Evan Weiner sports comments

2011-10-04T19:23:00.000-07:00

Do First Amendment rights exist in sports?
TUESDAY, 04 OCTOBER 2011 10:47
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/do-first-amendment-rights-exist-in-sports
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
If you watch the cable TV news networks or listen to newstalk radio or go through social media and message boards, you find out there are many United States Constitutional experts living throughout the country which probably comes as a big surprise to frustrated social studies teachers in junior high schools and high schools around the country. Those teachers probably didn't realize that when the lesson plan turn to the constitution the students really were listening while they dozed off as they ticked off every point the country's founding fathers articulated.
Some of those constitutional experts know all about the Second Amendment or whatever number they have specialized in so this may come as a shock for those who know the document inside out thanks to newstalk radio show hosts.
The first amendment need not apply to the freedom of speech in sports. Dallas Mavericks owner (and freelance writer) Mark Cuban has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines speaking his mind when it comes to matters in the National Basketball Association. The NBA Commissioner David Stern has levied fines against Cuban for talking about the NBA's officiating. According to some media outlets Charlotte Bobcats owner Michael Jordan was fined $100,000 for his words which looked like rather benign comments about the NBA lockout to a reporter from the Herald News in Australia.
Jordan told the reporter that "the model we've been operating under is broken. We have 22 or 23 teams losing money, (so) I think we have gotta come to some kind of understanding in this partnership that we have to realign." It is not surprising that Michael Jordan, one of the three players who made David Stern a sports genius was fined. Sports leagues seem to have no probably squashing and trampling over first amendment rights and that applies to opinion piece writers as well for someone writing about sports business for a newspaper that happened to be owned and operated by a Major League Baseball franchise baron.
The Chicago Tribune Company owned the Chicago Cubs and in the company's media portfolio was the Baltimore Sun. In late July 2002, while Major League Baseball owners and the Major League Baseball Players Association were negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement, I was an occasional contributor to the Sun writing Op-Ed pieces for Richard Gross's Op-Ed page. Richard was going on vacation but before he left he edited down one of my thought pieces which instructed baseball fans how to fight back against Major League Baseball owners by boycotting their "real" businesses. It was on the possible work stoppage in baseball sometime in late August or early September. We went over the piece, we both agreed it was in the "all the news fit to print" category and were satisfied with the result.
Richard left on vacation and the opinion piece never saw the light of day until 2005 in a book of my columns which was targeted for sports business management students in colleges and universities. Some higher up at the Chicago Tribune Company killed the piece. Those “higher ups” were never identified but it hit too close to home for them.
Officially the Baltimore Sun stance was that the paper didn’t support boycotts but that didn’t fly as the paper supported the South Africa economic boycott during that country’s days of Apartheid.
The column just didn’t fit with the Baltimore Sun’s style.
It was too radical for the staid Chicago Tribune Company and CEO Stanton Cook, one of the alleged architects of the 1994 baseball meltdown which cost the industry the playoffs and World Series.
"If you listen to sports talk radio or read writers from all walks of life writing about a possible baseball strike, there is a sense of resignation: The fans are saps with no voice who are hopelessly devoted to baseball.
"Simply put, baseball fans have no control over the situation in the spat between multi-millionaire owners and millionaire players if and when the players walk out.
"But baseball fans should know they can fight back and hit both sides hard where it hurts?
"The pocketbook. And here's how the fans can mount a counteroffensive:
"They should contact their state attorney general's office and make sure a mechanism is in place to ensure that they get refunds from games missed on cable TV. The refunds to the country's 86 million cable subscribers, who receive sports channels even if they don't want them, should come from the cable TV owners who transmit the baseball games.
"In Baltimore, that's Comcast, because it has the rights to show the Orioles.
"Fans should call their local, not national, elected officials. In those cities where the municipality helped to pay for a new baseball stadium, make sure that the team continues to pay rent during a baseball work stoppage. Municipalities should sue if a team withholds its rent because games were canceled.
"Baseball fans have enormous power; all they have to do is act. There's the all-time favorite, the boycott.
"For example, if fans are upset with San Francisco Giants owner Peter McGowan, don't shop at Safeway; he's a director of the supermarket's board after having been its chairman and CEO. If Dodger fans don't like Rupert Murdoch's role in the baseball stalemate, they don't have to watch the Fox network or go to movies produced by 20th Century Fox.
"Hungry and want some pizza? Don't buy Detroit Tiger owner Mike Ilitch's Little Caesar's products.
"Looking to go to a theme park in Orlando, Fla., or southernbCalifornia? Scratch the Disney parks in either locale. Also don't watch ESPN, ESPN2, ESP News, ESPN Classic, listen to ESPN Radio or see any Disney movies. The Walt Disney Co. owns the Anaheim Angels.
"The media?
“AOL Time Warner owns the Atlanta Braves. You can drop AOL as your Internet provider and seek another one. You don't have to buy Sports Illustrated, Time or People, watch CNN or CNN Headline News, the Cartoon Channel, HBO or go to New Line Cinema movies, buy Kodak products or spend a day at Warner Brothers Recreation Enterprises and theme parks or buy Atlantic Records products.
"Check stadium names. Budweiser, or Busch Stadium (St. Louis), Coors Field (Denver), Miller Park (Milwaukee), Minute Maid Field (Houston), Tropicana Field (St. Petersburg) are spending millions on partnerships, but there are other beers and juices to drink.
"Bank One (Phoenix), Comerica (Detroit) and PNC (Pittsburgh) aren't the only financial institutions around. Edison (Anaheim) and Cinergy (Cincinnati) are just two energy companies available. Network Associates (Oakland) and Qualcomm (San Diego) are just two of many technology companies. Don't shop at Safeco (Seattle).
"Fans don't need to buy baseball cards, which puts money into player's pockets, nor do they need to attend baseball card shows or stand in line for autographs.
"Fans should boycott buying licensed products and keep their money in their pockets instead of lining the pockets of both players and owners. “Sure, fans can boycott a game here and there and make a minor stand. But that won't send any messages to the owners and players who continue to bicker over how to split up billions of dollars.
"Some 70 million people attend Major League baseball games annually. Millions watch them on TV or listen to them on the radio. If just a fraction of that audience reacts, both the owners and players will get the message, and it could force a settlement in a hurry."
In 2002, the owners and players settled without a labor action.
When Richard Gross returned to work he had no real explanation for me. It wasn't his fault that someone upstairs had killed the column and clearly someone was very concerned about the thoughts.
No one today is suggesting a boycott of other NBA held businesses.
In New York James Dolan and Cablevision would feel an impact of Cablevision subscribers defecting to satellite TV because there are no Knicks games being played thanks to an owners’ lockout. In Los Angeles, Donald Sterling probably doesn't have to worry about turning people off from his residential holdings because his Los Angeles Clippers players have been locked out of the workplace. No NBA beat sportswriter would ever dare write that as that would be treason and all friendly accessibility to the team would be lost.
But it would be very easy to track the other businesses for some enterprising writer who worked for an outlet whose history included supporting the South Africa boycott.
Dolan bought Newsday from the Chicago Tribune Company and the business of the Knicks and the lockout's impact on that team will probably go unreported as will the 1998-99 lockout effort by Golden State Warriors owner Chris Cohan to avoid paying rent to the Oakland Coliseum owners Oakland and Alameda County taxpayers because he didn't play games as scheduled.
Cohan ended up paying the rent after going to arbitration and sold his team in 2010 for about $450 million.

The Chicago Tribune Company sold the Baltimore Sun along with other papers and properties to former Chicago White Sox minority partner Sam Zell who apparently overpaid for the properties and could not afford to maintain the newspaper at 2002 worker levels. The Sun is a shell of a newspaper these days. The Cubs franchise along with Wrigley Field also was jettisoned.
There is limited free speech in sports. People like NBA Commissioner David Stern and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell gagged NBA and NFL owners and threatened them with fines for talking about the lockouts. Goodell fined Tennessee Titans owner Bud Adams for giving the finger to someone as he sat in his owner’s box watching his Titans play. Major League Baseball commissioners have put up gag orders on the owners during labor talks.
Sports fans and constitutional experts on radio, TV and message boards should take note.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or Amazon Kindle.

2011-09-30T20:50:00.000-07:00

New York and New Jersey done a favor by not getting 2012 Olympics
Thursday, 29 September 2011 10:40

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/new-york-and-new-jersey-done-a-favor-by-not-getting-2012-olympics

BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
It has been more than six years since we last heard from Jay Kriegel and NYC2012, the group that had hoped to bring the 2012 Summer Olympics to the New York City metropolitan area. The New York Olympic dream or at least the Dan Doctoroff, Kreigel and others dream, ended in June 2005 when New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver voted against building a West Side Olympic/football stadium.

Doctoroff decided New York would be a perfect place to hold the Olympics while watching a Soccer World Cup match in New Jersey at the Meadowlands in 1994.

Sheldon Silverhammer came down on NYC2012 head, Sheldon Silverhammer made sure NYC2012 was dead and in doing so probably did New York and New Jersey taxpayers a major favor. He saved them hundreds of millions of dollars as the International Olympic Committee requires local communities to pay for Olympics cost overruns.

NYC2012 limped into the Olympics selection sweepstakes without a stadium and lost to London. Recently the organizers of the 2012 London Summer Olympics announced that they would no longer provide financial summaries of the Games since it might be a distraction. The general feeling is that Prime Minister Tony Blair’s 2005 genuflecting act before the International Olympic Committee and London’s 2012 budget will be causing some cash flow problems after the Games are done.

So see no evil, say no evil and hear no evil or taking a Sgt. Schultz “I know nothing. Nothing.” stance is probably best. It may also be telling. London could be losing copious amounts of money on the Games even though Prime Minister David Cameron claims the Games will be worth a billion pounds (or $1.5 billion) in economic impact. Some analysts think England is spending 7.2 billion pounds or $11.2 billion on the event.

Those numbers should become available in about a year although no one knows what China spent on the 2008 Games. Budapest considered a 2012 Olympics bid and came in with a $28 billion budget which seemed absurd. Hungary was going to redo the country’s infrastructure to house the Games. The bid never got off the ground.

Kreigel and NYC2012 contended that a 2012 New York Olympics would have cost $3.3 billion and would have been paid for by ticket sales, TV revenues and various IOC funds including merchandising.

The 2004 Athens Summer Olympics didn't cause Greece's financial meltdown but the billions of Euros that need to be paid off by the government for the debt accumulated by hosting the Games.

Sheldon Silver voted against funding the Manhattan west side stadium was not necessarily a vote against the Olympics. Silver was concerned too much money would be funneled into the stadium that would have been built between 34th and 30th Street and 11th and 12th Avenues and that his downtown district would lose out on dollars for local needs.

Is government spending on sports worth it?

For fans the answer is yes even though a lot of middle and lower class fans have been priced out of stadiums by owners who got public money for new stadiums.

The stadium game was pretty simple. Owners knew investing in stadiums was prohibitive and asked for government handouts, if they didn't get the local government to help with financial assistance for a new stadium, another city would give owners just what they wanted on the public dime.

That is what happened in Cincinnati although the owners of the Major League Baseball's Reds never did say they would leave town without a new stadium. The Brown family, the Bengals' owners, did in the mid 1990s when they threatened to move to Baltimore without a new stadium. Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell beat the Brown family to Baltimore. Eventually Cincinnati and Hamilton County worked which included a 0.5 percent sales tax hike which would pay down the stadium debt.

The Browns finally kept virtually all of the revenue generated inside the stadium which is capped at 92 percent by federal law. Eight cents on every dollar generated inside the building could go back to the municipality to pay down the debt thanks to the 1986 federal tax reforms.

The sales tax hike did not produce the revenues needed to pay off the two stadiums debt and that has become a major problem. The Reds and Bengals ownership got sweetheart deals and local taxpayers now face a tax hike or slashed services and municipal employees could lose their jobs because of sports stadiums debt.

Don’t expect the Reds or Bengals ownership to share in the sacrifice. After all a contract is contract and the lease is good for them.

Hamilton County needs $14 million in a hurry to pay off the 2011 stadium bill. The county doesn't have the money for the two stadiums debt load. Hamilton County property owners are now paying more on their tax bill because of the stadium but that is not enough.

The two teams got great deals from Hamilton County—maybe too great. Back in the 1990s, the general feeling was that if you built a stadium, it would be an economic engine. A platform that featured a stadium and potential growth of businesses around the facility. That has never happened although some will argue that downtown Baltimore was revitalized by a baseball stadium but that would be wrong. The Orioles baseball park was the next to last piece of an urban renewal that included a museum and an aquarium along with the building of a retail center.

The football stadium was supposed to have cost $280 million. The official price tag is being disputed with the Bengals owners saying the field cost $350 million while local politicians say it is $454 million. Hamilton County was on the hook for $34 million in debt payoff in 2010. The country pays the day-to-day maintenance of the facility

The Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper did something remarkable last Sunday for a newspaper. The newspaper reported on the financial problems of the two stadiums that were built for Reds baseball and Bengals football and how the stadiums have become a financial drain on the city. The paper's reporter checked out how other cities were handling cost overruns of stadiums and arenas.

The reporter looked at a number of cities. Indianapolis built a new football facility which nearly bankrupted the city's Capital Improvement Board with a $47 million a year shortfall. The Capital Improvement Board fired people and cut other costs while Indiana created a Professional Sports Development Zone near the stadium and there was a tax hike--one percent boost in hotel taxes.

That might not help. More tax hikes could come in 2013.

The stadium game has been a losing proposition for years. Jay Cross, the man who was supposed to deliver to Jets owner Woody Johnson, once said that the only people who benefit from a new stadium or a new arena were owners, players and parking lot attendants.

The Cincinnati saga is being ignored in other cities. Sacramento's city council voted on Tuesday to spend $555,000 to consultants as the first step in building a new arena to house the National Basketball Association's Kings. The city's mayor is Kevin Johnson a former National Basketball Association player. Johnson claims that the $555,000 investment (in a city that has cut municipal jobs and social services and has had a tent city for homeless within Sacramento) is worthwhile because an arena can create thousands of jobs and bring billions of dollars into the region.

Johnson is still reading off of the 1990s pro sports script sounding like Major League Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent telling Cleveland build a stadium and it will open up enormous business opportunities for you. Cleveland built a baseball park, an arena and a football facility and none of them has done much to revitalize the struggling downtown. The next hope is a casino to turn Cleveland's fortunes around.

Silver did New York and New Jersey taxpayers a favor by killing the New York Olympics dream. Montreal and Quebec residents pay extra taxes for 30 years to pay down the debt of the 1976 Summer Olympics. Do local politicians learn a lesson? No Montreal leaders were thinking of bidding for another summer event. Sydney, Australia interests are paying down the debt on unused facilities as a legacy from the 2000 Summer Olympics. Greece has to pay billions of Euros to pay off the 2004 Games.

Still countries continue bidding for the Olympics; California politicians have bowed to the Anschutz Entertainment Group and are trying to fast track a Los Angeles football stadium despite losing a convention center. Minnesota politicians are trying to figure out how to built a Vikings football stadium, Charles Wang's New York islanders could spark a bidding war for the team between Brooklyn interests, Nassau County interests, possibly Queens interests and Quebec City investors. Of course Quebec as a province is broke but that probably won't stop politicians from funding an arena and out in Edmonton, politicians seem to be a little too slow for the National Hockey League's Oilers owner Daryl Katz's liking on funding a new arena. Katz has told Edmonton elected officials vote on the arena issue by October 31 or else. Whatever the "or else" means. Buffalo, Oakland, San Diego and St. Louis politicians better start firing up the mint if they want to keep their NFL teams around.

The Buffalo Bills record is 3-0 but that's immaterial. The Bills next real important game will take place in 2012 or 2013 when the lease between Erie County and New York State officials ends and the real contest begins---"the Stadium Game."

Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or Amazon Kindle.

2011-09-26T14:26:00.001-07:00

Another week of sports business tests fan loyalty
MONDAY, 26 SEPTEMBER 2011 10:44
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/another-week-of-sports-business-tests-fan-loyalty
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
COMMENTARY
Sometimes you wonder why people become emotionally and, in some cases, overzealous about sports. After all, it is just a game and when one ends another begins. It is understandable that someone cares when they are an active participant in a sports activity but why should a fan care about an industry — sports is an industry — when the real owners of sports seem to take a rather cavalier attitude about their customers.
Just in the last week, the National Basketball Association’s collective ownership through their hired help — NBA Commissioner David Stern is an employee of a consortium of 29 owners (the franchise in New Orleans is owned by the league) — “postponed” (canceled is the real word) the opening training camp sessions and 43 preseason games (which count as regular season games in season ticket plans even though they are not bona fide contests in the strictest sense of competition as part of the 30 team’s business plan.
The only good news for season ticket holders is that a good many of those games were scheduled in so-called neutral sites). There is no word on whether cable TV subscribers will get a refund for paying for something that is not going to be available for them -- NBA pre-season games on cable TV.
While David Stern and the owners’ lockout continues, there is a very real possibility that Seton Hall and St. John’s University basketball fans may see the Big East Conference crumble as big time jock factories presidents and chancellors are again building up cartels and “expanding” big time sports conferences.
Pittsburgh and Syracuse, not the cities but the two jock-factory schools that play big time college football and basketball and earn money off of college kids who don’t get paid for their services and in some cases risk their health for the good old alma mater, have decided the Big East is no longer their cup of tea. The school presidents have decided that there is more prestige playing in the Atlantic Coast Conference and more money that can be squeezed out of fans from a cable TV contract. Pittsburgh’s chancellor Mark Nordenberg made it quite clear that college sports is a business when he addressed the issue talking to the media.
"Every university leader involved in intercollegiate athletics really has two fundamental responsibilities,’’ said Nordenberg. “One is to work to build strength in a current conference home. The second is to be appropriately attentive to the changing landscape and institutional opportunities that might need to be pursued. We also have been attentive to that responsibility. There's nothing incompatible about those.”
Nordenberg’s quote seemed to contradict the school’s 2003 stance when Boston College, Virginia Tech and the University of Miami left the conference to join the ACC.
Pitt brass was very critical of the move after the ACC poached The Big East for “big market schools” to strengthen the ACC’s bargaining position with cable TV executives because the conference needed bigger TV markets.
"We made very clear that if other opportunities did arise, we would feel obligated to seriously assess them looking at the long-term future of the University of Pittsburgh, and I made that point clearly in writing both to the commissioner of the Big East and chair of the conference in May of 2010, and they each responded was they thought the position I had articulated for Pittsburgh was the position that had been embraced by all the members of the conference."
The University of Connecticut seems to be the next Big East school to jump to the ACC. The irony here is that the state of Connecticut sued the ACC in 2003 for poaching the Big East. The case was settled and the ACC took the three schools for TV purposes.
There are some issues surrounding schools jumping from conference to conference for TV dollars. The first is just how are those TV dollars generated? They come from somewhere and the answer is that somewhere is cable TV consumers, who probably have no idea that their money is going to support big time college athletic programs.
The 1984 Congressional rework of cable TV rules that created a sort of cable TV socialism was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. Cable TV is the second biggest part of the three necessities needed to operate a successful franchise in Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League and Major League Soccer. You can add big time jock factories to that list as well.
The 1984 legislation created a basic expanded tier where “networks” could be banded together and sold as one to consumers. It was the lifeline that saved CNN, the Weather Channel, ESPN and others. The “I Want My MTV” ad campaign grew out of that because the MTV owners wanted to be placed on that tier because that was where money could be made. The cable systems operator decided what should be on that tier, not the consumer, and sports was a natural fit. ESPN thrived and started jacking up the network’s rate. Regional sports networks were founded and that became a huge source of revenue for teams.
The New York Yankees franchise was fortified by TV.
College presidents and chancellors are jumping on the bandwagon. The Disney-owned ESPN has created a University of Texas sports network. The college “realignments” have been caused by the want for TV dollars.
There is not that much interest in the college sports industry on TV. It is a niche industry at best and the cable TV ratings reflect that as a rather small number of people in the cable TV universe (ESPN has over 90 million subscribers) watch the games, yet 100 percent of the people are paying for what a rather small number of people are viewing. (Cable TV “news” works the same way, 100 percent of the basic tier universe is paying for what maybe a combined five million are watching on the FOX News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, FOX Business, CNN’s “Headline News” and other networks.)
The colleges and universities also have a federal tax exemption, which means that the schools and conferences don’t pay taxes from the proceeds of bowl games.
Consumers should be screaming about getting fleeced legally by jock factories by cable TV networks and tax loopholes because of federal legislation that does not help consumers. There are also some questions that need to be answered about all of the stars realigning to produce “Super Conferences.”
Just where is the money going? Most athletic programs lose money, so is the Disney and Rupert Murdoch money going to fix a budget problem or will the college student body see any of that money? Will the money go to pay coaches even more money? Why are college coaches the highest paid state employees in places like Connecticut, Iowa and New Jersey coaching at state schools? Why are governors like Chris Christie not addressing the issue? Rutgers is a New Jersey state school and all of the realignments will impact Rutgers.
Why are the players, the people who make the games possible, getting nothing out of this? The players get scholarship money, yes, and an opportunity to get an education, yes, but the demands on a so-called “student-athlete” are great as there is the emphasis on the sport, not studies. The players on scholarship are also stymied in non-school job opportunities as they are limited to about $2,000 in earning from outside work annually while on scholarship. Other college students are free to earn as much as they can in part time jobs.
Jock factories can say, look because of Bobby Bowden’s or Joe Paterno’s or Bobby Knight’s success, we got money to build new labs, etc. There probably will be some noise that college games have a big economic impact (but local and state governments don’t want to research the real economic benefits of sports because the numbers may not coincide with reality -- that the economic impact is minimal at best).
There is a paucity of reporting on the why Pac 12 Commissioner Larry Scott thinks an Arizona State-University of Southern California baseball game in Japan is great for his conference. Scott wants to put Pac 12 sports in front of Pacific Rim viewers. Don’t be surprised if the Pac 12 starts sending football teams to Asia for games, Scott’s tennis background suggests that he knows all the key money players in Asia and that the college presidents and chancellors of the then Pac 10 when he was hired wanted global expansion.
But what is the real reason that these chancellors are acting like pro sports owners and why are Robert Iger from Disney and Murdoch playing ball with them? Are they bettering the schools or just seizing an opportunity to grab more money?
Sy Syms in ads for his clothing store boasted that “an educated consumer is our best customer,” but that may not be the case in sports. The less a consumer knows the better off sports is as a business.
So Seton Hall, St, John’s and Georgetown probably will be thrown under the jock factory bus because the schools don’t play football and football is driving conference realignments. Without football, those schools are not welcomed into the super college jock factory club. They will be left behind in the money grab because they are not worthy.

