9.20.23 - New York Loves to Hate Him. Can a $2.3 Billion Sphere Redeem Jim Dolan?
' In his 26th-floor office, high above Midtown Manhattan, James L. Dolan sits on a white couch by a large desk and armoire decorated with family photographs, with an electric guitar on a stand in the corner. His eyes are trained on a wall-mounted surveillance screen.
Mr. Dolan, 68, oversees a family empire that includes some of New York’s most famous brands, including Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall, the Knicks and the Rangers. At the epicenter of professional sports, marquee concerts, politics and real estate, he is one of the most powerful forces in the city. He is also one of New York’s most vilified public figures, a punching bag and a punchline.
But New York is not where his brain or his video monitor are focused. Mr. Dolan — son of Long Island, commander of beloved New York sports teams, and magnet for the type of caustic mockery that only New Yorkers are capable of expressing — is looking 2,500 miles southwest for respect, redemption and reputational rebirth.
Foremost on his mind, and on the live-feed beamed into his New York office, is his new arena in Las Vegas, an audacious project that he believes could revolutionize the live entertainment industry.
Rising behind the Vegas Strip, the arena, called the Sphere, is an enormous orb wrapped — inside and out — with more than 700,000 square feet of programmable video screens. It has the capacity to use sound, vibration and even smells to transport audiences into a virtual reality, no headset required. The Sphere is scheduled to open next week with a series of largely sold-out performances by U2.
The project cost $2.3 billion to build, mostly during the pandemic, with the sheer force of Mr. Dolan’s legendary stubbornness propelling it to completion, albeit two years late and $1 billion over budget.
In this case, Mr. Dolan’s aggressive and exacting ways seem to have benefited him and his company. But that is not always so.
He has long carried a reputation as a mercurial and sometimes callous corporate manager — a grown-up rich kid with the good fortune to have been a son of Charles F. Dolan, who founded HBO and Cablevision, the company that bought its controlling stake in the Garden, the Knicks and the Rangers in 1997.
When the Knicks perform poorly — as they often have under Mr. Dolan’s ownership — fans excoriate him. Politicians and bureaucrats castigate him for leading a company that enjoys enormous tax benefits while insisting that he will not financially contribute to the renovation of Pennsylvania Station, the rail depot that sits dank and dark beneath the Garden. He is entangled in a protracted public fight with a revered athlete, and uses facial recognition technology to ban from his venues people whom he says are adversarial toward him. Fans holding signs that say “Sell the Team” risk being booted because, Mr. Dolan said, they violate a code of conduct barring the harassment of the arena’s workers, including him. “I am an employee,” he said.
This month, with the Sphere set to open, he is approaching one of the most pivotal moments of his professional life. “The entire thing is a huge bet,” he said. In interviews, those closest to him stressed that the Sphere is wholly a Jim Dolan creation, a big gamble that places him outside of his father’s shadow and, perhaps for the first time, without the benefit of the safety net that owning some of New York’s most beloved institutions has provided.
“This is something he has done,” said Joe Lhota, a former senior Madison Square Garden executive who is on the board of the Sphere’s parent company. “It’s not something he inherited — it is him bringing his vision to life. It is totally, 100 percent his vision.” '