Posted by Sabrina B. @gametimegirl
Jay-Z was sitting on the edge of his impossibly large oak desk when he stressed the importance of flatware.
Forks need to be heavy, he told his small audience, which included Chris Sharples, the architect in charge of designing a block of luxury suites at Barclays Center that would bear the rap impresario’s imprint. Forks, Jay-Z said, need to have substance. A plastic fork? Please. Even stainless steel was out of the question.
The meeting, which was held last spring at Jay-Z’s offices in Manhattan, was Sharples’s introduction to him, and he said it was revealing: The team’s most glamorous part-owner wanted to be involved. “He’s a very confident individual,” said Sharples, a principal at SHoP Architects.
As the Nets prepare to move to their new home in downtown Brooklyn, Jay-Z will headline the Barclays Center’s grand opening in September with a concert. And while the team declined to disclose his ownership percentage, which is considered to be small, this much is clear: His influence, particularly when it comes to style and branding, far outweighs his financial stake in the franchise.
“I don’t tell Jay-Z to do anything,” said Brett Yormark, the CEO of Barclays Center and the Nets. “I mean that. He tells me what to do. Listen, when it comes to our engagement, let’s just say he’s the CEO.”
The Nets are celebrating the role that he’s played in everything from revamping the logo (“He’s refreshed it,” Yormark said) to designing new uniforms (“His fingerprints are all over it”) to coming up with a new color scheme (“A bold redirection”), all of which the team plans to unveil this spring.
In addition, the Nets are set to begin marketing 11 luxury suites that will be known as “The Vault at Barclays Center,” a small, high-end space on the event level of the arena. Yes, Jay-Z chose the forks—in addition to offering his input on the Champagne ($300 bottles of Armand de Brignac), the layout (asymmetrical) and much of the décor (lots of black and shimmering metallics).
For the Nets, this is all by design. Jay-Z has the sort of cachet as a cultural icon that makes him uniquely marketable, said Tony Ponturo, the CEO of Ponturo Management Group, a sports consulting firm—particularly for a franchise that’s new to the neighborhood. “If you have someone who’s a bit of a taste maker as part of your ownership, I think you find a way to bring that element into your overall process,” Ponturo said.
Jay-Z, whose given name is Shawn Carter, did not respond to repeated attempts to reach him through his publicist and the Nets.
The suites themselves, which are still under construction, will be unabashedly bold—and that includes the price tag: $550,000 per year, with a minimum three-year term. That works out to $45,833 per month, instantly making them some of the most expensive rental properties in the city. That’s just slightly less than the $50,000-per-month asking rent on the townhouse in TriBeCa where Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the beleaguered former director of the International Monetary Fund, recently resided.
The tenants of each suite will receive eight tickets in the first 10 rows to all Barclays Center events, including Nets games, other sporting events, concerts and family shows. Yormark said he hopes to book 220 events per year. So here’s some rough math: If each event averages five hours, that means tenants will be paying $500 per hour—or about $8.33 per minute—for access to The Vault. “It enables us to appeal to a different demographic,” Yormark said.
(STORY CONTINUES…)
WRITTEN BY
SCOTT CACCIOLAÂ at WSJ
& FULL STORY HERE