So it goes in the world of sports. NBA lockout, college sports realignment, allegations by the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Newsnight that the Beeb has uncovered evidence of secret payments of millions of dollars from Azerbaijan in exchange for two boxing Olympic gold medals at the London 2012 Olympics. Phil Anschutz, the owner of the Los Angeles arena that houses the NBA’s Lakers and Clippers (Anschutz is a part Lakers owner), all of a sudden showing an interest in developing a Sacramento arena for the NBA’s Kings after the team owners, the Maloof brothers, made a pitch to relocate the franchise in Anschutz’s backyard in Anaheim and become a competitor for corporate support in the market.
The Lakers franchise in 2012 will start printing cash as a part owner (with Time Warner Cable) of a Lakers cable TV network in Southern California but Anschutz seem to want to make sure there is no reason for the Maloofs to cash in on LA area cash. While Anschutz will try and play white knight for Sacramento Kings fans, he is trying to convince an NFL owner to move to his proposed football stadium in downtown Los Angeles.
That was the week that was. It makes you wonder why sports fans still watch games when the lords of the game don’t care about them.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

2011-09-19T19:53:00.001-07:00

Ask Rick Perry about failed Formula 1 racing investment in U.S.
MONDAY, 19 SEPTEMBER 2011 13:50

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/ask-rick-perry-about-failed-formula-1-racing-investment-in-us
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
There is a question that "news presenters" who somehow get the plum assignment of moderating a GOP Presidential nomination debate should ask Governor Rick Perry of Texas. But given the absolute lack of imagination and scant information that the presenters and their researchers have or the lack of diligence in fact finding, it is unlikely that Governor Perry will be asked the following.
"Governor Perry, why are you, with your state having colossal financial problems (an estimated $27 billion hole), investing $250 million into a Formula-1 car racetrack in Austin, Texas in an effort to help Billy Joe "Red" McCombs re-introduce the car race to American audiences when F-1 racing is a proven failure in the U.S.?"
It is hard to believe that Brian Williams, Wolf Blitzer, Bret Baier or any other presenter would actually ask a narrow policy question in a national debate (These presenters take their jobs somewhat seriously. In 1992 ABC presenter Carole Simpson complained about the debate format in the Bush-Clinton-Perot gabfest which allowed normal citizens to ask questions troubled her as the electorate is filled with unqualified people. Ironically the electorate depends on Simpson and others to inform them. Simpson’s complaint did not reflect well on her and her colleagues’ professional acumen).
But there should be at least a mention of the quarter of a billion dollar subsidy and an inspection of the Texas-F1 contract as to how much money will Bernie Ecclestone and F1 keep from a television contract, how much of the ticket sales will go to Bernie Ecclestone and F1 and how much goes back to Texas as well as concession and how much rent Texas taxpayers can expect to see in the deal. Will there be a corporate sponsor slapping a name on the racetrack marquee and will investors/taxpayers get any of that money?
Will the Perry/Texas investment yield a dividend for Texas taxpayers or just put money in McCombs and F1's pocket?
Allegedly private money is going to pay the estimated $180 million required to build a permanent 120,000 seat F1 facility for Full Throttle Productions, McCombs company and Ecclestone, the commercial rights holder of F1. If the facility is being funded by private funds, why has Perry green lighted an annual $25 million payment to help out F1 and Full Throttle? Do the math; the state will spend a quarter of a billion dollars for 40 full time jobs. The race organizers contend the track will be a winner for Austin with the creation of 1,500 construction jobs, and 1,200 people will work the race on a per diem basis annually for maybe four or five days.
The race backers claim the track will be used 250 days a year. The key word in all of this is "claim".
The race people contend the race will have $300 million worth of economic impact but offer no proof behind the rationale of their claim. Sports organizers offer make large boasts of large economic impact, but New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said last year no one has ever really done a study to show the real economic impact of sports events in a community.
Austin taxpayers are kicking in $13 million for infrastructure and could be on the hook for an additional $4 million annually in subsidies for ten years. In this day and age, private money to build sports venues is rare and there are examples of private money sports arena failures in Minneapolis in 1994 and Columbus, Ohio in 2011.
Government support is an absolute necessity for sports in the United States. No project can be successful without cash handouts or tax incentives like PILOTS and TIFS. Will Ecclestone/McCombs pay property taxes to Austin? Is there a hidden taxbreak?
National Basketball Association and National Hockey League teams pay zero property taxes across the United States.
If Formula One is such a good investment, why is government dollars needed? Perry who is the hero of those who want sharp government cuts has created a government F1 racing program.
There seems to be something hypocritical about Perry’s stance that is at odds with his dogma. Perry’s recent political ideological book seems to be at odds with his political stances.
When completed, the Austin track will give F1 the circuit's first a permanent track in the United States in decades. Long Beach, California, Las Vegas, Detroit, Dallas and Phoenix have had street races which were fails. The F1 series inside the Indianapolis held eight races at the Brickyard.
F-1 racing has never been held in the New York area although there was a plan to hold a race in the early 1980s was never materialized. Now the mayors of Weehawken and West New York want to stage an F-1 race on the streets of those New Jersey municipalities in 2013. F-1 racing has been a financial disaster in the United States and the racing loop has not held an event in America since 2007. Formula One races were held at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway between 2000 and 2007.
F1 does well globally but the United States has been a challenge.
The Austin November 18, 2012 date seems odd in that the University Texas football season is still in swing and Austin is the home of the University of Texas. Football is king in Texas and McCombs is a huge financial supporter of University of Texas sports but he has apparently agreed that F-1 and football can co-exist for one week in November. The race will also have competition from the National Football League, specifically the Dallas Cowboys and the Houston Texans.
But Governor Perry has cushioned the blow of possible financial losses by making sure the state taxpayers are subsidizing the racing event if things don’t work out for McCombs.
McCombs has partnered with Tavo Hellmund to bring F-1 racing to Austin with Perry's blessing. Hellmund has a long history of being a race participant and racing promoter.
F-1 racing is different from NASCAR and Indy Car Racing according to the racing association's website.
"Formula One, also known as Formula 1 or F1, and currently officially referred to as the FIA Formula One World Championship, is the highest class of single-seater auto racing sanctioned by the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA). The "formula" in the name refers to a set of rules to which all participants' cars must comply.
"The F1 season consists of a series of races, known as Grand Prix, held on purpose-built circuits, and public roads. The results of each race are combined to determine two annual World Championships, one for the drivers and one for the constructors, with racing drivers, constructor teams, track officials, organizers and circuits required to be holders of valid Super Licenses, the highest class racing license issued by the FIA.
“Formula One cars race at high speeds, up to 360 km/hour (220 mph) with engines revving up to a formula imposed limit of 18,000 rpm. The cars are capable of pulling in excess of 5 g on some corners. The performance of the cars is highly dependent on electronics (although traction control and driving aids have been banned since 2008), aerodynamics, suspension, and tires. The formula has seen many evolutions and changes through the history of the sport."
Perry has signed off on the quarter of a billion dollar package to subsidize an annual race starting in 2012 and ending in 2021. McCombs, who was a co-founder of the now bankrupt Clear Channel Communications empire (and right wing talk radio shows with a liberal show sprinkled in for balance), led the charge to get the race and racetrack built in the Texas state capital. McCombs has a long sports history including a onetime stake in the NBA's San Antonio Spurs and the NFL's Minnesota Vikings.
McCombs failed to get a new stadium built in the Twin-Cities and sold the Vikings to New Jersey resident Zygi Wilf for a reported $600 million in 2005. Wilf is battling with Minnesota lawmakers in his effort to get a new football facility built in the Twin-Cities.
During the spring when Texas and Formula 1 deal was concluded, Perry trumpeted the deal and his words are still etched into the F-1 website.
Texas Governor Rick Perry conveyed his enthusiasm for the project, explaining Texas' relatively strong economy continues to draw both national and international attention and I commend Comptroller Combs for her work in bringing this exciting event to the Lone Star State.
The presenters should ask Perry about the commitment in what is a documented money losing venture, after all if F-1 racing in the U.S. was a good deal, there would be elected officials jumping through hoops to build a permanent facility for the event.

No one really in the United States pushed for F1 races until Austin came around. The New Jersey plan doesn't call for permanent structures.
When the agreement was executed, Perry was dealing with a record budget deficit and discussing the possibility of slashing services and jettison teachers. Why would any elected official even think of spending taxpayers’ dollars on an unpopular form of entertainment when staring at a record budget shortfall?
The presenters who moderate the debates ought to do a better job in getting ready for the debates. But for the most part, they are as woeful as the candidates (see Gwen Ifill in the 2008 Vice Presidential debates performance as a moderator. Ifill lost control of the debate asking Sarah Palin a question), maybe worse. So some free advice for the next presenter, ask Rick Perry about his commitment to Billy Joe McCombs, because a fiscal conservative like Perry needs to explain the Texas investment in a proven loser in the United States, F1 racing.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or Amazon Kindle.

2011-09-15T06:53:00.000-07:00

Could Major League Baseball or 'honkball' be coming to the Netherlands?
TUESDAY, 13 SEPTEMBER 2011 13:21

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/could-major-league-baseball-or-honkball-be-coming-to-the-netherlands
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
ON THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
(Amsterdam, the Netherlands) – The flight out of Schiphol near Amsterdam in the Netherlands should be heartening for the Lords of Major League Baseball. Looking out the window, one can see four baseball diamonds as a flight heads out to the North Sea. There is gold in those diamonds if Major League Baseball can attract locals to play baseball.
There is some talk that Dutch baseball officials want to host a Major League Baseball game in Hoofddorp near Amsterdam in 2014. Could Honkball (Dutch for baseball) be played on a Major League level in The Netherlands on a one-off circumstance?
It is possible but the Dutch need a honkball stadium for a game or a series as MLB is not sending two teams to Amsterdam or Hoofddorp to play just one game and there is a need to build a higher level of awareness for the game. Hoofddorp plans to open a 30,000 seat facility which would be used for an MLB series. There is money available in Amsterdam and the country is rebuilding the infrastructure so the low country might be a good place to start in MLB’s quest to find a European market and sell baseball.
The Netherlands will be celebrating 100 years of baseball in the country in 2012 but a lot of work needs to be done before anyone will consider the Netherlands a baseball hotbed. At sporting goods stores in places like Delft and Rotterdam there are football (soccer) kits, footballs, sneakers, basetballs and lots and lots of bicycles. Baseball gloves are not widely available. Baseball doesn’t have a bottom to the top support system starting with youth baseball and working through high schools in the country.
Yet, the Netherlands national baseball team is pretty good. The Netherlands is for some reason the most baseball friendly country on the European continent and you can spot a lot of Atlanta Braves hats along with New York Yankees caps, although Yankees caps can even be spotted in St. Petersburg, Russia. The team upset the Dominican Republic in the 2009 World Baseball Classic (WBC) and the country will return to the WBC in 2013. The team competed in four Summer Olympics between 1996 and 2008 and the only reason that the country won’t have a baseball team in the 2012 Summer Games in London is simple. The overseers of the five interlocking rings two week corporate bazaar were upset that Major League Baseball didn’t want to play ball with them and send the game’s best players to compete. MLB didn’t want to shut down the regular season to allow their players to compete in a glorified all-star tournament and the International Olympic Committee delegates decided that golf and rugby were better fits for the competition than baseball and women’s softball.
The International Olympic Committee also went after Major League Baseball by badgering members of Congress in 2003 and 2004 because the self appointed arbitrators of sport didn’t like Major League Baseball’s drug testing policies. These were the same people who took bribes from competing cities in exchange for votes during the bidding between cities for the right to host an Olympics. These were the same people who required host cities to set up what is nothing more than a slush fund to pay for construction overcosts for an Olympics.
The Netherlands team is more than just European trained players. There are some Americans who have Dutch roots and a number of players who are from the Netherlands’ Caribbean territories, Aruba, the Netherlands Antilles and Curacao.
Major League Baseball blew an opportunity to establish a footprint on the European continent in 1992 when the owners and the players association could not come up with a payment formula for members of the New York Mets and St. Louis Cardinals to play a few spring training games in Barcelona as a prelude to the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics. The IOC in those days classified baseball as demonstration sport. The Mets and Cardinals Barcelona series never took place.
Major League Baseball officials would like to get into Europe. Mike Piazza has been spreading the baseball gospel in Italy and one of baseball’s newest Hall of Fame members, Dutch born but California raised Bert Blyleven is also trying to raise baseball awareness in the Netherlands. MLB looked into the possibility of holding games in Italy in 2012.
Baseball like other North American based sports is feeling the need to go global. Later this month four NHL teams including the New York Rangers will start the regular season with games in Stockholm, Sweden, Helsinki, Finland and Berlin, Germany. The four teams will also spend part of training camp in Europe. The National Basketball Association, currently in a lockout mode, sent the New Jersey Nets and the Toronto Raptors to London for a pair of games last March. The NBA has a significant footprint in Europe and NBA Commissioner David Stern has long been an advocate of establishing an NBA European division but the league has not been able to find the right cities for the plan to work.
Only London and Berlin seem to have the “North American” style building that Stern seeks. Coincidentally the London and Berlin buildings are run by AEG, the Los Angeles based entertainment company headed by Phil Anschutz. Anschutz owns the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings (Anschutz’s Kings will play in the NHL’s Berlin opener) and a piece of the LA Lakers. A couple of years ago, Stern felt London, Berlin and Rome, Italy could support NBA teams.
Both hockey and basketball are well established entities in Europe. Both the NHL and NBA have European trained athletes in the leagues. MLB had just two Dutch born players on active rosters in 2011, Seattle outfielder Greg Halman and Baltimore pitcher Rick VanderHurk.
A guy by the name of Derek Jeter won the Yankees shortstop position in 1996 beating out the Dutch born Robert Eenhoorn for the job.
Eenhoorn now runs the Dutch baseball program.
Major League Baseball is looking for new markets; the Netherlands, Italy, Ghana and India are on the industry’s radar. The International Baseball Federation once had the Netherlands ranked as high as sixth in the group’s ranking of baseball powers.
The view from the soaring plane of four baseball diamonds is rather impressive for MLB. You just don’t find many baseball fields in Europe but there are at least four in the Netherlands that you can see from the sky and there probably are quite a few more scattered around the country.

The Netherlands wants a Major League Honkball game or two in 2014. MLB would gladly provide them with a few games in exchange for a considerable amount of euros. That’s what sports is all about anyway, dollars, loonies, pesos, euro, yen, yuan and how to maximize whatever currency into the business.
The Netherlands is calling, now it is up to the country to get the right stadium and the right amount of Euros together for Major League Honkball.
Evan Weiner,the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or Amazon Kindle.

2011-08-23T11:42:00.000-07:00

Discarded NFL players continue the fight for health insurance

Monday, 22 August 2011 19:34

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/discarded-nfl-players-continue-the-fight-for-health-insurance

BY EVAN WEINER

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS

There may be a cruel irony in play for disabled and discarded former National Football League players if a New York Post report is correct that MetLife is about ready to sign a multimillion dollar, multi-year deal to become the naming rights sponsor of the New Meadowlands Stadium. MetLife could be throwing as much as $20 million annually or $400 million over 20 years into the pockets of the stadium owners, the New York Jets Woody Johnson and the New York Giants Mara and Tisch families. But in a good many cases, a large percentage of former NFL players who suffered life altering injuries playing for teams like the Jets and Giants and the other 30 franchises would never be able to get a life insurance policy from MetLife.

MetLife has been a stadium sponsor since the new facility opened last year and apparently is just "upgrading" from a "cornerstone sponsor" to the naming rights sponsor. Some company figures to replace MetLife as “cornerstone sponsor” if the New York-based insurance company upgrades. Despite the media frenzy or the cable TV and talk radio carnival barkers who want to grab attention for ratings purposes that the economic sky is falling and we will be facing a double dip recession (cable TV news anchors and talk radio show hosts are economic experts just ask them), insurance companies seem to have a lot of disposable income for what probably is best described as vanity sponsorship.

MetLife is already part of the New Meadowlands Stadium landscape for a reported $7 million a year as a "cornerstone sponsor." In Los Angeles, the Anschutz Entertainment Group has sold naming rights for a proposed downtown football stadium to the Farmers Insurance Group, a Swiss company with Los Angeles headquarters. The Farmers-Anschutz Entertainment agreement is reportedly a 30-year deal with Farmers kicking in over $700 million during the length of the contract.

If the reports are correct, insurance companies will be spending over a billion dollars over a couple of decades to throw their names on top of two facilities that are used less than 30 times a year. MetLife's sports sponsorship includes plastering the company's name on blimps that over-the-air and cable TV networks use to provide aerial shots of stadiums and other sports venues.

Again there is a cruel irony in this for the former players as they probably could not get life insurance from the Farmers Insurance Group because of pre-existing injuries suffered while playing for the Los Angeles Chargers, Los Angeles Raiders and Los Angeles Rams of both the American and National Football Leagues.

The former players still have no idea if the National Football League Players Association got them any real long term health benefits from the recently concluded National Football League lockout. But the former players seem to be taking no chances that the National Football League Players Association or two decertified versions of the National Football League Players Association have once again failed their long term futures in exchange for short term economic gains.

There have been lawsuits filed and one National Labor Relations Board complaint has been placed in an attempt to change the lives of players who because of football injuries are unable to work or properly function following their careers.

The one action that is not getting much attention a claim filed by former Cleveland Browns player Bernie Parrish with the National Labor Relations Board on July 20, 2011. Parrish doesn't want the NFLPA or the association's executive director DeMaurice Smith representing him in trying to get better post career health and economic benefits from the NFL.

Parrish's involvement with the former players should not be dismissed. A former player rep and one of the founding fathers of the modern day NFLPA during his playing days in the 1960s, Parrish has gotten some results for the former players in their battle with the NFLPA in an effort to get some money steered their ways.

In 2007, Parrish and Hall of Fame defensive back Herb Adderley filed a class action suit on behalf of retired NFL players against the NFLPA and Players, Inc., one of the NFLPA subsidiaries, over retired players' benefits derived from player image and name licensing fees. Even though Parrish was dismissed from the suit as a lead plaintiff, a jury found in favor of the retired players and awarded a $28.1 million judgment against the NFLPA and Players, Inc., including $21 million in punitive damages The NFLPA appealed in February 2009, however both sides settled the case without further litigation.

"Since on or about within the six months prior to the filing and service of this charge, and continuing to date, the above-named labor organization (the NFLPA), by its agents, officers and representatives, has violated the National Labor Relations Act by violating an outstanding Board Order by continuing to try to represent the retired NFL players, including, among others Bernard Parrish," reads the complaint.

The former players have again gone in many directions in trying to secure health and economic benefits after the NFLPA signed "Money Now" collective bargaining agreements with NFL owners and didn't bother with post career benefits.

A number of former NFL players are living on government safety nets such as social security insurance and Medicare long before their 65th birthdays.

Parrish has gone through the courts and won and is now trying the National Labor Relations Board for a remedy. Last week seven former players including the quarterback of the 1985 Chicago Bears Super Bowl squad, Jim McMahon, filed a class action suit against the NFL in a Philadelphia courtroom contending they did not receive proper treatment for concussions and that the league has been concealing links between football and brain injuries. McMahon, Joe Thomas, Ray Easterling, Wayne Radloff, Gerry Freehery, Steve Kiner and Mike Furrey are the players who have their names on this lawsuit.

Another group is also going after benefits that they feel should be theirs led by former Minnesota Vikings player Carl Eller.

Eller and other former players sued both the NFL and the NFL Players Association, contending they were illegally been left out of the latest talks after taking part in court-ordered mediation sessions earlier this year. Eller's group claimed that both sides also conspired to keep benefit levels and pension payments low in the new collective bargaining agreement.

Eller recently circulated a letter among the retirees.

“(The) NFLPA objects to Independent Retiree Organization. Owners offer $33 Million per year to Retirees. The funds would come from the $50 Million that the Leagued informed us about a couple of weeks ago. The $22 Million that is designated for Retirees in the CBA that the NFLPA has the digression to use any way it chooses. Plus another $11 Million of the $50 Million that would be administrated by the League and the Retirees. Another $11 Million of the $50 Million would remain in the hands of the NFLPA which is designated for charities.

"Roughly $44 million per year which is not included in the proposed $.95 Billion to $1.1 Billion designated for Retiree Benefits and Pensions in the CBA is pending decision by the courts. $33 million of that $44 Million to have an Independent organization control it has been agreed on by two of the three parties involved in the Eller Class Litigation. The party that objects is obviously the NFLPA. It is not for naught that I want to bring your attention to these matters. My assumption is that the NFLPA has determined that the retirees individually and as groups are idiots. And that the NFLPA can basically say anything and the Retirees will believe it. Also that by using these basic and simple tactics they can disarm any threat that they may encounter in pursuit of their goal to control Billions of dollars and continue to operate as they have in the past. "

Some of the former retirees have complained that Eller isn't reaching high enough for retirees when compared with Major League Baseball retired players. But the Major League Baseball Players Association had much better leadership with Marvin Miller as Executive Director when you examine the two groups. Miller stressed to his group to think about the future while Ed Garvey and Gene Upshaw demanded "money now."

While the former players continue the fight and some quarrel among themselves, the business and corporate spending on the National Football League continues apace. There are insurance companies ready to spend billions and act like jock sniffers so that some company executives can rub elbows with NFL owners and league officials and players and coaches along with team officials. The fans care only about being entertained or how their monetary investments in fantasy leagues, point spreads over and unders are going by watching endless football shows which feature the same highlights in various degrees of slow motion and numerous anglings or listening to sports talk radio or reading handicappers guides. And some sit comatose in front of their televisions on a Sunday from the start of network pre-game shows in the morning to the final play of Sunday night football while downing beer and eating all sorts of unhealthy snack foods which may raise their health risk and force them to pay more money for life insurance policies from MetLife and Farmers.

This is the NFL Today.

Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

2011-08-06T07:33:00.001-07:00

New York Islanders still have a shot at a new arena

Friday, 05 August 2011 14:53

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/new-york-islanders-still-have-a-shot-at-a-new-arena

BY EVAN WEINER

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS

For the New York Islanders owner Charles Wang, the disappointment of losing an arena referendum in Nassau County last Monday was not the end of the road in terms of getting his Uniondale, New York-based New York Islanders a new arena. It was just a hiccup although if you read hockey writers accounts in both the New York and from the self proclaimed world's best hockey writers market, Toronto, it is all over for Wang. He should pack up and get out even if he has four years left on his lease because it will not happen for the Long Island businessman in Nassau County.

Wang, who spent part of his childhood in Queens, won't ever get a new arena in Nassau County according to the ones with supreme hockey knowledge and in fact one titan of the Toronto hockey writers Parthenon, the noted public policy and economic expert Damien Cox, suggested that the Islanders problems stem from Wang himself. Cox should stick to something he might know about — talking to hockey insiders about proposed trades, coaching or general manager changes — and leave the public policy writing to experts who understand property tax hikes, funding mechanisms for arenas and stadiums and whether a sports venue is an economic engine.

Cox probably has been to a New Jersey Devils game in Newark, New Jersey and if Cox and the rest of the enlightened thinkers who turn out daily rabble about hockey had any understanding of what they try and write about in the business arena of sports, Newark is a perfect place to start an urban policy lesson.

Newark was the apple of the eye of the former owners of the New Jersey Nets back in the 1990s and into the early part of the last decade. The Nets ownership planned to build an arena there and when it didn't happen, the Commissioner of the National Basketball Association David Stern called New Jersey politicians some names and said the politicians "blew it."

Funny thing, the New Jersey Nets franchise of Stern's NBA is using the very land on which the arena that was built after the Nets-Newark arena talk meltdown that the Nets ownership and Newark were planning. The team is renting dates at the building until a Brooklyn arena opens up. The New Jersey Devils ownership jumped into the void and worked out a deal with Newark to build a facility in a public-private partnership.

For Cox and the rest of the hockey hacks, perhaps some facts should be explained to them so they write better columns. In the sports stadium/arena game, no never means no even if voters say no.

Here are some examples of where the voters were sadly mistaken in the voter’s booth after rejecting a sports venue. Seattle, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Charlotte and Ramapo, New York eight miles north of the New Jersey-New York border at Montvale.

In the early 1990s, Major League Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent was terrorizing cities in hopes of getting a new ballpark in places like Cleveland. No new park and your team will be moved. In an awful lot of places the threatening tactics worked. Cleveland can up with a "sin tax" with tax hikes on cigarettes and alcohol to help pay for a new Cleveland baseball park. The explosion of stadium and arena building in the United States started after the 1986 tax reform and owners noticed that a large loophole existed if a municipality put up funding for a building. The municipality could take as little as eight cents out of every dollar earned inside a facility and use that money to pay down the stadium or arena debt.

All the possible relocation threats worked as almost everyone got a new stadium between 1986 and 2011. Only two franchises in baseball are looking for new facilities, the Oakland A's owner Lew Wolff and the Tampa Bay Rays owners. Just about every minor league ballpark has been replaced or renovated since the 1990 Major League-Minor League development pact.

King County, Washington, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania and Milwaukee residents said no to funding ballparks in votes. But the elected officials knew better and put new stadiums in those cities. Washington state lawmakers imposed tax hikes in restaurant, hotel and motel and restaurant tabs to fund a new Mariners home. There was a six county sales tax hike around Milwaukee to fund that city's new ball yard and A deal was crafted for Pittsburgh to build a new baseball facility and a new football stadium.

In the summer of 2010, Ramapo, New York voters overwhelmingly said no to a publicly funded minor league style baseball park only to see the Town Supervisor and the town council nullify the vote. Ramapo residents have no idea what the final tab on the stadium will be but they will be paying for years for a park that was built for a team in a financially shaky independent baseball loop, the CanAm League.

In the 1990s, stadium building was viewed as an economic engine which has over the decades proven to be false. The jobs created are mostly

per diem and minimum wage positions.

Still the stadiums kept being built. Middle and small markets like Nashville, Jacksonville, Charlotte and others began competing with the big boys and one of the biggest, the Los Angeles-Anaheim market, lost two National Football League teams following the 1994 season when Georgia Frontiere took her Anaheim-based Los Angeles Rams to St. Louis and Al Davis moved his Los Angeles Raiders back to Oakland after a deal had been conceptually worked out that would have kept Davis in the Los Angeles area. Art Modell moved his Cleveland Browns to Baltimore after the 1995 season when he was unable to get a new stadium, Cleveland threatened to sue the NFL and viola a deal was worked out, Cleveland built a new stadium and the NFL put an expansion team in the city in 1999. Houston and St. Louis also regained teams.

The National Basketball Association was not beyond using relocation threats. Leslie Alexander wanted to move his Houston Rockets along with his WNBA and indoor football team and flirted with Louisville. Houston voters got the message after saying no to an arena referendum and said yes. Ken Lay, the disgraced Enron CEO is a major player in getting a Houston baseball park approved, there seemed to be annual Larry King "exclusives" back in those days in his USA Today column that insiders told Larry that John McMullen (who also owned the New Jersey Devils) was moving his Astros to Washington.

After George Shinn could not get a new basketball arena built for his Charlotte Hornets, Shinn took his team to New Orleans. Despite voters saying no to a new arena in Charlotte, the city officials worked out a deal to build a new venue in exchange for an expansion franchise.

