Gaping hole is just what RSL needed

When Bill Manning moved to Salt Lake City this summer, hired by franchise owner Dave Checketts to be the new president of Real Salt Lake, he didn't have much time to see the local sights; he had a new soccer stadium to name.

Nothing much more embarrassing in today's sports culture than a stadium without naming rights.

He didn't look up at the huge gaping hole in the mountains on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley — the one the astronauts said they could see from outer space — let alone drive out there to check it out.

How was he to know it was the answer to his problem?

It's always helpful when someone points out the obvious, which is what happened when local businessman Richard Horne called Checketts and suggested he might consider having his people talk to the people who own the big pit about naming RSL's new $110 million stadium after it.

In the old days, that would have translated to Kennecott Stadium, since Kennecott is what locals have called the open-pit copper mine in the Oquirrh Mountains since the days nearly a hundred years ago when it wasn't much bigger than a gopher hole.

It was in 1903 that Daniel Jackling invented open-pit, above-Earth mining, and in 1915 that an Alaskan-based mining company, Kennecott Copper Corporation, bought into the Utah mine Jackling got started.

Incidentally, Kennecott is the slightly mangled misspelling of a man named Robert Kennicott, a naturalist who worked for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and died in 1866 exploring in Alaska, where he had a glacier named after him.

So the Utah copper mine is named after a glacier that was named after a naturalist who would be appalled at such destruction of the Earth — and how's that for irony?

But Kennicott was spared having the soccer stadium also named after him because in 1989 an international mining and exploration company called Rio Tinto acquired the Kennecott Utah Copper Corporation — and while Kennecott remains part of the letterhead, it's Rio Tinto that the company would like to become more of a household name locally.

This is where Manning comes in. Once alerted by Checketts that Rio Tinto officials would take his phone calls, the new RSL president entered into some serious courting.

At the end of July he invited Bret Clayton, a Salt Lake City native and CEO of Rio Tinto's copper division, to visit the nearly completed soccer stadium in Sandy.

When Clayton and local Kennecott CEO Andrew Harding showed up, Manning's welcoming committee included RSL head coach Jason Kreis and four players dressed in uniform. Then he gave the mining executives hard hats with Rio Tinto Stadium logos and walked them to the southwest side of the concourse, where he had set up some high-powered telescopes borrowed from the University of Utah.

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