kind (Youngkin has already declared he wouldn’t do anything differently), Bowser admitted she made mistakes in her first round with Leonsis.
“I’ll be candid, I learned some lessons with the last approach,” Bowser said.
D.C. needs to address both real crime increases (violent crime increased 39 percent in 2023 compared with 2022) and assuage the fears by touting the current crime decreases (violent crime is down 20 percent now compared with the same time last year).
Leonsis began his departure with a cry over crime and noise. Crime in the immediate area near the arena jumped 46 percent between 2021-2022. But, as I showed in a recent column, the increase in the area around the arena last year wasn’t a massive wave of violence. It was an increase of four incidents. Four. The story there is changing.
The city needs to lean into the businesses that aren’t part of the federal workforce. Publicly-funded stadiums aren’t always good deals for cities. But in this case, D.C. needs to keep the sports presence that transformed a neglected part of the city in 1997, when the arena opened as MCI Center.
The area boomed after the teams came, with a 14-screen AMC theater, shopping, a bowling alley that served drinks in glasses rimmed with Pop Rocks, a Sushi-go-Round. But a decline began over the past few years, and with the shifting dynamics of a workforce changed by the covid pandemic, this part of downtown is at risk of turning into a ghost town.
By coming back to Leonsis with a slightly sweeter package, Bowser acknowledged all of this.
She’s promised to make D.C. the Sports Capital. Up next: luring back the Commanders.
“If you want something said, ask a man,” Britain’s longtime Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once said. “If you want something done, ask a woman.”