Wang's biggest deficiency is that he has publicly not taken the threat road and in the stadium/arena game that is a big stick. Nassau County politicians have basically shown Islanders owners like Wang and before that Howard and Ed Millstein and Stephen Gluckstern the door like an overbearing landlord hold an iron clad lease. In the late 1990s, Millstein thought he had a deal to build a new arena and that fell apart.

If Wang wants some leverage, Queens political and business leaders are interested in bringing the team west to the Mets ballpark/tennis center area or work out a deal to share the Brooklyn arena that will house the Nets. Back to Cox, surely he knows that the Toronto Maple Leafs-Raptors home building was half done when Maple Leaf Enterprises took over the basketball-only building and turned it into a multi-use facility.

Nassau County lawmakers are suburbanites and not used to dancing with major league hitters but then again Wang has not been blustery about his problems like former Devils owners, the late John McMullen who never missed liking a city with an arena that was better than the Meadowlands like Hamilton, Ontario or Hoboken. McMullen never did get his Hoboken building constructed but the Devils franchise controls a building in Newark.

A lot of people look at sports as a well, sports. It is a business, Wang will have more shots at the net; all he needs is one to go in while playing the arena game. He was never going to win last week's referendum, his pitch for the building was very weak and National Hockey League Commissioner did not issue the requisite threats. Also Nassau residents have been bombarded with the "nattering nabobs of negativism" — radio talk show hosts and cable TV carnies who constantly rail against the government and government spending. But New York has built four baseball stadiums (Bronx/Yankees, Queens/Mets in a city-state, private partnership, Brooklyn/Cyclones minor league team, Staten island/Yankees minor league team), one very expensive basketball arena in Brooklyn in a heavily subsidized project and has given Madison Square Garden a property tax break for nearly 30 years. There seems to be political will in Queens, maybe some in Brooklyn.

In New Jersey, Newark built an arena, the Jets and Giants with state aid negotiated a deal in a private/public partnership to build a new stadium even as the debt on old Giants stadium approached nine figures. That is how it is, no is never no.

Wang has some leverage and in the stadium/arena game, all you need is leverage even if you have four years left on your lease.

Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

2011-08-02T14:20:00.000-07:00

NFL and NFLPA’s labor woes may not be over yet
TUESDAY, 02 AUGUST 2011 14:04
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/nfl-and-nflpas-labor-woes-may-not-be-over-yet
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
The National Football League owners have a labor agreement with the present members of the reconstituted National Football League Players Association but it appears that the league still has problems with the players association's stance on not helping out former players with their medical needs years after their last game in the league. The league apparently informed Carl Eller's legal team on Friday that the-then decertified National Football League Players Association decided not to take a $500 million offer over ten-years to get retirees life football medical benefits and an uptick in pensions as part of the recently completed collective bargaining agreement.
Eller, the one time member of the Minnesota Vikings "Purple People Eaters" defensive line, has emerged as a key player in the NFL-NFLPA labor agreement. Eller and a number of former players inserted themselves into this year's collective bargaining talks because they felt the league and whatever the NFLPA called themselves in this round of negotiations had failed to provide adequate post football life care in terms of pensions and medical benefits to former players.
There are numerous stories about former National Football League players who cannot function on their own or are suffering from dehabilitating injuries that occurred on the football field but did not come out until they were long retired from the game. A new story has been making the rounds in retired players’ circles about a onetime offensive lineman who played in the American Football Conference.
"(The former player) has gone downhill fast," said his wife. "He’s now on the 88 plan. I can't keep up with him – even with full-time help. We do not need anything financially. YET. But we do need communication and support. I could never have imagined how hard this would be and I pride myself on being a strong cookie. We are living in Crazyland every day!
"Fortunately, (the player) is just as sweet as he has always been. But two of us chase him all day long. He has several self-inflicted wounds: eye, thumb, nose. Minor but of concern. He thinks he’s holding something in his hand all day – nothing there but his hand is clasped. It’s crazy. Even two of us cannot keep up. Last night, I went to take a shower and I forgot to lock the front door. Within 10 minutes he was outside with the TV remote in his hand along with 4 or 5 books (anything he could get his hands on) and in his bare feet walking down a long driveway to get into a neighbor’s mailbox! And Terry cannot go into an assisted living facility at this stage as he’s beyond that and needs round-the-clock supervision to keep him from hurting himself or getting into trouble."
There is another story going around about a one-time offensive lineman in the AFL and NFL who is also totally disabled and is suffering from the same head injuries as his friend, the late John Mackey who died less than a month ago.
That former player’s story seems all too familiar.
The "88 plan" came about after the league and the NLFPA seemed to be shamed into having to do something to help former players. The “88 Plan,” named after John Mackey's Baltimore Colts uniform number, came about after it was revealed that the Pro Football Hall of Famer and one time NFLPA president Mackey was suffering from frontotemporal dementia. The two sides signed off on the following the 2006 CBA singing. The "88 plan" provides up to $88,000 a year for nursing care or day care for ex-players with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, or $50,000 for home care.
Not everyone can qualify for the "88 Plan" or other post career benefits. There is a panel made up of NFL management types and former players that rules on who gets money and treatment and who doesn't. It is a very complex issue that seems to have no solution.
The players association has always been about "Money Now". In 1982, NFLPA Executive Director Ed Garvey along with his then assistant, the former Oakland Raiders player, Gene Upshaw and the rest of the staff used the slogan "Money Now" to hammer their point across in that year's NFLPA strike. The NFLPA wanted the money in 1982 and didn't strive for any real post-career benefits. The Hall of Fame defensive back Herb Adderley is getting about $175 a month in pension. Wayne Hawkins, a long time offensive lineman in the American Football League, gets slightly more than $200 a month. To qualify for any kind of care, a player has to last three years.
The NFLPA, not the NFL owners, has failed to live up to a union/association's responsibility to get the best deal possible and that doesn't necessarily mean money now. In a rough world of pro football where exaggerated toughness commands respect there comes a price. The NFLPA has constantly ignored players once they go into the civilian world. The former players have blamed the NFL owners for their indifference but the NFL owners are not obligated to do anything for their former employees. They have been engaged in the collective bargaining process for more than five decades. The owners aren’t angels and in fact did not initially recognize any players association or union in the late 1950s.
The NFL ownership group, hardly a bastion of liberal and enlightened thinkers, understands that there is a need to collectively bargain with the players and has apparently offered mechanisms to take care of players who have suffered lifelong injuries related to the industry. The NFL may also face other legal suits. Seventy five former players including one time New York Giants running back and Super Bowl MVP O. J. Anderson are suing the league claiming that the NFL deliberately held back information that concussions had long term health effects.
The American public has been taking care of some players through Medicare and Social Security Insurance for years unknowingly. Players have turned to the government because they are uninsurable because of pre-existing injuries that they suffered on the field. It is not unknown how many players are on the Medicare or Social Security rolls long before their 65th birthdays because most of the severely injured players never come forth and go public about their National Football League or American Football League related injuries. There are few players still alive who played in the All American Football Conference between 1946 and 1949 who can discuss whether they had life impacting injuries from football. Other players who may have been saved by the American safety net include those who have played high school and college football, indoor football, minor league football and those who were in the World Football league, the United States Football League and the various incarnations of the World League of American Football which included NFL Europa.
It is an industry wide problem.
The former players who once were part of the NFLPA seem to have been betrayed by the leadership or were blinded by their agents or the "Money Now" thinking. The players found out that they are not only considered disposable commodities by their teams who tell them to play through injuries, both minor and severe, but by their agents and their association.
The NFL also stands for "Not For Long" in many cases.
The former players are fragmented which is a problem and there are often a good many agendas that are being put forth by people who are trying to rectify untenable situations. The NFLPA may have wanted to reach out to the former players in a public relations ploy and went as far as almost offering them a seat at the collective bargaining table. In the end, the NFL owners led by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and the decertified NFLPA led by Executive Director DeMaurice Smith came up with an agreement that allowed training camps to open a little late and persevered the 2011 season without the retirees having a seat.

There is a legacy fund to take care of former players in the new agreement although no one seems to know how it will work. Perhaps the league's insurance groups will take some of the severely injured players off of the Medicare and Social Security rolls and replace that with better health care and pension benefits. Perhaps is a big word though. This isn't silly stuff like "Spygate" where New England Patriots coach Bill Belichek was videotaping run throughs or the other inane stories that are manufactured throughout a football season about one team really hating another team. This is real life and the lawsuits that are being pushed might have be avoidable if the players had better advice.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

2011-07-29T20:22:00.000-07:00

Is the United Football League done?

Friday, 29 July 2011 14:21

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/is-the-united-football-league-done

BY EVAN WEINER

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS

It probably has not been a good business year for the former Google executive Tim Armstrong. After leaving Google, Armstrong took over America Online and decided to put together a new football league called the United Football League. Armstrong's AOL is still floundering and is not in any better shape after Time Warner made the decision to jettison the one time gold standard in Internet service. The United Football League seems to be, using a boxing parlance, taking a standing eight count just awaiting the knockout blow.

The United Football League was heavily in debt when the 2010 season closed and has not cleared up the financial problems. The 2011 training camp season for the league's five teams has been postponed as has the league's planned August kickoff. There is a question of just how many teams will be on the field if there is a 2011 season.

Will Hartford field a team? As of Wednesday, the answer seemed to be yes, maybe, well maybe not. The United Football League has been, to say kindly, a work in progress since the announcement in 2007 that a group of well heeled, well connected investors including the husband of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Paul Pelosi whose wife Nancy wielded the gavel in Washington, and Armstrong.

The league had a plan to start in 2008. The United Football League missed the target and began playing games in 2009. The present Hartford franchise was located in New York with the plan to use the Mets new baseball stadium in Queens named after a taxpayers bailed out bank who bought naming rights from Mets owner Fred Wilpon while the stadium was being planned and constructed.

Team owner William Mayer never did get a deal done with Wilpon and ended up playing one game at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ, one game at Hofstra's football stadium in Nassau County and one game in Hartford.

Mayer moved the team to Hartford in 2010 and found a local partner, the operators of the Hartford stadium, to invest in the team.

The league "expanded" to Virginia Beach, Virginia in late 2010 but the owner of the Hampton Bay area team, Jim Speros, got out and the league was stuck with an ownerless expansion team. Meanwhile the Orlando-based Florida Tuskers (partially owned by the Tampa Bay Rays Major League Baseball franchise owners) folded last January leaving five teams, Hartford, Las Vegas, Omaha, Sacramento and Virginia Beach. At the time Speros left and Orlando dropped out stories began to surface that the league was not paying some of the league and franchise bills including paying players for the championship game.

The UFL is supposed to be a development league not a National Football League competitor and players contracts with UFL teams in theory end with the UFL's championship game. But after the 2010 season, UFL officials wanted a payment from someone (the player, an NFL team) to release a player that had an opportunity to join an NFL team.

Armstrong had concluded a multimillion dollar deal with Arianna Huffington to combine the Huffington Post and AOL’s version of a newsroom. Meanwhile, they fired a lot of AOL writers and brought on the Huffington Post—a website that prides itself on not paying all of the writers at the time the stories about players not being paid started to leak.

The United Football League probably will be a case study one day in sports business management programs in colleges and universities in the United States. The league's apparent failure fits a narrative laid down by National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern.

Stern's formula for being a successful league and franchise can be best explained by looking at a three legged stool. A stool needs three legs to be operational.

A league, a franchise, needs three components or legs to make it work. Government, a large cable TV contract (regional and national sports networks are placed on a bundled expanded tier with other cable TV networks and the consumer pays for all of those networks whether that consumer wants the network or not as part of the tier thanks to Congress and President Ronald Reagan's signature in 1984) and corporate support (buying luxury boxes and club seats and dining at venues and claiming going to games as a business expense and getting tax breaks under federal law).

The UFL apparently has failed on all three counts.

Armstrong and league officials had no leverage strong arming politicians in making demands for new stadiums and getting 92 cents of every dollar generated in the facility to flow back into the league or individual owners. Mayer used three stadiums in 2009 for the New York Sentinels and settled on Hartford.

Hartford is a problem for a league made up of mid-level American cities looking for a large local cable TV deal. The regional sports networks in New York and Boston probably would not be interested in Hartford games at a premium price although a couple of Colonials games ended up on the Boston Red Sox, Boston Bruins owned New England Sports Network. The same holds true for Comcast's Sacramento region sports network, or Comcast's Mid-Atlantic sports network or MASN in the Virginia Beach territory. Las Vegas is part of the Los Angeles regional sports channel’s reach and Omaha is not enough of a draw for any Midwest sports channel to pay big dollars.

The league played games all over the calendar and flew under the radar in terms of scheduling games on Friday night and Saturday during the fall. The NFL doesn't play on Friday nights or during the day and not on Saturdays during the high school and college football seasons in a trade off for an antitrust exemption for television purposes. The NFL never plays a regular season game on Friday nights and presents Saturday games starting in mid-December.

The league never was able to land a big national cable TV contract and there was little hope for a national over-the-air network to pay any sizeable rights fees for an entity which in 2009 was located in New York, Sacramento, Orlando and Las Vegas. Mark Cuban's HD Net and Comcast's Versus had television rights.

In 2010, Hartford, Las Vegas, Omaha, Orlando and Sacramento had teams. Again that really is not appealing in terms of national footprint.

The UFL wanted fans not customers and pushed the league as a good place to watch football at a fraction of the price of NFL tickets. That doesn't work anymore in the world of big time sports. Attendance was poor in many spots.

There have been many "rival" football leagues that tried to gain a piece of the professional marketplace. There were four versions of the American Football League. The second version of the American Football League featured the Cleveland Rams in 1936. The Rams franchise jumped to the NFL in 1937 (that franchise moved to Los Angeles in 1946, Anaheim in 1980 and St. Louis in 1995). The All American Football Conference lasted four years between 1946 and 1949. The NFL took three of the AAFC's franchises, the Cleveland Browns (another Cleveland franchise that ultimately failed and was moved by the owner Art Modell to Baltimore in 1996), the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Colts (a franchise that went to New York in 1951, Dallas in 1952, back to Baltimore in 1953 and Indianapolis in 1984). AFL IV, which was bankrolled starting in 1965 by David Sarnoff’s NBC-TV, merged with the NFL in 1966 with the NFL taking all ten of the AFL's teams in 1970.

Other rivals perished.

The World Football League folded in 1975 after nearly a two-year run. The NFL moved the Pro Bowl to Hawaii after the WFL ended perhaps as a thank you to Hawaiian land developer Chris Hemmeter, the WFL owner who put the league out of business. The United States Football League had a three year go between 1983 and 1985. The USFL sued the NFL on antitrust grounds in a lawsuit headed by Donald Trump in 1986. The league won the lost suit (the battle) but Trump lost the war as a jury gave Trump's league a dollar in damages (apparently Trump's lead attorney Harvey Myerson did a great job getting the court win but messed up after the jury came back with a one dollar damage fee by not asking the jurors why they came up with the dollar figure while he had the opportunity).

Trump pushed the lawsuit while the NFL was looking for another solution which would have included taking two USFL franchises into the league. It was thought that Baltimore and Oakland (replacing two NFL franchises that moved to different cities) were the two markets the NFL wanted.

The NFL did not want Trump.

The International Football League and the Professional Spring Football League never got off the ground. In 2000, Bill Futterer's Spring Football League played a few games and then folded. Vince McMahon's spring time XFL was backed by General Electric's NBC network with dollars and exposure but the league folded shortly after the completion of the 2001 season. NBC Sports executive Ken Schanzer pulled the plug on McMahon and the XFL.

The XFL had a cable TV deal with TNN at the time and ESPN was allegedly very interested in the league for the 2002 season according to one prominent XFL official who still rues the day that Schanzer ended the XFL. According to that insider Schanzer didn't want a GE-NBC property on ESPN and he simply folded the league. The XFL would have been a cable only entity in 2002.

UFL officials knew the financial history of rival leagues and decided to test the marketplace for football in a crowded football environment in 2008 (just before the collapse of Lehman Brothers) in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. The UFL pulled back in 2008 and did not play until 2009. The league is supposed to announce plans for 2011 by August 15.

By that time only the owners, coaches, players and UFL personnel and their families will be the only ones caring if the league folds or plods through another year.

Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

2011-07-26T20:02:00.000-07:00

NFL is back and so is the business of football
TUESDAY, 26 JULY 2011 16:41

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/the-nfl-is-back-and-so-is-the-business-of-football
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
To the relief of a great many beers distributors, snack food vendors, per diem workers who are employed 10 days a year by NFL teams, fantasy football players, bookies, rather office pool organizers, casino operators in Nevada and those who cannot move from their couches for up to 12 hours at a time on Sunday because they are too busy watching football, the National Football League is back in business.
FOX's Rupert Murdoch, CBS' Sumner Redstone, General Electric's Jeffrey Immelt (NBC’s head prior to the Comcast takeover of the Peacock Network), The Walt Disney Company's Robert Iger and DirecTV executives don't have to explain to anyone including a federal judge in Minnesota why they were willing to underwrite the NFL owners lockout. Iger heads up Disney and one of Disney's companies is ESPN. That cable network would have put up money for the 2011 NFL season using subscribers’ money. Only about a tenth (and that is being generous) of ESPN subscribers watch football yet 100 percent pays and that is permissible thanks to the 1984 Cable TV legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. People who have no interest in the NFL would have helped support the owners lockout. That law allowed cable TV multiple systems operators to choose what networks they wanted on a basic expanded tier and sell them as one. The legislation probably saved ESPN, CNN, MTV and others from financial ruin.
The NFL owners lockout—which may have been prompted by some owners whose teams play in old facilities like New Jersey's Zygi Wilf's Minnesota Vikings who could not keep up with a salary floor—is over. It is unclear whether the new collective bargaining agreement will address that issue. With the end of the lockout, NFL owners can go back and demand new taxpayers assisted stadiums where needed. The NFL owners as part of the lockout ploy told the San Francisco 49ers ownership not to look for money to pay off the 49ers share of the costs a planned Santa Clara, California stadium because the league owners wanted the players to pay for part of the construction costs.
The players trade association, formerly known as the National Football League Players Association, never helped out broken down old players so it might have been a bit much to expect them to hand over money to owners to help build football facilities. The NFLPA didn't recognize in many cases that some of the retired players with very serious injuries that were sustained during their NFL careers ended up in government social safety nets long before their 65th birthdays such as Medicare and Social Security.
NFL owners and the NFLPA should have collectively bargained long term health care for players but that was not an important issue in the past for the NFLPA. The new CBA seems to have some provision to take care of the health of players but until the CBA is fully digested by all, including the retirees, it is unclear how much help those players may get.
The National Football League and by extension—the players—depends on government subsidies and handouts. The deal with the players is done and now it is time for the league to get new facilities in San Diego, Santa Clara, Oakland (the San Francisco Bay Area), Los Angeles, Minneapolis or Ramsey County, Minnesota and see what can be done with the Buffalo Bills franchise. Arthur Blank is seeking a new facility for his Atlanta Falcons franchise as 19 year old domed stadium that houses his team is quickly becoming antiquated and New York realtor Stephen Ross is stuck with a 24 year old, although updated, facility which is no longer suitable for a Super Bowl outside of Miami.
The mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford—who seems to fit in with the United States Tea Party movement in that he wants to slash services to the bone but not raise taxes for those who can afford a slight increase—may be open to finding public funding to build a National Football League state of the art facility in Canada's financial capital. Ford seems to be like a lot of politicians. Slash spending, cut public jobs and don't raise taxes on the very rich and if you can give the very rich tax breaks for sports facilities go for it. Political leaders in both parties in Minnesota are trying to build Wilf a taxpayers funded facility in some sort of public-private partnership. In Santa Clara, hundreds of millions of public dollars have been set aside for the 49ers planned facility. Louisiana is still giving New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson cash handouts and New York is doing likewise for Buffalo's Ralph Wilson while cutting services. Florida politicians are seeking a way to help Ross and the NFL’s sad plight.
The 1986 changes in the tax code altered American sports. President Reagan's signature gave owners who played in taxpayers built facilities after 1986 an opportunity to get up to 92 cents on every dollar generated in the building with just as little as eight cents going to pay down the facility's debt. It was great news for owners and a massive expansion of American sports would ensue.
Since the changed occurred, the National Basketball Association has grown from 23 to 30 teams, Major League Baseball has added four teams and in 1990, Major League Baseball signed a new deal with minor league baseball operators which forced cities to renovate or build new minor league parks or risk losing the minor league team. The National Hockey League went from 21 to 30 teams and some franchises were relocated. The 28 team National Football league also expanded and ended up with 32 teams. Major League Soccer was formed and MLS owners are also at the public trough claiming their fair share of tax dollars for stadium construction.

The NFL expansion process started in 1991 and started a chain reaction of events that included creating four expansion teams (Carolina, Jacksonville, Cleveland and Hpuston) and the movement of the Anaheim-based Los Angeles Rams to St. Louis and Art Modell's Cleveland Browns to Baltimore. There was also the transfer of the Houston Oilers franchise to Nashville, Tennessee and Al Davis' Los Angeles Raiders to Oakland. The most eye opening franchise-government deal that evolved out of the 1991 expansion was the $186.5 million 2001 agreement between Louisiana and New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson that assured Benson would keep his team in the Superdome even though he had an existing long term contract that bounded him to the building. Benson got $186.5 million from cash strapped Louisiana to stay in the city between 2002 and 2010.
In 1991, Baltimore, St. Louis, Memphis, Charlotte and Jacksonville decided to go after an NFL expansion franchise. The NFL never really expanded in the "modern" era (1956-present) because league owners like Chicago's George Halas, Pittsburgh's Art Rooney, and the Mara family's New York Giants had no inkling as to how to market and grow the NFL. Instead expansion was always a reaction to market pressures. When Lamar Hunt was unable to purchase the Chicago Cardinals or get an NFL expansion team in Dallas in 1959, he decided to start the American Football League. The NFL responded by expanding to Dallas and Minneapolis. In the mid-1960s, the NFL went into Atlanta to deny Hunt's league an opportunity to establish a team in that city. In 1966, the NFL granted New Orleans a franchise in exchange for Congressional approval of the AFL-NFL merger and in the 1970s, the NFL expanded to Seattle and Tampa to take potential markets out of circulation for the fledgling World Football League There was no outside pressure to expand in 1991 except there was money on the table and other owners could see what cities were willing to do to get an NFL team.
The NFL found out in a hurry that cities would be willing to pay a ransom for a team.
The league liked Charlotte and the possibility that a former player—Jerry Richardson—would own the franchise. Richardson didn't need much public money because the team was going to get ticket buyers to pay twice for seats and that would pay for the construction of the facility. Richardson's "personal seat licensing" scheme required ticket holders to buy a stadium seat over a set amount of years and then pay for a football game. NFL owners were impressed by the pricing mechanism and awarded Richardson a franchise but the NFL wanted two expansion teams and the 28 owners would split up $280 million with each owner getting a $10 million payment.
Boogie Weinglass and the author Tom Clancy pursued a Baltimore franchise. Weinglass presented a proposal that Maryland would build a stadium and the team would be well supported even though Robert Irsay moved out of the city in 1984 and NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue soured on the city that was more interested in building libraries than a football stadium.
"The problem was that the fans loved the (former team) Colts too much," said Weinglass in 1991. "And when we began to have the reverses (the team wasn't winning), they reacted very badly (attendance dropped) and the underlined feeling was that it was impossible that we would lose the team. In fact we did.
"They (the owners) said that it wasn't a factor (the team moving)."
Weinglass was competing with two other Baltimore groups for the franchise. They all failed but the Baltimore/Maryland stadium bid was circulated within the NFL. Baltimore was offering a stadium complete with the requisite state of the art luxury boxes, club seats, restaurants, concessions with major revenue streams. The stadium would be paid through a combination of municipal resources including proceeds from the Maryland lottery.
The NFL said no to an expansion team but the terms of the Maryland deal was too good for Art Modell to pass up. In 1995, Modell took the offer (which included a multi-million loan to Modell) and made Weinglass a bit of a prophet.

