On Saturday afternoon, wearing a red polyester shirt marked with the name of a man who is now in prison, I spent three hours yelling and screaming at a television at the Taco Mac on Peachtree Street in an attempt to encourage strangers in black helmets 1,850 miles away to run faster and shove harder and catch better than other strangers in white helmets. This is what sports will to do you.

A lot of us were behaving this way, but we could no more give you a rational explanation for our behavior than we could fly with our Buffalo wings. The Falcons were in the playoffs. The team from our city was one of the best in America at putting an odd-shaped leather missile across a line of white chalk, and this filled us with pride. And so we cried the name of Jerious.

Ask me why I watch sports and I can’t tell you, exactly, except that I love stories, and sports give me the backstory of a soap opera with the suspense of a big-budget blockbuster in addition to plot twists far too surprising for a scriptwriter to fabricate. Plus we all want to feel like warriors every now and again, and these games are like vicarious battles.

The Falcons fought with great valor this year. They gave me more joy than I could have expected. But when the Cardinals converted on third-and-sixteen and then ran out the clock, I felt empty, just like my pitcher of Pabst Blue Ribbon, as if I had lost something physical and real, an object whose color and shape I could not describe.

I expect to retrieve it in about eight months.

 The longsuffering Falcons fan sees the past two decades in a reel of painful images that unwinds without chronological precision. Montana throws six touchdowns and we can do nothing to stop him. Eugene Robinson gets busted by the cops and burned by the Broncos. The Cowboys shove Deion out of bounds and get away with it. The Redskins bury us in the mud. The Eagles pound us into the frozen turf. Vick is led away in chains. Petrino flees like a thief in the night. And so on.

Now we come to 2008, the year some forecasters said would be the worst of all, and what do we get? Four months of Christmas.

A running back with the body of a cornerback who has a habit of high-stepping into the end zone.

A running back with the body of a fullback who nearly leads the league in rushing the first season he gets to start.

Two wide receivers who are suddenly far better at catching the ball now that Vick isn’t throwing to them.

A nondescript coach with a nondescript name who seems to do almost everything right.

A quarterback whose first NFL pass goes for 62 yards and a touchdown, who dives headlong for the goal line even on second down, and who generally seems not to realize that rookies aren’t supposed to win when they step into what may be the most complex job in professional sports.

Not to mention the defense, which always seems to shut the other team down just enough. Underrated corners, no-name linebackers, a safety called Fudge. And, of course, a defensive end who never quit last season, even when it seemed like the other 21 guys had, and who ought to be considered for league MVP.

I can’t wait for Saturday. Yes, I expect them to beat Arizona, but I won’t hold them to it. As my brother John said yesterday, they’re playing with house money. We all are.
 

In the two extended conversations I've had with Ben Eason since his company, Creative Loafing Inc., declared bankruptcy almost three months ago, he expressed many feelings—optimism his company could weather the storm, excitement for his much-ballyhooed "digital transformation," and an almost casual indifference to the prospect of losing control of the six papers that together make up the second biggest chain of alternative newsweeklies in the country.

But one thing he did not express in our discussions, nor has he in any public way to his own employees, is a sense of shame or even regret in presiding over the dismantling of local institutions. Nor has he acknowledged the human toll his decisions have exacted on his employees, who with every week, it seems, grow fewer in number. Consider just the past week: At the City Paper in Washington, D.C., two web designers were let go. In Tampa, seven employees were cut, including a staff writer, a music critic and a copy editor. (That paper's editor, David Warner, gets this week's Most Transparent Line of B.S. Award for blogging that the "restructured newsroom can maintain and even increase the excellence and creativity that our readers have come to expect in print and online." Smoke 'em if you got 'em.) And in Chicago, home of the once-great Reader, press critic Michael Miner reports that the paper laid off six more staffers, reducing its editorial ranks to just 17, compared to 38 when Eason bought the paper last year. Here in Atlanta, there has been no apparent move to replace fired editor Ken Edelstein. The paper's news staff now consists of exactly three people.

Last week, I read James Surowiecki's "Financial Page" column in the New Yorker. As a little exercise, I substituted the name "Ben Eason" where Surowiecki mentions Sam Zell, who owns the beleaguered Tribune Company, which I in turn replaced with the words "Creative Loafing Inc." It worked out like this in the first paragraph:

"When Creative Loafing Inc. announced that it was filing for bankruptcy, Ben Eason said that its problems were the result of a 'perfect storm.' You take readers and advertisers who were already migrating away from print, and add a steep recession, and you've got serious trouble. What Eason failed to mention was that his acquisition of the company had buried it beneath such a heavy pile of debt that any storm would have sunk it. But although Eason was making excuses for his own mismanagement, the perfect storm is real enough, and it is threatening to destroy newspapers as we know them."

