What Would Lebron Really Mean in New York?
By Evan Weiner
July 1, 2010
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m7d1-What-Would-Lebron-Really-Mean-in-New-York
(New York, N. Y.) -- New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg wants the Knicks to sign Lebron James. Bloomberg's city is a financial mess with teachers getting fired and services being cutback. New York State is a financial disaster. Of course Bloomberg should not even be the city's mayor as he bypassed a law that term limited city elected officials to two terms (Rudy Giuliani left office because of term limits) but that is a story for another day. Bloomberg won last November for a third time and is the mayor.
Here is the rub with Bloomberg and his want of Lebron James in Manhattan.
Madison Square Garden does not pay city property taxes. It may be as much as $14 million a year that does not go into the city's coffers. Lebron James salary would be about $14 million a year. If the Garden's owners, the Dolan family (a family that made their fortune off of the government because of laws governing the cable TV business) paid the tax, perhaps some of those Knicks fans who are losing their jobs because the city is broke might be retained in their jobs.
(The Dolans did not negotiate the property tax deal, they inherited the break when they bought the Garden in 1995 with the ITT Corporation.)
The Dolans themselves have been cutting back on their "media empire" for a long time. Their News12s in various parts of the New York City metropolitan area have seen a departure of reporters and the Dolan's newspaper, Newsday, just got concessions from workers which will result in five to 10 percent wage cutbacks. The Dolans have money for players but seem to have short arms when reaching into their pockets when it comes to paying reporters and property taxes.
But sports is fantasyland and Lebron James going to the Knicks would be a feel good story for long suffering Knicks fans.
The sports pundits will talk about just how much money Lebron James will pump into the city. That's assuming he lives in the city. There are New York players whose residents are in Florida or in other states where there is no state income tax. They happen to play in New York.
But the "Trickle Down" theory is in play. Surely Lebron would bring more people into New York to see him play for the Knicks and that would mean more money to the city?
That's not true.
The Knicks play two pre-season games in October, then just 41 games between November and April and those dates are scattered. The playoffs would bring a few more dates but certainly nothing that would add up for the city. With or without Lebron or a number of players who would make the Knicks better, the city would not stand to make much. Economic impact is very overrated. People have a finite amount of dollars to spend on entertainment, if it doesn't go to the Knicks, it would go somewhere else in the city or in the metropolitan area.
There would be few people who would plan a trip to New York because of Lebron. As far as being a tourist attraction, Lebron's presence in New York City would pale in comparison to the amount of people who want to see Broadway shows or maybe the Big East Tournament.
Most sports is local. There are few teams that can pull people in and those teams are basically college football teams who travel with large contingents and perhaps St. Louis Cardinals fans.
Lebron doesn't even have the pull of the New York City Marathon. You want an event that brings a multitude of people and a ton of money into town? The Marathon attracts runners globally. There are about 100,000 people who want a shot at the 2010 New York City Marathon. Only 37,000 runners get to participate and an awful lot of those runners are not from New York who rent hotel and motel rooms, dine at area eateries and put money into not only the city but surrounding areas. The Marathon has international travel partners in about 40 countries. Lebron is a one man corporation but he is not going to be a money making attraction to the city and Bloomberg's budget.
Lebron is not as valuable to Bloomberg as the shows in the Javits Center such as the Toy Show or the Jewelry Show. Lebron is not in the same league as the Model United Nations which brings about 5,000 teenagers from all over the world to participate. Lebron cannot compete with Fashion Week or Fleet Week. The Javits Center events, the UN events including the annual world leaders session and the Model United Nations bring not only participants but guests into the area and those guests use hotels/motels and restaurants. Lebron is not the same draw as the US Open in Flushing Meadows in the late summer. How many Europeans will buy plane tickets and book hotels with various travel packages to watch Lebron for a game here or there when they can see two weeks of championship tennis and be in New York City?
Cities compete for conventions.
Conventions make money, sports teams make money for owners and players but in many ways they cannot even compete with a local 24 hour a day supermarket in terms of real economic impact.
A few people might get jobs helping Lebron if he signs with the Knicks but as far as a municipal money making machine. He is not.
There is some other nonsense about New York being the biggest stage in the world. Lebron's popularity began while he was in prep school and he has been in Cleveland, a decaying rust belt city, for the past seven years. He can make the same endorsement money in Cleveland that he can in New York. This is not the 1960s where Mickey Mantle ruled the roost along with other New York Yankees and New York Giants football players in terms of Madison Avenue. Henry Aaron was an afterthought in Milwaukee in the 1950s and 1960s but that was a different time.
New York isn't even the biggest NBA stage. It is just another franchise in the 30 team NBA. The Garden is an overrated building that has been living off the glory days of another Madison Square Garden that was located about a mile north of the place. Garden officials were so disgusted with the four-year-old building in 1972 that they looked at possibly relocating the Knicks and the NHL's Rangers to the New Jersey Meadowlands. Gulf and Western didn't think so highly of the building a decade later after the bought the place in the mid-1970s. In the early 1980s, the Garden owners were screaming that they could no longer be competitive in the then 15 year old building and unless New York City and New York State gave them a property tax break, the Knicks would move to Nassau County and the Rangers to the Meadowlands.
So much for sentimentally. It is all business.