"The fact of the matter is, the primary basis the league is going to make its decision is what city can make the most money for the league and I think Baltimore can make more money for the league than any other town (in 1991, Memphis, Jacksonville, St. Louis and Charlotte),” said Weinglass. “ (Baltimore) is a bigger city. It's bigger than Charlotte, bigger than San Antonio (which wasn't a serious bidder), we have done all the surveys that show we can fill a 70,000 seat stadium, we have a great big television market, one of the biggest in America. We got all the buttons pushed."
Baltimore has succeeded despite the fact that the market is surrounded by Philadelphia and Washington. The team is looking to expand market share and co-exist with the Redskins in a shared market status like the Giants and Jets in New York and the 49ers and Raiders in the San Francisco Bay Area market. Because of NFL rules not every Ravens game is seen on Washington TV which is 40 miles away nor is every Redskins game is shown on Baltimore TV.
Redskins and Ravens ownership would like to get same market status which would include no scheduling of home games at the same time in both cities. Major League Baseball has given Baltimore and Washington same market status and the United States Olympic Committee considered Baltimore-Washington one market in the bidding for the 2012 Summer Olympics.
It was thought that NFL marketing partner Anheuser Busch would be the deciding factor in St. Louis landing an expansion franchise in 1993. That was a concern for other bidders given AB's cozy relationship with the city of St. Louis and the NFL. But St. Louis was a failed NFL market. Bill Bidwill left town after the 1987 football season and went to Tempe, Arizona. That was a black mark against the city because St. Louis refused to build Bidwill a new football facility. After Bidwill left, Missouri, St. Louis County and the city of St. Louis socked away $258 million for a 70,000 seat domed football facility. The city was willing to help pay some of the costs for an expansion team. Some of the money was going to come from a motel-hotel sales tax hike.
"Central to our application was the stadium," said Jerry Clinton. "The others things that are naturally inherent are the size of our television market. We are the 18th largest TV market in the country. Our market is larger than 35 percent of the markets that currently possess National Football League teams. The, of course, all those things we inherit because of our location and population. We are nearly two a half million people, our location is exactly the population center of the United States, we are accessible, we fit expansion and division realignment in any direction, north, south, east or west, we are always compatible with NFC or AFC plans. On top of them we have a very solid ownership with Walter Payton and Jim Orthwein (the great grandson of AB's founder Adolphus Busch). I think that has to be considered very heavily too.”
Anheuser Busch didn't have much sway over the NFL owners. St. Louis failed. Charlotte was an area that the league really wanted and got the 29th franchise. But number 30 was a fight between Baltimore, St. Louis and Jacksonville. Memphis was not seriously considered.
Wayne Weaver got involved in the Jacksonville bid before the NFL solicited interested people in what amounted to an auction for two franchises. Jacksonville was looked upon as a huge growth city by football people including Robert Irsay who thought about moving his Baltimore Colts to the town as well as Houston's Bud Adams. Neither did but Jacksonville remained attractive.
"We had our mayor with us, Mayor Ed Austin," said Weaver knowing that political support was a major component of any bid back in 1991. "We had our city council president, Warren Jones, we had the gentleman who will renovate our Gator Bowl, the biggest contractor in the southeastern United States, Preston Haskell, and our president David Seldin.
"We have three qualities that we think we set us apart from the other candidate cities and that's what we talked about today. We think we have the best football fans in America. The second thing we talked about and what sets us apart from the competing candidate cities is that we have the only game in town. We have no competition from other major league franchises. I am not sure anybody can make that statement. We have no competition from college sports which Memphis has. We have no competition from other major league franchises and we think the only game in town aspect is an important ingredient. Finally and most importantly was the local ownership group issue. We have the financial credentials to qualify for an NFL expansion team and we made that very clear."
"It is very true that Florida is a very proactive sports state. One of the presenters today (in 1991) in our video is Governor Lawton Chiles, he is truly a supporter of NFL football in Jacksonville. Jacksonville is Florida's city of choice for the NFL. Simply put, the state of Florida is a partner in this quest. The state legislature has put together legislation that encourages and financially supports stadiums for sports in the state of Florida. The (baseball) Marlins are the latest example. We think Jacksonville will be the latest example of why we can compete because we have, among other things, the state of Florida as a financial partner. There are no tax dollars involved, it is a sales tax abatement there is no general revenue taxes involved in the state of Florida."
Jacksonville won the race and got a franchise. But it has been very tough sledding in recent years with rumors that Weaver is ready to pick up and move elsewhere. The stadium seating capacity has been cut and the rough northern Florida economy is not helping the franchise. Still Weaver has made it clear he wants to remain in Jacksonville. But Los Angeles interests have targeted Weaver and plan to try and entice him to move.
Neither Los Angeles nor Anaheim has had an NFL team since the end of the 1994 season. Georgia Frontiere did her 15 years in Anaheim and when a better stadium deal did not develop, she opted to take the St. Louis offer that was still on the table after the NFL gave Charlotte and Jacksonville teams. Raiders owner Al Davis could have had the LA market to himself but negotiations between the NFL, Davis and Hollywood Park racetrack in Inglewood broke down after a deal looked to be coming together.
Davis and the league were going to be what can best be described as partners in the deal. The NFL would award the stadium five Super Bowls in 10 years to get back some of the money Davis and the league were going to put up for the facility. Davis would get revenues from luxury boxes, club seats and concessions. But the NFL decided that five Super Bowls in 10 years was too much for LA and scaled back to three and then just one. Davis would only be the sole tenant for one year with another team moving in and sharing revenues from luxury boxes, club seats and concessions. Those were deal breakers and Davis moved back to Oakland. The NFL is more responsible for having no team in LA than Al Davis.
The LA area lost both teams but unlike Cleveland, they didn’t threaten to sue and replace a team. The NFL expanded into Cleveland after getting a deal done for a new stadium and the new Cleveland Browns started play in 1999. Los Angeles was given a 2002 condition expansion franchise if a stadium was built. There was no available funding for a building like Houston had, so the NFL gave the fourth expansion team to Bob McNair and Houston.
Davis is looking for a new stadium deal as Oakland has not been a panacea for the team money-wise. His Oakland deal is up after 2013.
Los Angeles' Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) has told LA city officials they better sign off on a deal to help finance a new football stadium by July 31 and cash strapped Los Angeles seems to be ready to make a deal.
AEG has a list of targeted owners including Stan Kroenke who has the St. Louis Rams. There was a provision in the Georgia Frontiere-St. Louis 20 year contract (which is done in 2014) that probably will come back and haunt the city, county and state. The Rams franchise has to be in the upper quarter or top eight in stadium revenue generation. A 20-year-old facility cannot compete with new places like the New Meadowlands Stadium or Jerry Jones' Dallas Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas. St. Louis may run into the Louisiana problem of 1999 and 2000 when Benson complained that the Superdome was no longer in the top 4 of NFL revenue generators and had fallen to the bottom and needed help or he would have to move.

Ironically it was new stadiums in St. Louis, Jacksonville and Baltimore that helped cause Benson's woes. The new stadiums were cash cows for owners; those owners spent money for scouting staffs and coaches. Baltimore and St. Louis won Super Bowls; Jacksonville was a Super Bowl contender. Benson went to the state house in Baton Rouge and find willing partners in both houses of the legislature and Governor Mike Foster. The Rams franchise may need a handout or might be available for some new facility in 2015.
The NFL is back, although it never went anywhere. No games were missed, the three day draft was held in April and people had to pay for their seats on time or risk losing them. That's the way NFL business operates and the business operations will soon be on display in Santa Clara, Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Toronto, St. Paul, Minnesota and maybe in Jacksonville, South Florida, Atlanta and Buffalo with one certainty: the billionaire owners will be looking for tax breaks for their football businesses which really don't do all that much for the economy.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

2011-07-22T18:12:00.000-07:00

Baseball Hall of Fame is incomplete without Curt Flood and Marvin Miller

Thursday, 21 July 2011 16:49

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/baseball-hall-of-fame-is-incomplete-without-curt-flood-and-marvin-miller

BY EVAN WEINER

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS

There will be a few new plaques hanging in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York as of this weekend but the baseball equivalent of the Smithsonian really is not a complete museum. Unlike the basketball shrine in Springfield, Massachusetts (which included Larry Fleischer who was the first Executive Director of the National Basketball Players Association as a builder) and the hockey Valhalla in Toronto, Ontario (a museum which inducted Alan Eagleson who founded the National Hockey League Players Association until he was booted for illegal activities), the Cooperstown museum has no room for perceived enemies of baseball like Marvin Miller, the founder of the Major League Baseball Players Association or Curt Flood who challenged baseball's reserve clause. Miller and Flood were major contributors to the game but perhaps they did it in a negative way. Cooperstown does honor two-bit baseball scribes for their contributions for providing baseball propaganda and inducts them into a special wing very year.

Miller just missed being elected into the Cooperstown shrine this year. Apparently there are still resentments from certain segments of baseball that linger. Flood has never been considered a serious candidate for an inclusion as a player.

Roberto Alomar and Bert Blyleven were voted into the Hall of Fame by baseball's ultimate sycophants--the Baseball Writers of America- last winter. Pat Gillick, a former General Manager whose stops included a stint with the Philadelphia Phillies was voted in by the veteran's committee. This year's winner of the writer's award goes to Bill Conlin who worked in Philadelphia. Roland Hemond got the Buck O'Neill lifetime achievement award and one time Montreal Expos and Florida Marlins announcer Dave Van Horne gets the announcers award.

Flood challenged the reserve clause which used to literally bind players in perpetuity to a club until the player was deemed by a general manager to be unnecessary.

"Evan, I am so pleased you said that,' was Curt Flood's response to a question back in the early 1990s when asked about the baseball fan's joy of the winter meetings--which is a meat market for baseball teams who trade human beings for others in the hopes that the teams will improve and yet forget that they trade a human being.” You know you kind of have that feeling many many times that at this huge conference table, these wonderful men sit in front of all these contracts and like cards they deal them out, you know.

"You want a shortstop, you want a shortstop, here's a shortstop and unfortunately every time you move a piece of paper and I want you to think about it now. Every time you move one piece of paper from this seat in front of someone else, Mrs. Flood has to find a new school, a new apartment, a new set of friends. Mrs. Flood has to find a new neighborhood. Enormous things happen when you move one player from one town to another when you trade or sell him.

"Sometimes the owners lose sight of that."

Curt Flood was a really good baseball player who began his career in 1956 with the Cincinnati Redlegs (the franchise owners for some reason lengthened the name from the Reds to Redlegs in the 1950s partially in response to America's "anti-Red", anti-communist mood with the Reds name removed from the logo. The name Reds would return in the 1960s). He played some games with Cincinnati and was traded during the December 1957 winter meetings to St. Louis.

Flood spent 12 years in St. Louis and was dealt on October 7, 1969 to Philadelphia along with Tim McCarver, Byron Browne and Joe Horner for Dick Allen, Cookie Rojas and Jerry Johnson. It was on October 7, 1969 that life would not only change for Flood and the other players involved in the deal but the baseball industry as a whole.

Flood refused to report to Philadelphia for a variety of reasons.

"I think it was a decision that came over many, many years of subtle abuses that people under contract have to live with," he explained. "It seems that when a handful of men own the industry, advantages are taking of the employees that under no other circumstances would you sit still for. That was true in baseball before we had the chance to really seriously negotiate the rest of our lives and I guess over the years and over a period of time where I saw men being traded while they drove to the ballpark and they heard on the radio that they no longer worked for the team that they were going to get ready to go suit up for, they were traded in between doubleheaders, they were traded or sold for one reason or another, after enduring that with a lot of my friends, I'd often wonder what the heck would happen if it even happened to me.

"And in 1969 that happened and after great successes in St. Louis, one of the, I can't call them underling, but it certainly wasn't Mr. (Gussie) Busch, the owner, called me on the phone one morning and said hi Curt, you know you have been traded. You know, that was probably the most important conversation in my lifetime and sure as check, the next day, a messenger delivered an envelope with an index sized card in it and it said 'Dear" and someone types your name in, you have been and there are five possibilities. You might not know that. You could have been sold, traded, optioned or whatever, outright, right and traded was checked.

"In the 13 years in St. Louis, I don't know. I think on top of all of the other situations that I saw happen over my career span that had to be the last kick in the pants that baseball wanted to give me."

Flood was a very good player and had won seven Gold Gloves as the best centerfielder in the National League between 1963 and 1969. He hit .300 or better six times and set defensive records for a centerfielder. He was part of two St. Louis Cardinals World Series championships and was co-captain of the team. But his relationship with Busch and the Cardinals had fallen apart by 1969. One reason? He asked for $100,000 which in those days was given to just a few players like Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Flood’s one time Cardinals teammate Stan Musial.

"I guess a week went by before you say to yourself, this is not a joke, this is serious. You no longer work here. And I guess about a week and I talked to Alan Zerman, who was my attorney then in St. Louis. He said Curt, you know baseball has been doing this to men for 200 years and you are just part of the machinery and there is very little you can do about it. You can challenge this if you want to and it started to germinate then that something illegal had been done to me.

"Something almost inhumane had been done to me. It kind of snowballed from there."

Curt Flood never did report to Philadelphia and filed a lawsuit against Major League Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn in January 1970 contending that Major League Baseball had committed an antitrust violation. Flood made $90,000 in 1969 and gave up a $100,000 deal to play for the Phillies in 1970. Instead Flood became immersed in learning about the Sherman Antitrust Act and baseball's history with the legal system. Marvin Miller and the Major League Baseball Players Association picked up Flood's legal bills.

"I learned a lot about the law system," Flood said. "And how it operates. I guess not playing that one year, it is necessary to be damaged in that one year and that would have done that. As I thought about it later on, I wished I had not played that one year in 1971 (with the Washington Senators) and the only thing that made me do it was (manager) Ted Williams, I love him. He was going to manage in Washington and he called me. I was in Denmark and he called up and said can I come up and see you. I thought he was down in the lobby. He said no I am in Washington. He said I will meet you halfway. So him (Senators owner Robert Short), they were both on the phone together and he said, no, no, I am not in the lobby. First of all, Robert Short said I got some guys on this team, I don't know if they can play baseball or not but I know you can and I will send you a contract, you sign it and you fill it in. Hohohoho, now you are talking.

"I said Mr. Short, you know the situation, you know the problems we are having with the reserve clause, all this thing is being litigated now in New York. He said they talked to Arthur Goldberg who then was my attorney, Justice Goldberg said that whatever decision the Supreme Court had made it, it already decided and there is nothing you can do short of jumping off a building, unquote, that would change their mind. So I did, I called Justice Goldberg and Marvin Miller and they said if you want to play again, I don't think there is anything you can do to hurt your case.

"How many times can you turn down $150,000 a year?

"Once there may I tell you.

"So they gave me the opportunity to play again and I wasn't going to turn that down. I'm a nice guy; I think I deserved to play for the Senators."

But Flood was busy litigating in 1970 and the baseball inactivity took its toll on the then 33-year old Flood in 1971. He retired after just 13 games with Washington.

"Seventy was like a long winter. You were always expect that at any moment you were going to go back to (the St. Louis Cardinals spring training site) St. Petersburg (Florida) and start what you really do for a living. After a while all of this kind of settles in and your mind accepts that you are no longer a baseball player," he recalled. "But I spent most of 1970 in Denmark, in Copenhagen, in a little place called Vivek where these wonderful nice Danish people would say what do you do for a living? I'm a baseball player. They would say no no no what do you do? I’m a baseball player.

"How do you feed your family?' he laughed.”They know so little about baseball that you could travel in circles where you could have complete anonymity which delighted me. So, it was not easy.

"It was getting over, cold turkey, something you have done every year for almost 15 years. It wasn't easy. 1970 was not an easy year."

Ultimately the Supreme Court of the United States ruled against Flood and his challenge of Baseball's reserve clause. Baseball had won again in the Supreme Court. In 1922, the National and the American Leagues got a favorable ruling in a lawsuit filed by the owners of the Baltimore team in the Federal League which provided the leagues with protection from the country's antitrust laws.

"I was flabbergasted because I am an American and I thought like an American and I thought that everyone could see that baseball players were getting the short end of a very short stick," Flood said more than two decades after the decision.

"However I was trying to explain this to men who would give their first born child to wear this uniform for a minute. Just let me touch it, you know, for me to tell them in this culture look at you how you too would have loved to have worn that uniform for me to say there is something wrong in baseball is like defiling the flag.

"The Supreme Court, I guess they felt the same way that being a baseball player is the best of all worlds and I ought to sit down someplace and shut up. The Supreme Court did not say that, they said they were going to leave this decision to someone else."

That someone else would be an arbitrator named Peter Seitz who ruled against baseball's reserve clause in 1975 after two pitchers, Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, played without contracts that season. Both became free agents following the 1975 season and were free to pursue contracts with other teams in 1976.

"I was disappointed (in the Supreme Court decision), I really was," Flood said. "When you look at the issue and the issue is this. Should a man be able to work wherever he wants to? Everyone is shaking their heads yes except if you are a baseball player. If you are a baseball player you have all those fans there who love you. You ought to stay in St. Louis until the owner wants to trade you.

"So I was caught up in the fact that this is America and this is probably the greatest country in the world and you can work in quotes any place you want to with the exception at that time in baseball. Now it's come around (early 1990s) where players are starting to make a fair share of the revenue being made in baseball and that delights me. The press seems to think I had a little to do with it and that pleases me."

Six year minor league players can today opted out of major league organizations and seek a chance elsewhere. Six year major league players can become free agents. Flood was the first player to challenge the reserve clause and before his death in 1997 he talked about whether players like him and Jim Bouton (whose book Ball Four made him the bane of baseball and Commissioner Bowie Kuhn's existence) were still lepers in the baseball community.

"No, no no. Well, you see there is a whole new ownership now but they still feel the pinch of the first and 15th (paydays) that may resent me a little. Many of the things I learned in first few days, when you said what was the first week like, in the first week I learned this," Flood explained. "That you will never be a manager (there was no African-American managers in Major League Baseball's modern history through 1969), you will never be in the Hall of Fame and you probably never play baseball again. There are three important points you have to know if you go through with this lawsuit against baseball and now in retrospect those things have never happened. And for me to say that is the reason why would be to get into the heads of ownership which I cannot do."

Flood did say back in the 1990s he was welcomed back to St. Louis. ”One of my teammates (Dal Maxvill) is the General Manager, one of my teammates (Joe Torre) is the manager and many of my greatest friends in the world that I made over 13 years that I was in St. Louis are in some position with the Cardinals there. Joe Cunningham is still with the Cardinals, Ted Savage is still with the Cardinals so of course I am welcomed there," he said.

Curt Flood was never really embraced by baseball. He was hired by another Bowie Kuhn enemy, Oakland A's owner Charles Finley, to work on Athletics radio in 1978 and was the Commissioner of the short-lived Senior Professional Baseball Association, an entity that lasted two years. Flood became involved with the United Baseball League, an idea that never got beyond the let's do it stage after Rupert Murdoch's FOX Sports merged with Liberty Media. Murdoch had a deal with Major League Baseball at the time.

Flood's lawsuit was filed more than 40 years ago and changed the game. In the 1960s athletes were in some cases activists. Billie Jean King has been marginalized in the 21st century but she fought for equal pay and equal educational opportunities for women in an effort to break the college quota system. The Title IX legislation signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon in 1972 was not a sports act rather an education law which gave women equal access to classes and majors in colleges and universities accepting federal funding. Muhammad Ali stuck to his principles in refusing to go into the armed forces in 1967. John Carlos and Tommie Smith staged a black power protest on the podium at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics which drew the ire of International Olympic Committee head Avery Brundage. All of those athletes were vilified in one way or another in those days. Flood has not been recognized by Cooperstown but his legacy is lasting.

The Curt Flood Act of 1998, signed into law by President Bill Clinton gives baseball players the same rights under American antitrust laws that basketball, football, hockey and soccer players enjoy.

Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

2011-07-18T13:22:00.000-07:00

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp scandal could mean trouble for U.S. sports partners

Monday, 18 July 2011 11:33

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/rupert-murdochs-news-corp-scandal-could-mean-trouble-for-us-sports-partners

BY EVAN WEINER

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS

The National Football League lockout may be winding down but NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, the 31 franchise owners and the Green Bay Packers Board of Directors may be facing a much bigger problem in the very near future if Rupert Murdoch's media business problems in England spread across the Atlantic and hit News Corp properties in the United States.

Murdoch has taken a financial hit which has forced him to buy back a significant share of his company's stock. In the case of the National Football League and Major League Baseball, he doesn't have cable subscriber fees to help pay off the licensing fees to show games on over-the-air television. His cable TV properties have no such problems in that most of the ones that pay huge rights fees to teams are on the basic expanded tier which means all of the people who get basic expanded are paying for what a few watch. It is cable TV socialism that makes Rupert Murdoch's business work, a cable TV socialism bill in the form of a 1984 piece of Congressional legislation signed into law by President Ronald Reagan allows the bundling of cable channels to be sold as one to consumers.

The 1984 cable television legislation seems to be at complete odds with the free market principles espoused by Murdoch's news and financial channels but Murdoch is all about money, not ideology.

In 1993, Murdoch gave the NFL a huge amount of money after his company won bidding rights for National Football Conference telecasts and the marriage seems to have been a happy one for both sides. So much so that Murdoch agreed to help underwrite the 2011 NFL Lockout and provide the owners with money (along with General Electric's NBC, the Walt Disney Company's ESPN, Sumner Redstone's CBS and DirecTV) to get along if there was no 2011 NFL season.

That seems like gratitude but the NFL made that demand of over-the-air, cable and satellite TV networks in the last television negotiations and got the five TV partners to agree to their demands.

Back in 1993, the NFL got billions and Rupert Murdoch was able to get his FOX over-the-air television network (although technically FOX is a syndication arm) off the ground. The NFL gave Murdoch and FOX credibility and once Murdoch got that street cred, he was able to work on other United States projects including the launch of the FOX News Channel.

There has never been any hint of impropriety in Murdoch's sports businesses whether it was with over-the-air network contracts with the National Football League, National Hockey League, Major League Baseball, NASCAR and other properties including the Bowl Championship Series or his relatively brief ownership of the Los Angeles Dodgers at the turn of the century.

(Murdoch's FOX Los Angeles regional cable sports network recently worked a deal with embattled Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, some of the money would come out of subscribers' pockets would have gone to help pay the divorce settlement between Frank McCourt and his soon to be former wife Jamie. The deal was stopped by Selig but someone will eventually get big money for Dodgers TV rights from someone whether that someone is Murdoch or some other Los Angeles cable TV entity)

But make no mistake, Rupert Murdoch and News Corp is heavily invested in American sports and given his seemingly significant problems in London that include the folding of the News of the World newspaper, numerous arrests of News International employees, the resignation of the top cop at Scotland Yard in conjunction phone hacking scandal that is engulfing Murdoch's empire that could be a problem for Goodell, Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig and others.

Do sports leagues want to be associated anymore with Murdoch and what happens if there are complaints about Murdoch's suitability to own TV stations in the United States? What happens to the rights deals that Murdoch's people have worked out with sports leagues and teams?

That may be an issue facing Goodell, Selig and others down the road depending on just how large the News of the World and other Murdoch properties in the UK, US and Australia scandal become. Murdoch has shut down the paper and has seen one of his closest associates arrested. That is not good on the resume for TV station license renewals.

Before the NFL, Murdoch's FOX network was a weak collection of UHF stations with the exception of a few cities like New York, Washington, and Los Angeles. Before the NFL, FOX had a few shows that drew some attention, the It's Gary Shandling's Show, the Tracy Ullman Show and Married With Children. Out of the Ullman show came The Simpsons, Shandling's show originally ran on Showtime and then went to FOX. Ullman's show was canceled in 1990. FOX could not establish a late night talk show, the Joan Rivers experiment was a disaster and a 1993 Chevy Chase late night show as a bomb. Not much worked for Murdoch.

Neither Al Bundy nor Bart Simpson, as popular as the characters would become, could bolster FOX. Murdoch's team was buying TV stations and became the biggest owner of over-the-air stations in the United States but by 1993, it was still the fourth network in a three horse race for ratings behind CBS, NBC and ABC.

The NFL changed all of that. Actually, it was Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys that put Murdoch on the map as Jones and Murdoch negotiated the TV deal that would change everything. The NFL had been prospering from TV rights fees since the 1961 Sports Broadcast Act which allowed the league commissioner, who is also the league's chief negotiator and lobbyist in all things NFL, to bundle the 14 member franchises into one entity in order to negotiate a TV deal. Three decades later, the NFL was a 30 franchise entity with four separate and distinct elements. CBS had the National Football Conference contests and paid slightly more money for the NFC than NBC did for American Football Conference games because the NFC had more major markets. ABC had Monday Night Football and ESPN and Turner Sports split a Sunday night package.

The NFL was being paid $3.6 million over a four year period between 1990 and 1993.

Murdoch's fourth place network was desperate for a game changer and the NFL provided him with an opening. The NFL and Jones were knocked over by Murdoch's bid for the NFC games. Murdoch was willing to fork over $1.58 billion over four years to get the NFC package along with the Super Bowl. Murdoch had a syndication arm but no news division, no sports division, none of the apparatus that CBS, ABC and NBC had. Murdoch knew that the NFL deals with an old philosophy, cash on the barrel head gets serious consideration and because he blew CBS out of the water with his bid, the NFL and Jones knew they would be getting a new partner with a patchwork of big city VHF and small area UHF stations and both sides would have to make it work.

In December 1993, The NFL took the money. In retrospect, it was the right decision but at the time it looked like just a money grab.

In early 1994, Murdoch started to prepare for the 1994 season by quickly established a sports department by giving John Madden an enormous contact and hiring his sidekick Pat Summerall. Murdoch also took Madden's CBS support team and made John feel right at home. Madden would become the face of FOX sports and with the NFL in tow, Murdoch was able to steal VHF stations in Detroit and Milwaukee away from CBS. Murdoch had one of TV's crown jewels, the NFL, and FOX would now be in a position to become a serious player in American TV.

