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.

NFL labor talks: Understanding the negotiations
MONDAY, 07 MARCH 2011 14:19

BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/nfl-labor-talks-understanding-the-negotiations
As the representatives from the National Football League ownership group and the National Football League Players Association continue to try and bridge their differences and sign a new collective bargaining agreement (and yes Green Bay Packers players have collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin despite the best efforts of the state's governor to bust public employee unions as Governor Scott Walker told the fake David Koch), it might be useful to review 60 years of television money and players association activity and how closely linked television and the players really are.
NFL owners were planning to use some $ 4 billion in 2011 television rights fees to underwrite a lockout. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (FOX), General Election (now Comcast)'s NBC, Summer Redstone's CBS, the Walt Disney Company's ESPN and DirecTV cozied up to the NFL owners because the owners' product is still a consistently watched fare in an increasing fragmented audience industry — TV.
Television is the “tiger blood” of the NFL. CBS, NBC and ABC were the “Goddesses” that brought the NFL to the masses during an explosive growth spurt between 1960 and 1970. Each one of the NFL owners was a “bi-winner.”
NFL owners and NFL players have been battling over issues since 1956. Today, NFL players get huge salaries but have short careers and unlike their counterparts in Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League, a NFL players contract is not guaranteed. If a player gets fired, he keeps bonus money but he is terminated with just some severance pay. NFL players need four years to get a pension and five years of medical benefits following a career. The lack of will to fight the owners and just take money now has left some former players financially destitute and in some case contemplating suicide from injuries suffered on the field from Pop Warner through junior high school, high school, college and pro football.
As television contracts got bigger and bigger, so did players salaries but NFLPA negotiators never looked at the future.
“Money Now.”
In 1950, the three most popular sports in the United States were baseball, boxing and horse racing. National Football league owners were running mom and pop store operations that operated from July to December. Television, as the noted writer Frank Deford explained on a long forgotten TV show that featured this writer and Al Michaels (along with the "Scud Stud" Arthur Kent) on Histories Mysteries, an all inconclusive look at sports history in about 88 minutes on the History Channel in 2000, changed the sports world. By 1965, football was the most popular sport in the United States. The owners had more money than they ever could imagine but the owners still treated players like they did in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.
The NFL owners and players had a contentious relationship for decades. The NFLPA formed in 1956 with help from Creighton Miller, the first General Manager of the Cleveland Browns. Unhappy players in Cleveland and Green Bay assembled a network of "player reps" on each team. The players included Don Shula (Colts), Frank Gifford (Giants), and Norm Van Brocklin (Rams) to represent their teams. The Chicago Bears did not have a players representative. The players first meeting was held in New York in the fall of 1956, after the owners ignored the players' attempts to discuss their requests. The players asked for minimum salaries of $5,000 per season, injury pay, uniform per diems, and for teams to supply their own equipment.
Nothing happened but the players got a big break in 1957 when, the first lawsuit involving professional football and antitrust was filed, Radovich v. NFL, which significantly altered player rights within the league. The case involved a player/coach, George Radovich, who sued the league because the NFL effectively prevented him from attaining employment in the NFL or affiliated leagues, such as the Pacific Coast League, which was in existence at the time. The case was dismissed on the grounds that the NFL was exempted from the antitrust laws, and was appealed to the Supreme Court, which reversed the decision of the trial court, holding professional football subject to the antitrust laws.
The Supreme Court of the United States decision changed life for NFL owners. The players could now sue the league on antitrust grounds which they threatened to do. The owners and players settled with the players receiving minimum salaries of $5,000, $50 payment for preseason games, medical coverage for injuries, and a pension.
But the players didn't get what they agreed to and spend the 1958 season chasing the owners to live up to the agreement. The deal was finally signed in 1959.
In 2011, as a fallback, the players will decertify their association and then sue the league on antitrust grounds if an agreement isn't reached soon. Nothing much has changed since 1957.
The truth was that football was a part time vocation and not a real job for either the owners of the players in the 1950s.
When the season ended in the 1950s, so did football as a main vocation. New York fans may have wildly cheered the New York Giants defensive lineman Andy Robustelli on six Sundays a season, but on the Monday after the final game, it was back to work in the civilian world.
"Each player the day that the season was over, you were free and you looked for a job. You wouldn't see each other until next year. I think, and with all respect to the modern ballplayer, I hope the modern ballplayer appreciates, not only the opportunity, but...football is a stepping stone it's not the end of life," said Robustelli , who became a successful businessman in Connecticut once his Giant days were through, in the 1990s.

Robustelli's generation of players didn't put up much of a fight with the owners for pensions and future health benefits. In fact, lots of generations of NFL players never put up much of a fight for pension and health benefits and according to one players agent, there was a reason for that.
"Their constituency is active players and when the crunch comes, no one with status is representing the retired players. So it relies on the good will of the current players, which has been subsumed to selfishness," said the agent. "Football players are the worst labor unit--short playing careers, spectre of injury, coaches kids, born-again Christians, all salary paid from September to January so each game check more impactful, (Joe) Montana and Howie Long and other stars crossed picket line last time (in 1987), no ability to sustain a strike."
The NFLPA has always been weak and the owners knew that. The two leagues may have merged, but the player associations did not, as the players on the 16 NFL teams were NFLPA members and the players on the 10 AFL teams were American Football League Players Association members. This caused a major problem in subsequent negotiations as the NFLPA would come to a tentative agreement with the owners on certain collective bargaining issues (such as minimum salaries, retirement age) then the owners would bargain with the AFLPA, who accepted lower terms, which wasn't good for NFLPA members.
There was a brief lockout and a 20-day strike in 1970 that ended just before the 1970 All Star game and which did not result in the cancellation of regular or post-season games, the NFL and NFLPA signed a four-year contract, the first collective bargaining agreement in the history of the NFL, which raised player salary minimums to $12,500 for rookies and $13,000 for veterans, added dental insurance, improved the pension, gave players the right to have agents, gave players representation on the Retirement Board, and provided for impartial arbitration of injury grievances.
(Retired players from that era are still battling the NFL over injury grievances)
In 1974, the previous CBA was coming to an end. Players were demanding the elimination of the Rozelle Rule and the option clause which kept a player tied to his team in perpetuity unless another team was willing to give up number one draft picks or players to sign a free agent among other things. On July 1, the players went on strike, and were prepared to sit out until a new bargaining agreement was hammered out. The sit-out led to the cancellation of the New York Jets game at New Haven, the first game ever canceled due to a labor impasse. However, by the early part of August, about a quarter of the NFLPA crossed the picket lines, breaking down union solidarity. On August 11, Garvey sent his players back to work after a federal mediator suggested a 14-day cooling off period, instead pursuing the issue through the Mackey case. The 42-day strike ended that day with nothing gained.
On September 21, 1982, NFL players went on strike. It was the longest strike in professional sports in the U.S. at the time and lasted until November 17. The owners responded by locking the players out at the commencement of the strike. During the strike, only 126 of the 224 scheduled regular-season games were played, forcing the league to change the format of post-season play to include 16 teams instead of the usual 10 teams. The players held two "All-Star" games to raise some funding for players without a paycheck. The players got more money but two goals were not met, a form of free agency and more pension money.
NFL owners won the 1987 battle with the players but the two sides ended up in Judge David Doty's courtroom in 1993 after the association decertified. They came up with a deal because of pressure from Judge Doty. Eighteen years later, Judge Doty is still involved with the two sides. Apparently Judge Doty disagrees with the owners pocketing network, cable and satellite TV money in 2011 whether the league is locked out or not. There is a question of what happens with that $4 billion. Eventually Judge Doty will decide what to do.
Television and the NFL have had a long history. TV has helped and hurt the league. Today, it is all good but 62 years ago, it was a different story.
The Los Angeles Rams showed all 12 of the team's home and away games on local television in 1949 and saw a sharp decrease in attendance from 1948. In 1950, NFL Commissioner Bert Bell urged teams to blackout home games in an effort to keep the people in the stands for home games instead of in front of the television.
Some teams had TV contracts. The Dumont TV Network paid $75,000 to nationally televise the Los Angeles Rams-Cleveland Browns championship game on December 23, 1951. By 1953, the NFL was in the courtroom defending its blackout policy. Judge Allan K. Grim of the U. S. District Court in Philadelphia upheld the league's blackout policy and did not violate anti-trust laws.
The 1957 NFL Championship Game was blacked out in the host city, Detroit, despite being a sellout. The blackout policy was challenged again in 1962 when the Giants hosted Green Bay in the NFL Championship at Yankee Stadium Judge Edward Weinfeld of the U. S. District Court upheld the NFL position and denied an injunction, which would have forced CBS to televise the game in the New York City area.
“That was a big test case for us,” said Mara of the 1953 courtroom proceedings. “I think the big value of TV was the promotion that it should what a great event this was; what a great game this was. It made people want to come to the ball park, or go up to Stratford, Connecticut to see it on TV.”
New York Giant fans who could not get tickets to the sold out Yankee Stadium would travel to Fairfield County, Connecticut and either rent hotel rooms or go to bars and/or restaurants to watch blacked out home games on WTIC, Channel 3 out of Hartford. Blacked out games meant money six, seven or eight times a year to Connecticut businesses.
The blackout policy would remain in effect until 1973, when Congress passed experimental legislation (only valid until 1976) requiring any NFL game that was declared a sellout 72 hours prior to kickoff be made available for local TV.
Television would play a role in the Bidwill family's move of their Cardinals franchise in 1960. The NFL also permitted the Cardinals to relocate to St. Louis for the 1960 season, in an effort to eliminate the market-cannibalization taking place between the Cardinals and the Bears in Chicago, the second largest television market at the time. The Chicago CBS station, which was televising NFL games, needed a solution to the Bears-Cardinals two-market setup. Since the teams never played on television head to head unless they played one another, and the league was blacking out home games, CBS never showed games in Chicago.
On March 13, 1960 the Cardinals moved to St. Louis after receiving $500,000 for "improvements" at Soldier Field, some of the funding coming from CBS. In effect, the Cardinals were not just "allowed" to move to St. Louis, but rather were paid to do so by the Bears, the NFL, and CBS.

