A New York Tabloid’s Seduction of Lebron James
By Evan Weiner
May 7, 2010
(New York, N. Y.) -- United States security officials are still investigating the Times Square bombing attempt, Greece is falling off the economic cliff, there is a flood cleanup in the heart of Nashville, the BP oil spill has not been capped in the Gulf of Mexico, the stock market blew a fuse on Thursday, a volcano in Iceland is still throwing ash into the sky and causing some airplane disruptions in Europe, the United Kingdom had an election and Roland Martin wore an ascot on CNN which became a running joke on The Daily Show for two days yet the New York Daily News, Mort Zuckerman's New York Daily News had an open letter to Lebron James on the front page of May 8's edition, please come to New York and sign with the Knicks after James becomes a free agent on July 1. Zuckerman's headline writer had a plea to Lebron.
This Is Home.
Actually Akron, Ohio is home for Lebron.
On pages 8 and 9 of the tabloid, there were articles and then a comparison between New York and Cleveland and why New York is better. This is not an unusual Daily News tactic. When the Knicks played Indiana in the playoffs in the 1990s, the tabloid poked fun at Indianapolis and Indiana using the headline "The Knicks Versus the Hicks".
Disrespectful yes, but tabloids have no time for hurt feelings. Especially New York tabloids in the midst of in what seems to be the Hundred Years' (tabloid) War.
The "This is Home" complete with pictures of the Statue of Liberty and Lebron front page (Emma Lazarus probably wasn't thinking of Lebron when she wrote give me your tired and poor line as part of her sonnet, The New Colossus which is immortalized on a plaque at the Statue of Liberty) was just the latest New York media's love note to Lebron, the wooing of Lebron in the New York papers is akin to the Knicks trying to recruit Lebron and it appears Knicks owner James Dolan has no problem with the New York tabloids gushing over Lebron who is a free agent come July 1. Dolan who himself owns a newspaper -- Newsday -- has been quiet on the subject, he could be accused of tampering with a player under contract to another team and Newsday has not been out in front of showing love and affection for the Cleveland Cavaliers player.
Zuckerman, whose paper (along with Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, the New York Times and Newsday) put up money for the establishment of the NYC2012 Olympic Committee and himself a part owner of the Washington Redskins, cannot be serious or can he? The Daily News is in a struggle with the New York Post for tabloid domination in the New York market, neither paper puts out much of a useable product as both are filled with mayhem, murder, entertainment and sports news with a lot of sensationalism and on top of that ESPN's new New York website poached Zuckerman's product and took a number of sportswriters.
The Daily News needs readership and if Lebron and the Statue of Liberty and "This is Home" sells papers, that is fine.
The Lebron on the Saturday cover and two-page in the non-sports section articles along with a blow up of Lebron in a Knicks uniform is a thoroughly unprofessional of a journalistic endeavor however and sophomoric at best. The paper seems to be on collectively hands and knees in begging mode, please Lebron look at me status. The only thing missing was Zuckerman's star writer, Mike Lupica (who in the 1990s was Garden President Dave Checketts stenographer and MSG's chief welcome wagon host in his love letters in the sand to MSG columns and Lupica is still pining for those days when the Knicks and Rangers mattered and the Garden was either the hippest or coolest spot on Earth---perhaps he can again hire people like he did back in the 1990s to tell him how the Rangers played and write coherent columns about hockey as well) did not write the valentines to Lebron pieces but that will soon be coming from the Daily News superstar political and sports columnist as the days dwindle down to July 1.
(Love Letters in the Sand was written by J. Fred Coots. Coots also wrote Santa Claus is Coming to Town and the Rangers Victory Song – the New York Rangers fight song back in the 1930s and 40s and beyond.)
The New York tabloid papers basketball coverage have been nothing more than let’s hope Lebron falls in love with New York cheerleaders and the papers are perhaps one step ahead of the New York sports talk radio shows in their infatuation. The hosts of those radio shows also pine for Lebron's love for New York.
Zuckerman, who has the very serious magazine, US News and World Report, has not mentioned in any of his coverage that Lebron's maximum annual NBA contract would allow him to make about $14 million a year is about the same amount of money that Madison Square Garden would pay in property taxes except Dolan doesn't have to pay property taxes. Dolan doesn't pay because in the early 1980s, Gulf and Western, then Garden owners, somehow convinced Mayor Ed Koch, the New York State Legislature and New York Governor Mario Cuomo that the NBA's Knicks and the NHL's Rangers could not be financially viable and could not compete with small market teams for talent without a reduction in property taxes and help with the Con Ed electric bill.