It can be suggested that the success of the NFL and Madden on FOX led to Murdoch to start the FOX News Channel. The over-the-air network, still technically a syndication arm, started producing hits like the X-Files along with Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, In Living Color to go along with The Simpsons and Married With Children. Murdoch didn't have blockbuster ratings but the network was doing okay business and he already had a satellite news network in Europe, Murdoch turned to creating a United States cable TV news channel.

There are no what if questions. The NFL changed the fortunes of both Murdoch and Lawrence Tisch's CBS. In 1993, CBS completed the TV hat trick; it won daytime, prime time and late night ratings. David Letterman had just moved over to the network and things were looking good. But Tisch's CBS did not invest in cable TV, lost the NFL and Madden, football's top star both on and off the field, lost affiliates and would start a downward spiral. Murdoch's FOX Sports added the National Hockey League and Major League Baseball soon after the NFL deal. Eventually Murdoch would gain NASCAR and the Bowl Championship Series. On the cable TV side, Murdoch's regional sports cable networks are still strong despite being challenged by upstarts in the past few years. FOX either owns or has agreements with 24 regionals. There is also a partnership with The Big Ten Network and another with the Pac12 conference.

Murdoch's Fox Soccer Channel has the UEFA Champions League, Premier League, and Serie A among other competitions. Fox Soccer Plus has soccer and rugby programming from around the world. Murdoch's Speed Channel provides NASCAR and F-1 coverage,

Murdoch's Fuel TV presents action sports such as skateboarding, surfing, snowboarding, BMX and FMX.

Murdoch's Fox Deportes provides Spanish-language coverage of UEFA Champions League, Premiere League, and Serie A as well as Beach Soccer and the F.A. Cup. It also presents the Spanish-language Major League Baseball Game of the Week, the All Star Game, and the World Series, as well as division and league playoffs. Fox Deportes probably would not play well with FOX News Channel viewers but Murdoch doesn't really have an ideology except identifying an audience to exploit to make money. FOX Deportes is aimed at Spanish speakers in the United States, some illegal aliens more than likely, not at FOX News Channel watchers.

That's Murdoch.

Rupert Murdoch built over-the-air viable network thanks to throwing money at the NFL, he had built a strong regional sports cable network, he had his news channel and became an American citizen because non American citizens could not own TV networks. Murdoch, the Australian, should not have owned FOX but American President Bill Clinton's Federal Communication Commission in 1995 allowed Murdoch to run FOX because it was "in the best interest of the public."

Murdoch has invested billions in American sports. So far the leagues and teams have said nothing about the events in London. FOX Sports has been above board according to those in the know but league and team operators have to be keeping a close eye on what is going on with the News of the World unraveling because it could have a real impact on their businesses.

Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

2011-07-13T13:30:00.000-07:00

Deron Williams revives NBA players' interest in Europe
WEDNESDAY, 13 JULY 2011 10:23

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/deron-williams-revives-nba-players-interest-in-europe
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
It has been 36 years since high school, college, and the NBA had a legitimate choice when it came to where they wanted to play professional basketball. In 1975, a high school player could go to college or into the American Basketball Association. A college player could leave school early and have either the NBA or the ABA offer him a huge — by 1975 standards — pro contract. And NBA players could jump over to the ABA, and vice versa. Since the NBA's absorption of four ABA teams in 1976, players have been limited in their location choices.
The NBA lockout wants to tighten player movement in free agency and bring down salaries and owners expenses. But the locked players may be looking elsewhere to work if you believe Deron Williams. The New Jersey Nets player is thinking of playing professional ball in Turkey if the National Basketball Association lockout lasts an extended time. But Williams is not the first player in recent time who is considering European basketball.
In 2008, just before the global financial meltdown, some players such as Ben Gordon, who was a restricted free agent, suddenly thought they had a European option. Gordon, the first rookie ever to win the NBA's Sixth Man of the Year Award in 2004-05, considered leaving the NBA for Europe if the circumstances were right.
Gordon ultimately signed a five year contract with Detroit in 2009 foregoing Europe. But the NBA has locked out the players and the hostility between the two sides is evident on individual team websites. Current players have vanished from team sites and are apparently free to play in any other league in the world. It seems that the players are free to go elsewhere like National Hockey League players did in 2004 when NHL owners shut the doors on the players.
"What has been happening this year (2008), especially with the free agents, you are starting to see guys who are using overseas as another option," Gordon said in an interview. "To me, personally, I think it is a beautiful thing that people from all over the world and players from all over the world have a chance to play in the NBA, and players over here a chance to play in Europe.
"When you get a guy like Kobe Bryant mentioning or considering playing overseas, if everything was right, I think it totally changes the whole landscape of basketball."
In 2008, nine NBA players have decided that the league isn't the end-all for them, and have signed with European, Russian, and Israeli teams. No big names crossed the Atlantic but Bryant sent out a message that once he was done with his Lakers contract after the 2009 campaign he thought Italy could be calling him. LeBron James said at that time that he might be open to a European team offer when his deal with the Cleveland Cavaliers ends in 2010. Dwyane Wade's deal with Miami also ended in 2010. In the NBA, there is a salary cap that limits how much money Bryant, James, or Wade can be paid. There is no salary cap in Europe.
None of the three players left the NBA.
"I know, growing up, my dream was to play in the NBA, hands down. It wasn't about the money," Gordon said. "Once you get to the NBA, things begin to change, it becomes more of a business. When you hear players as big as the Kobes and LeBrons talking about the possibility of playing overseas, it [shows it] is more of a business now. They are just not basketball players — now they are businessmen, so they have to think from a different aspect."
James and Bryant are corporations and brand names, and that could have played into the final decision on where they want to play. What if James's shoe partner, Nike, wanted to make him a bigger brand name in Europe and whispers in his ear that it makes sense for him to play in Barcelona or Athens. Because of the partners and the strength of the euro against the American dollar it was conceivable that James could have played in Europe. And Bryant might have ended up owning a team in Italy.
Nothing happened after 2008 but with the NBA out of business it could be a different story. Big name Americans may jump across the pond.
The commissioner of the NBA, David Stern, has spent the better part of the last 10 years promoting European expansion. Originally, Stern envisioned an NBA European league by 2010. Europe is lagging in building NBA state-of-the-art facilities, but more are coming online. London is ready, Berlin has an NBA-style arena opening and Rome may soon follow suit. The other European problem is whether or not local companies will want to pay the price for NBA tickets, and if local cable and satellite TV networks would want to pay a heavy price for the rights to NBA games.
The players who left the NBA in 2008 (the last major migration of NBA players to Europe), for the most part, were Europeans returning home, with the exceptions of Josh Childress, who left the Atlanta Hawks to sign a more lucrative deal with Olympicos in Greece's basketball league, and Carlos Arroyo, who will play with Maccabi Tel Aviv in Israel. Arroyo got a deal that was better than what he would have received with his former team, the Orlando Magic.
The NBA doesn't seem too concerned that Childress or the others have left, and the league has adopted the position that the best players in the world will want to play in the NBA anyway. But eventually wheelbarrows filled with Euros can trump that notion.
Not every elite player can play in the NBA, because of Stern's desire to keep 18-year-olds out of his league. Ultimately, American college basketball could find itself in the same position as it was when elite high school players skipped college and went into the NBA. Brandon Jennings could have been the trailblazer who could upset the applecart.
Jennings didn't play much in Europe but when he came back to the United States after a year overseas, he became a star with Milwaukee. A few other players tried to go Jennings' route but didn’t succeed.
The Jennings signing with Pallacanestro Virtus Roma of the Italian pro league didn’t hurt the NBA and had virtually no impact on college basketball. Jennings was supposed to play as an 18-year-old at the University of Arizona on a college scholarship. Instead, he signed a multiyear contract with an escape clause should an NBA team take him in the 2009 draft. Jennings may have been the best point guard in high school in 2007-08, and under the old collective bargaining agreement, he would have been eligible to be selected that year.

Had Jennings been able to make a smooth transition from being a high school player to living in Rome while playing pro basketball that would have opened up Europe as a pretty good alternative to college basketball in America. Sneaker companies will again be able to sign top American high school basketball players to endorsement deals, and this time, they will be able to showcase the player to a European market. But Jennings didn’t get much playing time and very few followed him overseas.
The timing may be better for a jump across the pond now that the NBA is on hiatus.
"The landscape is changing and the market and climate is a little different than it has been in the past," Gordon said in 2008. He was correct three years ago and is right today: The NBA may still be the best basketball league on the planet, but it has been closed down and it is not the only league willing to pay big salaries, and players and their agents know it.
The NBA lockout may revive an idea that some players were thinking of pursuing in 2008. Go to Europe and play.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

2011-07-08T11:58:00.001-07:00

A sports FAQ guide to NFL and NBA lockouts

FRIDAY, 08 JULY 2011 07:52
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/a-sports-faq-guide-to-nfl-and-nba-lockouts
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
Sports lockouts should come with a frequently asked questions guide for the sports media and sports fans. You see whether it is the National Football League lockout or the National Basketball Association lockout they is a small impact on virtually every American taxpayer and those who a cable TV basic expanded tier subscribers.
There are some questions that need to be answered for everyone. For instance, why are cable TV subscribers underwriting sports owners lockout? The Walt Disney Company plans to pay the National Football League a rights fee whether the NFL plans a full schedule or misses some games. Will cable TV subscribers get any refunds or rebates from ESPN? The answer is no.
National and regional cable TV sports networks have a long history of not refunding subscribers for missed sports programming including the 1998-1999 National Basketball Association lockout. Don't expect any refunds from ESPN, Cablevision's Madison Square Garden Network for missed Knicks games or Comcast for missed Philadelphia 76ers games. Cablevision owns the Knicks and Comcast owns the 76ers.
There are numerous sports owners who either own regional cable TV networks outright like Comcast or pieces of cable TV regional sports networks. In Chicago, Comcast is partners with Jerry Reinsdorf's Chicago Bulls, Reinsdorf's White Sox, the Chicago Cubs ownership and Rocky Wirtz's Chicago Blackhawks in the city's regional sports network.
What kind of economic impact will the lockouts have?
Not as much as people think. A National Football League team has 10 home dates (Buffalo has eight or nine with one regular season game in Toronto depending on the season) while an NBA team might host on average about six games a month between the beginning of November and mid-April to complete a 41 game home schedule. There may be a couple of pre-season games and playoff games. But the overall economic impact is minimal.
Visiting teams don't bring a lot of fans with them to attend NBA games and a typical NBA team sends players, coaches, equipment guys and trainers along with broadcasters on the road. It is not a big traveling party and that means not many hotel rooms are needed and restaurants aren't making a living off of having NBA teams come through.
In 1998-99, Golden State Warriors owner Charles Cohan didn't want to pay rent at the Oakland Arena for missed games during the NBA lockout. The municipally owned arena operators took Cohan to arbitration where he lost. How many owners in both the NFL and NBA will attempt to withhold rent payments?
That should be a FAQ.
Some municipalities will lose some sales tax monies from ticket sales and concessions but municipalities have decided not to collect property taxes on arenas throughout the country. In New York, Philadelphia and in California, municipalities will be denied of the "Michael Jordan tax" and collect taxes from players who are in for a day playing.
Some businesses around arenas and stadiums will lose money and that has caught the attention of the Attorney General of the State of New York. Eric T. Schneiderman claims he is taking action acting on behalf of a handful of businesses and workers whose incomes are threatened if there are no Bills games in Orchard Park.
The Florham Park, N.J.-based New York Jets franchise, which plays games in East Rutherford, will not be holding training camp at Cortland State in central New York.
Schneiderman's office sent NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell a letter informing him that the state plans to investigate the NFL to see if the league, the 31 owners and Green Bay, has violated New York antitrust laws.
The letter overstates the real impact the NFL lockout has on businesses but Schneiderman is the first politician seeking to involve himself in the lockout. Schneider is looking out for hotels, retailers, the New York transportation system of buses and trains and cars and the per diem workers who could lose between nine and 12 days worth of work in Orchard Park and the couple of weeks of pre-season workouts a New York State universities in Cortland, Albany and Fredonia training facilities.
To quote Donald Trump, the economic impact is small potatoes. A few people will get hurt but the jobs Schneiderman is protecting are part time minimum wage positions at the stadiums and training camps.
Sports teams’ economic impact on a given area is always overstated. Also people are going to spend money on entertainment, they will just shift that football or basketball dollars elsewhere.
"The expected blow to the state's economy will be tremendous," wrote Assistant Attorney general Richard L. Schwartz. "Many New York public and private institutions depend heavily on the NFL training camp and regular season games to generate revenue."
A note to the assistant attorney general, Cortland State, doesn’t depend on whether the New York Jets training camp takes place at the campus’ main stadium. Mr. Schwartz might want to check the books of the college to see just how profitable or unprofitable having an NFL team on the premises is for the school. It might startle him and others in the Attorney General’s office to see the books at Cortland.
Ralph Wilson's Buffalo Bills gets about $7 million in subsidies for stadium maintenance and day of game operations.
The entity formally known as the National Football League Players Association put out a paper that contended that if there was no 2011 NFL season, that $160 million in local spending in each league city and 3,000 jobs would be wiped out. The NFLPA stance seems absolutely ludicrous given the fact that the league plays just 10 home games except in East Rutherford where the stadium houses two teams and stadium jobs are dead end per diem positions which would supplement someone's income.
The real money losers are the players and cable TV subscribers underwriting labor actions and not even knowing it.

If Schneiderman really wanted to conduct a thorough investigation, he would start with the television networks, Sumner Redstone's CBS, General Electric's NBC (now majority owned by Comcast), Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (FOX), the Walt Disney Company (ESPN) and DirecTV and ask why those entities are underwriting the owners costs in the lockout. Schneider can also check in with the NBA and see if Time Warner's Turner Sports and the Walt Disney Company's ESPN are underwriting the NBA lockout and investigate the Dolan family's Cablevision and ask if any fees that are being collected are going to the Knicks from the Madison Square Garden Network. He can also ask Goldman-Sachs and the New York Yankees owned YES Network about fees going to the New Jersey Nets.
That would just be a New York investigation. Similar inquiries could take place around the country.
Those are just a few FAQs that should be asked and answered. In the toy store of media, the sports department-writers, TV talking heads and radio talk show hosts are infuriated that their world has collided with the real world sort of - after all they want to be entertained with games and want no part of how sports really operates. If Schneiderman was truly serious about probing sports, there is a lot out there but his inquiry will be forgotten once the two sides in the NFL battle call a truce and reach an agreement.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

2011-07-02T10:44:00.000-07:00

2011 NBA lockout can trace its roots back to 1983
FRIDAY, 01 JULY 2011 16:19

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/2011-nba-lockout-can-trace-its-roots-back-to-1983
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
Dear National Basketball Association fans:
A couple of weeks ago LeBron James told you like it is in sports when he said, “All the people that were rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems they had today. I'm going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do with me and my family and be happy with that. So they can get a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be on being happy about not only myself, but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal. But they got to get back to the real world at some point.”
James apologized for his statement even though what he said was true. But his rant was just the prelude to the next moment of truth in the world of a sports fan, an NBA fan. The owners and players don’t care if you offer unconditional loyalty to a logo or, as Jerry Seinfeld aptly says, dirty laundry. The NBA – and all sports -- are big business and if the NBA owners have to lock out the players to get a better deal, so be it.
The NBA is in a lockout mode. There will be teeth gnashing about greedy owners and greedy players but one day fans will have to be broken from their unconditional love, the face painting of colors, the tattoo team logo proudly displayed on some part of the body, the shirts, hats and realize that sports is nothing more than a business.
NBA fans really have not lost anything yet. Sure the rookie leagues have been cancelled and free agency is being delayed but there are still more than three months to go before the product disappears from the shelf -- pre-season games.
There is a question about the finances of the NBA. Commissioner David Stern, the owners’ front man, wants hundreds of millions of dollars in worker givebacks so that the league can be financially viable. Twenty-eight years ago, Commissioner Larry O’Brien was looking for givebacks to make the then 23-team league financially viable.
These were desperate time for the league, so much so that the owners of Madison Square Garden, Gulf and Western, somehow convinced New York City Mayor Ed Koch that the Gulf and Western’s subsidiary -- Madison Square Garden and the two franchises, the NBA Knicks and the National Hockey League Rangers -- could not compete with San Diego, Indiana, Cleveland, Salt Lake City for basketball players and Winnipeg, Hartford, Quebec City, Edmonton, Calgary along with Denver for hockey players.
Without property tax relief, Gulf and Western would relocate the Knicks to Nassau County and the Rangers to the Meadowlands. Gulf and Western never did like Madison Square Garden all that much and within four years of the building’s reopening in 1972, the company was considering moving both teams to an arena that would be built in East Rutherford.
Gulf and Western got the property tax break that the Dolan family, the Garden’s current owners, presently enjoys.
Despite the fact that both Larry Bird in Boston and Magic Johnson in Los Angeles were winning titles and a strong presence in Philadelphia where the old ABA star Julius Erving had won a title, the NBA was at the crossroads in 1983.
A good many franchises were losing money, the Collective Bargaining Agreement was up and the 23 team NBA was thinking of cutting as many as seven teams with Cleveland, Denver, Indiana, Kansas City, San Diego and Utah losing an enormous amount of money. Some teams fell behind on their deferred payments, estimated to be between $80 million and $90 million, which nearly prompted a player’s strike in 1982.   There were rumors that Denver and Utah were going to consolidate into one franchise and that other teams would move. Donald Sterling moved the San Diego Clippers to Los Angeles following the 1983-84 season without the NBA's permission. The Kansas City Kings, a franchise that tried to regionalize itself in the 1970s by splitting home games between Kansas City and Omaha after leaving Cincinnati in 1972, went west to Sacramento in 1984-85. Utah attempted to solve some of its financial problems by playing a number of home games in Las Vegas.
The players and owners met for nine months and completely rewrote the Collective Bargaining Agreement from its foundations. The league opened its books and let the players see what the profits and losses really were and a deal was brokered.
“I think it just had a number of important consequences,” said NBA Deputy Commissioner Russell Granik who was part of the NBA management and negotiating team in 1983. “One, by having rolling around in that stuff, for the first time, I think that process in the nine months or the year of negotiations, was that the players for the first time got complete financial information. Everybody knew everything.
“That really, I think, sort of created a feeling of we are in this together as a partnership that maybe hadn’t existed between the players and the league. I think that was a great boast. The other thing by having the salary cap and the revenue sharing system in place, we were able to go out and attract new ownership in places that up until then we were struggling.”
Two franchises that were struggling were the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Indiana Pacers. All together the league might have been left with just 16 teams without the new bargaining agreement.
“I believe Gordon and George Gund at the time would not have purchased the Cleveland Cavaliers shortly thereafter except we had this deal. At that point Indiana was really struggling. Shortly after that Herb and Mel Simon purchased the team in Indiana. Both are still in the league (in 2001) many years later. Two of the strongest ownership groups we had. I think there were others that followed thereafter that probably would not have happened if we hadn’t been able to say OK I think we got a system that’s going to make sense.
“At the time we were very serious and I think Larry (Fleischer) and the players, you know your first reaction is they are bluffing, but again having been in the process and learn all the numbers, we were seriously thinking of at least right away folding two or three times, buying them back or merging them or something. I don’t have any doubt but for that kind of deal that would have happened as well,” said Granik.  The 1983 Collective Bargaining Agreement that put a salary cap in place is considered to be the turning point in the league's history by the owners and by the players. The 23-team league survived and both sides formed a working alliance, which would allow the league to grow. It also helped that two entities were about ready to join the league, Michael Jordan and Nike. The salary cap was the brainchild of a new lawyer that came on the scene named Gary Bettman. Bettman would become one of the three key people that would run the NBA in the mid-1980s and beyond. David Stern would be the boss, Granik the No. 2 guy, followed by Bettman.
The Collective Bargaining was Commissioner Larry O’Brien’s last major work for the NBA.
O’Brien was in a sense a transitional commissioner. The NBA was a business under his predecessor Walter Kennedy, but under O’Brien it became a bigger business. O’Brien replaced Kennedy in 1975 and guided the NBA in the league’s “merger” with the ABA. O’Brien was the lead negotiator in two Collective Bargaining Agreements in 1976 and 1983. During O’Brien, gate receipts doubled and TV revenues increased by threefold. Still O’Brien was unable to financially stabilize the league and without the 1983 labor agreement, which established a partnership with the Players Association and its Executive Director Larry Fleischer, the NBA might have contracted franchises.
The 1983 agreement propelled the league into a better financial position.
Or did it? Kansas City ownership sold the franchise to a Sacramento group. Twenty-eight years later, Sacramento is in dire fiscal shape. Indiana remains a troubled franchise. The league over the years added teams; Charlotte was an initial success but eventually moved. Vancouver lasted just six years before the owner Michael Heisley uprooted the franchise and placed it in Memphis. A second Charlotte franchise has not been financially successful. The second New Orleans franchise is on the financial ropes. Seattle no longer has a team.
Cost certainty is fleeting. The owners and players celebrated in 1983 a new deal. In retrospect, it didn’t work for everyone.
David Stern replaced O'Brien as commissioner on February 1, 1984. Stern was an attorney who had been the NBA's Executive Vice President. Stern would direct a tremendous expansion in the marketing of the NBA and develop a cohesive and profitable broadcasting strategy. He would move try to ensure the stability of NBA franchises by increasing licensing revenues, and developing corporate sponsorships.
In the buildup to the potential NBA lockout of 1998, NBC and TNT guaranteed owners that they would pay out $465 million dollars for broadcast rights whether the league played a game or not. The NBA had been very good to NBC and TNT in 1997-98 as they shared $400 million in profits from TV. Those two items did not go unnoticed by the National Basketball Players Association.
The players promised that it would boycott interviews with NBC and TNT personnel because the association’s leadership felt the networks were bankrolling the lockout and provided a guarantee of money against losses if no basketball was being played. Phoenix Suns CEO Jerry Colangelo disputed that saying television had no influence on the lockout and that owners were merely seeking a better collective bargaining agreement.
Each owner would get more than $15 million from the NBC and TNT and more from local cable contracts. Cable consumers would help pay for the lockout unknowingly. Cable consumers did not receive any rebates from games missed because of work stoppages in Major League Baseball in 1994 and 1995 and in the National Hockey League in 1994-95.
On March 23, 1998 NBA owners voted to reopen the talks because the players’ share of the revenues exceeded 57 percent. The league shut down operations on July 1, 1998 and both sides dug in. The owners had a nest egg and could afford to wait until the players caved. The television unit of General Electric, the National Broadcasting Company and Ted Turner’s Turner Sports agreed to pay the owners a rights fee even though there was a possibility that games would be cancelled. If the games were cancelled, NBC would get money back either in a form or a rebate of a reduced rights fee schedule in the final three years of the TV agreement while Turner would have the contract extended by a year.
A few players boycotted NBC TV interviews whether they were on a national or a local affiliate level but TV interviews with NBC or CNN (TNT’s sister network) were of little concern.
The players sat for 202 days. In the end, the owners kept the salary cap, keep the draft and got a ceiling on top salaries at $14 million and a limit on how many years a team could pay a player at the $14 million level at seven. There was always a rookie minimum salary and stiffer drug testing policies. The middle class NBA player got more money; the stars were capped. David Stern had turned the middle class player against the stars in the fight and won the battle and the war.
The NBA got cost certainty in 1999 but not everyone made out. Charlotte and Vancouver quickly became former NBA cities. In 2005, the NBA and the players cut yet another cost certainty deal. Seattle didn’t make it and Sacramento ownership seriously considered moving to Anaheim this past spring.
The business of the NBA will go on despite a lockout. Anaheim will continue to push to get the Maloof brothers’ Sacramento Kings. Louisville may want in once the dust settles. San Jose and Newark will be buyers as well. Meanwhile the fans take another one on the chin. But they will be back … well some of them in the arena if they can afford the price of the tickets. If not, the corporate crowd will go to a game and treat it as an event and the real fans can stay home and watch it on TV.
LeBron told it like it is and he was vilified for that. David Stern, Players Executive Director Billy Hunter and others won’t be as blunt. The NBA is a business and the two sides will eventually settle this dispute without any worry about the fans.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

2011-06-29T12:18:00.000-07:00

Handouts to NFL owners have been an absolute failure

Wednesday, 29 June 2011 08:14

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/handouts-to-nfl-owners-have-been-an-absolute-failure

BY EVAN WEINER

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS

Cory Booker wants a National Basketball Association team in Newark. Tim Leiweke is working the room in Los Angeles trying to get government money to help his company, the Anschutz Entertainment Group, to build a football stadium in downtown Los Angeles. While Leiweke works the room and tries to entice the owners of various football teams—the Jacksonville Jaguars, the St. Louis Rams, the Minnesota Vikings, the Oakland Raiders and the San Diego Chargers—to move to the planned stadium.