The American Football League formed in 1959. It was an eight-team league, which borrowed a business model from the stillborn Continental Baseball League, which was a brainchild of Branch Rickey. The CBL planned to pool TV revenue and divide the money among the league's 12-teams. Rickey's league was working under the assumption that it had an antitrust exemption like the American League and National League in baseball. Lamar Hunt's league must have felt the same way. The AFL had decided on November 23, 1959 to approve a cooperative television plan whereby the league office negotiates the television contract and which proceeds from which were equally divided among member clubs.
By June 9, 1960, the AFL had a TV deal with the American Broadcasting Company. It was a five-year contract with the eight teams sharing $1,785,000 in 1960 and graduated increases of the life of the agreement.
The NFL wanted the same type of network deal but the league had to live with the Sherman Antitrust Act hanging over the league's business practices. That changed on September 30, 1961 with President John F. Kennedy's signature on a bill that allowed the 14-team league to become one entity for television contract negotiation purposes.
In 1960, the New York Giants received $340,000 for their deal, but the Green Bay Packers received $105,000. Rozelle saw the changing playing field and knew the big market teams in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles could get enormous contracts as television grew leaving behind smaller markets such as Pittsburgh and Green Bay.
"My brother Jack (Giants), George Halas (Bears) and Daniel Reeves (Rams), we were the three teams that were most affected," said Giants owner Wellington Mara. "Now, Art Modell (Browns), he had has own deal made already and he surrendered that to go into it.
"He (Modell) was really the one who gave something away. We didn't know what we were giving up. That is what did it. They made the decision. Without that, why we wouldn't have the league we have today."
Rozelle was a genius. He was lucky that the times were favorable but he had to work at getting a diverse group of owners to think league instead of individual fiefdom and he did.
"I think he explained to everybody very cogently what was at stake and he knew it wasn't going to be much of a league with lopsided revenue" Rozelle is a guiding force in the formation of the modern NFL. "We used to laugh a little bit, but we used to say Pete was so smooth and so polished and he had a great sense of public relations, but we always thought in running a league meeting, the softest part about him were his teeth," said Mara with a laugh.
"He knew when to twist an arm, and when to massage an ego and he made great use of that knowledge. He stepped in and from the very first minute, from the very first meeting he ran, he was a leader. He took things over and organized us."
CBS would win rights to NFL games in 1962 with a $4.65 million bid, NC would gain the 1963 AFL Championship Game for $926,000 despite the fact that ABC was the AFL regular season TV right’s holder. CBS would keep the NFL for the 1964 and 1965 seasons as well as the NFL Championship Game by paying $14.1 million per season and $3.6 million for two championship games. Meanwhile NBC guaranteed the future of the AFL by signing a five-year, $36 million contract beginning in 1965.
CBS extended its relationship with Pete Rozelle and the NFL in 1965 through 1967 with a $39.6 million for the 1966 and 1967 regular seasons with an option for 1968. CBS bought the 1966 and 1967 NFL Championship Games for $2 million per game. After the June 8, 1966 merger, the rights to the first four AFL-NFL Championship Games, 1967-70 was sold to both CBS and NBC for $9.5 million. In 1969, CBS passed on Rozelle’s idea of Monday Night Football, ABC acquired the rights to 13 games annually between 1970-72. Monday Night Football would change the NFL as much as the June 8, 1966 merger between the AFL and NFL.
The players of the 1960s kept pushing to get the owners to give them more benefits. They always seem to lose except salaries increased as TV contracts increased.
Television is willing to pay sports teams lavishly because TV executives think 18-49 year old males and 25-54 year old males will tune in and support advertisers’ products. The NFL makes TV networks. Monday Night Football made ABC a legitimate network in 1970. NFL ratings were down significantly in 1999, and 2000 yet CBS was happy with its decision to return to the NFL after one time owner Lawrence Tisch passed on extending the network's NFC deal with the league in 1993.
Tisch's failure to extend NFL football on CBS caused a massive turnover in the TV industry. CBS lost local affiliates in Detroit and Milwaukee as stations defected to FOX to continue having NFL games and FOX became a network sports powerhouse, eventually securing the rights to Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League.
While CBS claimed to have broken even on its football expenditure in 1998, insiders knew that other areas of the company were cut back because of football. The company announced massive layoffs in 1998 and closed studios around the United States.
After the NFL was lost in 1993, CBS still had its billion dollar, seven-year deal to cover the NCAA Tournament in basketball, golf's Masters and college football. Cutbacks at CBS were nothing new. Tisch scaled back the news operations in the 1980s to pay for football and baseball. In fact, Tisch really started the pay escalation for TV rights by paying the enormous sum of $1.06 billion over four years for MLB television rights from 1990-93. CBS ended up losing millions on the deal, especially with poor Saturday Game of the Week ratings.
Without the NFL and John Madden, Rupert Murdoch's United States media empire may not be as imposing as it is today.
Before the NFL and Madden, Murdoch's FOX network, which is technically not a network but a syndication unit, was a weak collection of UHF stations with the exception of a few cities like New York, Washington, and Los Angeles. Before the NFL and Madden, 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 and Madden 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 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 and Madden 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 sort of has a national sports network, but that is not where Murdoch really has a sports foothold. 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 23 regionals and there are college sports networks as well. There is also a partnership with The Big Ten Network
Madden's signing with FOX after CBS lost the NFL rights in 1993 cannot be dismissed. John Madden was a major part of the FOX promotion, so much so that at an NFL owners meeting at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, John ended up by the master of ceremonies for the night's owners party after Murdoch departed. Madden left FOX after the February 2002 Super Bowl and joined ABC Monday Night Football's crew. John was no longer that valuable to Murdoch. Rupert built a viable network; he had built a strong regional sports cable network. He had his news channel and was finally 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."
NFL owners never knew what they had in the 1950s. Today billions flow into the owners pockets. The fight between the owners and players is all about money. It is “Money Now” for the players and the 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 www.bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com

ESPN will get real competition from Comcast-NBC merger
Thursday, 20 January 2011 14:26

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/espn-will-get-real-competition-from-comcast-nbc-merger

BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
If you thought you heard a groan from the Walt Disney offices in Bristol, Conn., Manhattan and LA on Tuesday afternoon after the Federal Communications Commission approved the planned merger between the Philadelphia-based Comcast Corporation and NBCUniversal, you weren't imagining the sounds. The suits at Disney probably aren't too pleased with the FCC's decision to allow Comcast and General Electric's Peacock network and other holdings to go to the altar and be wed.

After all, Disney's cash cow, the so-called "World Wide Leader in Sports" will more than likely get real competition since the folding of CNN Sports Illustrated in May 2002. FOX Sports does program local regional cable sports networks but really has never been an outright competitor to ESPN. Neither CNNSI nor FOX successfully challenged ESPN SportsCenter but that could change as Comcast has the ability to put on a national cable TV sports show as they are doing that locally with some of the company owned regional sports cable TV networks.

Comcast, the largest multi-system operator in the country (with systems located in New Jersey) owns Versus, an all sports channel, the Golf Channel, a piece of the Major League Baseball and a boatload of regional sports networks around the United States, including SNY (a venture that includes Time Warner and New York Mets ownership in the partnership) and in Philadelphia. NBC has deals with the National Football League, the National Hockey League, Notre Dame football, and the 2012 Olympics among the network's sports properties. NBC has not had Major League baseball, the NBA or NASCAR in years. The network does have golf and tennis events.

