Season Opener for Sports Museum

What do the following artifacts — the American flag goalie Jim Craig donned following the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team’s “Miracle on Ice”; the sports bra Brandi Chastain famously bared at the 1999 Women’s World Cup, and a faded report card issued to Billie Jean King in the fourth grade, praising the tennis great’s sense of fair play — have in common?The answer — as of tomorrow, when the Sports Museum of America opens in Lower Manhattan — is an official home. Housed in the financial district’s historic Standard Oil Building, this $100 million shrine to sports will use its 28,000 square feet of exhibition space to accomplish an impressive set of goals. It will tell the greatest stories in American sports history. It will showcase several state-of-the-art simulations, including a Nascar cockpit surrounded by high-definition video of the Daytona 500. And it will also, presumably, give visitors an experience that’s worth the $27 entrance fee.The museum’s founder and CEO, Philip Schwalb, who will hold a press conference today with city officials to unveil the museum, said the idea of creating an all-sports museum in New York first came to him in 2001, while he was visiting the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. “I got up there and the place was really quite empty,” he recalled. “My business side said the issue is location.” Mr. Schwalb, a Duke graduate partial to basketball, imagined that many Americans agreed with him — especially the legions of sports fans who had never made the trek to Cooperstown, N.Y., or Canton, Ohio, the respective homes of the baseball and football halls of fame.As it happened, the day after Mr. Schwalb’s realization was September 11, 2001, and the museum may owe its existence to the unofficial mandate to revitalize downtown Manhattan in the wake of that day’s terrorist attacks. Tax-exempt Liberty Bonds, created to boost such efforts, accounted for $52 million — more than half — of the museum’s funding. “That was a big impetus to build downtown,” Mr. Schwalb admitted, adding that the museum raised $5 million in taxable bonds and $43 million in private equity.But tax breaks weren’t the only reason it ended up at 26 Broadway. The other reason? Bill Bradley. After getting wind of the Mr. Schwalb’s plans, the NBA Hall of Famer and former U.S. senator invited Mr. Schwalb to his office, where they pored over maps of the city for two hours. Mr. Bradley was “very adamant” about a downtown site, Mr. Schwalb recalled. “He actually sort of pointed to the exact area where we are, Bowling Green.”Mr. Schwalb warmed to that opinion — it came from a boyhood hero, after all. “It began to occur to me more and more that if this was going be a true national museum of sports, with the kind of credibility that a Smithsonian has, or a Met, that it had to be iconic, and it really wasn’t appropriate for Times Square,” Mr. Schwalb said. Mr. Schwalb said he hoped the 800 relics and 1,100 photos on display — loans or donations from individual athletes and some 60 museums and sports organizations nationwide — would carry some of the emotional impact of Ellis Island and the World Trade Center site, adding that “when you get back from the Statue of Liberty, you’ll get off the boat and see a 24-foot image of Jesse Owens,” whose diary from the 1936 Olympics in Berlin is part of the museum’s collection.Although much of the museum’s content is organized by sport, there are also themed exhibits. One of them, “Dreaming Big,” offers a look at the early lives of famous athletes, and includes video footage of Tiger Woods hitting golf balls not long after learning to walk, as well as Derek Jeter’s Little League uniform, and a pair of go-kart goggles once owned by Jeff Gordon.The museum was designed by Gallagher & Associates — the firm behind the crowd-pleasing International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. — as an interactive space where not everything is behind glass. But while some of the interactive exhibits, such as the Nascar simulator, are high-tech, others,such as a hockey stick once used by Wayne Gretzky, are quite the opposite.Indeed, the museum’s appeal has a more classic source. And it is not even necessary to worship athletes like the Great One to feel it, Mr. Schwalb said. “The one thing about this museum is you do not need to be a sports fan to get goose bumps.”

Season Opener for Sports Museum

Season Opener for Sports Museum

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