The Knicks and Rangers stayed in a valuable parcel of real estate not far from Macy's or Times Square, Gulf and Western got the property off the city's books and Con Ed customers paid for the privilege of having the two teams stay in Manhattan by picking up the Garden's electric tab. The New York State-Garden deal seems to be one of those that will last in perpetuity or eternity.
Zuckerman seems to be trying to play the Jack Murphy role in getting two big league sports franchise in San Diego in 1961 and 1969 in the pursuit of Lebron James. There is no secret that newspapers like to shape public opinion and make endorsements for political candidates and public policy. But a newspapers main goal is not reporting news per se. The news is the lure or the bait for people to look at the newspaper and check out the advertisements. It is the ad money that newspapers have lived and died with. Ad money has been evaporating for newspapers over the past decade and the product has suffered as writers have been let go.
The Lebron on the front cover is a ploy to get people to sample the Daily News. Zuckerman is not Jack Murphy though. Jack Murphy is a forgotten figure in sports and probably belongs in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the Baseball Hall of Fame as a contributor. Murphy was a columnist and the sports editor of the San Diego Union in the 1950s. San Diego was a quiet, navy town in the 1950s but Murphy reached out to the owner of the American Football League's Los Angeles Chargers, Barron Hilton (the grandfather of Paris Hilton) and began a city pursuit of Hilton's football team. Murphy did convince Hilton that San Diego was a much better venue for his fan-challenged Los Angeles Chargers but there was a potential short term and long term problem.
San Diego lacked a suitable professional football stadium. With Hilton's team ready to move southward but not having a home, Murphy began writing that the Chargers needed a real stadium not the patchwork Balboa Stadium (some renovations at the facility to make it an acceptable AFL stadium were done by Chargers players including Jack Kemp and Paul Maguire) which sat 34,000 people. Murphy pushed to get public support in a referendum to build a real stadium and voters responded by passing the $27 million stadium ballot in November 1965. The new stadium opened in 1967 with the Chargers football team as the main tenant. After Murphy passed away in 1980, San Diego Stadium became Jack Murphy Stadium. The name didn't stick along as changing economics forced a naming rights partner's logo on the stadium in exchange for multi-million dollar checks that went to help pay off players salaries.
A series of factors led both the American and National Leagues in baseball to expand in 1969. Neither league had an expansion plans on the table but when Kansas City A's owner took his team to Oakland after the 1967 season, Missouri Senator Stuart Symington threatened Major League Baseball with stripping the antitrust exemption that the Supreme Court gave the game in 1922. Senator Symington demanded a replacement for Finley's A's as soon as possible which meant 1969.
Initially, the National League did not want to add teams until 1971 but with Symington breathing down Baseball's neck and the American League committing expansion franchises to Kansas City and Seattle, National League owners took San Diego as one territory and Montreal or Buffalo for the other expansion team. Montreal officials were about to secure a ballpark while San Diego had a major league stadium ready to go. Buffalo did not get a team and was a fallback in the event Montreal could not produce a stadium.
Murphy got two franchises into San Diego. Zuckerman waves pom poms for the Knicks. It would be interesting to see how Zuckerman would have reacted if he had more of a financial stake in the Washington Redskins and papers in other markets wanted the Redskins best player and spent years courting the superstar player.
NBA Commissioner David Stern cannot stop Zuckerman's bouquets to Lebron and Stern must know that the Knicks from Dolan to the team's president Donnie Walsh to others in the Garden, while not actively encouraging sportswriters and the papers to seduce Lebron are also not discouraging writers to blow kisses at Lebron. Sportswriters for all their talk about being professionals are fans too and are happy to cover a winning team. The New York Knicks basketball franchise has not been a good product for years.
Lebron is not going to sell any papers anyway. Those days are long gone; newspapers have too much competition from other media sources. But don't tell that to Mort on Rupert. They are in a tabloid war and if Lebron or Dwayne Wade, individually or together, don't come to New York, there is always Carmelo Anthony waiting for free agency in 2011. In fact some New York basketball fans, rather writers, think that Lebron will spurn them and are already making eyes at the Denver Nuggets player. Until Lebron makes a decision, the newspaper seduction of Lebron James will continue in New York.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and a lecturer on "The Politics of Sports Business." He is available for speaking at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Why N.J. cannot get a Major League Baseball team
WEDNESDAY, 05 MAY 2010 12:45
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
COMMENTARY
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/why-nj-cannot-get-a-major-league-baseball-team
Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig has a committee trying to figure out whether Oakland A's owner Lew Wolff can move his team from Oakland to San Jose, if San Jose can find the money and is able to build a mostly publicly-financed baseball stadium. The committee has not figured out, as of yet, if they know the way to San Jose but there will be an answer some day. What happens in Northern California should have no immediate impact on New Jersey. But as it stands now, neither San Jose nor northern New Jersey can be the home of a major league baseball team.