Versus, or whatever the Comcast owned cable sports network will be called, could become a much bigger player in sports. Right now, Versus has the NHL, some cycling events, the United Football League (if that league makes it into a third season next fall) and some other events. Versus has not be able to get nearly 100 percent penetration onto cable TV's basic expanded tiers thorough the country as of yet.

But that could be changing.

More than likely, in the short term, there will be integration of Comcast sports programming with NBC's sport programming and some of that will end up on cable TV networks which including USA.

Comcast NBC may be too late to the table to bid on some events in the short term.

Disney is talking with the National Football League about extending ESPN's contract with the league for the Monday Night Football package which might bring as much as $2 billion annually to the NFL through 2022 or 2023. (NFL owners are complaining that they cannot afford to continue giving players 59 percent of the league's revenues because of tough economic times. If the reports that Disney is ready to pay billions — which would come out of cable TV subscriber's pockets whether they watch Monday Night Football or not and most of ESPN's potential audience does not watch the channel — it makes it hard to believe the NFL is in dire economic straits as a March 3, 2011 deadline looms as a possible lockout date if the owners and players do not agree to a new collective bargaining agreement.)

The Monday Night NFL package may be a done deal for Disney, but Comcast has NBC's Sunday Night NFL package through 2013 as part of the merger. NBCUniversal was cash strapped prior to the announcement that Comcast was buying 51 percent of the company. Sunday Night Football has been the top rated prime time series on over-the-air network TV in 2010. It stands to reason that Comcast-NBC will attempt to throw as much money as possible to the "cash-poor" NFL owners to keep the franchise.

The big prize, or the "perceived perception" big prize, in TV is the International Olympic Committee's pride and joy events — the Summer and Winter Olympics. NBC Universal has the rights to the 2012 London Games. The IOC, an entity which believes that it is an international entity with the power to dictate to countries policy and has permanent observer status at the United Nations, waited for the FCC to act before it opened up contract negotiations with American TV networks for the rights to the 2014 Sochi (Russia) Winter and the 2016 Rio (Brazil) Summer Games. The IOC can now go ahead and start a bidding war or what they hope is a bidding war between Brian Roberts's Comcast-NBC, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, Sumner Redstone's CBS (and possibly Redstone's NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament partner Turner Sports) and Disney for the rights to future Olympics.

NBC lost money on the 2008 Beijing Olympics and American networks, particularly in an economic recession and recovery might not want to spend every last Swiss franc to satisfy IOC President Jacques Rogge and his band of merry men for the big prize.

Future Olympics will be seen over a multitude of platforms including over the air TV, cable TV and broadband. All of the US bidders have the wherewithal to provide that type of coverage to the IOC.

Disney has the rights to the Bowl Championship Series through January 2014. Disney and Turner share NBA rights until 2016. MLB's TV deals with Rupert Murdoch's FOX, Time Warner and Disney's ESPN are done in 2013. ESPN's non-exclusive deal with Major League Soccer is done in 2014. The MLS is currently trying to negotiate a new deal with Murdoch's FOX Soccer Channel and is reportedly asking for a 700 percent increase in rights fees. Reportedly Murdoch's channel wants to just slightly more than double payments from $3 million annually to $7 million.

Cable TV sports networks negotiate with other people's money — subscriber fees — and the subscriber is at the mercy of the network or multiple systems operators. It is either all or nothing for basic expanded tier customers.

Comcast and NBC have National Hockey League national cable and over-the-air TV rights. Disney, according to reports, would like to get a piece of the NHL's cable TV deal. This could be the first bidding war between ESPN and Comcast. Comcast owns a team in the NHL, the Philadelphia Flyers. Comcast also has the cable TV rights of a number of NHL teams including the Flyers on Comcast Sports Net, Philadelphia.

There is also another aspect of this deal that could impact local news operations at various NBC owned and operated stations including those in New York and Philadelphia. SNY and Comcast Sports Net Philadelphia already have sports staffs and Comcast could decide to drop the local sports anchors on WNBC in New York and WCAU in Philadelphia to save money.

There was a report in 2010 that WPIX, Channel 11 in New York was considering outsourcing the station's local sportscast to the Comcast-owned SNY but that never materialized. Local news operations around the country have been marginalizing or dropping sports reports within the news show.


Critics of the merger contend Comcast will simply be too big, too controlling of content (critics have ignored how cable TV has been set up, this is nothing new) and that a multiple system operator cannot also be a programmer and that Comcast could muscle out competitors like ESPN by simply dropping the channels from Comcast systems. It is unlikely that Comcast would drop ESPN since the channel makes them money. But there will be disputes. Comcast and the NFL have been fighting over the NFL Network for years. Comcast might have played hardball with the NFL after the multi-systems operator thought it had a deal with the league for a small Thursday-Saturday night package for the Versus network. The NFL decided to keep the games in-house and put them on the NFL Network. After that, Comcast decided the NFL Network charged too much money for programming for their subscribers.

There will always be skirmishes between the multiple system operators and cable networks over money. That will not change with the Comcast-NBC merger.

The merger probably will not be in the best interests of consumers as rights fees, retransmission costs and other fees will continue to go up. The question that needs to be answered is whether Comcast can make the merger work because big media deals over the past 15 years including the AOL Time Warner agreement have been failures. Clear Channel bought out thousands of radio stations following the 1996 Tele Communication Act passage by Congress which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton and that has been a disaster for the company. And for those who are worried about the direction Brian Roberts might take NBC News, here is a question. What kind of job did General Electric do in covering the news? One of GE's properties is MSNBC, a so-called news channel which like FOX News Channel and CNN doesn't cover news but is long on shrill and fake confrontational arguments led by carnival barkers. NBC Dateline once blew up a General Motors truck in 1992 in a staged report called "Waiting to Explode" which questioned the safety of GM trucks.

Comcast has been a major player on the sports scene for a long time. The company owns the Philadelphia Flyers and 76ers and has partnerships thorough Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, the National Basketball Association, golf and limited National Football League team business arrangements. NBC Sports has properties; a combined Comcast NBC is stronger and has some money to spend. That is music to the ears of sports owners and promoters but not necessarily the sound that makes Mickey Mouse and Disney too happy as ESPN is no longer alone as the undisputed heavyweight champion of sports programming.

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 www.bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com

Journalist Sarah Palin should ask why TV money will fund an NFL lockout

TUESDAY, 30 NOVEMBER 2010 11:52

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/journalist-sarah-palin-should-ask-why-tv-money-will-fund-an-nfl-lockout

BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
So Sarah Palin wants "to help clean up the state that is so sorry today of journalism." Palin also has "a communications degree. I studied journalism, who, what, where, when, and why of reporting." Let's take Sarah Palin, who has a communications degree from one of the five colleges she attended in six years, at her word that she really wants to help clean up journalism. Let's give the former Alaska TV sportscaster an assignment and see how she does.
Palin is employed by Rupert Murdoch's FOX News Channel so it should be rather easy for her, as a onetime Vice Presidential candidate in the United States, to score an interview with the naturalized American citizen Murdoch. Palin, the former sportscaster, should begin the interview with her boss with a simple question. "Mr. Murdoch, why are you helping to underwrite the National Football League lockout which is slated to begin in March 2011?"
Palin's second question of the Australian-born media mogul should get right to the core of Murdoch's FOX News Channel and New York Post audience. "How does your guarantee of paying hundreds of millions of dollars in rights fees to the National Football League in 2011 help your audience, "real" Americans, even in the event that the 31 owners and Green Bay's management lockout the players and no games are played?
Palin should then just go with the flow and ask a few more questions "is providing financial support for a labor action by a custodian of the public airwaves — Murdoch owns a number of television stations across the United States. He had to become an American citizen to do that after being an illegal alien owning the New York Post before he was naturalized — a proper use of a television station license?" And, "is it in the public interest to use monies generated by News Corp-owned stations (including WNYW and WWOR in New York and WTFX in Philadelphia and 24 other stations), to support the NFL ownership group?"
To expand her report and show off her journalism skills Palin should invite Jeffrey Immelt, the General Electric Chairman of the Board and Chief Operating Officer (and at present owner of NBC), Robert Iger, the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Walt Disney Company (and ESPN owner), Sumner Redstone, the Chairman of CBS and Michael White, the President and CEO of DirecTV to appear on her report on the potential NFL lockout.
Iger should jump at the opportunity to chat with Palin after Sarah's oldest daughter Bristol brought new viewers and tons of phone calls over the past few months to the ABC show, "Dancing With the Stars," along with more advertising dollars.
Palin could pose the same questions to Iger and Redstone that she did to Murdoch and ask whether it is ethical that Iger's ESPN and White's DirecTV is taking subscribers money to provide a cushion for NFL owners. After all, Congress in 1984 kept ESPN alive (along with other cable TV networks) by allowing multiple system (cable TV) operators to bundle financially struggling networks like ESPN, CNN and The Weather Channel and to place them on a basic expanded tier, which is a direct restraint of trade in a free market society. The result was cable consumers now pay for networks whether they watch them or not. All basic subscribers pay for channels that only a fraction watches; and it is all legal because of the Cable TV Act of 1984 which was signed into law by the champion of free market — President Ronald Reagan. The whole issue of why media companies and by extension their news divisions (with the exception of DirecTV, which does not have a news division) are supporting NFL owners needs to be explained to the very "real" Americans that Palin says she stands with.
Murdoch, Iger, Immelt, Redstone and White agreed to individual contracts with the NFL and paid a lot of money for the right. They also told the NFL that they would cover (financial not in depth news) the owners in the event of a lockout and at some point down the road would get a rebate if the owners' lockout in 2011 forced the cancellation of games. But the NFL never lowers rights fees. When the contracts are renegotiated down the road, the NFL will still have big leverage over the TV networks — NFL games are among the top rated TV shows in the United States and attract the 18-34, 18-49, 18-54 male demographic that advertisers want. The NFL TV guys, Dallas's Jerry Jones, Denver's Pat Bowen, can ask for the moon; but that doesn't mean Murdoch, Igor, Immelt, Redstone and White's predecessor at DirecTV needed to give the NFL whatever they wanted. The 2011 season rights fees will go into the owners' war chest in the battle with the players; and because of that the owners will have an enormous edge over the players in the bargaining talks, as they can hold out while players' careers are brief and any games lost to the lockout will impact the players' pockets far more than the owners'.
The owners want to reduce the players' take of revenues from 59 to 48 percent and chop salaries by 18 percent. The TV people are in the owners' corner in the labor action which brings up a point. Are the TV networks shilling for the rich and elite, or do they care about "real" Americans? What does that say about their ability to real provide "fair and balanced" news?
In all seriousness, could ABC, CBS and NBC news divisions really report on the NFL owners' lockout in full detail, knowing the corporate bosses are providing much needed leverage for the owners? Could the FOX News Channel and ESPN lay out the story? The answer is no. No one on the FOX News Channel, MSNBC or ESPN is going to criticize Murdoch, Immelt or Iger. Katie Couric and her CBS news division is not going to go after Redstone. But Palin did run for Vice President and as a journalist she should have the gravitas to actually get Murdoch, Iger, Immelt, Redstone and White on record to explain their decisions.
Murdoch's FOX syndication arm (FOX is not a true TV network) owes the NFL an awful lot. Murdoch got the rights to NFC Games in 1993 with a four-year, $1.58 billion offer beating out CBS. Murdoch's FOX had The "Simpsons" and a few other programs like "Married With Children" and "Beverly Hills 90210" that garnered some interest on many weak stations. With the NFL, a powerful TV franchise in his back pocket, Murdoch also took away two strong CBS affiliates in Detroit and Milwaukee in early 1994 and all of that resulted in the loss of audience share for CBS' Sunday night news magazine, "60 Minutes." FOX also got a promotional platform for prime time shows during NFL games and ended up with a Super Bowl. The NFL built FOX and allowed Murdoch to move ahead with the FOX News Channel. CBS returned to the NFL in 1998, taking away NBC's AFC package with an eight-year deal. NBC returned in 2006 with a Sunday night package, Disney's ABC Sports was folded into ESPN's camp and in 2006, Monday Night Football shifted from over-the-air ABC to the cable ESPN.
Palin, the journalist, could conclude her in depth report by getting into the political arena by interviewing Congressional Republicans and asking if they plan to review the whole question of why and how Murdoch, Iger, Immelt, Redstone and White are using public airwaves or cable/satellite TV subscriber fees. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform seems like a good place to start hearings on television's role in an NFL lockout.
The players association is asking elected officials in NFL cities to get involved with the negotiations, claiming there is a huge potential for major economic losses with NFL football in 2011. The NFL Players Association Executive Director should be playing the public financing of stadiums card just to educate the public about the real costs of football and sports in the United States and to reveal how "real" Americans are paying a variety of taxes to support sports facilities around the country. Palin, who apparently favors small government and less government spending, should ask about the billions upon billions of public tax dollars that are spent for facilities, including the one she approved in Wasilla, Alaska when she was mayor of that city for a junior hockey franchise that ended up in her town.


Palin is right about the quality of journalism today. Glenn Beck passes for a journalist, as do all of the yellers and screamers on cable TV news and AM talk radio. None of them really goes into any depth or perhaps even has the ability to be a savant even though CNN's Anderson Cooper is trying to "keep them honest."
The entire politics of the potential NFL lockout includes a conversation on workers' rights, medical/health benefits, retirement payments, government's role in infrastructure (stadiums), the National Labor Relations Board, Congress, the Oval Office and the media. Sarah Palin, of all people, could use her FOX credentials to work the story and get the info out to "real" Americans. Somehow though, it seems very unlikely that Palin would find the time and do the proper interviews with the proper people. "Real" Americans may not have an entire NFL season starting in March which includes the April Draft, mini-camps, free agency and then finally training camp. Someone should explain why this is happening and how Murdoch, Iger, Immelt, Redstone and White have fingerprints all over the potential loss of the NFL during next season by underwriting an owners' lockout.
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 www.bickley.com or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com

Does Linda McMahon know why the N.Y.-N.J. Hitmen and the XFL went out of business suddenly?
THURSDAY, 07 OCTOBER 2010 12:11