New York Governor Mario Cuomo and New York Mayor Ed Koch cut a deal with the Garden which relieved the arena ownership of the burden of paying city property tax and the arena's electric bill. Everyone in the Con Ed power grid got to pay a portion of the Garden's electric bill. That has gone on for nearly three decades even though neither Cuomo nor Koch though the law was passed by the legislature in Albany in 1982 would last in perpetuity.
Lebron is a money making machine for Lebron and his company along with a sports team, a league and his marketing partners. Knicks ticket prices will go up with Lebron, of course they go up even when the team is bad.
There isn't that much room to expand the fan base at the Garden for Knicks games as remarkably the team is still selling tickets at a high volume at 98.7 percent capacity in a building that seats about 19,500 people in 2009-10. With the teetering economy, a bad record and a lot of sports competition for the dollar in the New York area, it is actually incredible that the Knicks are still sellable. The Yankees cannot sell high priced home plate ticket in a new stadium with a championship team, the Mets attendance is way down and the New York Jets have slashed prices on about a quarter of the seats at the team's new stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
Lebron would probably help Madison Square Garden's cable TV channel because more eyeballs would be on the channel and that would bring in advertising. The network might demand a higher licensing fee from multiple system operators who would then pass that along to cable TV customers which means that all cable TV subscribers that have the Garden's channel on their basic tier would have to pay for what maybe three or four percent of the audience watch---Knicks basketball.
In the world of fantasy---sports---Lebron James to the Knicks is a gift to Knicks fans. In the real world though, it is far far different. Bloomberg wants Lebron, he wanted a New Jersey-based Super Bowl also in 2014 which he got. He has green lighted hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tax breaks and subsidies for the construction of athletic facilities while presiding over job cuts because the city is broke.
Lebron James might save the Knicks from basketball mediocrity but he will do very little for the city's economy and job growth.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on the "Politics of Sports Business and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Showing posts with label Madison Square Garden.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Madison Square Garden.. Show all posts
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Monday, June 21, 2010
34 years after joining NBA, the Nets are still struggling
34 years after joining NBA, the Nets are still struggling
MONDAY, 21 JUNE 2010 08:14
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/34-years-after-joining-nba-the-nets-are-still-struggling
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
On June 17th, 1976, New Jersey unknowingly got a National Basketball Association team. On that day, representatives from the National Basketball Association and the American Basketball Association signed off on a deal that saw four ABA teams, the Uniondale-based New York Nets, the Denver Nuggets, the Indiana Pacers and the San Antonio Spurs join the 18-team NBA. Two other ABA teams did not make the cut, the Spirits of St. Louis and the Kentucky Colonels.
The deal overwhelmed New York Nets owner Roy Boe who could not afford to $3.2 million entry into the NBA and then a $4.8 million additional charge that he would have to pay Madison Square Garden because he invaded the New York Knicks territory.
Ultimately Boe would move his team to New Jersey within a year.
In retrospect Boe should have taken the deal that the Silna Brothers of New Jersey were offering.
The Spirits of St. Louis and Kentucky were left out, but the Silna Brothers, who owned the St. Louis franchise, took TV monies and a $2.2 million a cash settlement for not applying to the NBA. The Spirits owners would get a share of whatever future NBA national TV contract was signed in perpetuity. The Kentucky owner John Y. Brown took a $3 million settlement. Brown used that money to purchase half of the NBA Buffalo Braves franchise. The rest of the ABA players were distributed throughout the league in a dispersal draft.
"I think they made a mistake," said Fritz Massmann, who stayed on with the Nets as the team's trainer and traveling secretary after the merger. "The ABA everybody worked together, every trainer could call each other and help each other out. We cooperated. We had one trainer who was in San Diego; they gave them 12 jocks and said that was enough for the year. We gave them extra jock straps; we tried to help everybody out. You got to help the people out if they were hurting. It was learning how to survive and we did.
"When they made the merger, we were at a trainer's meeting in Boston, they were supposed to take eight teams, at the end they took four. But I would have liked to have seen them take St. Louis and Louisville. It was exciting, it was something new every day. I loved the ABA."
Massmann was an ABA vet and had fond memories of the league, even the Island Garden days when the landlord Arnold "Whitey" Carlson would not open the doors of the building for Nets practices.
"I still call it the massacre," said Bob (Slick) Leonard who was coaching Indiana at the time. "The NBA didn't like us because we upped the ante for players and everything. We come in and they take away your draft choices, they don't give you any television rights, you pay $3.2 million in cash up front to get in. So it really was a massacre.
"But I look back at that and I say how good was the ABA when the merger came? It was really very good. Because the first year after the merger in the NBA All-Star Game we put 12 players on the roster."
The Nets ownership was not so fortunate and in a sense, the franchise has never recovered from the "merger" even though the team went to two NBA Finals in 2002 and 2003. Dr. J, Julius Erving, was the Nets best player and the ABA's best-known player.
Dr. J never played a game for the Nets in the NBA. The financially strapped Boe sold Erving's contract to the Philadelphia 76ers to make ends meet. A year later, the Nets were playing in a college gym in Piscataway. The NBA franchise was back in the state where it played in 1967-68: New Jersey.