The areas are in other team's territories and Major League Baseball, thanks to an antitrust exemption, can just say no to anyone who wants to put a team in San Jose or East Rutherford, New Jersey. There is no proposal at the present time to attract a Major League team to New Jersey although when then Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth opened the door to possible expansion in 1987, New Jersey had a presentation ready. New Jersey also tried to attract George Steinbrenner's interest and get him to move the Yankees across the Hudson in the 1990s.
There are two owners of Major League Baseball teams who have serious doubts about the revenue production capabilities of their present stadiums. Wolff in Oakland and Stuart Sternberg in St. Petersburg.
Wolff has failed in getting a "stadium-village" for his A's and a real estate in Oakland and in Fremont, which is about 20 miles south on the I-880 of the team's present home at the Oakland Coliseum. In St. Petersburg, Tampa Rays ownership, which includes Managing General Partner Stuart Sternberg of Rye, New York is looking for a new stadium in either St. Petersburg or Tampa.
There was a rumor, which was just a rumor, that Rays ownership thought about moving the Rays to Connecticut. There is one other major fly in the ointment though. The Rays' lease with the St. Petersburg stadium ends in 2027.
Both Wolff and Sternberg are trying to work out an arrangement to remain in their present markets. Wolff can get out of his lease within a few years in Oakland as he signed a short-term agreement to keep his team at the Coliseum through 2013. Here is the problem that Wolff faces and a problem that New Jersey would face if someone in the state decided to go after a Major League Baseball team.
Major League Baseball assigns territories to teams. The San Francisco Giants ownership has the San Jose/Santa Clara County territory which is more than 40 miles south of the Giants China Basin ballpark. The Oakland Coliseum is considerably closer to San Francisco and is accessible by the Bay Area Rapid Transit and is not far down the I-880 from the Bay Area Bridge. San Jose became Giants territory in the 1990s when the team attempted to get a stadium built in the South Bay's most populous city. Neither San Jose nor Santa Clara voters had any interest in paying for a Giants stadium and turned down ballpark referendums. Despite the no votes, MLB has not changed the Giants' territorial claim.
Major League Baseball does not live by the same antitrust laws as normal businesses because the Supreme Court of the United States in 1922 ruled that baseball was a game and not a business and gave the "game" an antitrust exemption which still applies to areas like territories and television. Wolff is blocked from even thinking about crossing the Santa Clara County line because that would be crossing his baseball brothers. Wolff tried to get as close as he could to San Jose and Santa Clara and not upsetting the Giants ownership by trying to relocate to Fremont.
Now Wolff is openly talking to San Jose despite the fact that Giants ownership will not cede the territory and Giants ownership through a subsidiary, the San Jose Giants — the California League Class A Giants affiliate — is trying to block San Jose from building a stadium. Giants ownership has a one-quarter interest in the San Jose Giants.
Wolff's Oakland A's are struggling drawing people this year. Oakland does not have the corporate crowd that fills the Giants China Basin stadium. Santa Clara residents might send Major League Baseball is big wakeup call on June 8 by going against national trends and voting to spend public money to build a football stadium for the San Francisco 49ers to show the Giants, MLB and the city of San Francisco that they are fed up with the Giants territorial claims and to stick it to San Francisco city officials and San Francisco Giants ownership by "stealing" or "poaching" the 49ers. Santa Clara is willing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the stadium.
San Jose is the Silicone Valley and somehow both MLB and the Giants are convinced that money headed up the 101 Freeway to San Francisco will shift to a San Jose baseball team which would have a crippling affect on the Giants. The San Francisco baseball team is one hour away from San Jose; Oakland is across the Bay and is accessible by mass transit.
Wolff doesn't seem to want to sue Major League Baseball and challenge the antitrust exemption. Wolff shares the Oakland Coliseum with the NFL's Raiders and Raiders owner Al Davis did sue the NFL in the 1980s when the league interfered with his negotiations with the Coliseum for a lease extension and then tried to block the Raiders' move to Los Angeles.
Davis won.
In 1984, San Diego Clippers owner Donald Sterling thumbed his nose at NBA officials and moved his franchise to Los Angeles without league consent. He was fined $100 million for the move. Sterling sued the league. The two parties settled. Sterling stayed in LA and paid the NBA a $6 million fine.