Leiweke is going after a football team despite the fact that the National Football League owners have locked out their employees – the players.

Booker wants a new franchise even though the NBA plans to shut down on Thursday night if there is no new collective bargaining agreement between owners and players.

The National Football League business goes on despite the fact that the main product is not available—football games—and could conceivable not be available to consumers this fall. That doesn’t seem to bother Los Angeles politicians who are talking to Leiweke about funding a downtown facility or Minnesota politicians who are trying to figure out a way to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to satisfy New Jersey’s Zygi Wilf and his want for a new stadium for his Minnesota Vikings franchise.

Sports fans probably don’t want to read this, but the team you love or hate doesn’t belong to you. The team belongs to an owner and that owner is looking for government handouts and if he or she doesn’t get a handout from the local government, he or she will look elsewhere and probably find it.

It is about time that people understand that government support of big time sports has been an absolute failure since the 1986 tax reform that changed the way stadium and arena debt were paid. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the tax reform that created a new formula for paying off municipally funded stadiums and arenas and placed the onus on local taxpayers to pay down the debt and gave the owners as much as 92 cents on every dollar generated within a stadium or arena and left just as little as eight cents on every dollar to pay off hundreds of millions of dollars worth of debt.

Despite sweetheart deals, the National Football League owners shutdown the business in March.

What is the real reason for labor strife?

Owners with older stadium such as Wilf’s Vikings and Al Davis’s Oakland Raiders have to invest more and more money into player’s salaries to meet the salary cap and salary floor NFL rules with the proliferation of municipally built facilities since 1986. Since the last National Football League owners and players collective bargaining agreement in 2006, new stadiums came online at the Meadowlands in East Rutherford, New Jersey, Arlington, Texas and Indianapolis and that forced up the salary cap and floor as more revenues flowed into the league.

Apparently the alleged new agreement that is being breathlessly reported by football insiders at a worldwide cable TV sports leader indicates that the very reason that triggered the lockout is not being addressed.

But life goes on in Los Angeles and in the legislative chambers in St. Paul, Minnesota and in Santa Clara, California where local officials are trying to cobble together a money deal to get the Santa Clara football stadium off the ground for the York family’s San Francisco 49ers.

The Santa Clara stadium is also a sore point for the owners. The Yorks have to throw money into the place and the NFL owners want the players to assume some of the costs for the Santa Clara building. The NFL owners basically have told the Yorks don’t seek any funding from the banks to cover their costs and they would try to extract that money from the players.

Meanwhile Booker wants a replacement for the departing Nets in Newark even though the NBA owners are on the verge of closing down the National Basketball Association business.

If the owners and players don’t come up with an agreement by Thursday night, the NBA owners will lockout the players.

Just how important is government as a sports partner? That is easy to answer. NBA Commissioner David Stern will tell you there are three major aspects in running a successful franchise. You need government to supply funding for arenas, you need government to continue the current cable TV rules which forces all consumers to pay for channels they don’t want in a basic expanded tier – where ESPN, TNT and regional sports channels reside because multiple cable systems operators place them there not consumers- and give corporations favorable tax breaks in buying tickets or club seats or luxury boxes.

If you don’t believe David Stern, perhaps Mario Cuomo’s words from 1991 will back up Stern. Cuomo, at that time, was the governor of New York and was lobbying the National League of Major League Baseball for an expansion team for Buffalo.

Cuomo was hardly a reluctant lobbyist as he told this reporter when he was asked if the Cuomo name—Mario Cuomo was considered a favorite for the 1992 Democratic Presidential nomination—would help get Buffalo a franchise.

“When you say enormous, you mean length?” joked Cuomo in response to the question. “Ah like Willie Sutton (the legendary bank robber). That’s an excellent question and it is a question I thought of before you did frankly.

“From the beginning I have said to (Buffalo mayor at the time) Jimmy Griffin, you know we have been very supportive from the beginning and it is not because I am a baseball fan. It is because this is a terrific investment for a strong part of the state.

“Pilot Field (the baseball park built in the late 1980s and a facility that is now known by yet another corporate name—the fourth since the stadium opened in 1988) was a great idea. I am proud of the judgment I made in giving nearly $22 million (to pay for the project). It wasn’t a gift, it was an investment and a very good investment and Buffalo proved that by setting (attendance) records for a few years and by qualifying by being this high up in consideration (for an expansion team).”

Buffalo was in the hunt along with the Miami area, St. Petersburg, Florida and Denver, Colorado. While Cuomo was a big name, he didn’t have the same clout as Florida Senator Connie Mack III and Colorado Senator Tim Wirth. Those two lawmakers could have played havoc on Major League Baseball by starting legislation that stripped Major League Baseball of antitrust protection from United States business laws which gave Florida and Colorado a leg up on Governor Cuomo.

But sports owners cannot afford to turn their collective backs on politicians of any stripe who can help that get a sweetheart lease for a team.

“But I said to Jimmy Griffin and Rich, Bob and Mindy, (the people pursuing the franchise for Buffalo) in the beginning. I am not sure exactly what role you should want me to play. How do they feel about politicians? If it is better for us to stay away, I will go nowhere near this thing. If you think it is helpful for me to talk to (National League President) Bart Giamatti, may he rest in peace, I will. But you tell me what your sense of how the owners feel about talking to politicians.

“Under some circumstance, your political identification could be a negative. I don’t know what these baseball people feel about it. Bob and Mindy came back to me and said we will tell you when and how you think you can be most affectively supportive. And they have from time to time. I spoke to Bart Giamatti, again may he rest in peace, he was a terrific, terrific human being. I knew him when he was president of Yale and I knew him as Commissioner.

“And they said when it is time to make the presentation; we would like you to be there. We understand other governors will be there. Their judgment is, it does not hurt for the political person to be there.

“I think from the owners point of view, they need to know what the governmental units, upstate New York. It is important for the owners to know that we are going to contribute to the stadium’s expansion. They want to hear you say it. They want to see you on the record. They want to know the money will be there, that the support for infrastructure will be there. That when you have a World Series, the police will be there. The security will be there. That is all a very important part in running a major sports franchise.”

Cuomo wasn’t done yet. He spoke the words that politicians that elected officials understand when it comes to government-sports partnerships.

“It is one of their stated criteria,” Cuomo said of what sports leagues want. “Indeed it is their first criteria. To what extent do you have sport and government?”

In the end, the National League did expand to the Miami area and Denver and the threat of having the antitrust exempt being pulled was gone.

Major League Baseball still has portions of the 1922 Supreme Court of the United States ruling that granted the industry an antitrust exemption in place. The 1922 decision is felt to this day in the New York City area.

New Jersey cannot get a Major League Baseball franchise because the owners of the game can block anyone from bringing a third team into the area. Oakland A’s ownership cannot move to San Jose because of the exemption.

Government has invested billions into helping sports reach a level that no one who played in the NFL or the NBA in the 1940s or 1950s could ever envision. The stadiums, the cable TV act, the 1986 tax reform, the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961, the 1966 American Football League-National Football League merger, the tax hikes for car rentals, hotel, motel rooms, and restaurant bills, sewer and water, alcohol, cigarettes (the so-called Sin Tax in Cleveland) and various tax hikes to build stadiums and arenas and yet, it is not enough.

The owners and players cannot figure out how to split up $9 billion in annual NFL revenue. The NBA owners want major salary givebacks because they claim they are losing money despite sweetheart leases because they cannot generate enough in arena revenues for many franchises.

The National Football League lockout allegedly will have an impact on communities that will not be hosting training camp this year regardless of whether there is a settlement or not in July. Yet Cuomo’s son Andrew has not said a word about the lockout as New York’s Governor even though the Madison, New Jersey based New York Jets will not hold training camp as planned in central New York State at the State University of New York – Cortland. The Baltimore Ravens franchise will stay at the team’s training facility instead of traveling to McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley is quiet about the NFL Lockout even though his state seduced Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell to Baltimore with a generous lease offer and helped Modell through a tough financial situation in 1995.

Maryland spent more than $100,000 per jobs created at the Ravens football facility. New York is kicking in about $3 million a year at the Orchard Park football field for the Buffalo Bills. Louisiana finished paying a $186.5 million bill to New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson to keep him in town between 2002 and 2010 and renegotiated the contract that gave Benson a building (he is renting office space to the state) for about $10 million and reduced the state’s contribution to the team to as much as $6 million annually along with tax breaks.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has said nothing about the NFL lockout and the upcoming NBA lockout. Louisiana pours millions of dollars in NBA’s New Orleans Hornets. Mitch Daniels is Governor of Indiana, a state that is basketball crazy. But the NBA’s Indiana Pacers cannot make money in what was a new building in 1999 and the team under the right set of circumstances could move in 2013. The Pacers ownership is paying virtually nothing to use the city’s municipally built arena and sucks out every nickel from the building.

Daniels is mute on the subject of sports. The NFL’s Indianapolis Colts are taking virtually every cent out of the city’s new stadium. Sports is costing Indiana residents millions upon millions of dollars.

Media anointed political superstars like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is a heavyweight at putting down his bosses — the public — but he along with a lot of elected officials who pay the bills for sports are more like Harpo Marx or Marcel Marceau and are lightweights when it comes to solving lockouts that have been caused in part by using public dollars to build arenas in areas that should never have major league sports.

Christie inherited a bill of hundreds of millions of dollars for the now departed Giants Stadium and the Meadowland sports complex. New Jersey also supplied hundreds of millions of dollars for infrastructure for the New Meadowlands Stadium and provided property tax taxes for the Giants/Jets stadium. He should be vocal and pressure John Mara and Woody Johnson, the Giants and Jets owners but publicly he is not.

Cuomo never reviewed the property tax break that various owners of Madison Square Garden have enjoyed for nearly three decades. His son Andrew apparently doesn’t want to put the Garden back on the New York City tax roll either.

The public has a stake or an investment in stadiums and arenas and by extension sports franchise. The elected officials across the country should have stepped up and pressed NFL owners to get a new collective bargaining agreement done if having sports teams are important and if stadiums and arenas are economic engines. Elected officials should be all over David Stern and NBA players to get a deal done. The NBA has shutdown summer leagues due to the pending lockout.

If sports is so important and adds billions to the economy—like politicians who pitched voters to approve sports facilities—where is the pressure on keeping the games going?

Cuomo and Stern have let people in on a secret that sportswriters seem to blissfully ignore and that the worldwide leader in sports doesn’t want to talk about. By the way, the worldwide leader in sports owes its very existence to federal legislation in 1984.

Sports depends on government to survive. But do the politicians and the public know that? The answer seems to be no.

Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

2011-06-23T13:32:00.001-07:00

How the NHL and sports accidentally stumbled into globalization
THURSDAY, 23 JUNE 2011 12:26

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/how-the-nhl-and-sports-accidentally-stumbled-into-globalization
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
Sports globalization will again be on display this week as the National Basketball Association holds the league’s annual draft in Newark on Thursday and the National Hockey league holds the league’s annual grab bag in St. Paul, Minnesota on Friday and Saturday.
The NBA, the NHL and Major League Baseball have been global entities for a long, long time with baseball signing players from outside of the United States for decades. In the 1960s, the National Hockey league was essentially a closed shop with the league players made up entirely of Canadians with just one American, Tommy Williams and one Swede, Ulf Sterner who played with the New York Rangers.
Today, the National Hockey League teams all feature a good number of young and talented players from around the globe. Canadians, Americans, Swedes, Finns, Swiss, Slovakians, Czechs, Russians and other nationalities who take to the ice but it wasn’t always like that.
The globalization of North American sports escalated in 1972 during the Summit Series between Canada and the Soviet Union. Team Canada took on the Swedish National Team in a pair of exhibition games in between the four games and Canada and the four scheduled games in Moscow. One NHL general manager, Toronto’s Jim Gregory, took notice of the Swedish team during the two game series and dispatched his scout Gerry McNamara to a Christmas tournament in Sweden a few months later to evaluate talent.
Gregory and McNamara found two players they immediately liked and felt would be good NHL players, defenseman Borje Salming and winger Inge Hammarstrom. That really was the start of the globalization of the National Hockey League. Both players were free agents, so there was no need to worry about taking them in the draft so Toronto was able to sign them under the radar.
The two players signed Maple Leafs contracts in May 1973 and that would start a revolution that would ultimately change how hockey was played. The Canadian game borrowed significantly from the European version of the game and Gregory was at the forefront.
Salming was a Hall of Fame player.
“I brought Hammarstrom in, Gerry McNamara was our scout and we brought Hammarstrom and Salming in and they were welcomed additions to our club despite what (owner) Harold Ballard said,” laughed Gregory who knew Ballard did not like non Canadian players.
“That was his prerogative. Borje Salming was an unbelievable player for the Toronto Maple Leafs and Inge Hammarstrom while he was there did a real good job as well.”
Ballard needed to be sold on the addition of Swedes to his lineup and every though he would eventually warm up to Salming, Ballard did say that Hammarstrom could go into a corner with six eggs in his pocket and not break any of them. Back in the 1970s, the NHL was still a league of mostly Canadians although Gregory did his best to change that.
“Actually the Rangers brought in a player in 1964 (from Sweden) named Ulf Sterner and then Detroit brought over a player (Thommie Bergmann) and we had started scouting and Gerry McNamara went over and we were very lucky to get the players we did.
“We had a couple of other ones that should have been on our team. (Anders) Hedberg and (Ulf) Nilsson. We got into a little bit of bidding (with the World Hockey Association’s Winnipeg Jets) and we did not win out.”
The World Hockey Association was vilified by the sports media for being an inferior product, but the sports media like Pavlov’s dog is conditioned to react in a certain way and putting down upstart leagues like Lamar Hunt’s American Football League, Dennis Murphy’s American Basketball Association and World Hockey Association was par for the course. The truth is that those leagues changed North American sports. Hunt brought new ideas to what was essentially a mom and pop organization—the National Football league. Murphy’s ABA is on display every night dressed as the NBA as the old league “borrowed” from Murphy and his associates ideas which included the three point play and the All Star Weekend. The WHA sold the naming rights to the league’s championship trophy and pioneered international play and welcomed Swedes and Finns into the league.
Established leagues were staid affairs.
Gregory left the Toronto Maple Leafs and joined Central Scouting in 1979. He fought to bring Europeans into the fold shortly after that.
“I had been to Europe very early when I worked with the Leafs and actually I was part of a committee that hired Jack Button, who started Central Scouting, and when I was let go by the Leafs, the league offered me that job. I had been to Europe and had seen the talent that was there and, of course, had Salming and Hammarstrom as part of the organization that I was with and we had some other players as well.
“I contacted a couple of gentlemen, one of whom who had lived in Toronto and was part of the Finnish Ice Hockey Association, and we get together in talking and formed European Central Scouting to augment what was already there for the National Hockey League.”
By 1979, NHL teams were very aware of European talent or at least players who could come over from Sweden and Finland. The Iron Curtain countries also had many talented players but Soviets and Czechoslovakians could only come to North America if they defected.
In 1981, Czechoslovakia allowed Ivan Hlinka and Jiri Bubla to join the Vancouver Canucks not long after the Statsny Brothers defected and signed with the Quebec Nordiques. Hlinka would eventually coach the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2000.
It was not until 1989 that players who played for Russia were able to free join NHL teams. The first Soviet player to legally join an NHL team was Sergei Priakin who signed a contract with Calgary. Later that summer, New Jersey added Vyacheslav Fetisov and Sergei Starikov. Sergei Marakov and Igor Larinov were also cleared to join NHL teams. Fetisov and Larionov are members of the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Gregory said it was inevitable that Europeans would seek to come to North America and NHL teams would hire them “because of the popularity of the World Cup and Canada playing Russia, Sweden and Finland and the US as well.”
The globalization of hockey and looking for hockey talent had an effect on the lifestyles of NHL scouts who back in the six-team league rarely ventured out of Canada looking for talent.
“No, I went close (to the Arctic Circle),” said Gregory of one of his initial trips to Sweden. “Salming’s hometown is right near the Arctic Circle. When I was with the scouting bureau and you have to go look.”

The National Hockey League started the ball rolling in North America as the effort to expand North American branded sports continued in 1974 when the World Hockey Association sent a touring team to play Europeans and the Soviets. The NBA did not catch up to the NHL until Ted Turner developed the Goodwill Games and sent his Atlanta Hawks to the Soviet Union for training camp in the late 1980s. The NHL and NBA finally landed Soviet players in the late 1980s.
The National Basketball Association is hoping to open up a marketplace in India; Major League Baseball is expanding the World Baseball Classic and wants to introduce the game to countries like Ghana. The NHL plays regular season games in Europe. Oddly enough, the National Football league is way behind the other leagues in global expansion. The NFL has not been able to stage any games in China and seems to be content to go to London for annual games. The NFL has to continue finding growth areas in the United States, if possible, because it has limited options outside of North America. People do not play American football elsewhere except in British Columbia, a market that the NFL has cornered.
Sports continues to be a multinational entity. The drafts illustrate that pointedly.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

2011-06-14T17:05:00.000-07:00

Rant by LeBron James speaks volumes about the real world of sports
TUESDAY, 14 JUNE 2011 16:14

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/rant-by-lebron-james-speaks-volumes-about-the-real-world-of-sports
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
Perhaps in the smoke and mirrors and laser light shows filled with loud music of 2011 sports, LeBron James should be introduced with some Billy Joel music the next time he goes onto the basketball court.
The song "My Life" seems apropos but if you think LeBron's post game rift was out of line, think again. High salaried athletes of the 21st century in America live in gated communities and don't have much to do with fans on a daily basis. It is no longer the 1950s — a time when members of the Brooklyn Dodgers lived in the Brooklyn community, members of the New York Giants baseball team lived in Dobbs Ferry, New York and were a part of that community.
Phil Rizzuto and Yogi Berra are no longer selling suits in a Newark clothing store in the off season to supplement their New York Yankees income.
Sports fans and sports media employees expect a lot out of their athletic heroes.
At one time LeBron James was a hero but he has become the equivalent of a wrestling heel, a bad guy after leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers franchise and announcing his intentions during a made for cable TV show on ESPN. Forgotten in the criticism of the show which was dubbed "The Decision" was that LeBron James made some money for charity. Athletes are supposed to be role models and the excuse is always because kids look up to sports heroes. LeBron has been clean, no drugs, no jail time yet he is a villain while scores of athletes are arrested on an annual basis for various crimes.
Plaxico Burress and Michael Vick seem to be coming back into sports as conquering heroes after doing jail time. LeBron James doesn't seem to have humility or has yet to be humbled by the sports media so he is a bad, bad guy now. Athletes are supposed to be humble. Entertainers on the other hand are applauded for being wild people. The Lindsay Lohans, Britney Spears of the world are great copy. The sporting media expects athletes lead the way by example because the kids look up to them.
Babe Ruth was hardly a role model but the Babe was out there signing autographs for the kids back in the 1920s and 1930s. But Babe was also a businessman and in 1930 made more money than President Herbert Hoover. Babe’s response drew chuckles when asked about making more money than the President of the United States.
“I know, but I had a better year than Hoover,” he said.
LeBron James problem seems to be his lack of a quick wit and humor. His statement was innocuous. LeBron James is not refusing to go into military service as a conscientious objector and not following Muhammad Ali’s 1967 lead. He wasn’t on the podium in Mexico City with a black glove raised in the air like John Carlos and Tommie Smith did in 1968 protesting poverty in America.
There was a no political statement here. It was just a pro wrestling type rant.
James should have been signing the final words from the 1978 song — I don't care what you say anymore, this is my life. Go ahead with your own life, leave me alone.
"All the people that were rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems they had today. I'm going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do with me and my family and be happy with that. So they can get a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be on being happy about not only myself, but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal. But they got to get back to the real world at some point," James said after the game.
James is getting excoriated for his statement.
James is saying publicly what athletes have thought and talked about privately for years. Athletes are not normal people as just everyday performers. LeBron James is in a different stratosphere from the average NBA player. Athletes are coddled, put on pedestals by fans — many of them adults who are in their 40s, 50s and 60s and wear the name of their favorite athlete on their back. They are pursued by autograph hounds and other jock sniffers and there are groupies who chase them. Their athletic exploits are recorded and chronicled for the ages.
Athletes are supposed to be happy just playing a child's game and at one time, great players like Honey Russell back before the days of the National Basketball League and the Basketball Association of America in the 1930s played for nothing. Even a great player like George Yardley played for nothing with the Los Angeles Jets of the American Basketball League (an organization that featured a Cleveland franchise owned by George M. Steinbrenner III). Yardley took the opportunity to play because he only participated in home games and select road games where his business would have taken him anyway. But as the late George Young pointed out in the 1980s while running the New York Giants in selecting player personnel and coaches that if a player says he will play for nothing, he is a liar.
It is a business and LeBron James is merely a businessman who let out a secret that is well known in his community, sports. You play a game and then get on with your life. Jim Bouton in his ground breaking baseball book Ball Four wrote that in 1970.
Sports is nothing more than a business even though fans are asked and give unconditional love for the team. But fans have to put up with an awful lot in exchange for a team. Madison Square Garden displaced the true "fans" decades ago when the building owners tore out the blue seats and replaced them with luxury boxes. The blue collar worker has been evicted from the best seats in that and other buildings.

All of the new buildings that have gone up since the 1986 federal tax code update (which shifted the way municipalities could charge owners for debt payment and put the onus of paying the bills for the facility on the taxpayers) also gave owners an excuse to hike ticket prices. The new places became malls complete with a sporting event, restaurants, shops and some new places included a Ferris Wheel or a swimming pool. In a 2000 interview, long time basketball executive John Nash, talking before Nets game at the Meadowlands, wondered if ticket prices for sporting events became too high.
"Cost is obviously a factor and it is directly related to players salaries," said Nash who was the General Manager of the New Jersey Nets at that time. "The players get 53 percent of the gross revenues by virtue of the agreement they made with the NBA. And as their salaries go up, the revenues streams necessarily have to go up."
In 2000 Nash and other sports executives were asking the same question. Were ticket prices hitting a plateau? The answer was no as ticket prices continue to escalate shifting the culture and social class inside of the arena to a high income "fan" and leaving behind the real sports lovers.
"That's a great question and I think every year teams have to decide for themselves," Nash said. "What has happened in many cases is that corporations have become our top customers as opposed to the everyday fan who cannot afford either the time commitment of 41 games or the cost."
In two weeks, NBA players may be locked out by the owners over money issues.
Politicians are willing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to build sports stadiums and arenas and in some cases go the extra mile and hand owners money so their cities can be considered big league.
This is the culture of sports and Lebron James is part of that culture.
There is a National Football League owners led work stoppage taking place right now. On July 1, there could very well be an owners-led National Basketball Association work stoppage. Looking down the pike, the possibility of a Major League Baseball work stoppage exists as the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the owners and players expires in December. That National Hockey League owners and players CBA ends in the summer of 2012.
Since the Nash interview, the three NBA franchises have been relocated. Vancouver lost the Grizzlies franchise when Michael Heisley went shopping for a better arena deal in 2001. Heisley took an offer from Memphis. George Shinn relocated his Charlotte Hornets franchise in 2002 to New Orleans also in search of a better arena deal. The Oklahoma City-based owners of the Seattle SuperSonics took the franchise to Oklahoma City in 2008 after Seattle officials refused to build a new arena for the team some 13 years after the city rebuilt the municipally owned arena that housed the NBA team. The owners left despite having two years remaining on the lease between the city and franchise.
New Jersey will be losing the NBA Nets soon as that team will relocate to Brooklyn.
Allegedly 22 of the NBA’s 30 teams are losing money.
National Hockey League owners locked out their players in 2004 and shut down the business for an entire year. The NHL figures to approve the relocation of the Atlanta franchise to Winnipeg in a few days. Glendale, Arizona is paying $25 million a year for the privilege of having an NHL franchise in the Phoenix suburb.
Hawaiian officials are questioning why they are paying the NFL $4 million annually to host the league's annual all-star game, the Pro Bowl.
Businessmen in the Los Angeles area are demanding Los Angeles taxpayers kick money into a stadium for a National Football league team. In Sacramento, police, firefighters, teachers and other municipal employees are getting fired but Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson is determined to spend taxpayers dollars to build an arena for the Maloof brothers Kings NBA franchise and keep the team in town.
Stadiums and arenas are costly projects and sports owners are smart enough to know that they don't want to build one on their own dime if possible.