Boe's other entity; the NHL's New York Islanders nearly sold their players to pay for the Nets entering the NBA. The ABA-NBA consolidation did Nets owner Roy Boe no favors. Boe was overextended and he had already pledged $4 million to the Garden in 1972 for invading the New York Rangers territory when he got an expansion franchise in Nassau County.
Boe had done the NHL a favor by accepting an NHL expansion franchise because it closed off a potentially solid market, Long Island, for the World Hockey Association. The new hockey league was established by the same people who put together the ABA.
Boe had helped the Garden, too, because the WHA's New York Raiders franchise rented the arena to use for WHA games in 1972-73 and 1973-74. But Boe found out that despite being part of the sports owners' fraternity that business trumped friendship and he happened to be in a market that required deep pockets, something that Islanders President and General Manager Bill Torrey said that Boe didn't have.
Boe had acquired Tiny Archibald from Kansas City after the 1976 season and started an ad campaign featuring Dr. J and Tiny. They never played together. Erving wanted an increase to $450,000 a season up from $400,000 and Boe held firm because a contract was a contract and Erving was under contract Boe didn't have the cash to give his best player a promised raise.
On October 20 1976, Boe sold Julius Erving to the Philadelphia 76ers for $3 million.
"I played with the Doctor in the summers and on All-Star games," said Archibald. "Sometimes you don't get to play with who you want to play with."
Archibald's stay with the cash-strapped Nets lasted one year. He would be traded to Boston and would eventually get to play with one of the greats: Larry Bird.
Rod Thorn was an assistant coach with the Nets, when Roy Boe sold Erving to Philadelphia. Thorn said he understood what had happened. Boe was facing a money crisis.
"He was a great guy, I worked for him when the Nets were on Long Island," said Thorn, now the Nets' president. "He was a great, great owner to work for. He gave you a job to do, he expected you to do it and he tried to give you all the means to get it done. I cannot say enough nice things about him.
"I was hired the same year Dr. J was, I was very fortunate to come in with him and I was also there when we sold Dr. J. Roy needed the money to come into the NBA and he had to sell Dr. J; he had no choice. It was terrible because Dr. J was such a great player and such a leader and had did so many things for our team and then to lose him and really not to replace him, I mean we replaced him with nothing.
"We lost one of the best players in the history of the game and got absolutely nothing other than money which is what Roy had to have to survive but we didn't get anything for it. It was a killer for our franchise."
ABA players made an immediate impact on the NBA. David Thompson was a first team All-Star while Erving, George McGinnis and George Gervin were second team All-Stars. Denver won the Midwest Division title and nine of the Top 20 scorers in the league were ABA refugees.
"I don't think it was very fair at all. But when you look back at it, we changed things a lot," said Leonard. "I felt at that particular time in 1977, that the NBA was hurting and really needed our players. Had our four teams been a little better negotiators, maybe we would have not been hit so hard."
ABA players stuck together through thick and thin. ABA owners didn't, however, with Denver and the Nets' Roy Boe jumping ship in 1975. But it was not until 1976 that Boe got his wish, an NBA franchise. Erving, who was the Vice President of the ABA Players Association, years later harbored some resentment to how the merger or absorption took place.
"It was more business in the NBA," said Erving of the difference between the two leagues. "I guess it was the transition, the expectations were greater, the platform was so much greater and generally when you have a vast platform, there are more good things about it, but then there are more negative things you have to deal with that we didn't have to deal with in the ABA. We were protected by the obscurity so our private lives where protected a little better."
For Dr. J, leaving his hometown New York Nets was strictly a business decision. Boe's Nets were in financial straits and he wanted more money.
"Coming off of the last ABA title, you are feeling no pain. I am 26 years old and individually speaking, anything I see anybody else do in basketball, I probably could do. But at 26, I still know there are a lot of things I don't know about," said Erving. "In going to Philadelphia, I sat down with (General Manager) Pat Williams after signing and he said, OK, I don't need you to come in and score 28 points a game. I don't need you to dominate; we have George McInnis here with Doug Collins, World Free, Mix, Bryant. We have a cast of characters, we need a piece that we didn't have the last year, we need more scoring but we need all-around play.
"There was a conversation about the role changing and I accepted that because it was a business move going to Philadelphia. I reached an impasse with the Nets, and it was either don't play at all or make a good deal and go somewhere else and sort of start all over. I was willing to do that. The transition physically was probably was not as difficult as it was emotionally and otherwise going from a team based in the suburbs to a city like Philadelphia which is a tough basketball city."
But Erving withdrew from the business of basketball. As the ABA's lead performer, he was center attraction, but he was aloof, somewhat, in the NBA.
"The thing I was saddened about was that all the players in the ABA didn't get a chance to play in the new league, the merged league," he said. "There were some pawns in the process and that saddened me greatly and had me stay away from the Players Association activities and even the Board of Governors activities because I thought those players got compromised and I didn't want to be a party to that. I had fought very hard as Vice President of the Players Association to get everybody in.
It was going to be all or nothing.
"Then the Nets and Nuggets applied for entrance into the NBA and that was the undoing of the ABA. It was really a sabotage. So that saddened me and that troubled me and I had my own form of protest for several years before eventually coming around. I didn't join the association in the NBA and I was vocal about that. I just signed a contract, played ball and minded my business."