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/does-linda-mcmahon-know-why-the-ny-nj-hitmen-and-the-xfl-went-out-of-business-suddenly#
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
There has been an awful lot said about the Connecticut Republican Senate candidate Linda McMahon and her role with the World Wrestling Federation and World Wrestling Entertainment as chief executive officer. When you run for political office, everything is fair game and rightfully there has been a major focus on the McMahon family bankruptcy in the 1970s and questions about former World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment performers who died as young men while either working for Vince and Linda McMahon or shortly after they left the wrestling organization.
But there is one area of the McMahon portfolio that has not been given a lot of scrutiny.
The short-lived XFL.
The XFL was born after Vince and Linda McMahon past on an opportunity to buy the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League and then the entire league in the late 1990s. McMahon and General Electric's NBC division teamed up in early 2000 and started to put together a single entity owned league with each side owning half of the product. The league was scheduled to start in February 2001 and came to life around the same time that Time Warner was thinking about creating a professional football league.
The McMahon-NBC venture failed and was done by May 2001 and left a lot of football people rather bitter because of just how the end played out.
Vince and Linda McMahon did not put the XFL out of business. Ken Schanzer, an executive at NBC Sports did according to numerous insiders who were employed by the league or NFL people who were friends with XFL football people.
The late George Young, who built two New York Giants Super Bowl teams as the franchise's general manager, used to carp about how someone would not allow the football people to run the show. The someone was not Vince McMahon nor was it Linda McMahon. It was NBC personnel that decided to give the league a wrestling persona which included having the network's football analyst Jesse Ventura try to bait the New Jersey-New York coach Rusty Tillman to create some sort of storyline.
The tactic failed miserable and caused George Young one day to complain vehemently to anyone who listened that it belittled Tillman and the other coaches looking for a place to hone their craft. George Young never had a problem with the XFL as it gave people opportunities to play, to coach, to scout, to market and to announce.
People like Bob Costas and John Sterling cut their teeth on upstart leagues.
The story that former XFL people tell is that NBC executives were still miffed at the National Football League for accepting a 1998 CBS offer to get the rights to American Football Conference games, playoff contests and an occasional Super Bowl for $4 billion over an eight year period which was about a 130 percent increase over what NBC had paid for the contract. NBC wanted to stick it to both CBS and the NFL in a rather childish manner and hoped to get good ratings for a late winter-spring product.
It was not until late in the 2001 season when the XFL fell off the map that football people took over the product. The XFL might have lasted into season two, 2002, had Schanzer and NBC not pulled the plug. According to one XFL official who was present at the end, everyone acknowledged that the league had lost some $50 million but ESPN in Bristol, Conn. had interest in picking up the programming in 2002 and TNN would have returned for a second year. UPN had dropped out but ESPN's interest would have more than made up for losing the weak UPN network. But according to the league insider Schanzer, (the insider did not know if Schanzer acted on his own or if a higher authority made the call) and didn't want a competitor.
With that the league disappeared leaving an awful lot of angry football people stewing both in the NFL and XFL.
McMahon wanted to keep going according to the XFL insider.
Western civilization survived the first weekend of the existence of the XFL on February 3, 2001. The first game pitted the New Jersey-New York Hitmen and the Las Vegas Outlaws in the desert. Las Vegas won the game 19-0. The XFL didn't change the world despite the horrors predicted by the very predictable sportswriters of the time who in the Pavlov dog thinking abhorred the thought of somebody starting a new football (or basketball or hockey or soccer) league and other naysayers like George Will.
The XFL didn't prompt China to bringing the tanks back to Tiananmen Square in Beijing; the Wall didn't go up again in Germany, there was no reversal of the Florida Presidential Election results.
The XFL featured just a bunch of football players who played the game in various sites around the country with scantily clad cheerleaders on the sidelines.
Vince McMahon's latest contribution to American society at the time really didn't make very much difference. There was the assertion from then Baltimore Ravens owner Art Modell that McMahon was selling sex and violence. But Modell was stopped in his tracks when the name Sam Huff came up and then the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders was the second part added to the conversation.
Nearly 40 years ago, on October 31, 1960, CBS aired as part of the network's Twentieth Century series, "The Violent World of Sam Huff" which was narrated by Walter Cronkite. Huff was the tough New York Giants linebacker who was also the first NFL player to appear on the cover of Time magazine on November 30, 1959. The Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders became a brand name and were regulars on TV shows.
The XFL was a made for TV show for NBC, the UPN Network (which is now out of business) and the TNN cable network, which is now Spike TV. The first week's TV audience was a pleasant surprise. The actual football though was ragged at best but the XFL was not necessarily going to be about football. Wrestling had storylines and was a soap opera. McMahon and NBC, who had some experience with daytime soap operas on the network, were going to create storylines. But they would have had to go a long way in 2001 to catch the real life drama of some NFL players like Rae Carruth the Carolina Panthers player who was standing trial for the murder of this girl friend, the Baltimore Ravens Ray Lewis, who was arrested on murder and aggravated assault charges (Lewis copped a plea for obstruction of justice and got one year probation) and Green Bay's Mark Churma who just a couple days after the start of the XFL was acquitted of sexual assault charges.
McMahon and professional wrestling in general always presented lowbrow entertainment. There was nothing ever sophisticated about professional wrestling in the TV era and a lot of it resembled Three Stooges shorts. The critics fired at McMahon and the XFL but his presentation was really lame and at best fourth grade humor. The XFL didn't have DWI arrests (a common occurrence in football), wife beaters, coke addicts like the other "established" sports leagues at the time.
But University of Chicago economist Allen Sanderson was quoted that he "hopes the league fails" because Professor Sanderson "doesn't want the bar of entertainment to be lowered." Then there was the conservative columnist, baseball shill and member of two baseball franchises' board of directors (the liberal Peter Angelos' Baltimore Orioles and John Moores' San Diego Padres — Moores was a major contributor to Bill Clinton's Presidential campaigns) George Will's comments.
Will worried that the XFL would continue the "further coarsening of America."
McMahon may have come up with a lot of sports and entertainment ideas in his Cape Cod Coliseum incubator but he didn't invent bad behavior in sports.
George Will probably likes to draw a blank on the illegal steroids usage in baseball while he served Angelos and Moores but the former professor, one time Republican political operative and conservative writer and TV talking head is smart enough to know that bad behavior started long before Vince and Linda McMahon.
When the New York Islanders Pat Lafontaine suffered a concussion during a game at Madison Square Garden against the New York Rangers in 1990, Rangers fans blocked the exit out of the Garden for the ambulance and then rocked the ambulance as it was leaving. Jeffrey Lange was arrested at Giants Stadium for throwing a snowball and he wasn't the only one pelting the field with snow and ice balls during a Giants-San Diego Chargers game on December 23, 1995. Lange was arrested with 17 others that day. Some fans in various cities around North America used championship celebrations as an excuse to go on rampages. The XFL crowds were not dangerous. The XFL did not have European soccer crowd lunatics.
The XFL lead TV analyst Jesse Ventura was the governor of Minnesota at the time. George Will didn't take note of this in 2001 because he is a baseball apologist in many ways. But Governor Ventura issued an apology statement after Minnesota Twins fans at the Metrodome pelted former Twins and New York Yankees leftfielder Chuck Knoblauch with garbage from the stands in 2001.
By the time the XFL's life support was pulled by Schanzer, the XFL didn't cause gas prices to rise, the XFL didn't create tension between the US and China, the US and North Korea nor did McMahon cause the US to lose its United Nation's seat on the Human Rights Commission in that body. It was just a TV show but it is interesting to read all of the negative reaction to the McMahons, the wrestling industry and how the real story of the failure of the XFL has never really been fully explained.
The XFL was just entertainment, a made for television show. In 2001, the XFL expired and that aspect of Linda McMahon's life and business has not been explored. It deserves a look, not only for Connecticut voters but for sports business management students who need to see how sports and business intersect. The questions of why the XFL didn't go on should be asked and the first question that Linda McMahon or Schanzer should be asked is this. Did NBC really pull the plug because a Connecticut business, ESPN, wanted to get involved? Nine years later with the senatorial campaign nearing an end, and Linda McMahon claiming she knows how to create jobs, there may be some people who want an answer.
Evan Weiner is an award winning author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Business and Politics of Sports" and can be reached atevanjweiner@yahoo.com

SenatiorWill the New York Giants or Jets be blacked out on local TV this season?
MONDAY, 20 SEPTEMBER 2010 12:59


