Derek Jeter not obscene, not even in Boston

I’ve never liked corporate sponsorship or selling naming rights to sporting venues, but this… I’ve never liked corporate sponsorship or selling naming rights to sporting venues, but this is getting flat-out ridiculous.

Boston’s FleetCenter, owned by Delaware North Companies, has been auctioning off naming rights to the facility and will continue to do so until it finds a company to replace Fleet National Bank, which recently saw its deal with the venue terminated.

Anyone who wants to name the arena for a day can log onto eBay.com and purchase the naming rights, as long as they’re willing to fork over about $2,000. Perhaps most importantly, all of the proceeds from the daily auctions go to FleetCenter Neighborhood Charities, a nonprofit organization that works with more than 200 different charities and outreach programs in the greater Boston area.

The only catch: You can’t be a Yankees fan.

Kerry Konrad, a New York lawyer, won the naming rights to the FleetCenter for March 1 with a bid of $2,325. Konrad, a Harvard graduate and New York Yankees fan, chose to use the opportunity to honor his favorite team’s shortstop and captain, naming the arena the Derek Jeter Center.

More importantly, he saw it as a way of taking a jab at his old Harvard classmates — many of whom are Red Sox fans — as part of an ongoing, 25-year feud.

Then Richard Krezwick, president and CEO of the FleetCenter, announced the center’s executives had decided to nix Konrad’s winning bid. “We decided that all the names had to be rated G, and this name was determined to be obscene and vulgar,” Krezwick said.

The Derek Jeter Center? To a diehard Boston sports fan, the idea of naming an arena after the enemy might seem sacrilegious, but it’s hardly obscene. And while Sox fans may curse the shortstop’s name, the words “Derek,” “Jeter” and “Center” are hardly vulgar.

Having finally beaten the Bronx Bombers and exorcised the demons of its 86-year title-less drought, Sox nation would appreciate the joke and would do so in the name of a good cause.

“I got a lot of e-mails from Red Sox fans in Boston who tipped their cap to me,” Konrad said. “They left the back door open. I’m sure if George Steinbrenner were foolish enough to auction off the naming rights to Yankee Stadium for a day, Red Sox fans would have thought of something clever.”

Konrad is right. The FleetCenter naming rights had been sold about a dozen times before Konrad came along, and it’s a good bet that, were the naming rights to Yankee Stadium for sale, Sox fans would have jumped at the chance to poke fun at their rival squad much sooner than Konrad did.

But the brass at the FleetCenter not only lack a sense of humor, they’ve got no faith in the fans.

“We were afraid of the volume of phone calls bogging down our switchboard … and the potential graffiti on the side of our building,” Krezwick said.

There isn’t even an event scheduled at the FleetCenter on March 1, but they were still afraid?

The fans might have a better grasp on reality than the arena’s executives do. In fact, one of the old classmates Konrad was poking fun at even offered up an additional $6,275 for the bid so the total would stand at $8,600, representing the 86 years the Sox went without a title. That’s $8,600 that would have gone to charity. It would have been a good joke and all in good fun.

Instead, on March 1, the arena will be known as the Jimmy Fund Center, in honor of a Boston organization that raises money for the fight against cancer, and the $8,600 will go directly to the Jimmy Fund.

FleetCenter executives and Delaware Northern are lucky that Konrad is being as cooperative about this as he’s been. He could have made a case out of the sellers not living up to their end of the bargain, and in doing so, caused a public relations disaster for Delaware Northern. Surely, there isn’t a court in this country that would deem the “Derek Jeter Center” vulgar.

Like him or not, Jeter has been a refreshing personality in an era marred by cheating and inflated egos. He’s a clean-cut, respectable figure who plays the game with flare, carries himself with great dignity outside the ballpark and takes pride in community involvement.

We live in an era marked by corporate sponsorship. Teams, stadiums and individual athletes rent themselves out for amounts of money that truly are obscene. It’s nice to think that the executives at the FleetCenter, who are making light of this for charity’s sake, would be able to do so in good fun.

That they are unwilling to do so is more despicable than the name suggestion they shut down.

Rename Matt Wein at mattwein@hotmail.com.J