Sports is filled with entitlement.
It doesn't matter if it is pro sports, college sports or in Lebron James case, the AAU. LeBron James and other talented young teens are courted by sneaker companies and push into colleges whose coaches have deals with sneaker companies. The money game starts very early in life for basketball players.
LeBron James talked and the sports world went into a tizzy.
He said nothing.
America is fighting two declared wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and is involved with NATO in Libya. There seems to be secret wars taking place in Pakistan and Yemen. The economy is still struggling; politicians are more concerned with ideology than settling real problems yet LeBron James' my life statement is being scrutinized.
LeBron James is nothing more than a highly paid basketball player and entertainer. He's right. People go back to their lives after a game and he has his own life. He just plays a game, nothing more, nothing less.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

2011-06-11T05:34:00.001-07:00

Belmont Stakes Odds: Final leg of Triple Crown will depend on slot machines
FRIDAY, 10 JUNE 2011 19:25

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/belmont-stakes-odds-final-leg-of-triple-crown-will-depend-on-slot-machines
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
The eve of the running of the annual June Belmont in Elmont, New York is a good time to review the "racino" industry. For those who have never heard of the time “racino” you better get used to it. A "racino" is a horse racing facility whether it is for thoroughbreds or harness or standard bred horses, which depends on a casino loaded with slot machines to survive.
For the most part, standard bred racing in the northeast United States would be gone by now without the “machines” and the thoroughbred industry would be on life support. Around 1950, baseball, boxing and horse racing were the crown jewels of American sports. Horse racing has diminished in popularity because of the abundance of state sponsored gambling through lotteries at local stores and in New York, keno in restaurants.
The horse racing business is now surviving in many areas, except New Jersey, through proceeds from on site slot machines and table games (in some states) at racetracks. New Jersey is not keeping pace with neighboring states like New York, Pennsylvania and Delaware and has no "racinos", preferring to keep operations going in Atlantic City.
New Jersey residents can go to Yonkers and bet the slots or into eastern Pennsylvania. Sometime this fall, they will be able to go to Aqueduct in Queens and deposit money into “machines” which may help bolster thoroughbred racing at Belmont, Aqueduct and in Saratoga.
“Too much in terms of gaming?” asked Charles Hayward, the President and Chief Operating Officer of the New York Racing Association, in response to a question about gaming and slot machine saturation on the east coast. “No, I think there is a fair amount of density in casinos throughout Pennsylvania, Delaware, West Virginia. The Aqueduct facility will be the first casino within New York City.
“We think the projects we have between $300-350 win per machine are very conservative. When we had our partner MGM, this goes back a few years; they said the biggest problem we were going to have would be managing the crowds on weekends when people would be lined up behind all of the 4,500 machines.
“There is no question there has been more saturation. Pennsylvania, which is much closer to that market you are speaking of (New Jersey), I don’t know how many slot machines and now they have gone to full blown table games but that had to increase the number dramatically and it has had a big impact on Atlantic City. But I think the Aqueduct "racino" is geographically situation to do well and I think more importantly Genting (Malaysia’s Genting Group-a casino operator) is a world-class operation. They are going to put more money into this, making the amenities better. It is not a destination resort by any stretch of the imagination but it will be a place people will want to go.”
The Aqueduct "racino" should be in business sometime after Labor Day.
The slot machines at Aqueduct figures to give a big push to help revive an ailing business – thoroughbred racing in New York.
“The money comes in in a bunch of different tranches,” said Hayward. “One is purses and that is probably an increase of somewhere around $30 million just to give you a frame of reference. Purses last year were about $103 million and it will be about the same this year. So that is about a 30 percent increase. We can tap X money, which again depending upon win per machine will be between $20-25 million. We get operating expense monies, so we can do more marketing customer service things and then there is a breeder award.
“So all in all, the racing industry and NYRA gets about 16 percent of the net win from the VLT (video lottery terminal or slot machine) so that is going to be significant. We have undertaken some studies for Cap Ex (Capital Expenditure) improvements at all three of the tracks (Aqueduct, Belmont and Saratoga) and we can start working on that once we got the money.”
Video Lottery Terminals are saved a lot of tracks thorough New York and in Delaware. The horse racing industry is dependent upon the slot machines.
Hayward is hoping that people will return to horse racing as owners. Since the economic meltdown of September 2008, a lot of horsemen and horsewomen have left the industry.
Hayward is monitoring what is going on in New Jersey in the struggle between bolstering Atlantic City and saving the horse racing industry but doesn’t have much to say about the New Jersey legislative battle to help both industries.

“I wish Morris Bailey (who now runs Monmouth Race Track) a lot of luck on the thoroughbred side, I had the good fortune of meeting the gentleman at the Preakness (in Baltimore). I think he knows what he is getting himself into,” said Hayward. “Look, it is important for racing to have various circuits, it is important for us for Monmouth to be a strong track. Obviously, the Meadowlands was a premier harness track for many, many years and Jeff Gural (who has a lease at the Meadowlands) is a very talented guy. He has brought back some harness racing here in state (upstate New York). I don’t know what is going to happen but it looks to me that the current administration (Governor Chris Christie) is certainly protecting Atlantic City. Under that scenario, it would seem unlikely that they would do anything (installing slot machines) at the Meadowlands
“But as you know, those things can change very quickly.”
Don’t look for slot machines at Belmont race track anytime soon. There has been mention that as part of the New York Islanders quest to gain a new arena for the hockey team in Nassau County that land which could be used for a Shinnecock Indian Casino in Uniondale (as suggested by former New York Senator Al D’Amato) should be shifted to Belmont but Hayward isn’t interested in the idea.
“We have not been involved,” he said. “Our position and our board’s position, you know the state (New York) has an option. If they put VLT’s here, they have an option on 10 acres of land at the end of building here (at Belmont). But, our view is let’s get the VLT’s going at Aqueduct; it is only nine miles away. I think to bring another entity in the market until we establish what is going on and until Genting gets some return on their $380 million investment would be inappropriate. You know, Nassau County, you can understand given their financial situation why they would want more economic development but we have not been involved in any conversations about gaming at Belmont nor will he be or putting an arena here. We have about 400 acres so we got some room but we would like to do some expansion. We need to build a few new barns. This is a beautiful old building we have; it’s an old building that doesn’t have a lot of air conditioning or heat so we have some challenges.”
The horse racing industry seems to be surviving thanks to the slot machines in various states. NYRA has been on the ropes for a long time but like a number of other horse tracks, its future depends on slot machines and eventually table games.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

2011-06-07T11:59:00.000-07:00

Rio and Sochi Olympic Games are about to drive up your cable TV bill
TUESDAY, 07 JUNE 2011 10:49

BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/rio-and-sochi-olympic-games-are-about-to-drive-up-your-cable-tv-bill
The groveling has started.
American media giants are genuflecting in front of International Olympic Committee chief Jacques Rogge and his associates in Lausanne, Switzerland begging them to take their billions of dollars so they can win the television and multiple platform video rights to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia and the 2016 Rio Summer Games.
The media brigade trying to win Rogge and his colleagues hearts are going to raise cable rates if they land the Olympic rights. Someone will have to pay billions for the two week corporate bazaar that happens to feature some sports events.
The IOC wants four billion dollars for the rights which means cable and satellite subscribers will be paying more on their monthly bill because whoever wins the rights will pass the bill onto consumers — whether they watch the games or not on cable TV.
Powerful people including heads of state and those who head up media companies became putty when it comes to business dealings with the International Olympic Committee. In 2009, President Barack Obama was criticized for being unable to move IOC delegates in Copenhagen and landing the 2016 Summer Games for Chicago. The noise crowd (media pundits and Republican operatives) was thoroughly unprepared in the criticism in that they did not know how the IOC works, they just saw Tony Blair lobbying the IOC while he was England's Prime Minister and secure the 2012 Summer Games for London or that Vladimir Putin's bended knee routine helped Sochi, Russia's chances for the 2014 Winter Games.
Sochi got the Games.
Because of Blair, heads of states had to go before the IOC and beg for either the Winter or Summer Games.
The International Olympic Committee, a group that somehow has "earned" permanent observer status at the United Nations, one of two entities with permanent observer status. The Vatican also has permanent observer status. But the International Olympic Committee is not a sovereign state, it just acts like one and powerful people allow them to act like a sovereign state.
Local politicians have created slush funds or have raised taxes to pay down the debt incurred by building huge sports complexes for a two week sporting orgy that has left financial messes behind. American television network executives have filled IOC coffers with billions of dollars, and American corporations have thrown billions to put their logo next to the Olympic rings. Canada changed laws protecting Olympic sponsorship during the lead up to the 2010 Vancouver Games.
The Olympic aura is just too strong for political and business leaders who are attracted to the five interlocking rings like a magnet.
The International Olympic Committee spited women softball players globally by dropping the sport because the Americans women were too good and the IOC could not get Major League Baseball to shut down the season, like the National Hockey League does, and send baseball’s very best players to the Olympics.
The National Hockey League may not send players to compete in the 2014 Sochi Games which might infuriate Rogge and his associates. They want professionals, not amateurs in their little sports orgy. Professionals can be used for cross promotional opportunities and are worth more money to the IOC — money is the IOC's only concern — than unknowns.
At present, the International Softball Federation is trying to figure out how to get the sport reinstated in the 2016 or 2020 Games. One suggestion was to move some of the Summer events indoors to create a bigger winter event but the games must go on in the winter on snow and ice. The International Softball Federation is trying to negotiate in a political maze.
Women softball players only chance on the world stage has been ended because Rogge and his IOC delegates are mad at Major League baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, MLB owners and the former Executive Director of the Major League Baseball Players Association Don Fehr for not seeing it the IOC's way. Selig, the owners and the players just think their little endeavor, Major League Baseball, is more important than
Meanwhile, the IOC which loves to lecture the world about human rights has barred a women's only event from the 2012 Summer Games — softball — because Rogge and his cohorts are still angry with Major League Baseball for not including top players in an ersatz competition for an Olympic Gold Medal in baseball. The IOC awarded the 2008 Summer Games to China despite China's appalling human rights record.
The IOC leaned on the United States Congress to make Major League Baseball change drug policies that were collectively bargained to suit Olympics needs. The IOC didn’t care if baseball players were taking banned substances and some of those banned substances were legal in a number of players home countries like the Dominican Republic and Mexico; the IOC was bigger than Major League Baseball and flexed the group’s collective muscle.
Major League Baseball and the Major League Players Association have separated from the Olympics. Major League Baseball created the "World Baseball Classic", an event that will feature 28 countries in March 2013.
There seems to be just one organization that intimidates the IOC: FIFA, the governing body of football (soccer). Football’s World Cup is a much bigger event than any Olympics, and the IOC knows that. FIFA calls the shots in football, not the IOC.
The Walt Disney Company's ESPN, Comcast's NBCUniversal and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. United States media rights fees from a network TV-cable TV-multiple media platform funds a significant part of the Olympics. In 2010, General Electric's NBC unit lost millions on the two-week event. Yet like sailors on leave, TV executives feel the need to cozy up with their billions to Rogge and his crowd.
There are few global entities with the arrogance of the IOC.
The IOC has a pattern of corruption unmatched by any sports organization in the world. Salt Lake City, Utah won the rights for the 2002 Winter Olympics by bribing various International Olympic Committee delegates.

New York and New Jersey residents should feel very fortunate that London, England won the 2012 Summer Olympics bid. London taxpayers will be on the hook for millions of pounds to cover cost overruns for venues built specifically for the Games. A decade following the Sydney, Australia Games, venues used for the event are being maintained by taxpayers. Greece spent 5 percent of its gross domestic product monies on the 2006 Athens Games. It took 30 years to pay down the debt on the 1976 Montreal Olympics with all sorts of taxes, including a 17 cent per pack cigarette tax, being assessed for decades long after the closing ceremonies at Montreal's Olympic Stadium. The main stadium for the Beijing Games in 2008 is gone.
Despite all the evidence that the Olympics traveling show is a financial fiasco for host cities and now American TV networks, cities are still going after the Games. There is a question whether Annecy, France has the appropriate funding to remain in the running in the last month leading up to an IOC decision on the 2018 Winter Olympics site. That is the lasting Olympic legacy. A taxpayer draining two-week corporate bazaar that features a few athletic events and cable/satellite TV subscribers facing rising rates because someone has to pay for the television rights for the Games.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

2011-06-02T18:20:00.000-07:00

Bad owners like Time Warner ruin sports
THURSDAY, 02 JUNE 2011 13:35
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/bad-owners-like-time-warner-ruin-sports
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
The sale of the Atlanta Thrashers to a Canadian group of investors who will take the National Hockey League team to Winnipeg, Manitoba is yet another Time Warner failure. The media giant selected the wrong people in Atlanta to buy the company's National Basketball Association Atlanta Hawks, the NHL Thrashers and the lease agreement with the city of Atlanta for the use of the city built arena.
Time Warner officials, like an awful lot of other officials at media companies, in the late 20th century decided that getting bigger was better and buy out other companies. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp bought the Los Angeles Dodgers and attempted what was then called "vertical integration" and bring a sports franchise into the company. Murdoch's thinking or his advisors thinking was to put Dodgers telecasts into the homes of the Pacific Rim countries like Japan.
Murdoch failed and sold the Dodgers to Frank McCourt's group in 2004.
Time Warner ended up with the Atlanta Braves, the Hawks, Thrashers and control of the leases at Atlanta's new baseball stadium and the city arena. Time Warner then merged operations with America Online or AOL.
AOL Time Warner was a financial disaster.
AOL Time Warner got rid of World Championship Wrestling in March 2001 because it just didn't fit in with the corporate culture of the company. AOL Time Warner ditched the CNN's Sports Tonight program soon after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. The show would continue on the CNNSI network which started in 1996. But AOL Time Warner ended that channel in 2002. The Hawks, Thrashers and the arena lease was sold off in 2003. Turner South, a regional cable network that was founded in 1999 and carried Braves, Hawks and Thrashers games was sold off in 2006.
In 2007, the Braves franchise was sold. AOL Time Warner also got rid of its share Comedy Central along with a record label.
The company now known as Time Warner has a long history of getting rid of sports properties. After Murdoch attempted to take over Warner Communications (a Time Warner predecessor) in the early 1980s, the company decided that it no longer was interested in owning the New York Cosmos despite the team's success at the Meadowlands. It can be argued that Warner Communications ruined not only the Cosmos with handing out large contracts to big names but the North American Soccer League as well. Eventually the Cosmos and the NASL folded.
AOL was eventually spun off.
Time Warner has stomped all over Ted Turner's legacy in sports. The Hawks, the Thrashers, the Goodwill games, even a sports show on CNN. Time Warner has destroyed CNN as a legitimate source of news and turned Headline News into something that resembles bad daytime/tabloid television. CNN and Headline News are profitable because of the 1984 federal legislation that created a bundled tier that saved cable channels like CNN, Headline News and ESPN.
It is quite clear that Ted Turner was and remains the most important person in Atlanta sports. He bought the Atlanta Braves and turned the medium market franchise into a national brand thanks to WTBS. Turner hired top notch people to run his sports enterprises, Dr. Harvey Schiller, Jack Kelly, Stan Kasten.
At one time, New Jersey-native Kasten ran the Braves, Hawks and Thrashers.
Turner understood the value of having Braves baseball on WTBS and was mocked by baseball purists for turning Braves baseball into TV programming. Braves baseball games started at 5:05 p.m. on Wednesdays in a television block which served as a prelude to a Wednesday night movie. The Braves, a team out of Atlanta, had a national following and showed others in baseball that baseball was TV programming not just a game. Turner also brought the first Soviet player to the NBA as a part of the back and forth of staging the Goodwill Games.
Turner named the hockey team the Thrashers.
Turner ran a successful enterprise which was run into the ground by a company that got far too big, Time Warner and then AOL Time Warner. The company never replaced the sports people who ran Turner Sports, Dr. Schiller, Kelly, Kasten and a host of others. The only smart thing that AOL Time Warner did was to leave John Schuerholz and Bobby Cox in charge of the Braves but the big money that Ted Turner provided to the club was gone. Today, the Atlanta Braves baseball team is run as a mid market franchise and is no longer "America's Team."
To blame Time Warner for the demise of the Atlanta Thrashers may be a bit of a stretch as the company washed its hand of the team eight years ago. Back in 1997, it was a foregone conclusion that Ted Turner was going to get a National Hockey League expansion team in Atlanta and that Dr. Schiller and Kasten were the kind of people the NHL wanted. Turner had the checkbook to buy a franchise for $80 million, there would be a new arena opening in the city and he could put together a regional cable TV network. There was always a possibility that the NHL could get a cable TV network contract with Turner Sports. He could also get corporate support. But the Time Warner takeover of Turner's company and then the AOL-Time Warner merger ended that.
The AOL Time Warner debacle came under President Bill Clinton's watch. Clinton also signed the 1996 TeleCommunications Act into law, an act that virtually destroyed local radio and ended up created two radio giants—Infinity and Clear Channel—and changed the industry.
Vertical integration failed.

Time Warner's Turner Sports still has some major properties. The NBA on TNT, Major League Baseball on TBS, NASCAR on TNT, NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament on TNT, TBS and TruTV along with ncaa.com, nascar.com,nba.com, pga.com, pgatour.com. Atlanta Braves games are on Peachtree TV but Turner does not produce the games.
Time Warner was an original partner of the Fred Wilpon/New York Mets' SNY regional sports network. But Time Warner got rid of Time Warner Cable in 2009. Time Warner and Time Warner Cable are separate companies and Time Warner Cable has a piece of SNY.
Media companies got bigger and were too big to fail but failed. Time Warner and Clear Channel have been bad stewards of media properties. Time Warner is out of the sports ownership business. Bad owners ruin sports and the guys at Time Warner and then AOL Time Warner whether it was Gerald Levin or Steve Case is at the top of the list of bad sports owners.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

2011-05-31T19:42:00.000-07:00

Will the NBA become a 'fly over' league?
TUESDAY, 31 MAY 2011 14:28

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/will-the-nba-become-a-fly-over-league
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
The NBA Champion Final series is one of the National Basketball Association’s crown jewel events but behind the glitz and glamour of the competition is a real question that no one wants to discuss. Is the NBA in danger of becoming what Louisville lawyer and player agent Bruce Miller calls a fly over league?
A fly over league is a term that needs to be defined.
This seems to be the best definition. The NBA may become a league of just major cities with three teams in New York – Manhattan’s Knicks, Brooklyn’s Nets and a small market team moving to Newark. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has already told NBA Commissioner David Stern that Newark is open for NBA business as soon as the Nets franchise moves over to Brooklyn. New Jersey Devils owner Jeffrey Vanderbeek wants an NBA team in his Newark building. Three teams in the Los Angeles area, two teams in the San Francisco Bay Area
The Sacramento Kings owners, the Maloof brothers, have toyed with the idea of moving their franchise to Anaheim to give Los Angeles three teams, the Lakers and Clippers along with the proposed Anaheim Royals. Sacramento officials are scrambling to find hundreds of millions of dollars to build the Maloofs a new arena despite proposed layoffs of municipal workers along with the shut downs of public parks and scaling back of educational opportunities from kindergarten through 12th grade.
Anaheim doesn’t have an NBA team because city officials gave the lion’s share of the Anaheim arena revenues to the Walt Disney Company when Disney signed a deal to put a National Hockey League expansion team in the building. There weren’t enough revenues left over for Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling to move his team from the Los Angeles Sports Arena to Anaheim. That is why Anaheim lost an NBA team.
Priorities are priorities for a small market franchise that cannot keep up with the Knicks, Lakers and other large market teams.
National Basketball Association owners and players do not have a collective bargaining agreement after June 30th. The National Basketball Players Association has already filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board claiming that NBA owners are not negotiating in good faith.
NBA owners want to roll back salaries and there is a claim that as many as 22 of the 30 franchises are losing copious amounts of money.
Newark officials want to replace the Nets. San Jose is looking for an NBA. The NBA owns the New Orleans Hornets franchise; Wisconsin Senator Herb Kohl is not running for re-election and owns the Milwaukee Bucks, a franchise looking for a new facility. The Indiana Pacers franchise is heavily subsidized by local taxpayers in Indianapolis and surrounding areas. The very successful on court Oklahoma City Thunder franchise is also very heavily subsidized by Oklahoma City taxpayers.
That franchise was in Seattle until a few years ago when local elected officials decided not to build a new arena for the team. The then SuperSonics owners squeezed every last nickel they could out of Oklahoma City and state politicians.
This is the NBA today.
Miller is charge of an effort to bring the NBA to Louisville. The Kentucky market is small yet it is basketball crazy. The state has two “professional” basketball franchises already – the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville – but the city has not had a “big league” team since the American Basketball Association folded in 1976 and the Louisville Colonels owner John Y. Brown took some NBA cash and left the world of basketball.
Brown returned to pro basketball after in 1976 when he purchased a piece of the NBA’s Buffalo Braves.
Louisville started seeking an NBA franchise about 10 years ago but struck out in efforts to land George Shinn’s Charlotte Hornets, Michael Heisley’s Vancouver Grizzlies and Leslie Alexander’s Houston Rockets. Shinn moved his team to New Orleans (which is a financial disaster), Heisley went to Memphis (another fiscal problem) and Alexander stayed in Houston.
Miller isn’t doing a whole of lobbying for an NBA team at the moment. No one is going to sink $300 million into a small market team without knowing what the new Collective Bargaining Agreement looks like.
Could Louisville work? Under the right set of circumstances, yes. But it has to start with NBA owners increasing revenue sharing between the large market Knicks and Lakers and the ownerless New Orleans, Milwaukee, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, Indianapolis and other small market franchises.
Will the Knicks Jim Dolan and the Lakers Jim Buss (the Lakers scored a huge deal with Time Warner Cable to form a Lakers regional cable station in English and in Spanish starting in 2012) to share revenues? One of the major coups of Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig’s career was getting New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner to give up some of his dollars in a revenue sharing scheme. Can David Stern, who really has never been very successful in twist the arms of Buss and Dolan to give up some of their dollars to help the smaller markets.
The NBA plans to manufacture what 2008 Republican Presidential candidate John McCain denounced. He claimed Barack Obama wanted to redistribute the wealth of the country.
NBA owners want a shift in wealth the in the business.
McCain, of course, was using a new campaign slogan but Stern and small market owners have been after a shift in wealth for four years now. Mainly the owners want to stop paying the playing enormous salaries over a long term commitment. A lot of players are not as productive as owners and general managers projected and a lot of contracts are bad investments on the court.
The National Basketball Players Association should not be in the business of protecting owners from a bad investment. The NBPA already gave the NBA owners a huge concession in the last go around for a CBA by agreeing to bar players just out of high school and high school graduates from applying for a job as a player in the league.
NBA Commissioner David Stern came up with flimsy excuses which included that he didn’t want to see NBA scouts at high school games. Does that clean up the high school game?

