Sports

New tenant Amway wasn’t Mets’ best choice

NOT THE ‘WAY’ TO GO: In the wake of the Bernie Madoff scandal, the Mets rented space at Citi Field to Amway, a company that has suffered legal trouble of its own. (
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Look around and count heads, those at the heads of our teams. It’s hard to find good guys. It’s far easier to conclude this city’s team owners serve no higher purpose or better end than being money hounds, heels and creeps who hold your favorite teams and longest-held passions for ransom.

There’s “Monopoly” Jim Dolan, who owns, operates and eviscerates Madison Square Gulag, its teams, employees and patrons. But at least, having previously known how the Dolan Family run Cablevision, we logically could anticipate the Garden would become a Midtown manor atop a feudal system.

Then there’s “PSL” Woody Johnson, whose team’s ticket-sales techniques seem lifted from boiler room dialogue sheets, and whose No. 1. PSL purchaser — for more than $400,000! — was exposed as a moneyless Jets inside jobber and flim-flammer, and soon after was off to the slammer for bank fraud, while the PSL-duplicitous NFL looked the other way.

Consider that Jets’ PSL contracts include language absolving the team of any promises or come-ons made by sales personnel representing the Jets in inducing the purchaser to sign the contract!

The Steinbrenners, as fronted by Yankees president Randy Levine, have, since new Yankee Stadium opened, been unable to get out of the way of their own staggering greed. Thousands of the best seats to the biggest games — regular and postseason — go empty.

Then there are the Wilpons, Fred and son Jeff, and Fred’s brother-in-law, Saul Katz, owners of the Mets and fellows who seem inalterably attracted to the more dubious big boys in big business.

The Wilpons may not know a ponzi from a pyramid, but they clearly are fascinated by businesses shaped so they don’t roll straight, can’t roll at all.

First, there were the logic-defying profits in their no-questions-allowed thrown-in with ponzi-schemer Bernie Madoff.

So, as part of the attempt to climb back, the Wilpons — in addition to $65 million in loans granted by MLB (conditions discreetly not made public) on the urging of old family pal Bud Selig — sought nice, fresh minority share investors in their Mets.

There was an undisclosed share sold to Jim McCann, CEO of 1-800-Flowers and a self-described pal of the senior Wilpon. McCann’s online flower shops have a habit of being at the center of fraud claims and lawsuits.

In 2010, McCann’s company paid $325,000 to clean up a consumer fraud suit with the N.Y. Attorney General’s Office. Another lawsuit, filed in Connecticut and claiming millions in theft through a credit-card scam, has not yet been adjudicated. In each case, the company denied wrongdoing.

Then there’s lifelong Mets fan Steve Cohen, the big hedge-funder who bought a piece for a reported $20 million. Several of Cohen’s employees have been charged with facilitating a massive securities fraud.

Last week came word the Wilpons have a new Citi Field tenant: Amway, in the form of the Amway Business Center at Citi.

Now, if businessmen and owners of a big league team ever were eager to restore their reputations for integrity and prove they’re not so cash-desperate that they would add to the suspicion they are, the first company they would avoid is Amway — frequently accused of selling all sorts of products through suspected pyramid schemes.

In 2010, Amway paid $56 million to settle a 2007 class action charging it’s a pyramid scam. There have been more suits filed against Amway — here, there and everywhere — than Fred Wilpon keeps in his closet.

In other words, if the Mets’ owners wished to, at last, shake free of their well-earned reputation for doing big business with big bad guys, it wouldn’t sell Amway a quarter-page ad in the Mets’ 2013 Yearbook.

Instead, one entering Citi Field for a Mets game this season can visit the Amway Business Center. It will be hard to miss. So, too, will be the Amway team sponsorship sign in right field.

That right field wall in Citi is a special place. That’s where the “Subway $5 Foot-Longs” sign was — not far from the concession stand in Citi that sold Subway $5 Foot-Longs for $14.

Shocking!?! WVU Big 12 travel ‘unreasonable’

Cry Me a River: Big East-bolter West Virginia has complained to the Big 12 that its travel schedule, which now takes its football and basketball teams to Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Iowa, puts it at a competitive disadvantage, replete with 4 a.m. returns to campus.

“We have asked that when reasonable they give us a two-game stay-over on the road,” athletic director Oliver Luck was quoted in the Times West Virginian.

Reasonable? How reasonable was it for WVU to join the Big 12? It didn’t see this coming?

Not that WVU previously had a track record for producing scholar-athletes (see: Adam “Pacman” Jones, Chris Henry, WVU football) but how would joining the Big 12 reasonably allow WVU to serve full scholarship student-athletes as a college?

* Another day, another shamelessly hypocritical charge filed by Jimmy Dolan’s Cablevision, this one a lawsuit against Viacom for forcing Cablevision to carry and pay for little-wanted stations, including MTV and VH1 spinoffs.

Agreed! But then who wants FUSE, a rock, punk and sleaze channel? Ahh, but FUSE is owned by Cablevision! And why must we pay for four Cablevision-owned MSG sports channels when all four go empty five months at a time?

Who wants six home shopping channels? And where’s all the money Cablevision/MSG kept — again — for all those NHL games that went un-played by the three local teams?

* Not sure what media people think when they’re moved to tweet. Wednesday from SNY reporter/studio host Jeane Coakley: “What do you think of my new dress from @TownHouseShops? C u on Geico Sportsnite at 1030. Talking mets, jets, knicks.”

* How’s this? Why not have ESPN’s execs encourage their own college kids to storm basketball courts and football fields, and leave our kids alone.

* The minimal acceptable standard for NBA free-throw shooting used to be about 75 percent. Today, that’s considered very good. Monday’s Lakers-Nuggets: Denver 16-of-27 (.593), L.A. 14-of-31 (.452).

* As reader Michael Conway suggests, if the Jets’ website was any more eager to push Darrelle Revis and Tim Tebow team jerseys — and for a mere $145 each — you would suspect that something’s up.