Major League Baseball did not move a team between 1971 and 2004. The Washington Senators left the nation's capital for Arlington, Texas in 1972. A number of attempted franchise shifts failed for various reasons including San Diego going to Washington in 1974, the Giants to Toronto in 1976, Oakland to Denver in 1979. A number of teams looked at moving to Tampa including the Giants, Seattle Mariners, George W. Bush's Texas Rangers and the Minnesota Twins. Minnesota ownership nearly sold the team to Greensboro, North Carolina interests in the late 1990s if a stadium became available in that North Carolina city. Voters turned down a Greensboro stadium in 1998.
It is not easy to move a team to open markets like Tampa was before 1995, like Denver before 1991, like Washington between 1972 and 2004. What chance does San Jose have? What chance does New Jersey or Connecticut have?
New Jersey may have the right stuff for a Major League Baseball team. In 2000, Major League Baseball had big names like Paul Volcker, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Richard C. Levin, the Yale University President, the former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and media personality George Will, a former political operative and college professor who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977, analyze baseball's financial condition.
The "Blue Ribbon Panel" on baseball economics left the door open for franchise relocation to places like northern New Jersey and Washington despite the presence of teams in the vicinity. New Jersey or Connecticut have a major revenue stream that is currently untapped. Cablevision's Madison Square Garden network has little summer programming of note that would draw in potential viewers since the Yankees formed the YES Network and the Mets, along with Time Warner and Comcast, started SNY. There probably is more than $60 million on the table waiting for a third New York City area team.
New York City is still the financial capital of the United States. The city once had three baseball teams - the Yankees, the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Walter O'Malley took his Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1957 although he kicked the tires and his Dodgers played seven games at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, N.J. in 1956 and 1957. O'Malley used Jersey City as leverage in his bid to get New York to spring for a new stadium for his Dodgers. Giants owner Horace Stoneham seemed more determined to move his team from upper Manhattan out of the New York area than O'Malley ... with Minneapolis one of his choices.
With the population, the corporate wealth and television monies available, New York City or northern New Jersey would be ripe for a failing franchise. But New Jersey is blocked (as Connecticut would be) because both the Yankees and Mets would nix any move into their territories and the Philadelphia Phillies ownership would probably object to a third New York area team if it was placed in New Jersey. (The Philadelphia Flyers got a million dollars from John McMullen when he bought the Colorado Rockies NHL team and move his newly acquired team into the Meadowlands in 1982).
In Oakland, Wolff has Comcast's TV money, but he lacks corporate support. San Jose wants to build a stadium and Oakland is back in the game.
There are three essentials to running a successful franchise whether it is in Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League or the National Basketball Association or even Major League Soccer. Government support is an absolute necessity in terms of building a facility. Government can build the place with taxpayers' dollars or give substantial tax breaks and incentives (as the Giants/Jets stadium entity is receiving at the Meadowlands) to owners to build their own plants. The federal government regulates Cable TV where billions are made by sports franchises and separates the Yankees, Mets, Angels, Red Sox, Phillies and Mariners from the rest of baseball and corporate support. Corporates can take 50 cents off the dollar in buying luxury boxes, club seats for business purposes.
Wolff already shares the market with the Giants in the Bay Area and cannot get his foot in the door in San Jose. If Sternberg was looking at the New York City area, he would get a door slammed in his face. Sternberg is not seeking a New York area facility and is concentrating on getting a place built in Tampa. The lease in St. Pete has a long way to go but as the late John McMullen once said, a contract is just a piece of paper.
Major League Baseball moved the financially troubled and ownerless Montreal Expos into Washington after the 2004 season once MLB secured a commitment from the city that it would build a state-of-the-art baseball facility. Remember McMullen's comment.
A contract is just a piece of paper.
Washington is about 40 miles from Baltimore and was a part of the Peter Angelos' Baltimore Orioles territory. MLB worked out a deal with Angelos which gave him a regional cable TV network, the Mid Atlantic Sports Network, as a partial payment for the Washington team which "invaded" his territory. That agreement might work in Wolff's favor and could be used by someone in New Jersey if that someone decided that New Jersey and Major League Baseball are perfect together.
The owners of the Seattle SuperSonics took their NBA team to Oklahoma City with two years left on their contract in Seattle to use the publicly financed and refinanced facility for their basketball team. Clayton Bennett reached a financial agreement with Seattle and left. But Bennett had the NBA Commissioner David Stern's blessing. Bruce Ratner is taking the Nets from the Meadowlands to Newark for the next two years with New Jersey's approval along with Stern.