"The best business aspects of the NBA were much better than the ABA in term of how it was run. I think there was a lot of innovation in the ABA and so many things have been adopted. Three officials was adopted and the three point line. They brightened up the ball a little bit. The NBA was that old brown ball league and it was dark. They lightened it up a little bit, they didn't go red, white and blue but they lightened it up."
Boe sold the team in 1978 to a group of New Jersey businessmen. The team would eventually move to the Meadowlands in 1981. Erving, while a huge name, was never the performer in the NBA that he was in the ABA. Erving gets his due but even after all these years, yet there is still a stigma about the ABA that lingers.
The NBA co-opted many ABA ideas after the merger ... or absorption ... or expansion that happened 34 years ago. Today's NBA owes a great deal of gratitude to the old ABA. But don't expect too many people to shower the ABA with praise. After all, the NBA did the best job the collective 18 owners could do to ruin the Nets franchise while lining the pockets of Irving Mitchell Felt's Madison Square Garden.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaking on "The Politics of Sports Business" and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
MONDAY, 21 JUNE 2010 08:14
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/34-years-after-joining-nba-the-nets-are-still-struggling
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
On June 17th, 1976, New Jersey unknowingly got a National Basketball Association team. On that day, representatives from the National Basketball Association and the American Basketball Association signed off on a deal that saw four ABA teams, the Uniondale-based New York Nets, the Denver Nuggets, the Indiana Pacers and the San Antonio Spurs join the 18-team NBA. Two other ABA teams did not make the cut, the Spirits of St. Louis and the Kentucky Colonels.
The deal overwhelmed New York Nets owner Roy Boe who could not afford to $3.2 million entry into the NBA and then a $4.8 million additional charge that he would have to pay Madison Square Garden because he invaded the New York Knicks territory.
Ultimately Boe would move his team to New Jersey within a year.
In retrospect Boe should have taken the deal that the Silna Brothers of New Jersey were offering.
The Spirits of St. Louis and Kentucky were left out, but the Silna Brothers, who owned the St. Louis franchise, took TV monies and a $2.2 million a cash settlement for not applying to the NBA. The Spirits owners would get a share of whatever future NBA national TV contract was signed in perpetuity. The Kentucky owner John Y. Brown took a $3 million settlement. Brown used that money to purchase half of the NBA Buffalo Braves franchise. The rest of the ABA players were distributed throughout the league in a dispersal draft.
"I think they made a mistake," said Fritz Massmann, who stayed on with the Nets as the team's trainer and traveling secretary after the merger. "The ABA everybody worked together, every trainer could call each other and help each other out. We cooperated. We had one trainer who was in San Diego; they gave them 12 jocks and said that was enough for the year. We gave them extra jock straps; we tried to help everybody out. You got to help the people out if they were hurting. It was learning how to survive and we did.
"When they made the merger, we were at a trainer's meeting in Boston, they were supposed to take eight teams, at the end they took four. But I would have liked to have seen them take St. Louis and Louisville. It was exciting, it was something new every day. I loved the ABA."
Massmann was an ABA vet and had fond memories of the league, even the Island Garden days when the landlord Arnold "Whitey" Carlson would not open the doors of the building for Nets practices.
"I still call it the massacre," said Bob (Slick) Leonard who was coaching Indiana at the time. "The NBA didn't like us because we upped the ante for players and everything. We come in and they take away your draft choices, they don't give you any television rights, you pay $3.2 million in cash up front to get in. So it really was a massacre.
"But I look back at that and I say how good was the ABA when the merger came? It was really very good. Because the first year after the merger in the NBA All-Star Game we put 12 players on the roster."
The Nets ownership was not so fortunate and in a sense, the franchise has never recovered from the "merger" even though the team went to two NBA Finals in 2002 and 2003. Dr. J, Julius Erving, was the Nets best player and the ABA's best-known player.
Dr. J never played a game for the Nets in the NBA. The financially strapped Boe sold Erving's contract to the Philadelphia 76ers to make ends meet. A year later, the Nets were playing in a college gym in Piscataway. The NBA franchise was back in the state where it played in 1967-68: New Jersey.
Boe's other entity; the NHL's New York Islanders nearly sold their players to pay for the Nets entering the NBA. The ABA-NBA consolidation did Nets owner Roy Boe no favors. Boe was overextended and he had already pledged $4 million to the Garden in 1972 for invading the New York Rangers territory when he got an expansion franchise in Nassau County.
Boe had done the NHL a favor by accepting an NHL expansion franchise because it closed off a potentially solid market, Long Island, for the World Hockey Association. The new hockey league was established by the same people who put together the ABA.
Boe had helped the Garden, too, because the WHA's New York Raiders franchise rented the arena to use for WHA games in 1972-73 and 1973-74. But Boe found out that despite being part of the sports owners' fraternity that business trumped friendship and he happened to be in a market that required deep pockets, something that Islanders President and General Manager Bill Torrey said that Boe didn't have.
Boe had acquired Tiny Archibald from Kansas City after the 1976 season and started an ad campaign featuring Dr. J and Tiny. They never played together. Erving wanted an increase to $450,000 a season up from $400,000 and Boe held firm because a contract was a contract and Erving was under contract Boe didn't have the cash to give his best player a promised raise.
