Rush Limbaugh’s partners head for the lifeboats

Image via Wikipedia

Rush Limbaugh may have said he’ll go down with the Titanic in his bid to become the part owner of the St. Louis Rams. But in the real world where real investors are trying to acquire real assets that make them real money, it’s looking like Rush’s friends re not interested in having him on board any longer. ESPN reports that Limbaugh will be dropped as an investor in a bid to buy the St. Louis by Dave Checketts of Sports Capital Partners Worldwide:

Rush Limbaugh is expected to be dropped from a group bidding to buy the St. Louis Rams, according to three NFL sources.

Dave Checketts, chairman of the NHL’s St. Louis Blues and the point man in the Limbaugh group attempting to buy the Rams, realizes he must remove the controversial conservative radio host from his potential role as a minority member in the group in order to get approval from other NFL owners, the sources said.

[...]

Ultimately, the sources said, Checketts must reconfigure his group and find another investor to make his bid more viable.

Exactly when Limbaugh will be dropped is uncertain, though some familiar with the situation said it could be within the next week. It is unclear if the two sides even have spoken.

via Sources: Rush Limbaugh to be out of bid for St Louis Rams – ESPN.

Adam Schefter’s report notes that Limbaugh said he’d never cave in. It sounds like that’s fine to Dave Checketts, et al, but they’d rather actually buy the Rams.

I’m willing to gander that Checketts expected this from the start, and he’s ready for it. While some might say Rush did this for PR reasons, I don’t see it that way. If you look at Rush’s transcripts, he actually seems sort of sincerely hurt that his politics are being brought into the Rams deal. While I could see Checketts believing that the bid that is most talked up is the one that closes the deal, Rush is a real football fan who loves the game, even if he can’t help but make ridiculous racist statements about many of its best players. And I think he really would have liked to be part of a group that owned a professional football team.

The question now is whether Checketts has another source of capital that wants to dunk into the deal. In the days since Limbaugh’s part in the bid was announced, we haven’t heard boo from the other potential investors – perhaps a mistake on their part as they could have made this a Checketts issue more than a Rush issue. On the other hand, perhaps privately they’ve already accomplished that goal. It’s a high stakes game, and it doesn’t look like any of the players are going to fold, even if they give a few cards back.