This little gimmick doesn't work out quite so neatly applied throughout the rest of Surowiecki's column, and given Eason's fervent desire to be a major player on the American media landscape, I hesitate to further validate his sense of destiny by stacking him up too closely to Zell, who oversees something like twenty thousand employees to Eason's two hundred and sixty. Still, although the scales are different, the comparison is, to a point, an apt one. Two years ago, Eason's chain of four papers in Atlanta, Charlotte, Tampa and Sarasota may not have put him in any list of Fortune 500, or even 5000, companies, but it was making money. It wasn't until he borrowed $40 million to buy the alt weeklies in Chicago and Washington, D.C., that the wheels began to come off.

In the lengthy re-organization plan he submitted to bankruptcy court earlier this month, Eason mentions that his management team members "generally have good relations with their current employees." I think it's fair to say that such a characterization is about as accurate as calling Bernie Madoff an upstanding citizen. To the extent he ever enjoyed any respect from his employees, Eason, over these past months, has managed to let what little remained leak away. It's at the point where employees of his six papers have taken to calling the U.S. Trustee assigned to the case, expressing their fervent wishes to her that someone—anyone—other than Eason be given control of the company. Who says the devil you know is better? Not Eason's employees.

"There's not a person I've spoken to who has any remaining faith in Ben," says one Atlanta staffer. "He can't settle on one thing. He's constantly shifting gears, changing course, deciding that the next thing is what's going to pull us through. But he has no observable grounding in the fundamentals of this business. He doesn't seem to really understand how CL got to be a valuable commodity in the first place. He talks blithely of completely changing business models from one month to the next. It's like saying Christianity isn't working, so I'm going to become a Jew. This is serious stuff and I don't get the sense that he really has a grasp of what he's doing. He's incompetent in the classic sense of what the word means. He has no competency in this business."

A staffer up in Washington was more measured, but no less generous, in their assessment. "We got an email from him saying we're not in the newspaper business, that we're in the business of meeting the needs of urban explorer. That's not what any of us are here for. We have a lot of good writers and editors and they didn't come here to meet the needs of urban explorers. They came here to tell stories and dig deep."

The staffer recalled another email Eason had sent, saying he wanted CLI to be one of "the most admired media companies in America." "He had stars in his eyes," the staffer told me. "But I don't know if he's ever won a serious admirer in this building. I would be very surprised if there was anyone here who's hoping he holds on to the company."

Speaking of layoffs, it's become clear that the hemorrhaging of talent at Eason's papers is a way of keeping revenue numbers at a certain level. On October 1, the company employed 259 full-time employees. By month's end, it was down to 241. By now, it's down to around 225. The layoffs have given ammunition to Atalaya (the company that is the main creditor in the bankruptcy case) that with each passing week he's in charge, Eason is doing irreparable harm to the company. But even despite sloughing off staffers, the paper's revenues continue to drop. The chain went into October with $859,336 in the bank, and into December with less than $600,000. (Management is taking one for the team, however; in October, the company spent $70,751 on travel and entertainment; in November, that amount dropped to $27,329.)

I spoke briefly last week with Erik Wemple, the editor of City Paper in D.C. Wemple says his editorial staff of about a dozen, down from about twice that in early 2007, is "white-knuckling it, for sure. We've adapted. The paper has downsized. My main job is to hold the line."

1. Existing shareholders in Creative Loafing Inc. would see their shares wiped out and they would receive nothing in return. New stock would be issued, but only to those who invest in the company since it declared bankruptcy. Eason appears to be seeking about $10 million in new capital (more on that below). Existing shareholders, according to the filing, "are presumed to have rejected this Plan and are not entitled to vote to accept or reject this Plan."

2. CLI proposes to make monthly payments to Atalaya, to whom it owes $32 million, over ten years, in an amount to be determined by Delano. Other creditors could be paid in full; others wouldn't be so lucky.

3. Eason's plan for success rests on his "Digital Transformation Strategy" and he claims that his management team is uniquely postioned to implement it. What is the Digital Transformation Strategy? In plain English (which is lamentably absent from anything put forth by Eason), they want to get more local and national ad dollars. Well, duh. The court filing goes on and on about this, and you can read about it for yourself in the disclosure statement if you've run out of Ambien, but Eason believes he can deliver advertisers' messages to his readers online in very specific ways, as opposed to, say, the shotgun approach that you find in print publications. In this way, advertisers can more accurately measure the impact their ads are having. There's nothing revolutionary about this, and it's something newspapers across the country have been trying to figure out for years. In any case, CLI says it has had "considerable success" in the past year in developing a "new business model" that bundles ads across print and online. Such sales account for 10 percent of their revenue and are "growing rapidly." (Farther down, the filling also makes note of another asset—the company's "very talented content and news teams" that are the community's "conscience.")

