NEW YORK -- A Brooklyn bar owner hailed a federal judge Friday for punishing the Los Angeles Dodgers for deserting Brooklyn 35 years ago and promised to hold a whopper of a victory party next week.
Richard Picardi, 52-year-old proprietor of The Brooklyn Dodger bar and restaurant in Bay Ridge, said the Thursday ruling of Judge Constance Baker Motley that he could continue to run his business under that name was 'a great day for Brooklyn.'
His right to the name was challenged in Federal Court, Manhattan, by the Los Angeles Dodgers, successors to the Brooklyn bums team. Motley ruled the team had not used the name Dodger commercially for more than a quarter of a century and therefore had given up exclusive rights to it.
Robert Kheel, attorney for the Los Angeles Dodgers, said no decision had been made on whether to appeal the decision 'which the Dodgers obviously disapprove and disagree.'
Picardi praised Motley, noting that although she is not from Brooklyn, she 'understood how we felt and saw things the right way, the truth of the case.'
'I feel great,' he said. 'I'm elated. This thing has been dragging on for four years and the trial was last May.'
In her ruling, Motley said she wasn't shutting out the Los Angeles Dodgers' right to baseball novelties emblazoned with the Brooklyn Dodgers name, which reportedly grossed $2 billion last year, but she said the Brooklyn Dodgers was much more than just a name.
'It is a nontransportable cultural institution separate from the Los Angeles Dodgers,' she said. 'The move to Los Angeles in 1958 was one of the most notorious abandonments in the history of sports. The people of Brooklyn remain bitter even to this day.'
Picardi said he is throwing out invitations to a huge party at the bar, which is decorated with memorabilia of baseball, including one of Jackie Robinson's bats, and other sports, next Thursday.
'Thousands of people signed petitions in favor of retaining the Dodger name and a lot made donations toward our court costs,' he said. 'I'm offering them all an opporunity to celebrate. But anyone can come. It's not going to be a closed party.'
When the bar was opened, Picardi said he informed Dodgers president Peter O'Malley and invited him to drop in whenver he was in New York.
'We did it openly and in good faith,' Picardi commented.
Eighteen months later the Los Angeles Dodgers brought suit, although Picardi's attorney, Ronald Russo, had made a trademark search and found the Brooklyn Dodgers name was not being used.
'Actually the bar is named Dodger, not Dodgers, and it is a play on Dickens' 'the artful dodger,' Picardi said, perhaps tongue in cheek.
And how did the Dodgers get their name in the first place? Picardi said that when the team was established in the 1880s Brooklynites were called dodgers because they had to dodge trolleys crossing streets.