On October 20 1976, Boe sold Julius Erving to the Philadelphia 76ers for $3 million.
"I played with the Doctor in the summers and on All-Star games," said Archibald. "Sometimes you don't get to play with who you want to play with."
Archibald's stay with the cash-strapped Nets lasted one year. He would be traded to Boston and would eventually get to play with one of the greats: Larry Bird.
Rod Thorn was an assistant coach with the Nets, when Roy Boe sold Erving to Philadelphia. Thorn said he understood what had happened. Boe was facing a money crisis.
"He was a great guy, I worked for him when the Nets were on Long Island," said Thorn, now the Nets' president. "He was a great, great owner to work for. He gave you a job to do, he expected you to do it and he tried to give you all the means to get it done. I cannot say enough nice things about him.
"I was hired the same year Dr. J was, I was very fortunate to come in with him and I was also there when we sold Dr. J. Roy needed the money to come into the NBA and he had to sell Dr. J; he had no choice. It was terrible because Dr. J was such a great player and such a leader and had did so many things for our team and then to lose him and really not to replace him, I mean we replaced him with nothing.
"We lost one of the best players in the history of the game and got absolutely nothing other than money which is what Roy had to have to survive but we didn't get anything for it. It was a killer for our franchise."
ABA players made an immediate impact on the NBA. David Thompson was a first team All-Star while Erving, George McGinnis and George Gervin were second team All-Stars. Denver won the Midwest Division title and nine of the Top 20 scorers in the league were ABA refugees.
"I don't think it was very fair at all. But when you look back at it, we changed things a lot," said Leonard. "I felt at that particular time in 1977, that the NBA was hurting and really needed our players. Had our four teams been a little better negotiators, maybe we would have not been hit so hard."
ABA players stuck together through thick and thin. ABA owners didn't, however, with Denver and the Nets' Roy Boe jumping ship in 1975. But it was not until 1976 that Boe got his wish, an NBA franchise. Erving, who was the Vice President of the ABA Players Association, years later harbored some resentment to how the merger or absorption took place.
"It was more business in the NBA," said Erving of the difference between the two leagues. "I guess it was the transition, the expectations were greater, the platform was so much greater and generally when you have a vast platform, there are more good things about it, but then there are more negative things you have to deal with that we didn't have to deal with in the ABA. We were protected by the obscurity so our private lives where protected a little better."
For Dr. J, leaving his hometown New York Nets was strictly a business decision. Boe's Nets were in financial straits and he wanted more money.
"Coming off of the last ABA title, you are feeling no pain. I am 26 years old and individually speaking, anything I see anybody else do in basketball, I probably could do. But at 26, I still know there are a lot of things I don't know about," said Erving. "In going to Philadelphia, I sat down with (General Manager) Pat Williams after signing and he said, OK, I don't need you to come in and score 28 points a game. I don't need you to dominate; we have George McInnis here with Doug Collins, World Free, Mix, Bryant. We have a cast of characters, we need a piece that we didn't have the last year, we need more scoring but we need all-around play.
"There was a conversation about the role changing and I accepted that because it was a business move going to Philadelphia. I reached an impasse with the Nets, and it was either don't play at all or make a good deal and go somewhere else and sort of start all over. I was willing to do that. The transition physically was probably was not as difficult as it was emotionally and otherwise going from a team based in the suburbs to a city like Philadelphia which is a tough basketball city."
But Erving withdrew from the business of basketball. As the ABA's lead performer, he was center attraction, but he was aloof, somewhat, in the NBA.
"The thing I was saddened about was that all the players in the ABA didn't get a chance to play in the new league, the merged league," he said. "There were some pawns in the process and that saddened me greatly and had me stay away from the Players Association activities and even the Board of Governors activities because I thought those players got compromised and I didn't want to be a party to that. I had fought very hard as Vice President of the Players Association to get everybody in.
It was going to be all or nothing.
"Then the Nets and Nuggets applied for entrance into the NBA and that was the undoing of the ABA. It was really a sabotage. So that saddened me and that troubled me and I had my own form of protest for several years before eventually coming around. I didn't join the association in the NBA and I was vocal about that. I just signed a contract, played ball and minded my business."
"The best business aspects of the NBA were much better than the ABA in term of how it was run. I think there was a lot of innovation in the ABA and so many things have been adopted. Three officials was adopted and the three point line. They brightened up the ball a little bit. The NBA was that old brown ball league and it was dark. They lightened it up a little bit, they didn't go red, white and blue but they lightened it up."
Boe sold the team in 1978 to a group of New Jersey businessmen. The team would eventually move to the Meadowlands in 1981. Erving, while a huge name, was never the performer in the NBA that he was in the ABA. Erving gets his due but even after all these years, yet there is still a stigma about the ABA that lingers.
The NBA co-opted many ABA ideas after the merger ... or absorption ... or expansion that happened 34 years ago. Today's NBA owes a great deal of gratitude to the old ABA. But don't expect too many people to shower the ABA with praise. After all, the NBA did the best job the collective 18 owners could do to ruin the Nets franchise while lining the pockets of Irving Mitchell Felt's Madison Square Garden.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaking on "The Politics of Sports Business" and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Will the World Series of Boxing stem diminishing interest in the sport?
Will the World Series of Boxing stem diminishing interest in the sport?
