Soapbox: Sunderland caught Short – the Yanks are coming

Soapbox
…in which Pete Sixsmith acknowledges that not only do policemen seem to look younger these days, so do football club proprietors. Pete knows little about our American majority shareholder, but a lot more about his home town….

Interesting to read that Drumaville’s majority share holder is an American Investment mogul called Ellis Short. Seems we are now flying under a joint UK/Ireland/USA flag and are looking likely to become another of the Premier League’s foreign-owned clubs.

There’s not much known about him. He is based in Dallas and runs an investment firm called Lone Star Funds. It’s not been the best of times for investment funds in the USA so here’s hoping that he has been smart enough to get rid of some dodgy investments – maybe Sports Direct have bought some.

He’s 48, so now the owner is younger than me. It started with policemen, then footballers and managers and now owners. I preferred it when greybeards like Syd Collings and Jack Parker ran the club. They looked old and had probably been in their 60s for decades.

Sources identify his home town as Independence, Missouri. I’ve been there and spent a very pleasant afternoon at the home of Harry S Truman, the best known resident of Independence.

My father always described Truman as his favourite US president, as “if he hadn’t have dropped those bloody bombs on the Japanese, I’d have been on my way to fight them”. So, Truman pressed all the right buttons for him – if not for the unfortunate citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

One well known fact about Truman is that he had a plaque on his desk that read: “The buck stops here.” On the reverse it said “I’m from Missouri”. This refers to the fact that Missourians are not impressed by high falutin’ talk and firmly believe that actions speak louder than words. The state is known as the Show-Me-State, as in don’t tell me about something, go out and do it. When someone was clearly bullshitting Truman, he would turn the plaque around. It would usually shut them up.

Hopefully, Mr Short will display the frontier spirit and determination of his home state and not be seduced by fine words and little action.

A straight talking Missourian and a passionately honest and forthright Cork man could be a winning combination.

1 thought on “Soapbox: Sunderland caught Short – the Yanks are coming”

  1. Whilst this is clearly good news in a financial sense does no-one have any reservation about the American influence here. American involvement in our game, with the possible exception (so far anyway) of Aston Villa, hasn’t exactly been a roaring success. And why did the club keep it so quiet? Even now they are refusing to comment on it.

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