http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/will-the-new-york-giants-or-jets-be-blacked-out-on-local-tv-this-season
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
On the opening weekend of the 2010 National Football League season, neither the East Rutherford-based New York Giants nor the New York Jets sold out the New Meadowlands Stadium. In theory, neither the Giants- Carolina Panthers game nor the Jets-Baltimore Ravens contest should have been seen in the New York area. On over-the-area, cable (ESPN, NFL Network) or satellite (DirecTV) in a 75-mile radius of New York City. But the game was on television despite the fact that the Giants and Jets did not sell out all of their inventory (seats) to the games.
Apparently the failure to sell club seats and luxury boxes, the really big-ticket items, doesn't count when it comes to National Football League blackout rules. So for TV purposes, the Jets and Giants not being able to sell out seats because they were designated as club seats or luxury boxes gives the two teams some leeway. The two teams New York City area fan base is much better off in terms of TV than the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders fan bases. Tampa Bay failed to sell out the team's Tampa stadium during the NFL's opening week in a game against the Cleveland Browns.
The Chargers' home game on Sunday against Jacksonville was blacked out in the San Diego market because the stadium didn't sell out.
The Oakland Raiders home opener against St. Louis was blacked out on September 19 because the team did not sell out the Oakland Coliseum. Oakland's last home game telecast in the San Francisco Bay Area was the opening game of the 2009 season against San Diego.
Other teams will probably not sell out games during the 2010 and that has caught the attention of Congress. Ohio Senator. Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown has asked the NFL to take a close look at its blackout policy. The Ohio Senator thinks the league should take into consideration that the country has not recovered from the September 2008 economic meltdown and that people cannot afford pricey tickets.
In 2009, there were 22 blackouts across the league. In 2008, there were just five. The NFL will keep the policy in place even though a Senator is asking them to reconsider. This could get nasty at some point this fall if there is a trend of non-sellouts. Congress created the NFL as the league exists today with the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961 and Congress can make life miserable for NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, the 31 owners and the people who run Green Bay.
Exhibit A was the 2007 season final Saturday night game between the New England Patriots and the New York Giants when New England was on the verge of a 16-0 season. That game was scheduled to be on the NFL Network with just local broadcasts in New York and Boston. The NFL Network was having problems with carriage with various multiple systems operators (including Time Warner, Cablevision and Charter limiting the NFL Network's reach to 43 million households) which meant a great deal of the country could not see the game.
The non-availability of the game caused a stir on the Hill in Washington and by week's end, the game suddenly appeared on CBS, NBC and the NFL Network. When Congress is motivated, things get done in a bi-partisan manner rapidly without rancor.
Particularly in sports.
The NFL blackout rule has been bounced around for six decades. Television is both a blessing and a curse for sports in the minds of some owners and sports officials. What TV really is for sports is a three-hour infomercial selling the product. In this case, the NFL. But in 1950, NFL Commissioner Bert Bell told his owners to blackout home games to get people to buy tickets for home games instead of in front of the television. Bell's plea to his owners came after the Los Angeles Rams ownership saw a 50-percent drop in attendance in 1949 compared to 1948 after the team signed a deal with the Admiral Television Company in Southern California. Admiral was a maker of televisions and used Rams games to sell TVs not unlike David Signoff who put programs on his NBC radio network in the 1920s to sell RCA radios. By 1951, the NFL was in the courtroom defending its blackout policy. In 1953, Judge Allan K. Grim, upheld the league's blackout policy believing that it was not in violation of anti-trust laws.
The blackout problem resurfaced in 1957, when the NFL Championship Game was blacked out in the host city of Detroit despite being a sellout.
Because of the blackout rule, Chicago football fans in the 1950s hardly ever saw a football game. Chicago was the only two-team city in the NFL with the Bears and Cardinals hosting home games on a weekly basis over the course of the 12 game schedule. If the Cardinals and Bears played one another, then one weekend would be freed up for CBS' WBBM in Chicago to televise a game. Eventually the Bidwill family's Cardinals would play two "home" games a year in other locales such as Minneapolis or Buffalo. The NFL finally solved the "Chicago problem" when Bidwill's Cardinals moved to St. Louis on March 13, 1960. The Bidwills went to St. Louis after receiving $500,000 from the Bears, the NFL, and CBS.
Congress really got involved in sports broadcasting in 1961 and changed the sports landscape of the United States. In its early years of television, post World War II, TV contracts were negotiated locally. In the 1950's, the NFL was under a court-ordered injunction that prevented it from signing a single league-wide contract with a network. Instead, each NFL team had a separate deal with a local television station. For instance in 1960, the New York Giants received $340,000 for their deal, but the Green Bay Packers received $105,000. In 1960, the just established American Football League, not limited by the injunction, pooled the broadcast rights and signed a national network contract with the American Broadcasting Company (which was at the time, a limited TV network trying to make inroads against the established Columbia Broadcasting System and the National Broadcasting Company.
On September 30, 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed Public Law 87-331, better known as the Sports Broadcasting Act, which exempted professional sports leagues from antitrust scrutiny allowing them to sell television rights on a league-wide basis.
After President Kennedy signed the bill, the NFL pooled its television rights and signed a deal with CBS for 1962 for $4.65 million annually.
The blackout policy was challenged again in 1962 when the Giants hosted Green Bay in the NFL Championship at Yankee Stadium. Judge Edward Weinfeld upheld the NFL position and denied an injunction, which would have forced CBS to televise the game in the New York City area. The blackout policy would remain in effect until 1973, when Congress passed experimental legislation, which was supposed to have lasted until 1976, that stated that any NFL game that was declared a sellout 72 hours prior to kickoff be made available for local TV.
The NFL renewed its contracts with CBS for the regular-season and the championship games in the years 1964 through 1967. Sarnoff was extremely unhappy with the NFL spurning his NBC network and decided to bankroll the American Football League. The TV monies poured in but owners had to use those funds to hire expensive talent like Joe Namath who signed a $427,000 deal with the New York Jets in 1965. The NBC-AFL partnership would eventually force the AFL and NFL to merge, a marriage that had to be approved by Congress. That happened in October 1966. By 1969, television income had risen to $1.6 million per team in the NFL and $900,000 per team in the AFL.
Once the leagues merged, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle began dabbling with the thought of a regular Monday night game. In 1966, CBS did two games. But Rozelle thought a regular series would be a ratings grabber. Both William Paley's CBS and Sarnoff's NBC declined because they had hit Monday night programming, but still ratings challenged ABC signed on in 1969 but with the understanding that Monday Night Football would be more than just a game. It had to be entertainment as well, which is why Howard Cosell and Don Meredith became the stars of the show not the players per se. 1969. Monday Night Football debuted in 1970, with ABC acquiring the rights to televise 13 NFL regular-season Monday night games in 1970, 1971, and 1972/
In 1969, four-year television contracts, under which CBS would televise all NFC games (between 1970-73) and NBC all AFC games (except Monday night games), with a division between the networks of the televising of the Super Bowl and AFC-NFC Pro Bowl games, were signed.
Congress created a major revenue source for the NFL by passing the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961 and to this day, both House and Senate members know that. The NFL may be able to fend off Sherrod Brown but what happens if other lawmakers decide this is an issue? If Brown gets addition support on the Hill, Roger Goodell may be explaining why the NFL still needs a blackout rule and how the Giants and Jets haven't sold all of their Meadowlands inventory and yet the league televises Jets and Giants home games in the New York market with less than a full house but San Diego, Oakland and Tampa can't. Things might get nasty later this fall if teams are not selling out but the consumer wants the NFL.
Evan Weiner is an award winning author, radio-TV commentator and speaking on "The Business and Sports of Politics" and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com

Trump’s ‘You’re Fired’ moment in football

Trump’s ‘You’re Fired’ moment in football
By Evan Weiner - The Daily Caller 10:18 AM 07/28/2010
http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/28/trumps-youre-fired-moment-in-football/