WEDNESDAY, 09 JUNE 2010 15:57
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/will-the-world-series-of-boxing-stem-diminishing-interest-in-the-sport
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
COMMENTARY
Sometime this fall, probably in November, somewhere in some sports arena in Manhattan or perhaps Newark or maybe Uniondale and in 11 other locales worldwide there will be a sports experiment that bears close scrutiny. Boxing will become a team sports with four franchises in North America, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Mexico City, four franchises in Europe, Istanbul, Turkey: Milan, Italy; Moscow, Russia and Paris, France. There will be an Asian quartet, Astana, Kazakhstan, Baku, Azerbaijan, Beijing, China and Delhi, India.
Boxing, a sport that has seen better days in terms of popularity in the United States, needs to be rebranded. Long gone are the days of Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Sugar Ray Robinson, Sugar Ray Leonard and even Mike Tyson. Boxers come and go now generally as afterthoughts in the sports world.
The North American teams will have home and home series, the European teams will have home and home series and the four Asian clubs will have home and home series. The three division winners will advance to the semi-finals and there will be one wild card team and the championship will be held in Macau, China. The 12 teams will be stocked by a draft, which will be held in London, UK, on June 28. The draftees will come from a pool of fighters who are registered with national boxing federations globally.
A 12-team structure with individual owners and a pool of athletes that are drafted onto a roster is standard fare for any new league. But this one is very different. No North American sports league has teams outside of America and Canada. There has never been an entity that has had North America, Europe and Asia component although tennis' Davis Cup and golf's Ryder Cup are one-off international events.
Other sports leagues globally will be paying attention to the experiment. The World Series of Boxing (WSB) came about because a number of people around the world and a sports management company think they can improve the sport according to Ivan Khodabakhsh, the Chief Operating Officer of the WSB.
The WSB came about as the result of a partnership between the International Boxing Association (AIBA) and International Management Group (IMG) that was created in November 2008. AIBA will own 75 percent of the venture while IMG has the other 25 percent. AIBA will supply the boxers and the boxing personnel which will include the equivalent of a general manager, a head coach and a training and medical staff, along with referees and judges. IMG will do all the marketing and international TV and broadband. WSB boxers will be top ranked amateurs who are about to turn pro, there will be no big names in the league, and those fighters will keep their 2012 Summer Olympics eligibility even though they have turned pro with the WSB. The boxers will come from all 195 AIBA members including USA Boxing.
The WSB will have the backing of the International Olympic Committee and will live under the rules of the IOC and will adopt the rules and regulations of the World Anti-Doping Agency.
Why is there a WSB?
"On the professional side, you can question their (World Boxing Council, World Boxing Association, International Boxing Federation and World Boxing Organization)," said Khodabakhsh. "When AIBA President Dr. Ching-Kuo Wu took over (the AIBA), he initiated a number of reforms. The one thing the AIBA looked into is whether the AIBA can reform boxing."
Dr. Wu had doubts as to whether boxing could reform and decided there is a better way to promote the sport than going through Don King or Bob Arum, two of the major players in boxing promotion.
"The AIBA decided to start with the grass roots level and not duplicating (what King and Arum do) and create something and bring boxing into the 21st century," he said. "The idea was to create the World Series of Boxing. We did look at all issues, what is good about boxing and why other leagues are successes. So we will create individual boxing and team boxing. You need to have a season for the fan base and the followers, you can't have a one-off bout and disappear, we want to create a meaningful story to connect the bouts to each other."
Each team will have six matches and they will have five different divisions (Bantams-54kg), Light (61kg), Middle (73kg), Light Heavy (85kg) and Heavy (91kg). There will be 5 rounds of 3 minutes in the team competition and 7 rounds of 3 minutes in the Individual Championships. Match decisions will be based on points, Technical Knock-Outs, Knock-Outs and disqualifications - there will be no draws.
A new scoring display with electronic input is being studied in order to provide an open scoring system that will be based on the so-called 10-point "Must System" (10-9, 10-8, 10-7, to indicate the winner of each round and rank the second-placed boxer based on the level of their performance). Scores will be publicly displayed at the end of each round and at the conclusion of the bout. The scores will be given by three judges seated ringside.
The top two individual fighters in each weight class will fight for an individual championship after the season.
Because boxing is a dangerous sport, the health of fighters and the frequency of fighting is a concern that needs to be addressed.
"We have a detailed medical handbook," said Khodabakhsh. "We will have an anti-doping program, we will monitor the gloves. We are very well aware (the fighters) are assets to the franchise. We will have brain scans and bring structure to the sport."
The WSB is not going to be on the same level as Major League Baseball, the National Football league, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey league, the PGA or the tennis tour. The boxers will be young and not make much money whether it is in dollars, pesos, Euros, rupees, Yuan or rubles.
"They (King and Arum) will do what they do," said Khodabakhsh."We aren't getting their boxers, we are getting amateurs. The boxers will be in a healthy environment and will sign three-year deals.
"All of the boxers have registered with their federations and all have competed in international events. These boxers have developed skills in the highest levels of amateurs and are ready to turn professional."
Chuck Fairbanks, when he became the coach of the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League in 1982 wryly laughed when he was asked if there were enough quality players available for the USFL. Fairbanks said what you need is the right ball, fat in the middle, square on top that bounces funny. In other words, Fairbanks said there were more important aspects to the sports business than performers.
