A fevered pitch: how pushing the national pastime and other games has turned Jim Goodmon into a dangerous man.

• Author: Perkins, David
• Position: Profile

Jim Goodmon was as excited as an arms-control negotiator who has extracted a new concession from the Soviets.

He looked across his desk and handed over the piece of paper. It didn't look like much, just a few paragraphs long, the resolution passed at a meeting that

October morning with the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce. But it endorsed his plans for a $32 million pro sports complex in Research Triangle Park, a row of jock palaces once scoffed at as a fantasy.

"And look at that line there," he says. It reads: "The Chamber of Commerce encourages the Triangle Sports Authority to purchase land and construct a baseball stadium for the Durham Bulls as the initial phase of Triangle Central Park." That's a subtle endorsement of tax support, Goodmon says. "They had never said that before - for anybody."

For Goodmon, president of Raleigh-based Capitol Broadcasting Co., getting his hometown business community to support a project built entirely in Durham County was no small feat. Two months later, the Wake County Board of Commissioners voted for the plan.

For three years, Goodmon has been on a quixotic quest, toting charts, statistics and his gospel of Triangle unity before Kiwanians, Rotarians, legislators, chamber committees and anyone who would listen. Goodmon's sports park would be the biggest of its kind south of New Jersey's Meadowlands complex: four stadiums for a Triple A professional baseball team and tennis, soccer and ice hockey teams on 200 acres that Goodmon has optioned near Raleigh-Durham International Airport. To pay most of the bill, Goodmon wants Wake and Durham counties to add a 3 percent hotel-motel tax. (Raleigh and Durham County now levy 3 percent room taxes.)

In the last six months, he's added muscle to his skeletal plan with his purchase of a pro soccer team and an agreement to buy the Durham Bulls, one of the minor leagues' most-profitable teams. And he's cemented his role as the Triangle's leading sports entrepreneur by leading a long-shot bid to attract a National Football League team to the area. People have started to listen.

The sports complex hinges on the kind of cooperation between the two counties that hasn't been seen since they jointly expanded the airport. The plan would, he says, become a model of regional accord that could lead to the solution of other problems.

"It will take some time to create a consensus, but Jim's got the vision and the resources to do it," says developer Smedes York, a former Raleigh mayor. "With the teams already in place, I think it's realistic."

Others are more skeptical. "It's a great vision. It could unify the Triangle, which needs to happen," says Miles Wolff, who is selling the Bulls to Goodmon. "I don't think I've heard of anybody who says it's a bad idea, but everybody's fairly cynical about the political bodies being able to work together."

Goodmon wants to use sports to pump up the Triangle. "Industries don't come here because of Raleigh or Durham. They come here because of Duke or N.C. State or the N.C. Symphony - because of the region.

"Every time I fly into Charlotte, I see the coliseum, and I think about what it's done for them. They're several years ahead of us in terms of recognizing the economic benefits of pulling the community together around sports and sports facilities. They're getting a name for the city as a sports area, as a city on the move. They've taken the momentum from us. ... Of course, they don't have to talk with three chambers of commerce, three counties and 17 cities." Goodmon pauses, and then he laughs at his own earnestness.

"You've got to watch people who believe in something as strongly as I do," he says. "They're dangerous."

Jim Goodmon, 47, is a tall, intense man whose dry wit sizzles like drops of water on a skillet. Today, he is sitting in his office overlooking the manicured gardens of Capitol Broadcasting's Raleigh headquarters. If his pitch rolls out low and smooth , it's because he has had plenty of time to polish it.

What's in it for Goodmon? It's not the money, he says. As Capitol's...