Boston FleetCenter Renamed.......uh..........

3814 · Feb 19, 2005

So, the owner of Boston's FleetCenter held an auction for the chance to rename the arena for a day. All proceeds going to charity.

The top bidder for Feb 28th's sign was Fark.com. And they're renaming it the Fark.com UFIA Arena.

(If you're not familiar with Fark.com cliches, click here to find out what UFIA stands for.)

Vengeance · Feb 19, 2005

UFIA won, but Drew says it's going to be "Boston Garden"

Link - about 2/3 down the page:

WALLACE: It sounds good. All right, Carrie Lee at the Nasdaq Marketsite. Thanks so much and have a great weekend.

Well, how much would you pay to see your name in lights? How about your name on Boston's biggest sports arena? The FleetCenter has been auctioning off naming rights for a day on eBay.

Drew Curtis of the news and entertainment Web site Fark.com submitted a winning bid for FleetCenter naming rights, and he has some pretty whacky ideas about what he can do with it.

Drew joins us live from Lexington, Kentucky.

And, Drew, thanks for being here. My first question: Why does a guy from Lexington, Kentucky, want to have naming rights for a sports arena in Boston?

DREW CURTIS, WWW.FARK.COM: Mainly because of the humor value, honestly. It's more of a fun joke for us to be able to play on other folks.

WALLACE: All right. We know that you paid $2,550 on eBay for these naming rights. We know that your idea -- we can't really say for sure. You're a Kentucky fan obviously, because you said the Fark.com Duke -- S-U-C-K -- Suck Center. That didn't quite go over. But you are putting out a contest for some winning names. What are some of the names you're hearing?

CURTIS: Well, we asked our readership what they would like to see up there, and some of the suggestions included the Fark.com Abe Bagota (ph) Memorial Center. Abe is not actually dead by the way. He is doing fine, he tells us. The Fark.com UFIA Center, which is an in- joke. And the Yankee Stadium was a pretty popular submission as well.

WALLACE: Also I understand there was one, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, the stadium.

CURTIS: Yes.

WALLACE: How popular was that one?

CURTIS: It was definitely up there. Unfortunately, the submission came in late in the contest. So, it didn't get as much exposure as the other ones.

WALLACE: And also, I love the Starbucks. Tell us about this Starbucks idea.

CURTIS: We also held a digital photo editing contest for people to ahead and change the image to give people an idea of what it might look like if the name had been changed to something else. And one of them was what if Starbucks had taken over the FleetCenter?

WALLACE: All right. So, obviously you had to come up with a choice. What did you decide and why?

CURTIS: I ended up going with actually the third place contest submission, which was Boston Garden. For people who aren't from the Boston area, that's the name of the center before they called it the FleetCenter when they sold the naming rights. And it was a fairly controversial decision by the company. And there are still a lot of people that would wish it go back to that.

So, I figured that would be kind of fun to go back to Boston Garden for a day.

WALLACE: That was a good one, not as whacky, though, as some of the others. It seems like you kind of went mainstream on us there.

CURTIS: Yes, sort of. I think it depends on whether or not the people over at the FleetCenter were actually there at the time of the controversy. We'll see if they actually end up accepting that one. But I did receive an e-mail from them yesterday, and they said that that sounded like the way they were going to go.

WALLACE: And very briefly, Drew, tell us about Fark.com. What is it?

CURTIS: Sure. Basically, it's a news repository, where we take about 50 to 75 of the strangest news stories of the day and post them for people to make comments on.

WALLACE: I like that. You say, an opportunity to share odd news with your friends.

CURTIS: Yes.

WALLACE: Drew Curtis of Fark.com. Thanks for being here. We certainly appreciate it.

CURTIS: No problem. Thank you.
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