Khodabakhsh acknowledges that the business side is extremely important. IMG is handling broadcast arrangements worldwide and as of yet there is no United States TV partner although that announcement could come very soon, perhaps by draft day. But there is a TV deal in China. That is the nature of the business, global. The league will be collecting money in various forms and pay taxes in various forms.
There will also be phased in expansion and it will not be in the United States.
"All the federations expect to be part of it," said Khodabakhsh.
Oceania, South America and Africa will be part of it. What is important is that we have a league with exciting boxing but this also has to be profitable. We have been struggling to regulate salaries and a salary cap. India's money is worth different from the United States and France. It will be about $25,000 a year not including prize money per boxer."
Khodabakhsh will be meeting with Madison Square Garden officials and with people in Chicago, Los Angeles and Anaheim in an effort to get arena commitments in the US. The season will start on the weekend of November 19-20 and end sometime in March or April with the team and individual champions taking place in May. Macau was chosen because it is a bigger tourist area than Las Vegas and gambling revenues have surpassed the Nevada gambling oasis.
The boxers have been vetted and will have their visas and will be able to go from country to country and will be involved in more than fisticuffs according to Khodabakhsh. They will participate in local and global marketing.
The WSB experiment will also be an interesting case study. Corporate dollars fund sports in North America and Mexico while there is a lot more government support in Asia. "In China and Kazakhstan, there is a high level of government as a source of income," said Khodabakhsh. "Government sponsorship is more important in Asia; there are commercial (corporate) partners in Europe and the US. Mexico is a mix."
Two United States formed leagues, the World Football League and the World Hockey Association had global aspirations. The World Football League barely lasted it's year because it did not have solid financial backing in 1974 and folded in 1975. Had the World Hockey Association not reached a deal with the National Hockey League in 1979 which brought Edmonton, Hartford, Quebec City and Winnipeg into the NHL, the World Hockey Association had plans to go to Europe in 1980. The National Football League tried a spring time minor league with a mixture of North American and European based franchises which ultimately failed. The league which had a few different names played in 1991 and 1992. The NFL suspended the league in 1993 and 1994 and brought it back as solely a European entity in 1995. The league ceased operations in 2007.
The WSB plans not to challenge King or Arum, but if the team boxing idea globally is successful, they could change a portion of boxing. A Delhi-Chicago final may not resonant in the United States but there are a lot of people in India and in Macau. That's the audience the WSB is trying to capture, not the Atlantic City or Las Vegas fighting crowd.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and lecturer on "The Politics of Sports Business." He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
WEDNESDAY, 09 JUNE 2010 15:57
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/will-the-world-series-of-boxing-stem-diminishing-interest-in-the-sport
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
COMMENTARY
Sometime this fall, probably in November, somewhere in some sports arena in Manhattan or perhaps Newark or maybe Uniondale and in 11 other locales worldwide there will be a sports experiment that bears close scrutiny. Boxing will become a team sports with four franchises in North America, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Mexico City, four franchises in Europe, Istanbul, Turkey: Milan, Italy; Moscow, Russia and Paris, France. There will be an Asian quartet, Astana, Kazakhstan, Baku, Azerbaijan, Beijing, China and Delhi, India.
Boxing, a sport that has seen better days in terms of popularity in the United States, needs to be rebranded. Long gone are the days of Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Sugar Ray Robinson, Sugar Ray Leonard and even Mike Tyson. Boxers come and go now generally as afterthoughts in the sports world.
The North American teams will have home and home series, the European teams will have home and home series and the four Asian clubs will have home and home series. The three division winners will advance to the semi-finals and there will be one wild card team and the championship will be held in Macau, China. The 12 teams will be stocked by a draft, which will be held in London, UK, on June 28. The draftees will come from a pool of fighters who are registered with national boxing federations globally.
A 12-team structure with individual owners and a pool of athletes that are drafted onto a roster is standard fare for any new league. But this one is very different. No North American sports league has teams outside of America and Canada. There has never been an entity that has had North America, Europe and Asia component although tennis' Davis Cup and golf's Ryder Cup are one-off international events.
Other sports leagues globally will be paying attention to the experiment. The World Series of Boxing (WSB) came about because a number of people around the world and a sports management company think they can improve the sport according to Ivan Khodabakhsh, the Chief Operating Officer of the WSB.
The WSB came about as the result of a partnership between the International Boxing Association (AIBA) and International Management Group (IMG) that was created in November 2008. AIBA will own 75 percent of the venture while IMG has the other 25 percent. AIBA will supply the boxers and the boxing personnel which will include the equivalent of a general manager, a head coach and a training and medical staff, along with referees and judges. IMG will do all the marketing and international TV and broadband. WSB boxers will be top ranked amateurs who are about to turn pro, there will be no big names in the league, and those fighters will keep their 2012 Summer Olympics eligibility even though they have turned pro with the WSB. The boxers will come from all 195 AIBA members including USA Boxing.
The WSB will have the backing of the International Olympic Committee and will live under the rules of the IOC and will adopt the rules and regulations of the World Anti-Doping Agency.
Why is there a WSB?