Donald Trump will once again be presented on NBC this fall as the as an incredibly successful businessman and host of a so-called “reality” show, The Apprentice.
There is no such thing as “reality” on “reality TV” despite the publicity surrounding programs like Trumps’, however, since the show features a man who has been anything but successful with the failure of his football team and his casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, his airline and other ventures.
Trump probably doesn’t like to be reminded of this, but people who were connected with the United States Football League will tell you Trump, more than anyone else, was the leader in destroying the league which last played on July 14, 1985. While Trump wasn’t the only poor businessman in the endeavor; he just led the owners down the path to ruin.
On July 29, 1986, Trump’s football aspirations came to a crushing end. A Federal Court jury in New York couldn’t figure out the football business and handed him both a win and loss.
A quarter of a century later, The Donald is not a beloved football icon.
To this day, Trump is remembered as the pied piper who failed USFL people. Former USFL personnel are not impressed with The Apprentice, Trump’s golfing exploits, his boxing ventures, his character on wrestling or his licensing of his name to businesses.
He failed at a business that should have worked. Spring football in the United States should have been foolproof, as it came with a TV deal with ABC and a separate deal with the Getty Oil owned ESPN (Getty sold ESPN to ABC in 1984).
The United States Football League started at a swanky New York hotel on May 11, 1982 and died in New York in a court house in Foley Square about four years later. The league had franchises in Arizona, Birmingham, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, New Jersey, Oakland, Philadelphia, Tampa Bay and Washington and had a two-year TV agreement with ABC and ESPN and a national radio contract with ABC.
Eleven days prior to the league’s first games, Heisman Trophy winner and underclassman Herschel Walker signed a deal with Walter Duncan’s New Jersey Generals. That signing would eventually change National Football League eligibility rules. Duncan would sell the franchise to Trump on September 22, 1983 after the first season was complete. The team cost Trump a reported six million dollars. Trump had originally sought a USFL team when Dixon was planning the league but had some financial problems and didn’t go through with purchase.
The USFL had strong franchises and as many weak ones, like the Boston Breakers. The Breakers encountered stadium problems and moved to New Orleans in 1984 and then to Portland in 1985. Like a good number of USFL teams, financial problems beset them.
Oddly enough, while the USFL was going through financial woes, another group of businessmen led by Californian Alex Bell decided 1984 would be a good year to start yet another spring football league.
The International Football League announced its official formation on July 1, 1983, at Donald Trump’s Grand Hyatt Hotel next to Grand Central Terminal. It is unknown whether the check cleared for the IFL banquet and meetings at Trump’s hotel.
The news conference was a big party that featured cheerleaders, lots of food and drink and IFL hats. It would be the only “official” function the league would hold.
The IFL’s twelve charter franchises included Chicago, Florida, Honolulu, Houston, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina (Charlotte), Ohio, San Jose, and Tennessee. The league would also play in the spring, like the USFL.
Yet, the IFL faded away by 1984.
Years later, another group of businessmen were poised to start a league in the 1990s called the Professional Spring Football League. Again there was a New York news conference to alert the world that a new league was coming. The league even brought in ex-Jets and ex-Generals coach Walt Michaels to head up a New York entry, but all that is left of the league are some baseball caps with the letters PSFL. Michaels decided not to discuss his years with Trump that day.
Following the first season, the USFL added six teams in Pittsburgh, Houston, San Diego, Jacksonville, San Antonio and Memphis. Trump purchased the Generals on September 22, 1983. Chicago and Arizona swapped franchises. San Diego never played a game and moved operations to Tulsa. Boston became the New Orleans Breakers.
The league continued to be beset with financial problems in 1984. Chicago and Pittsburgh folded. The Tulsa based Oklahoma Outlaws merged business operations with Arizona who had been Chicago in 1983; the Detroit based Michigan Panthers hooked up with the Oakland Invaders. Philadelphia moved to Baltimore to play home games but the Stars trained in Philadelphia. Washington relocated to Orlando, New Orleans ended up in Portland and the USFL took over the Los Angeles Express, who among other contracts gave Steve Young a $40 million contract.
The Express owner William Oldenberg spent wildly on players and lost $15 million. Oldenburg had major financial problems as well and left the team a financial ruin. The ABC deal required the league to have teams in New York (New Jersey), Los Angeles and Chicago. Chicago folded, the league kept Los Angeles going in 1985 because of the ABC deal and Trump, well Trump was talking about building a condominium stadium in the Flushing junk yards across the way from Shea Stadium in Queens, New York. Trump, to his credit, was the first to publicly talk about a plan that required customers to buy a seat license and then pay for a ticket. It is a concept that many NFL teams use today.
The spring league had plans to compete with the NFL in the fall of 1986. Led by Trump and Eddie Einhorn, who promised to take over the defunct Chicago franchise if the league abandoned the March to July schedule, the league started making moves.
The USFL filed an anti-trust suit against the National Football League, charging in part that the NFL monopolized the fall football television schedule. Trump somehow convinced his fellow owners that the league would thrive by going head to head with the NFL in the fall. Originally the USFL brought in famed attorney Roy Cohn to handle the case but settled on Harvey Myerson was their lead attorney. According to Carl Peterson, who ran the Philadelphia-Baltimore Stars franchise for Myles Tannenbaum, the NFL wanted to avoid a court case and offered to take two unnamed USFL franchises, presumably Baltimore and Oakland (to replace the departed Oakland Raiders and Baltimore Colts in the NFL) but USFL owners like Trump and Einhorn balked at the possibility and demanded that the NFL take at least four and possibly as many as six USFL teams and decided that an antitrust suit against the NFL was the way to proceed.
Baltimore had a USFL championship caliber team in the Stars and had an owner who probably would have made the cut in the NFL, Myles Tannenbaum. Oakland did not do well financially however the NFL spent a lot of money and time in court fighting Raiders owner Al Davis’ right to relocate his team from Oakland to Los Angeles which made the city a lead candidate for NFL inclusion. The NFL had passed on Birmingham and Memphis in 1976 after the World Football League folded and it was unlikely those two USFL cities were on the short list of towns the NFL wanted. Other USFL cities that might have piqued the NFL’s interest from the USFL could have been Jacksonville and Phoenix. The NFL had no desire to take Trump’s franchise.
There were other bad owners like the San Antonio Gunslingers Clinton Manges who had no money. The late Harry Usher, the USFL Commissioner who presided over the league in the Trump days. Manges once threw a pair of guns on the table at a USFL meeting in Teaneck, New Jersey for some reason and Usher politely asked Manges to put his toys away. Peterson remembers a meeting where Manges was being asked about lack of payments to players and Manges told Usher to line up with all the others who were suing him.
“We had a real good season with the Breakers in Boston,” recalled Dick Coury who made the cross continent trip between 1983-85 with his team in Boston, New Orleans and Portland. “It was three great experiences. It was different. In the National Football League, when you change cities, it means you got fired.
Coury admitted that the strain of financial uncertainty certainly played a role on his teams. The moves affected families, in terms of setting up homes, doing banking, and other day to day tasks. That affected the team that was 11-7 in 1983, 8-10 in 1984 and 6-12 in 1985.
“It was difficult and most of our players did go to all three cities,” he recalled. “When we moved, the team did house the coaches until the players got there. We moved in the off-season, so most of players just came into town and found apartments for the season. It was not easy, but our players took it well. It was trying for some of the families. We had to be ready to move, we didn’t unpack in any city, we just kept our clothes in a suitcase, in case we had to move we were ready to go.”
Coury had been with the Portland World Football League franchises in the 1974. The World Football League somehow lasted until 1975.
“In the World Football League, we had players mostly at the end of their career. I had players like Ben Davidson and Pete Beathard, who could still play but were on the downward side. In the USFL, we had some great players like Herschel Walker, Jim Kelly, Marcus DuPree.”
“Had we stayed in the spring, we would still be playing in the USFL,” he said.
But his former Breakers owner Randy Vataha said it was just not that simple. He remembered an owner’s dinner prior to the start of the league when Tampa Bay owner John Bassett was asked about how a league operated as Bassett was the only USFL owner with previous ownership experience with the WFL, and the World Hockey Association Toronto Toros/Birmingham Bulls.
“Bassett said, we will have 12 teams, six games a week. Six teams will win, six will lose and we need to understand that to be a successful league,” said Vataha.
“Our payrolls were about $1.5 million a year. The NFL was around $6-7 million. As teams started to lose, they went after NFL players and brought the average to $5 million.
“That was $42 million more than we had budgeted.”
To offset the 1983 losses, the league expanded to six cities and got some $36 from expansion monies to split between the 12 original teams. One of those new owners was Trump.
“Trump lobbied for one year to move to the fall, and so we suspended the league during the antitrust law suit and we would have started in the fall of 1986,” said Vataha.
Only July 29, 1986, a jury declared that the NFL was an illegal monopoly but they could not figure out what to pay the USFL in damages. They decided to give the USFL a dollar and hoped that the Judge Peter K. Leisure would adjust the figure. Apparently the jury did not understand Judge Leisure’s instructions on monetary damages.
Myerson and the league won the case, but were awarded just $3 in damages. Vataha said the real cause of the league’s demise was not NFL owners but USFL owners who didn’t pay attention to what Bassett said.
“No matter what you spend, there are six teams that win and six teams that lose every week. We could have been successful if we stayed a spring football league, had a budgetary restraint and didn’t compete with the NFL. But some of the owners decided they had to win and went out of business,” said Vataha.
“The salaries went up; we expanded too fast and decided to play in the fall. We went out of business.”
The end of the USFL meant Jim Kelly, Herschel Walker, more than 100 players would join the NFL player ranks. Three players would contribute to the Giants 1986 Super Bowl victory, offensive lineman Bart Oates, running back Maurice Carthon and punter Sean Landeta.
“I just kind of laughed a little bit after months and months of high profile courtroom proceedings ended up in a $3 outcome. I thought that was kind of funny,” said Landeta. “Other than that, I thought a lot of fun like that went down the drain.”
Donald Trump never owned another football team and within a few years of the demise of the USFL faced severe financial problems. Chances are pretty good Trump will never own an NFL team. The USFL should have said to Trump, “You’re Fired” back in 1984 or 1985. But Trump does have a TV show, and has proven what comedian Billy Crystal once said about him when he walked it a room at a 2008 golfing event. Crystal in his Howard Cosell voice announced, here he comes ladies and gentlemen: P. T. Barnum.
Barnum was the king of the side show as is Trump today.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio and TV commentator and speaker on “The Politics of Sports Business” and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com.


Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/28/trumps-youre-fired-moment-in-football/print/#ixzz0uzXWgnom

Discarded NFL players are often forgotten in retirement

Discarded NFL players are often forgotten in retirement
FRIDAY, 23 JULY 2010 16:15

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/discarded-nfl-players-are-often-forgotten-in-retirement

BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE POLITICS OF SPORTS BUSINESS
As National Football League training camps begin to open up around the country, (the New York Jets in Cortland, N.Y. on Aug. 1, the New York Giants in Albany, N.Y. also on Aug. 1 and the Philadelphia Eagles at Lehigh in Bethlehem, Pa. on Monday) some 2,560 players are getting ready for what has become an annual ritual — two a day sessions upon the broiling sun to prove they belong on the field. Eventually only 1,696 of them will make teams. A number of the 864 players who are "cut" might end up on practice squads where they make a minimum of $5,200 a week to hone their skills. Some of the players will be placed on injured reserve and will either return to the field or get cut when they are deemed healthy. Each team can keep as many as eight players on the payroll (practice squad) which means 256 players might get another shot at a roster spot when a team loses a player to an injury.
Football is a tough game. Americans have been sold on football's brutality since the October 31, 1960 CBS documentary called "The Violent World of Sam Huff" which was narrated by Walter Cronkite. Yes TV networks once did documentaries in a time when TV news did reporting, research and presented facts and not worried about being profitable. In the 1970s, Al Primo convinced TV executives that news could be turned into entertainment and news divisions could make really big money. Cable TV news would take Primo's idea to the next level and began to feature raving lunatics screaming about their viewpoint because it made for "good TV". Huff was a linebacker with the New York Giants and was the first NFL player ever to appear on the cover of Time magazine on November 30, 1959. Huff's job was to "hurt people" because football was a "man's game" according to the accompanying Time magazine column.
The Huff piece came about 10 months after the "greatest football game ever" when Johnny Unitas led the Baltimore Colts to an overtime win over the Giants in the NFL Championship Game, a game that captivated Americans and propelled the NFL from a "mom and pop" operation into the big time. Huff wasn't the best linebacker in the NFL but played for the "glamorous" New York Giants, a team that caught the fancy of Madison Avenue's advertising community and the TV networks which were headquartered in New York. Huff's Giants didn't win the 1958 championship, Baltimore did but Baltimore was led by a quiet crew cut quarterback named Unitas while the Giants had the handsome Frank Gifford and the tough as nails Huff.
Sam Huff became a successful businessman after his career. Unitas didn't. The quarterback who put the NFL on the map couldn't use his right hand as he got older because of a tendon injury he suffered in 1968. He has two knee replacements and heart bypass was denied disability. Unitas died in 2002 but the denial of disability to the quarterback who put the NFL on the map still draws the ire of former players in tough spots.
In 2007, Congresswoman Linda Sanchez, the chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, held a hearing because she wanted to have "an open discussion on the fairness of the system to severely disabled retired players." It was the start of drawing attention to the plight of retired NFL players. Johnny Unitas' widow Sandra was in Washington watching the hearings.
Huff in his Time magazine interview in 1959 didn't say anything new. A Life magazine had a cover story on December 3, 1971 "Suicide Squad Football's most violent men." Suicide squads have been given a more genteel name — "Special Teams" — but that's where rookies have to first earn their stripes in the NFL. Special teams are the worst assignments on the team and punt returns can be especially dangerous.
Football has been wrestling with players been injured and maimed for more than a century. President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 told college presidents to clean up the game or he would ban football because of the number of deaths and injuries associated with the game.
New rules were implemented but the game remained violent and more than a century later, it seems that not much has changed. Players are still one play away from ending their career and that leads to the question.
Do the young players and some of the veterans who are about to go to camp know what they are getting into? If you listen to Dave Pear (and other older retired players who suffered life changing injuries playing football), the answer is no. Pear played in the NFL for six years as a defensive tackle between 1975 and 1980 with the Baltimore Colts, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Oakland Raiders. He played in one Pro Bowl and was a member of the Raiders Super Bowl XV championship team in 1980-81. Despite all of that, Pear wished he never played football.
"They think they are but no they are not," said Pear who broke his neck during his career and is facing hip replacement surgery in the very near future. "I don't begrudge the active players one penny and I suggest to them save as much as you can because when they become 40, 45, 50, 55, if things don't change, they are going to need the money because the union won't support them."
Pear is uninsurable and depends on government support such as Medicare and social security disability for his medical needs. But he might be one of the lucky ones as he has his wife's support and seems willing to take on the NFL and the NFLPA in an effort to get access to his benefits. He is one of the few with George Visger, Brent Boyd, Conrad Dobler and Mike Ditka who are speaking out about what they feel is the NFL and the NFLPA's abandonment of broken down old players who are in need.
But a lot of former players are not talking, partly because they have been trained since junior high school to "suck it up" and "be a man" which is the football mentality. Most players who play college football have no skills when they leave college because they don't get an education as they are too busy playing football. Sunday's warriors have been beaten over their heads since they were small and are team players even in retirement.
Retired players face high rates of divorce, face bankruptcies and have to put up with the pain of serious injuries on a daily basis. Alzheimer's disease and memory-related diseases in former players between the ages of 30 and 49 are 19 percent higher than average in that population pool.
"Football players wear a mask," said Pear. "All people see is a number. We are just a number that is how football works. Nobody knows how many retired players there (in dire straits)."
The House of Representatives has been holding hearings and monitoring the head injuries situation around the NFL. In 2009, several House members did not think NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell or the league has done enough to care for players with head injuries — concussions — and that the league really has not made much of an effort investigating long time damage from concussions suffered by players who worked in the NFL as players.
Pear and other retirees have been after the league and the players association to do more and it wasn't until Congress stepped in and began hearings in 2007 that the league and the players association took notice.
The NFL and researches have been at odds over the sports head trauma and later cognitive degeneration. Researchers looking into the relationship between concussions and cognitive problems have seen a link while the NFL's medical committee on concussions has not. On December 3, 2009, the NFL changed the league's concussion policy telling teams that if a player shows any significant sign of concussion that player must be removed from a game or practice and cannot return to the field on the same day.
New NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith told the retirees that "the rift is over" between the old players and the union and that help for those in need is on the way. But Pear doesn't see any evidence that the rift is really over. "The NFL grosses about eight and a half billion dollars a year, so where is the dough? (Former Executive Director, the late Gene) Upshaw once said we could not receive a pension and disability. Now we have the Gene Upshaw Dire Need Fund, but nothing has changed. So (to today's players) save every penny because once they realize they need medical insurance and can't get it."
When the cheering stops for a good number NFL players, there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Because of the injuries, a good many players became medical liabilities and are uninsurable. The National Football League does not guarantee contracts and if you are a marginal player who was injured, as soon as a doctor pronounces you healthy, you could be cut and your contract just ends with some severance pay.
Players of Pear's era got no severance and there was no guaranteed money given as a bonus. The bonus money is the only payment that a player will get, all players are then on a week-to-week basis. Virtually all of the players are replaceable on the spot.
"I know there is no pot of gold," said Pear. "In football, you are only a number. When you are a professional football player, you think you are invincible but when you get hit in the head, you injure your brain and life becomes different. We want our disability, our pension and future medical benefits. We don't want charity"
The football culture is different than real life. Football players grow up in a paramilitary setting as one long time NFL owner once said. That may explain why the National Football League Players Association has never been as effective as the Major League Baseball Players Association or the National Basketball Players Association or the National Hockey League Players Association in delivering guaranteed contracts to their members. The NFLPA seemingly has been pushing salaries up throughout the last four decades and not worrying about aftercare for former members until recently when the league and the players association were hauled before Congress to talk about the plight of former players.
"What they have done is create a myth," said Pear. "They have misled these young men telling them to be tough and work through injuries. Major League Baseball, the NBA and the NHL guarantee disability, pensions and medical their career. They (the NFL and the NFLPA) have convinced up that we do not deserve it. They have not allowed us access to our benefits which is not right and that has hurt players and players' families."
The National Football league Players Association has not kept records detailing the difficulties former union members have had in their post-football lives. One of the problems is that most players last 3 1/2 years in the league and pensions for players with three years in the league is not much. But the 3 1/2 year average is deceiving. Running backs may last 2.2 years and not be eligible for a pension or benefits as an example. The NFL may be recognized as the National Football League, but people in the NFL know the initials NFL as Not For Long. A good number of players never make it to where they can apply for a pension or disability and by the time they get to the NFL, after surviving high school and college ball, they probably have had some injury baggage. There is a disability benefit plan but according to Pear, it is more lip service than reality.
Congress, for the most part, has left the NFL issue behind although the House could call the NFL and NFLPA before them at any time. Pear is of the opinion that Congress, a class action suit by former players and chipping away at the NFL's image are three areas where the retired players can make the most strides.
The class action suit demanding compensation for injuries would need a law firm with deep pockets willing to take on the NFL and would require players to step up and talk about their problems. It might be easier to find a law firm than getting macho tough guys to go public. There is still a stigma attached even in retirement for players who don't toe the company line. Congress can go after two of the league's antitrust exemptions, the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961 which allowed the NFL to package all of the league's teams (14 in 1961, 32 in 2010) and sell the league to over-the-air and cable TV networks as one entity and undo the 1966 American Football league and National football League merger. That is highly unlikely but the NFL can be vulnerable there. The NFL does a remarkable job selling the product — football — but can the NFL afford images of broken down old stars and grunts who are relatively young, in their 40s and 50s parading around with ailments suffered in games?
It is unlikely that NFL media partners, Sumner Redstone's CBS (or any of the Redstone's holdings including Showtime), General Electric's NBC, Disney's ESPN or Rupert Murdoch's FOX businesses (including Fox News Channel or the FOX Business Channel) would tackle the issue. Newspapers are not partners with the NFL but newspaper sports sections depend on the NFL to fill up space for content and hope that readers will pay attention to ads and some of the ads are football related wrapped around Thanksgiving, weekends and playoff games leading up to the Super Bowl. A reporter sniffing around might lose access to the NFL and most writers would rather give up their right arms than be denied NFL access. The NFL controls the narrative and while Time Warner (the cable TV programmer and channel stock side not the stock side that owns Time Warner Cable) no longer has an NFL TV contract and could do pieces on CNN (a news network that hardly covers news), Time Warner might not want to show the NFL in a bad light. Image or perceived perception is everything to the NFL.
Pear fits into the study of short term memory problems. "There is a problem, you don't know what it is, as a player you are taught to work through it, but as you get older....I wished I never played. I enjoyed playing football when I was not injured. I played with a broken neck for two years. It wasn't worth it."
The image of the NFL, the romance of training camp, the start of the season goes fully on display by Aug. 1. The question for the 2,560 players who are in training camps is simple? Do you know what you are getting into? It is a question that only they can answer and perhaps instead of worrying about how much money they can get in the ongoing collective bargaining agreement, the players should check off safety concerns for both active and retired players (even though retired players don't pay the salaries of NFLPA staff) as their top priority in the next CBA.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio and TV commentator and speaking on "The Politics of Sports Business." He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com