New Jersey had the right stuff for Major League Baseball in 2000 according to Volcker, Levin, Mitchell and Will. The state could not go after the Montreal Expos franchise when it was up for sale in 2002, 2003 and 2004 because of the antitrust exemption. That is why people who want a Major League Baseball team in New Jersey should be paying close attention to Wolff's actions in Oakland and San Jose and what Selig's committee rules.
The door to Major League Baseball in New Jersey could all of a sudden open.
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
COMMENTARY
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/why-nj-cannot-get-a-major-league-baseball-team
Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig has a committee trying to figure out whether Oakland A's owner Lew Wolff can move his team from Oakland to San Jose, if San Jose can find the money and is able to build a mostly publicly-financed baseball stadium. The committee has not figured out, as of yet, if they know the way to San Jose but there will be an answer some day. What happens in Northern California should have no immediate impact on New Jersey. But as it stands now, neither San Jose nor northern New Jersey can be the home of a major league baseball team.
The areas are in other team's territories and Major League Baseball, thanks to an antitrust exemption, can just say no to anyone who wants to put a team in San Jose or East Rutherford, New Jersey. There is no proposal at the present time to attract a Major League team to New Jersey although when then Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth opened the door to possible expansion in 1987, New Jersey had a presentation ready. New Jersey also tried to attract George Steinbrenner's interest and get him to move the Yankees across the Hudson in the 1990s.
There are two owners of Major League Baseball teams who have serious doubts about the revenue production capabilities of their present stadiums. Wolff in Oakland and Stuart Sternberg in St. Petersburg.
Wolff has failed in getting a "stadium-village" for his A's and a real estate in Oakland and in Fremont, which is about 20 miles south on the I-880 of the team's present home at the Oakland Coliseum. In St. Petersburg, Tampa Rays ownership, which includes Managing General Partner Stuart Sternberg of Rye, New York is looking for a new stadium in either St. Petersburg or Tampa.
There was a rumor, which was just a rumor, that Rays ownership thought about moving the Rays to Connecticut. There is one other major fly in the ointment though. The Rays' lease with the St. Petersburg stadium ends in 2027.
Both Wolff and Sternberg are trying to work out an arrangement to remain in their present markets. Wolff can get out of his lease within a few years in Oakland as he signed a short-term agreement to keep his team at the Coliseum through 2013. Here is the problem that Wolff faces and a problem that New Jersey would face if someone in the state decided to go after a Major League Baseball team.
Major League Baseball assigns territories to teams. The San Francisco Giants ownership has the San Jose/Santa Clara County territory which is more than 40 miles south of the Giants China Basin ballpark. The Oakland Coliseum is considerably closer to San Francisco and is accessible by the Bay Area Rapid Transit and is not far down the I-880 from the Bay Area Bridge. San Jose became Giants territory in the 1990s when the team attempted to get a stadium built in the South Bay's most populous city. Neither San Jose nor Santa Clara voters had any interest in paying for a Giants stadium and turned down ballpark referendums. Despite the no votes, MLB has not changed the Giants' territorial claim.
Major League Baseball does not live by the same antitrust laws as normal businesses because the Supreme Court of the United States in 1922 ruled that baseball was a game and not a business and gave the "game" an antitrust exemption which still applies to areas like territories and television. Wolff is blocked from even thinking about crossing the Santa Clara County line because that would be crossing his baseball brothers. Wolff tried to get as close as he could to San Jose and Santa Clara and not upsetting the Giants ownership by trying to relocate to Fremont.
Now Wolff is openly talking to San Jose despite the fact that Giants ownership will not cede the territory and Giants ownership through a subsidiary, the San Jose Giants — the California League Class A Giants affiliate — is trying to block San Jose from building a stadium. Giants ownership has a one-quarter interest in the San Jose Giants.
Wolff's Oakland A's are struggling drawing people this year. Oakland does not have the corporate crowd that fills the Giants China Basin stadium. Santa Clara residents might send Major League Baseball is big wakeup call on June 8 by going against national trends and voting to spend public money to build a football stadium for the San Francisco 49ers to show the Giants, MLB and the city of San Francisco that they are fed up with the Giants territorial claims and to stick it to San Francisco city officials and San Francisco Giants ownership by "stealing" or "poaching" the 49ers. Santa Clara is willing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the stadium.
San Jose is the Silicone Valley and somehow both MLB and the Giants are convinced that money headed up the 101 Freeway to San Francisco will shift to a San Jose baseball team which would have a crippling affect on the Giants. The San Francisco baseball team is one hour away from San Jose; Oakland is across the Bay and is accessible by mass transit.