"On the professional side, you can question their (World Boxing Council, World Boxing Association, International Boxing Federation and World Boxing Organization)," said Khodabakhsh. "When AIBA President Dr. Ching-Kuo Wu took over (the AIBA), he initiated a number of reforms. The one thing the AIBA looked into is whether the AIBA can reform boxing."
Dr. Wu had doubts as to whether boxing could reform and decided there is a better way to promote the sport than going through Don King or Bob Arum, two of the major players in boxing promotion.
"The AIBA decided to start with the grass roots level and not duplicating (what King and Arum do) and create something and bring boxing into the 21st century," he said. "The idea was to create the World Series of Boxing. We did look at all issues, what is good about boxing and why other leagues are successes. So we will create individual boxing and team boxing. You need to have a season for the fan base and the followers, you can't have a one-off bout and disappear, we want to create a meaningful story to connect the bouts to each other."
Each team will have six matches and they will have five different divisions (Bantams-54kg), Light (61kg), Middle (73kg), Light Heavy (85kg) and Heavy (91kg). There will be 5 rounds of 3 minutes in the team competition and 7 rounds of 3 minutes in the Individual Championships. Match decisions will be based on points, Technical Knock-Outs, Knock-Outs and disqualifications - there will be no draws.
A new scoring display with electronic input is being studied in order to provide an open scoring system that will be based on the so-called 10-point "Must System" (10-9, 10-8, 10-7, to indicate the winner of each round and rank the second-placed boxer based on the level of their performance). Scores will be publicly displayed at the end of each round and at the conclusion of the bout. The scores will be given by three judges seated ringside.
The top two individual fighters in each weight class will fight for an individual championship after the season.
Because boxing is a dangerous sport, the health of fighters and the frequency of fighting is a concern that needs to be addressed.
"We have a detailed medical handbook," said Khodabakhsh. "We will have an anti-doping program, we will monitor the gloves. We are very well aware (the fighters) are assets to the franchise. We will have brain scans and bring structure to the sport."
The WSB is not going to be on the same level as Major League Baseball, the National Football league, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey league, the PGA or the tennis tour. The boxers will be young and not make much money whether it is in dollars, pesos, Euros, rupees, Yuan or rubles.
"They (King and Arum) will do what they do," said Khodabakhsh."We aren't getting their boxers, we are getting amateurs. The boxers will be in a healthy environment and will sign three-year deals.
"All of the boxers have registered with their federations and all have competed in international events. These boxers have developed skills in the highest levels of amateurs and are ready to turn professional."
Chuck Fairbanks, when he became the coach of the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League in 1982 wryly laughed when he was asked if there were enough quality players available for the USFL. Fairbanks said what you need is the right ball, fat in the middle, square on top that bounces funny. In other words, Fairbanks said there were more important aspects to the sports business than performers.
Khodabakhsh acknowledges that the business side is extremely important. IMG is handling broadcast arrangements worldwide and as of yet there is no United States TV partner although that announcement could come very soon, perhaps by draft day. But there is a TV deal in China. That is the nature of the business, global. The league will be collecting money in various forms and pay taxes in various forms.
There will also be phased in expansion and it will not be in the United States.
"All the federations expect to be part of it," said Khodabakhsh.
Oceania, South America and Africa will be part of it. What is important is that we have a league with exciting boxing but this also has to be profitable. We have been struggling to regulate salaries and a salary cap. India's money is worth different from the United States and France. It will be about $25,000 a year not including prize money per boxer."
Khodabakhsh will be meeting with Madison Square Garden officials and with people in Chicago, Los Angeles and Anaheim in an effort to get arena commitments in the US. The season will start on the weekend of November 19-20 and end sometime in March or April with the team and individual champions taking place in May. Macau was chosen because it is a bigger tourist area than Las Vegas and gambling revenues have surpassed the Nevada gambling oasis.
The boxers have been vetted and will have their visas and will be able to go from country to country and will be involved in more than fisticuffs according to Khodabakhsh. They will participate in local and global marketing.
The WSB experiment will also be an interesting case study. Corporate dollars fund sports in North America and Mexico while there is a lot more government support in Asia. "In China and Kazakhstan, there is a high level of government as a source of income," said Khodabakhsh. "Government sponsorship is more important in Asia; there are commercial (corporate) partners in Europe and the US. Mexico is a mix."
Two United States formed leagues, the World Football League and the World Hockey Association had global aspirations. The World Football League barely lasted it's year because it did not have solid financial backing in 1974 and folded in 1975. Had the World Hockey Association not reached a deal with the National Hockey League in 1979 which brought Edmonton, Hartford, Quebec City and Winnipeg into the NHL, the World Hockey Association had plans to go to Europe in 1980. The National Football League tried a spring time minor league with a mixture of North American and European based franchises which ultimately failed. The league which had a few different names played in 1991 and 1992. The NFL suspended the league in 1993 and 1994 and brought it back as solely a European entity in 1995. The league ceased operations in 2007.
The WSB plans not to challenge King or Arum, but if the team boxing idea globally is successful, they could change a portion of boxing. A Delhi-Chicago final may not resonant in the United States but there are a lot of people in India and in Macau. That's the audience the WSB is trying to capture, not the Atlantic City or Las Vegas fighting crowd.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and lecturer on "The Politics of Sports Business." He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)