4. Speaking of the employees, of whom there are 260 across the six newspapers in the chain, the filing notes that there has never been a work stoppage or union to deal with at any of its papers. "The Debtors believe they generally have good relations with their current employees." (Not mentioned is Eason's recent firing of Ken Edelstein, the longtime editor of Creative Loafing's Atlanta paper, which left some of the news staff in tears. Reporter Andisheh Nouraee has since resigned. Currently there appears to be no hurry to replace Edelstein. Instead, Publisher Luann Lebedz, noting to her employees that "the best talent comes from within," has instead let various sub-editors take control of their repective sections. Who needs a chief?) There is no specific mention of further layoffs.

5. What's Creative Loafing Inc. worth? It's a valid question, especially considering it owes more than $42 million to Atalaya and another investor, BIA Digital Partners. Does it owe more than it's worth? Atalaya has said so. But in figuring out what it's worth, CLI bean-counters disagree. Yes, they say, we are in debt tens of millions of dollars. But apart from our cash on hand, we have $23,745,464 worth of "goodwill." Goodwill refers to intangible assets, such as a company's reputation, the value of its brand, its relations to its customers, its place in the community, and also to tangible things, like how much money it makes before it pays taxes and interest. Goodwill is ultimately a measure of earning potential. The amount, assuming it's even in the same galaxy as reality, allows Creative Loafing's assets to match its liabilities. Factor goodwill out of the equation, though, and the chain is now worth about $10 million. And interestingly, that's about the same amount Eason seems to want to raise in new capital. (CLI's filing, incidentally, puts the "going concern enterprise value" of the company in its proposed re-organized state at between $8 million and $15 million.)

    On a similar point, the filings note that the company's revenue went up from $21 million to $24 million between 2000 and 2006, while profitability went from $1 million to $3.5 million. Of course, this was before Eason decided to borrow $40 million to buy the alt weeklies in Chicago and Washington, D.C. last year. The recession cut into revenues, and the filings note that the company's "profitability was restored" this past spring. However, newsprint cost spikes combined with cuts in ad revenues left the company unable to makes it loan payments, forcing it into bankruptcy.

6. Finally, Eason believes that he and his management team deserve another shot at running Creative Loafing Inc. It's an argument that takes a certain amount of balls, considering that it was under his stewardship that the company has fallen into bankruptcy. Apart from allowing him to remain in control, Eason wants a judge to re-set the terms for the re-payment of the company's debts to be more in his favor. Meanwhile, he is seeking out new capital and wants to issue fresh stock to the new investors (whoever they may be), a move which would wipe out the value of the shares of all the people who helped build the company before. Well, bankrutpcy is all about a fresh start.

(P.S. The disclosure statement makes note of various exhibits that outline revenue projections through 2019, but I haven't been able to find them. When I do, I'll post them.)

Also, Sunday paper ran a Q&A with its publisher and the investor, Brian Conley, whose money is supposedly going to help Sunday Paper expand to Tampa and Charlotte. Nothing very revelatory there, except Patrick Best, SP's publisher, does take a bit of a swipe at Eason, who believes aggregating is key to Creative Loafing's digital future. Says Best: "Content. Content. Content. In my mind, it's more valuable for The Sunday Paper to write one great story than to link to 1,000 published by other publications."

In a sure sign I’m in dire need of a life, it’s Sunday evening and I just checked for new filings in Creative Loafing’s increasingly antagonistic bankruptcy case. On Friday, Atalaya—Creative Loafing Inc.’s main creditor, to the tune of $32,227,876—said that CLI hasn’t been forthcoming in explaining things like budgets and cash flow forecasts. Last month, Judge Caryl Delano ordered CLI to give Atalaya a report every Wednesday detailing receipts and expenses from the previous week. Such are the headaches a company can expect when it files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Atalaya lawyers say CLI has “failed and refused” to provide them with the information “needed to understand the Budget and Cash Flow Forecast.”

P.S. I was remiss in not linking to Mara Shalhoup's sayonara to Edelstein, which ran in last week's CL. Despite the piece's valedictory tone, I get the feeling we haven't heard the last from him.