Wolff doesn't seem to want to sue Major League Baseball and challenge the antitrust exemption. Wolff shares the Oakland Coliseum with the NFL's Raiders and Raiders owner Al Davis did sue the NFL in the 1980s when the league interfered with his negotiations with the Coliseum for a lease extension and then tried to block the Raiders' move to Los Angeles.
Davis won.
In 1984, San Diego Clippers owner Donald Sterling thumbed his nose at NBA officials and moved his franchise to Los Angeles without league consent. He was fined $100 million for the move. Sterling sued the league. The two parties settled. Sterling stayed in LA and paid the NBA a $6 million fine.
Major League Baseball did not move a team between 1971 and 2004. The Washington Senators left the nation's capital for Arlington, Texas in 1972. A number of attempted franchise shifts failed for various reasons including San Diego going to Washington in 1974, the Giants to Toronto in 1976, Oakland to Denver in 1979. A number of teams looked at moving to Tampa including the Giants, Seattle Mariners, George W. Bush's Texas Rangers and the Minnesota Twins. Minnesota ownership nearly sold the team to Greensboro, North Carolina interests in the late 1990s if a stadium became available in that North Carolina city. Voters turned down a Greensboro stadium in 1998.
It is not easy to move a team to open markets like Tampa was before 1995, like Denver before 1991, like Washington between 1972 and 2004. What chance does San Jose have? What chance does New Jersey or Connecticut have?
New Jersey may have the right stuff for a Major League Baseball team. In 2000, Major League Baseball had big names like Paul Volcker, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Richard C. Levin, the Yale University President, the former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and media personality George Will, a former political operative and college professor who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977, analyze baseball's financial condition.
The "Blue Ribbon Panel" on baseball economics left the door open for franchise relocation to places like northern New Jersey and Washington despite the presence of teams in the vicinity. New Jersey or Connecticut have a major revenue stream that is currently untapped. Cablevision's Madison Square Garden network has little summer programming of note that would draw in potential viewers since the Yankees formed the YES Network and the Mets, along with Time Warner and Comcast, started SNY. There probably is more than $60 million on the table waiting for a third New York City area team.
New York City is still the financial capital of the United States. The city once had three baseball teams - the Yankees, the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Walter O'Malley took his Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1957 although he kicked the tires and his Dodgers played seven games at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, N.J. in 1956 and 1957. O'Malley used Jersey City as leverage in his bid to get New York to spring for a new stadium for his Dodgers. Giants owner Horace Stoneham seemed more determined to move his team from upper Manhattan out of the New York area than O'Malley ... with Minneapolis one of his choices.
With the population, the corporate wealth and television monies available, New York City or northern New Jersey would be ripe for a failing franchise. But New Jersey is blocked (as Connecticut would be) because both the Yankees and Mets would nix any move into their territories and the Philadelphia Phillies ownership would probably object to a third New York area team if it was placed in New Jersey. (The Philadelphia Flyers got a million dollars from John McMullen when he bought the Colorado Rockies NHL team and move his newly acquired team into the Meadowlands in 1982).
In Oakland, Wolff has Comcast's TV money, but he lacks corporate support. San Jose wants to build a stadium and Oakland is back in the game.
There are three essentials to running a successful franchise whether it is in Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League or the National Basketball Association or even Major League Soccer. Government support is an absolute necessity in terms of building a facility. Government can build the place with taxpayers' dollars or give substantial tax breaks and incentives (as the Giants/Jets stadium entity is receiving at the Meadowlands) to owners to build their own plants. The federal government regulates Cable TV where billions are made by sports franchises and separates the Yankees, Mets, Angels, Red Sox, Phillies and Mariners from the rest of baseball and corporate support. Corporates can take 50 cents off the dollar in buying luxury boxes, club seats for business purposes.
Wolff already shares the market with the Giants in the Bay Area and cannot get his foot in the door in San Jose. If Sternberg was looking at the New York City area, he would get a door slammed in his face. Sternberg is not seeking a New York area facility and is concentrating on getting a place built in Tampa. The lease in St. Pete has a long way to go but as the late John McMullen once said, a contract is just a piece of paper.
Major League Baseball moved the financially troubled and ownerless Montreal Expos into Washington after the 2004 season once MLB secured a commitment from the city that it would build a state-of-the-art baseball facility. Remember McMullen's comment.
A contract is just a piece of paper.
Washington is about 40 miles from Baltimore and was a part of the Peter Angelos' Baltimore Orioles territory. MLB worked out a deal with Angelos which gave him a regional cable TV network, the Mid Atlantic Sports Network, as a partial payment for the Washington team which "invaded" his territory. That agreement might work in Wolff's favor and could be used by someone in New Jersey if that someone decided that New Jersey and Major League Baseball are perfect together.
