True Pirates of the Montecristo Club
Posted by Dicksbain on 20 Mar 2007 at 08:34 am | Tagged as: News
A mere season after it opens, the anti-smoking zealots have forced the closing of the Montecristo Club at PNC Park. The club featured cocktails, cigars, and live jazz for the lucky 200 who were admitted to each of the 81 home games last season. Even with their state-of-the-art ventilation system in place, the clubs doors are closing due to an impending Allegheny County-wide smoking ban.
The Montecristo Club has been renamed “Club 21” in honor of former Pittsburgh Pirates Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente. For those non-baseball fans, Clemente was an amazing right-fielder who played his entire career as with the Pittsburgh Pirates (1955 – 1972). He sadly died in 1972 in a plane crash delivering aid to the cigar-nation of Nicaragua.
These smoking bans are far too broad. Cigar bars should be exempt from any ban, period. Capitalism works, we’ve proven that in our 200+ year history as a country. Why we as a society keep imposing more laws upon ourselves boggles my mind. Was attendance down in 2006? No… 1,861,549 vs 1,794,237 in 2005. One could easily make the argument that the cigar bar helped increase attendance by 4%. Simply put, let the system work. Money is king. If I open a smoking restaurant or bar and across the street a non-smoking establishment does triple what I’m selling, I’d probably switch to non-smoking real quick. And vice-versa. There simply is no need to keep imposing more and more laws to make the “majority” feel better about themselves. The original constitution had10 amendments…we’ve added literally millions of laws on top of this with each slowly giving away our freedoms. Eventually we’ll be back where we started, dumping leafs in the bay and declaring revolution.
There are plenty of anti-anti-smoking rants out there already, so I won’t continue mine. If you read this site, you’re probably pissed off about all the anti-smoking laws already. Do what you can to stop these nut jobs from destroying this country.
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Truly a black day for baseball and cigar lovers around the globe. Doesn’t COMACHO have a cigar bar in Florida marlins?
This is downright criminal.