The retirement home for NFL players that never was

CANTON, Ohio — In 2014, the Pro Football Hall of Fame announced plans for a $500 million development on its campus in Canton, Ohio. Included in the renderings was a senior care facility called Legends Landing. It was intended to serve aging NFL retirees, including those with cognitive diseases researchers have associated with the repeated hits to the head many football players take during their careers.

The care facility was trumpeted by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. Tom Benson, then-owner of the New Orleans Saints, committed $1 million toward Legends Landing as part of an $11 million contribution to the Hall of Fame. He also sent his fellow owners a letter urging them to match his donation.

“We can make a tangible difference in the lives of our game’s greats,” Benson said in a news release at the time. “It is important that we all play a role here.”

Ten years later, the overall development known as Hall of Fame Village has progressed, but no care facility has been built and the idea seems to have been abandoned. In the place where Legends Landing was supposed to be is instead a “Play-Action Plaza” amusement park, whose main features are a Ferris wheel and a zip line.

As the Hall of Fame prepared to induct a new class of honorees Saturday, the demise of Legends Landing is another example of how the NFL and its partners have grappled with finding ways to help former players. The league has been criticized for not paying older retirees fair pensions, making it hard for them to win disability benefits, and fighting claims in concussion-related litigation. Legends Landing was supposed to help change that perception.

“They couldn’t get enough funding, I think,” Gayle Benson, who became the Saints’ owner after her husband’s death in 2018, said in an interview at a league meeting in December. “We thought some of the other owners would participate, but they didn’t want to participate.”

What became of Legends Landing has been something of a head-scratcher in NFL circles. Michael Crawford, CEO of the Hall of Fame Resort & Entertainment Co., the for-profit company overseeing the larger development project, said in an interview last month that he decided not to move forward with the care facility soon after he was hired in late 2018. Yet that decision does not appear to have been clearly communicated, even to those with ties to the project.

Benson agreed in 2020 to lift the restrictions on the $1 million contribution for Legends Landing, according to spokespeople for the Saints and the Hall of Fame, allowing the nonprofit museum to use that money for general operating costs during the COVID-19 pandemic. But she still hoped that Legends Landing — which was cited in a 2020 investor presentation and in a 2022 announcement for a $15.9 million tax credit from the state — could be built in the future. Warren Moon, a Hall of Fame inductee and board member, said late last year that he believed Legends Landing was still in the works.

Legends Landing was one piece of a grander development that David Baker, who was hired to run the Hall of Fame in 2014 and left in 2021, hoped would result in a year-round Disneyland for football, with a hotel, restaurants, a water park, sports facilities and other amenities. By 2017, the plans had expanded to include a $35 million Player Care Center, which was also supposed to house an orthopedic surgical center and a behavioral science and addiction unit. While some were skeptical about the draw of a care facility in a small, cold-weather city, some of the NFL’s biggest names publicly endorsed the idea.

“It’s going to make a real difference and that’s what we’re after,” Goodell said of Legends Landing and the Player Care Center in an interview with The Canton Repository in 2017. Jones, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame that year, told Sports Illustrated that “to give deserving ex-professional football players places to live at a time of need is something that will be great for our league.”

Despite their bullishness, there were signs of trouble: The expected completion date was moved back multiple times, and Baker said in 2017 that he had not yet secured the funding needed to complete Legends Landing, though he still expressed confidence it would happen.

“There were a lot of people that were committed to the concept,” Baker said in an interview in July. “They just went in a different direction, near as I can tell.”

Crawford, a former executive for Disney and Four Seasons Hotels, said that he sought to streamline the Hall of Fame Village development project, which was plagued by rising costs and funding shortages. One of the first items to go was Legends Landing, he said.

“I don’t know many leisure tourism destinations where you go to retire,” Crawford said, adding that Goodell inquired in an early conversation about whether he would continue building the retirement facility. “So, I used a practical approach to saying, let’s make this a more compelling tourism destination.”

Crawford said the business model for operating a retirement facility might have made sense for a nonprofit organization like the Hall of Fame, but not for a for-profit sports and entertainment company.

Brian McCarthy, a spokesperson for the NFL, deferred to the Hall of Fame Resort & Entertainment Co. for comment on why it did not move forward with the idea. The league and the players’ union, he said, have focused on expanding other benefits and programs. They agreed to increase pensions and added 700 additional players to the pension plan in the 2020 collective bargaining agreement, and in 2021 created a hospital network in NFL cities for former players younger than 65 who played at least three seasons.

Even without Legends Landing, the Hall of Fame Village has faced challenges. The Hall of Fame Resort & Entertainment Co. went public in July 2020, opening at $204 a share. But the stock has plummeted and it currently trades for less than $3 a share. In the first quarter this year, the company lost $14.6 million and it has $325 million in debt and other liabilities.

To jump-start construction, Crawford has secured tens of millions of dollars in government subsidies and pushed for the creation of a special improvement district to obtain low-cost loans to pay for energy-efficient buildings. Still, funding issues and supply chain constraints have led to delays in the construction of a hotel and water park adjacent to the Hall of Fame that are now slated to open next year.

Crawford and his team have made progress elsewhere. They finished a $150 million overhaul of Tom Benson Stadium, which is adjacent to the museum, and completed construction of a small strip for shops and restaurants that is nearly occupied. An indoor performance facility that doubles as an event space is attracting sports and entertainment events. The ForeverLawn Sports Complex, with eight fields, drew many of the more than 300,000 visitors to the Hall of Fame Village last year. It recently hosted theNFL’s four-day national youth flag football championships, attended by nearly 3,000 athletes.

This weekend’s Hall of Fame induction is the marquee event for Canton. In recent years, when Gayle Benson and other members of the Saints organization have watched the festivities at Tom Benson Stadium, they have thought about the idea Tom Benson supported a decade ago and wondered if it might still happen.

“I am fully supportive of that vision, and remain hopeful that a Legends Landing could one day come to fruition,” Gayle Benson said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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