The owners of the Seattle SuperSonics took their NBA team to Oklahoma City with two years left on their contract in Seattle to use the publicly financed and refinanced facility for their basketball team. Clayton Bennett reached a financial agreement with Seattle and left. But Bennett had the NBA Commissioner David Stern's blessing. Bruce Ratner is taking the Nets from the Meadowlands to Newark for the next two years with New Jersey's approval along with Stern.
New Jersey had the right stuff for Major League Baseball in 2000 according to Volcker, Levin, Mitchell and Will. The state could not go after the Montreal Expos franchise when it was up for sale in 2002, 2003 and 2004 because of the antitrust exemption. That is why people who want a Major League Baseball team in New Jersey should be paying close attention to Wolff's actions in Oakland and San Jose and what Selig's committee rules.
The door to Major League Baseball in New Jersey could all of a sudden open.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Big time college sports: Something is happening around here, what it is ain’t exactly clear
Big time college sports: Something is happening around here, what it is ain’t exactly clear
http://dailycaller.com/2010/05/04/big-time-college-sports-something-is-happening-around-here-what-it-is-ain%E2%80%99t-exactly-clear/
By Evan Weiner - The Daily Caller 05/04/10 at 2:17 AM
If you’re curious as to why your cable or satellite television bill will go up, this column is for you. The people who bring you the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Men’s Basketball Tournament, the event also known as March Madness, will also be bringing you a higher cable or satellite television bill. But you probably won’t have the rate hike explained to you by your local television provider. The NCAA just got a bump TV contract renewal for one of the crown jewels of American sports – March Madness –and a significant amount of that money will come from the people who pay the bills for cable Internet and wireless video.
You.
There is something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear, to quote Stephen Stills. Big-time college sports is yet again evolving, with the new contract serving as merely a jumping off point. The only certainty is that the cost of delivering college sports to the consumer will be going up, whether it is on cable, satellite TV, or broadband.
The winds of change in big-time college sports will be steered by the jet stream of the recently concluded NCAA-CBS/Turner Broadcasting (Time Warner) agreement that will see the over-the-air network, CBS and the cable/broadband/wireless distributor Turner Broadcasting, showing the Division I Men’s Basketball Championship between 2011 and 2024 on their delivery systems. The distributors, CBS and Turner Sports, will pay the NCAA members about $10.8 billion over the life of that contract. All the tournament games will be shown live across four national networks, beginning in 2010.
CBS Sports and Turner Broadcasting will help out on the NCAA’s corporate marketing program.
The good news for college basketball fans, consumers, alumni and gamblers (Like it or not, the gambling community makes up a sizeable portion of audience that follows so-called student-athletes playing games for colleges) is that all of the games will be available on television at the same time. The bad news is that people with no interest in the games will subsidize the $10.8 billion contract, which means they will be unknowingly subsidizing big time college sports to the tune of $740 million annually through 2024.
The new good news for the big-time college programs, as well as the smaller schools in Division II and III,is that they will get a chunk of that $740 million to underwrite their entire intercollegiate sports program, from football to fencing in both men’s and women’s sports. College sports is a financially losing proposition for most schools, with a handful of exceptions, like Michigan and Missouri. It costs an awful lot of money to run full sports programs, even if the students receive just a scholarship and a chance to get an education if they so desire.
The NCAA released a statement trying to clarify what the $10.8 billion will do by pointing out that “approximately 96 percent of the revenue generated from this new agreement will be used to benefit student-athletes through either programs, services or direct distribution to member conferences and schools. Further, the agreement ensures student-athletes across all three NCAA divisions will continue to be supported in a broad range of championship opportunities, access to funds for personal and educational needs, and through scholarships in Divisions I and II.”
Only football and basketball are sports moneymakers for college and universities that have decided to swim in the very deep end of the pool.
Just how will CBS and Turner Sports pay the actual bill? Sumner Redstone’s CBS has to hope that there will not be a deep recession anytime in the next 14 years which will scare advertisers away from the TV, because over-the-air TV has just one revenue source to cover the bills — sponsorship or marketing partners — while Turner Broadcasting (Time Warner) has a dual revenue stream, user fees and advertising.
Most of the money needed to pay off the cable/satellite TV bill will come from consumers. Although Time Warner will never give exact figures as to how much they charge consumers for TNT, TBS or truTV, those numbers are believed to be a dollar a subscriber for TNT (which has sports content like the National Basketball Association), fifty cents for TBS (which has a Major League Baseball deal in place, a $310 million, seven year agreement which started in 2007 and ends in 2013 for a package of 26 Sunday games during the season and the first round of the playoffs) and about a dime for the ratings-challenged truTV, which used to be the ratings-challenged Court TV.