No.
The real reason Stern and his owners didn’t want 18-year-old out of high school players was simple. Why pay for research and development when you have a college willing to do just that? By getting a 19-year-old instead of an 18-year old, you have a more finished product and more importantly, a contract renewal comes at 22 or 23 years of age not 21 when a player still has a perceived upside.
Jermaine O’Neal was a total bust with Portland after getting millions from ownership as the 17th player picked in the 1996 draft. He cost Paul Allen a lot of money and did nothing for Allen’s Trail Blazers franchise. Allen though stuck with him and at 21 offered O’Neal a huge contract. O’Neal’s second contract was big but his playing time wasn’t and he languished costing Allen millions.
Portland traded him to Indiana where he flourished. Had O’Neal been in college, Allen would have invested his money in another player. Allen, under today’s CBA, would have been protected against a bad investment because O’Neal would not have come into the league at 18 and qualify for a new contract at 21. Players second contracts come at 22 or 23.
If the NBA owners don’t get rollbacks, Miller’s job of trying to get an NBA team in Louisville will be difficult. The league has not given up on New Orleans yet and is looking for a person who has an interest in keeping the team in New Orleans. The Sacramento arena deal has not been fully explained but the league is committed to remain there through spring 2012. Of course if the owners lock out the players and there is a long work stoppage, it doesn’t matter what will happen in New Orleans and Sacramento in 2011-12.
The new CBA may very well determine whether the NBA becomes a fly over league or not. Charlotte, Memphis, Oklahoma City, San Antonio, Sacramento, Portland, Orlando, New Orleans, Indianapolis, Cleveland and Denver may become fly over cities in the NBA owners minds if they don’t get what they want in the new collective bargaining agreement. The players? They just want status quo.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, “The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition” is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

2011-05-25T16:36:00.000-07:00

NFL lockout, failure of Atlanta Thrashers, and other sports struggles can be blamed on Ronald Reagan
WEDNESDAY, 25 MAY 2011 08:29

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/nfl-lockout-failure-of-atlanta-thrashers-and-other-sports-struggles-can-be-blamed-on-ronald-reagan
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
If and when the Atlanta Thrashers National Hockey League franchise is sold and moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, there will be those who will analyze the failure of the business to catch on in Georgia. Yes, the Thrashers ownership was bad, and there is enough evidence to completely convict the ownership of being thoroughly incompetent as a court proceeding proved.
But it is far more than just bad ownership that doomed the Atlanta Thrashers franchise and after a quarter of a century it is time to place the finger of blame on the real culprit on the potential Thrashers move along with the National Football League lockout, the potential National Basketball Association lockout and the struggles of various franchises to succeed economically in the sports arena.
It was the 99th Congress that revised the 1986 tax code and President Ronald Reagan who signed those changes into law.
A good number of cities should never have had "major league" sports franchises but those cities decided to go into the sports business by building stadiums and arenas and handing out leases to owners that became an albatross around the necks of taxpayers.
The smaller market cities went after teams to show other businesses that their city was a great area for business. Memphis, Nashville, Jacksonville and other smaller towns all of a sudden became big league and paid handsomely for the “title."
The 1986 tax code revision redistributed the wealth and shifted the burden of paying for new facilities from team owners to taxpayers. Only eight cents of every dollar generated in new facilities could go to pay down the debt of the municipally built facility unless a local government got tough and negotiated a better deal.
In most cities, the local governments who were so desperate to build "major league" structures rolled over and gave owners whatever they wanted in an attempt to be "major league" and forced all sorts of tax hikes on local residents. The stadiums and arenas were peddled to voters as "economic engines" that would provide first construction jobs then build up an area. Local residents who had to vote on the expenditure were told that they would pay nothing (in some cities) that the money would come from hikes in hotel and motel taxes and car rentals. Other tax hikes were imposed on beer, alcohol, cigarettes, cigars, tobacco, water, sewer and a general sales tax hike to fund facilities. There were breaks given on property tax payments (the combined Giants-Jets real estate holding pays East Rutherford, NJ about $6 million a year in combined rent and taxes on the Meadowlands facility on a property that is probably worth about $13 million a year on the tax roll.)
Sports owners jumped on the 1986 Congressional act which Ronald Reagan approved. This is what the change in the tax code has brought. A 2011 NFL Lockout, the probable move of the Atlanta hockey team to Winnipeg, the Glendale, Arizona government paying the National Hockey League $25 million to keep a franchise in the city, the delay of a move of the National Basketball Association's Sacramento Kings to Anaheim, California until cash-poor Sacramento along with other local governments in the area find an arena funding formula. The move of the New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn has New York City and New York State politicians fingerprints all over it. The building will be heavily subsidized by New York taxpayers as are the new Yankees Stadium, the Mets ballpark in Flushing (complete with the logos of the taxpayers bailed out corporate sponsor--Citibank) and New Jersey kicked in well over $300 million for infrastructure for the Giants-Jets new stadium. New Jersey still owes hundreds of millions of dollars in paying down the debt at the departed Giants Stadium. New Jersey is not alone in paying for sports facilities that were blown up. Pittsburgh was paying off the debt at Three Rivers Stadium for years, Seattle and King County will be paying off the bonds on the long gone Kingdome until 2014. Those stadiums were replaced after the changes in the 1986 tax code.
The NFL lockout's roots can be directly traced to Ronald Reagan's signature in 1986. It is no coincidence that the majority of NFL cities built new venues after the 1986 legislation. As more and more stadiums were opening on the public dime, revenues kept rising. By the late 1990s, the New Orleans Saints ownership claimed it could no longer compete in the NFL unless they got a new stadium in the city because the team no longer was in the top of the NFL in stadium revenues and fell to the bottom.
Eventually the state of Louisiana came up with a $186.5 million deal to satisfy the owner, Tom Benson, and handed him direct checks every July 1 between 2002 and 2010 to make him happy and keep the team in town. As far as anyone could tell, it was the first time a state gave money to a team. New York State gives $3 million annually to make Ralph Wilson elated in Orchard Park, New York. Indianapolis virtually gives away the new football facility and all of the revenues generated inside the place to Colts owner Jim Irsay. Small market owners need help from governments.
In places like Cincinnati, the local government has to take money from other services to pay down the debt at the football stadium. The new stadiums have helped the owners but in cities like Minneapolis, Oakland and San Diego where the stadiums are old (although renovated in Oakland and San Diego) and cannot produce the revenues that are found in Arlington, Texas (Dallas Cowboys), East Rutherford, Philadelphia, Houston, Foxboro and Washington (Landover, Maryland) and that has hurt the franchises in Minneapolis, San Diego and Oakland. Those teams cannot keep up with the salary floor as NFL revenues rose. The old stadium franchises cannot keep up with the Joneses, Maras-Tischs, Johnsons, Krafts, Snyders, Laniers and the other big boys in revenues.
The NFL lockout is designed to help the old stadium owners who don't have the revenue sources in the local market that new stadium owners have. That's the whole reason behind the NFL lockout strategy. It's not a difficult concept to grasp even though the league and players continue to slug it out in the judicial system. The NFL has been reluctant to spell out the real reason it has locked out the players. They need taxpayers dollars to fix the problem in Minneapolis, Oakland, San Diego, San Francisco (Santa Clara) possibly Buffalo and certainly in Los Angeles and it is a tough sell for the prosperous NFL to beg for tax dollars to build stadiums to help the lower revenue teams. But the league needs taxpayers dollars to make everyone equal.
The National Hockey League came up with a grand plan to expand the business in 1990 from 21 franchises to 30 with most of the nine franchises to take root in the United States. The expansion scheme was hatched long before Gary Bettman became National Hockey League commissioner, something that seems to be conveniently forgotten by sportswriters who don't have any understanding of business and politics and sports.
The official line was the NHL needed to expand their United States footprint for television purposes and the unofficial line was that Wayne Gretzky popularized the NHL because he was in Los Angeles and attracted the Hollywood crowd to Los Angeles Kings games. But the truth was that cities were building arenas and ready to give away the house in exchange for a franchise. In Anaheim, the Walt Disney Company decided to capitalize on the success of the Mighty Ducks movie franchise and bought a team from the league after securing a sweetheart lease in the new Anaheim arena. Disney ended up with everything at the arena and apparently would not share revenues with say Donald Sterling and his National Basketball Association Clippers. Sterling and other potential NBA owners could not get into Anaheim because there was not enough money available for an NBA team to be financially successful thanks to the Disney lease.
Before Bettman got to the NHL, the league split the Minnesota North Stars franchise with some players staying in Bloomington, Minnesota and the rest ended up with an expansion team in San Jose although the franchise started at the Cow Palace in Daly City south of San Franchise. The league expanded into Ottawa and Tampa and then Anaheim and Miami. The NHL owners began splitting a lot of money, $50 million per new franchise. Bettman joined when they league had 26 teams. Bettman came into the league in 1993 when Norman Green was attempting to move his Minnesota North Stars franchise to either Anaheim or Dallas. Green moved to Dallas. In 1995, Quebec City officials refused to provide funding for a new arena and the franchise moved to Denver. Winnipeg officials did not build a new arena and the Winnipeg Jets franchise ended up in Phoenix in a poor conceived arena that was built to satisfy Phoenix Suns owner Jerry Colangelo need for a new basketball arena for his team. The facility was built in such a way that it had thousands of obstructed seats making it unusable for anything but basketball.
In 1997, the NHL expanded to planned new buildings in Nashville and Atlanta (two cities that could hardly be called hockey mad cities), along with St. Paul, Minnesota and Columbus. St. Paul Mayor Norman Coleman pushed heavily to build a taxpayers subsidized arena in St. Paul while private money was found to build a venue in Columbus, Ohio. Also in 1997, Hartford Whalers owner Peter Karmanos moved his franchise to Raleigh, North Carolina. That deal also came with Karmanos promising to move a piece of his Compuware business to the Raleigh area. Connecticut Governor John Rowland was too busy trying to get Robert Kraft to move his New England Patriots NFL franchise to Hartford. Kraft listened said yes and then got a deal in Massachusetts abandoning Rowland.
The NHL expansion gave owners $450 million which was split between 21 owners. That was not Gary Bettman's plan but it was the NHL's business plan was developed by league owners in 1990.
The NBA added four franchises after Reagan changed the tax code but those arenas in Orlando, Charlotte, Miami and Minneapolis were online prior to the change in the law. All four cities became problems for NBA Commissioner David Stern and the league. The buildings were not state of the art 21st century buildings as they were designed in the 1980s. Orlando, Charlotte and Miami didn't have the real revenue producers, club seats and luxury boxes for corporate customers. All three cities replaced arenas that were 20 year old or less. Minneapolis's building was funded by private money---which nearly snuck the franchise---and by the mid 1990s the building was taken over by the government.
The NBA lockout of 2011 will be caused by reckless spending. The NBA went into markets that cannot compete with New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and other large markets without a real revenue sharing plan. Those markets will never have had franchises without the Reagan signature. Memphis, Charlotte, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City, San Antonio have teams because of new arenas, Seattle lost a team because local politicians would not spend money for a new build some 12 years after renovating the city's arena bringing the building up to 1990s standards. Despite giving all the revenues away at the arena in Indianapolis, Pacers owner Herb Simon may eventually move his team. Indianapolis cannot make money even though the city has given away the building.
Major League Baseball went through the same dance. New stadiums, great leases and broken promises of stadiums being an economic engine.

Major League Soccer owners learned their lessons well as they sold local politicians on the benefits of new stadiums starting with the failed economic engine theory.
The NHL is still playing the arena game. Charles Wang's New York Islanders franchise needs a new building and Nassau County voters will be asked on August 1 to sell bonds for a building. Edmonton is seeking a new arena, Columbus wants the city to take over the building, and Calgary is looking for a new building. Major League Baseball wants new venues for the Tampa Bay Rays and Oakland A's. The NBA could become a league with three New York area teams, three Los Angeles area franchises and two franchises in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Taxpayers are on the hook for billions thanks to Ronald Reagan's signature. Reagan supporters and apologists will probably try to debunk the impact of the 1986 tax code changes on sports. It would be a futile argument. There is plenty of blame to go around starting with the House and then the Senate. Two Senators, New York's Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat, and then Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania (before he switched parties) tried to close the 92 percent loophole in the tax code but to no avail.
Reagan and Congress changed sports in 1986. A quarter of a century later the impact is astounding. The NFL lockout, the NBA lockout, the Sacramento arena problems, the Glendale subsidies, the Louisiana subsidies which continue to this day for Benson's NFL Saints and the NBA Hornets, Nassau County's vote, the Atlanta relocation, baseball's "Bay" problems in St. Petersburg and Oakland. It goes on and on with no relief in sight for sports fans.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

2011-05-19T11:28:00.000-07:00

Former New York Jets great Marty Lyons says retired players need health benefits now
THURSDAY, 19 MAY 2011 07:43

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/former-new-york-jets-great-marty-lyons-says-retired-players-need-health-benefits-now
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
NEW YORK. N.Y. — In October 1987, New York Jets defensive lineman Marty Lyons decided to cross a picket line and play football because he didn't like the way National Football League Players Association Executive Director Gene Upshaw was conducting the association's business. The NFLPA went on strike looking for a liberalized form of free agency and more money. The NFLPA didn't bother asking for after-career lifetime health benefits.
Lyons has never looked back at his decision to cross the picket line and in hindsight thinks the 1987 four week strike was a waste of time.
"I don't worry about it, I got more important things to do than worry about a labor dispute, worry about a lockout" said Lyons on Tuesday at the announcement that he was elected into the College Football Hall of Fame. "I got four kids, I try to be the best father, best husband that I can to them. Whatever happens in this dispute, they will settle it.
"If it is going to help the league, if it is going to help the players, if it is going to subsidize our retirement a little bit better. Great. If it doesn't, I can't worry about things I can't control. I am interested. I am still an NFL alumnus, I still believe in what the players are trying to accomplish but I cannot control it. If you can't control it, why get stressed out about it. I support (former Giants defensive lineman) George Martin and the NFL alumni. I was just at the NFL Draft with (Commissioner) Roger Goodell. I do a lot of work for the Jets. I see the issues on both sides of the fence. But I can't control any of it, so you know what, I get every morning and I go to work."
But Lyons is interested in the welfare of his former teammates and others who played in the NFL and thinks the old players need some help.
"Eighty-seven, it was very difficult," he said the of labor action. "I think there was a lot of dissension between the players and the leadership we had in Gene Upshaw. When the replacement teams can in, some of us made the decision that it was in our best interests and our families best interests allow to let these people to come in and take our jobs."
Neither the 1982 nor the 1987 NFLPA strikes, in the long term, helped the membership. The "Money Now" mantra of the players should have been replaced by “what will your life at the age of 45, 50, 55 and 60 be like?” The players seem to have the same problems today as they did in 1982 with the exception of having more money than those who played 29 and 24 years ago.
"Probably not," said Lyons of whether the two strikes helped those players involved in the long run. "You know, I think the issues from 87 to where we are now maybe get magnified a little bit more because there is more money involved. Anytime that there is money involved and the issues are back and forth, I don't know who wins. Because you got the owners, because they want a little more money, you got the players...I see guys like Kevin Turner, a good friend of mine who played at the University of Alabama suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease.
"A lot of head injuries.
"He is 41 years old, 42 years old with three kids. What's the NFL going to do for him? What's his pension going to do for him and his family? He's just fighting every day to stay alive.
“There's another head injury. "
The National Football League does not acknowledge that head injuries may cause health problems down the line. In 2010, the league posted a warning about head injuries in each of the 32 team's locker rooms but other than a few words and some other forms of communications, players still are getting their bells rung and returning to the field as quickly as possible.
"You didn't worry about them (head injuries), you really didn't worry about injuries," said Lyons of his attitude and the attitude of his NFL playing peers during his time in the league in the 1980s. "Because the bottom line is, if you allowed somebody to come in and take your position, you may not get it back. So there was a big difference, everybody played hurt. If you were injured, it was a different story."
Lyons former coach Walt Michaels and former Sack Exchange teammate Joe Klecko are hurting like many others who played in the NFL.
"If you see Walt now and walks around, if you see Joe Klecko, he just had a shoulder replacement. The game does have a price to pay if you play it long enough. And I think man for man, the individuals that are playing the price now, myself I had eight operations, I would have gone through a few more if I had an opportunity to lace them up and play one more game. It is well worth the price now to get out of bed."
Lyons is doing well. He is a senior vice president of operations for a Long Island construction company, the Marty Lyons Foundation is still going strong after 27 years helping terminally ill children, he is a motivational speaker and has 20 years of broadcasting on his resume.
But Lyons knows that former NFL players need help.
"I would love to see the league and the committee (the players association or more correctly what is the decertified players association) to come to some sort of agreement that if you are a vested player (three or more years experience) and you leave the game, you have a lifetime benefit of health benefits. When you retire, you benefits stop (the post 1993 players get health benefits for five years and then it ends, Lyons career was done in 1989 after 11 years). You better hope you get a good job or have enough money to go on COBRA. So I think health benefits are the number one priority that we should be looking at to get retired players once they leave the NFL.
"If you are vested and you make a contribution to helping the league and the players then you and your family should have lifetime health benefits. When I left the game in 1991, I had to get my health benefits. In hindsight, I think it was a mistake (that the NFLPA did not fight for lifetime health care) because some of the players who are financially stressed or some of the players now who don't have health benefits maybe they would not be in this situation in their life and the time of the life if they had better benefits, better health care. Maybe they would have gotten the proper help needed."
Lyons, despite an 11 year career, never made big money that could last a lifetime. The "billionaires versus millionaires" slogan that sportswriters have attached to this lockout doesn't work. Very few players make huge sums of cash. Most careers are brief and players need to find other employment after their careers. But the problem is that NFL players might have short careers but their aches and pains last a lifetime and some become disabled and cannot work. Those players eventually end up on social security insurance and Medicare and are looked after by taxpayers.
That is where Upshaw and his associates which include members of the NFLPA executive board and player agents failed their constituency in 1982, 1987 and 1993. They took short term gains and didn't see the future.

Lyons looks at the dispute as a former player but notes that other people are getting hurt. NFL teams have been laying off or reducing employee’s salaries. Coaches are taking a pay cut and if games are missed per diem employees will be left out in the cold.
"Everybody wants a little bit more of the pie," he said. "And the bottom line is that the people at the bottom end of the food chain that are going to pay the price if they don't play the game of football. You got a lot of people that are relying on that added income every single Saturday or Sunday whether they are parking cars or working concessions or working the stadium. For them not to have an opportunity to feed their family when there is a lockout or labor dispute, it is a shame."
NFL owners and players go to court on June 3 to argue over whatever they are fighting for. Collective bargaining agreement negotiations pick up on June 8. The players want status quo and keep 59 percent of football revenues, the owners want the players to give back revenues, cut their salaries (contracts are not guaranteed) and help build stadiums in Minnesota and Santa Clara, California by kicking in part of their revenues. Meanwhile former players are still out in the cold with meager pensions and no health benefits and for many football players, getting health insurance is almost impossible because of pre-existing conditions.
This is the NFL, with the initials NFL standing for, "Not For Long."
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble

2011-05-16T17:13:00.000-07:00

Fans don't matter in sports
MONDAY, 16 MAY 2011 14:43

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/fans-dont-matter-in-sports
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
And so the National Football League lockout has become a version of the People's Court. The good guys, the National Football League Players Association, are fighting for workers' rights and are begging "fans" to help them lift the lockout. The owners, the bad guys, want to take away the players ability to make truckloads of money and are threatening their long term health care. Wait, the players have done such a great job in past collective bargaining agreements that former players lose health benefits five years after their playing careers are done and only if a player has three years in the league.
The "People's Court" is now playing in Minneapolis, Minnesota where United States District Judge David Doty is figuring out of the owners owe the players money over how the league managed to negotiate TV contracts to protect that side if in the event of a 2011 lockout. The players are seeking $707 million in damages. The fans will get ZERO if Judge Doty gives the players a monetary award even through a good chunk of that TV money comes from the cable TV subscriber-based ESPN and the satellite pay service DirecTV. In fact a good many people who never watch an NFL game on either ESPN or DirecTV are subsidizing the billions of dollars that ESPN and DirecTV pays the NFL.
The chances are that Judge David Doty will not address relief for subscribers are great. Fans are not a part of the lockout equation. Cable TV subscribers never received a rebate in 1994 and 1995 when Major League Baseball shutdown the 1994 season and the National Hockey League's lockout did not end until January leaving cable TV subscribers without a product from mid-September 1994 through January 1995. An awful lot of teams had local cable TV deals in 1994 and 1995 and subscribers were playing for something that they didn't get. Programming in terms of games which they were charged for. In 1998-99, the National Basketball Association locked out the league players for about 30 games. Not one cable TV subscriber received a penny back for missed games. Interestingly enough the owner of the Golden State Warriors, Chris Cohan, tried to stiff the Oakland Alameda Coliseum Authority and not pay rent at the Oakland Arena during the NBA lockout.
An arbitrator smacked down Cohan and forced him to pay rent for missed games.
No one has ever looked after cable TV or satellite TV subscribers and gotten consumers money back for missed games because of labor actions.
Judge Doty also should bring up the fitness of Rupert Murdoch (FOX owned and operated stations such as Channels 5 and 9 in New York and Channel 29 in Philadelphia), Sumner Redstone (Channel 2 in New York, Channel 3 in Philadelphia) and Comcast-GE's Channel 4 in New York and Channel 10 in Philadelphia for agreeing to deals with the NFL that would underwrite a lockout by supplying a full TV rights fee even if there was a lockout.
The question here that needs to be asked in court is how people who have public licenses to run TV stations nationally (and program networks and syndication arms—FOX is not a network but a syndication company) like Murdoch, Redstone and the NBC owners (General Electric when the contract was signed) could use monies generated by a business that is owned by the public---a television station---to provide a foundation for a lockout/strike war chest?
Television is one of the three essentials of the sports business. The trilogy is government (government builds stadiums, provides tax breaks for the business, creates cable TV rules and allows businesses to write off part of the expense of a luxury box, club seats, tickets and dining in a stadium or arena restaurant), cable TV (in the case of the NBA, NHL and Major League baseball through regional sports channels) and corporate support.
The fans don't count for much except undying loyalty to a team.
Despite all of the fans "concerns" no one is protecting them while the owners and players have an army of high priced lawyers taking care of their interests.
The other "People's Court" venue is in St. Louis where an Eight Court of Appeals panel has been reviewing Judge Susan Nelson's order to lift the lockout.
The battle between the NFL and the former players association has been defined as billionaires versus millions. That is not true at all. It is multi-faceted with elected officials having their hands all over this lockout. Here's why. Politicians pushed stadiums after the 1986 federal tax code revisions to become "big league." Canadian sportswriters have it all wrong when they blame National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman for the league's "sunbelt strategy" and expansion into Atlanta, Nashville, Tampa, Miami, Anaheim and San Jose (although neither Anaheim nor San Jose are in the sunbelt) and franchise relocations into Raleigh, Dallas, Denver and Phoenix. New arenas came online with sweetheart leases and begged to get into the NHL. The same thing happened in the National Basketball Association, the NFL and Major League Baseball.
To those Canadians sportswriters who keep spewing the same nonsense about Bettman’s southern strategy and get it wrong constantly. The NHL decided to expand to 30 teams from 21 in 1990, four years after the revision in the tax code while Bettman was working at the NBA.
Cities bid against one another for teams and when the league would not expand into a city, an existing club owner picked up and moved to a city waiting with open arms. In the NFL, Baltimore, St. Louis, Nashville and Oakland got teams. As more cities built NFL facilities and handed out sweetheart leases, the ones left behind---Minnesota, Oakland and San Diego---could not maximize or match the revenues in their old stadiums. The new places in East Rutherford (for the Jets and Giants), Arlington (the Dallas Cowboys) and Indianapolis (where Jim Irsay hit the lottery in terms of what he has to pay in order to rent the new facility) pushed up league revenues and raised the salary cap for players. It also brought up the salary floor and the less revenue producing stadiums were not printing out the right amount of money for NFL owners. Literally some teams cannot keep up to the Joneses (okay Jerry and Stephen Jones and the Cowboys) and that is why the NFL wants to cut the slice of the revenues the players get from 59 to 48 percent and reduce salaries.
The players, of course, want no part of that seeing how TV monies are enormous and that NFL owners seem to be swimming in money. The players want the owners to show them the books. The owners won't give them the books the players are seeking. The majority of the players don’t make millions and have short careers.
It is all about "Money Now" on both sides of the argument.
Previous incarnations of the National Football Players Association (this version doesn't exist, wink-wink, as the players association officially decertified in March) have ignored the long time health needs of the players and have always stuck to the "Money Now" mantra, a slogan which appeared in 1982. A lot of people knew that playing surfaces in Philadelphia and Houston and other places were not good for the players. The players did nothing about the surfaces of stadiums that were built on the back of taxpayers.
The multi-purpose stadiums built in the 1960s, Houston, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and other places had an artificial field which was separated from a concrete type surface by a piece of foam or other flimsy padded material. Players knew the fields were not safe yet the people who were watching out after their interests worried about "Money Now."

By the way, where are the municipal leaders who lead the rush to get stadiums built for NFL owners (and other sports)? President Barack Obama has washed his hands of the NFL lockout as has the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Republican Lamar Smith of Texas. Apparently all elected officials want to stay clear of the NFL lockout despite the fact that the NFL clearly has been built by Congress (the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961, the 1966 AFL-NFL merger, the 1984 Cable TV bill that allowed cable operators to bundle channels on a basic tier and forced subscribers to pay for all channels on a basic tier -- the tier that became the home to sports -- whether the subscribers watch sports programming or not and the 1986 tax code revision which changed the way municipally funded stadiums and arenas were financed and placed the burden of paying off the debt on taxpayers) and helped along by local elected officials.
There is no bully pulpit pressure on either side. There is no Congressional pressure. Missing in action on the subject are Governors like Chris Christie, Andrew Cuomo, Tom Corbett, Rick Snyder, Scott Walker, Rick Scott, Jerry Brown, Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, Jan Brewer. Minnesota's Mark Dayton is busy looking to get New Jersey's Zygi Wilf a stadium for his Minnesota Vikings despite the lockout. Tough guy politicians are beating up on municipal workers and teachers yet have not voiced an opinion on the NFL lockout which may close stadiums in the fall. The same stadiums politicians have claimed are economic engines for the community.
The fans are being hosed and yet they always come back although not necessarily in the stadiums or arenas. Fans have been priced out by NFL owners unless they want to pay a fortune of money for a seat. But fans can always sit in front of a TV and the owners will make money from rights fees and from cable TV, it doesn't matter if no one watches. The ESPNs and the regional sports channels of the world get their money from subscriber fees. That is part of the argument that has been redacted from the Judge David Doty's courtroom. No one, from NFL lawyers, to the people who are representing an organization that allegedly went out of business on March 11, the NFLPA, to the cable TV network executives want to touch. It would just bring unwanted trouble.
NFL beat writers for newspapers aren't going to report on that either and it would not be in the best interests of ESPN SportsCenter, ESPN's Outside the Lines, the fluff ESPN shows that feature sportswriters like Mike Lupica and a gang of know nothings talking about nonsense, or the CBS, NBC, FOX or Disney's ABC news to discuss that aspect of the lockout. The television executives have a big role in this lockout. They are not complaining about their partner's---NFL owners--business strategy. Corporate partners have also been very quiet about the NFL's tactics. The only ones complaining are the bottom feeders---the fans.
The NFL is just the first in the queue. NBA owners and players don't have a collective bargaining agreement after June 30. The Major League Baseball owners and players six-year collective bargaining agreement ends in December and the National Hockey League owners and players deal is done in September 2012.
It's all about money.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.