Those rates will go up and will be passed onto the consumer. Someone has to pay the freight, and it will not be Redstone or Time Warner. They will play with other people’s money.
Time Warner is actually footing the bill, with CBS paying Time Warner back as much as $670 million a year. CBS will show the Final Four until 2015 and then the over-the-air network, CBS and the dual revenue cable company Time Warner, will alternate coverage on an annual basis.
CBS does own College Sports TV or CSTV, which is a digital cable channel, which will not be part of the CBS-Turner Broadcasting-NCAA deal. CSTV has coverage of NCAA Division’s I, II, and III, that features over 35 men’s and women’s college sports, in addition to nine NCAA championships. CSTV has multi–media and marketing rights for the Mountain West Conference, the Atlantic 10 Conference, Conference USA, the Big West Conference, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Navy athletics. CSTV is another source of revenue for college programs, but it is not the plum that schools are after.
Conferences want to own a network, like the New York Yankees YESNetwork or the Boston Red Sox-Bruins New England Sports Network or the New York Mets SNY (which is partially owned by Time Warner and Comcast) or the Cablevision New York Knicks-Rangers-Madison Square Garden Network or the Chicago Bulls, Cubs, White Sox, Blackhawks ownership with Comcast of the Chicago Sports Net. Or Stan Kroenke Altitude Sports Network, which features Kroenke Colorado Avalanche, Denver Nuggets and Colorado Rapids sports franchises.
That is where the real money can be made.
There is something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear.
Just how much will consumers have to pay once 2016 rolls around, and will Congress take a look at big-time sports events migrating to cable, along with lesser events? Time Warner will be renewing a good many of the company’s carriage agreements with multiple system operators (MSOs) like Comcast, Cablevision and Cox. Will Time Warner, which is also a multiple system operator, hold up the major and minor MSOs and demand more money from them because of the major investment in college sports? Will the other MSOs say yes and pass the added cost to consumers?
While Time Warner figures out strategy to maximize revenues on this deal, the big-time college conferences may be in an “expansion” mode. The Southeast Conference is eyeing “expansion” just in case. The “just in case” scenario will be played out if the Big Ten (which has a cable TV network with Comcast, the country’s largest MSO) decides to add a number of schools to reach 16 and go beyond the Midwest.
There is a lot of money available from the Big Ten moves east (perhaps Rutgers or Pittsburgh) or south or west from cable TV. The Southeast Conference isn’t hurting for capital as it has a $3 million, 15-year deal with CBS and ESPN for football games. The old argument of why expand because our new partners will take a share of the TV deal will certainly come up at the next SEC meeting in May. This SEC is not the Security and Exchange Commission. It is a college conference looking for more money.
College conferences have been adding schools because of the possibility of more money for the last decade. The Atlantic Coast Conference poached Big East schools and took Miami, Boston College and Virginia Tech, which annoyed Connecticut officials, and the state sued to first block the ACC’s actions and then to get some money for damages. The Big East went after other conference schools to replace the ones that defected. It caused a realignment of conferences.
The Big Ten kicked the tires and thought about adding Rutgers and then Pittsburgh. So far, there is just talk that the Big Ten will go from 11 schools to possibly 12, 14 or 16. To do that, the conference would have to poach possible Big East schools like Rutgers or Syracuse or Pittsburgh or convince Notre Dame to drop being an independent (Notre Dame has a deal with NBC, an entity that will merge with Comcast. Comcast is partners with the Big Ten on a cable TV network) or perhaps go after Missouri of the Big 12 Conference. The college to change conferences will trigger an avalanche of moves, all done for TV revenue, most of which will come from cable TV consumers, whether they like sports or not or watch sports or not.
Something may happen here, but what it is exactly ain’t clear. Big time college sports business is changing or evolving, and because of that it is not out of the question that NCAA officials, over-the-air and cable TV executives and college presidents and chancellors, along with conference commissioners and athletic directors, will be hauled down before Congress to explain the real business of college sports and how “super conferences” could be formed because of TV opportunities. Congress has given big-time college sports a lot of anti-competition protection over the years, including a tax-exempt status.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and lecturer on “The Politics and Business of Sports” and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2010/05/04/big-time-college-sports-something-is-happening-around-here-what-it-is-ain%e2%80%99t-exactly-clear/print/#ixzz0mxcfEskJ
http://dailycaller.com/2010/05/04/big-time-college-sports-something-is-happening-around-here-what-it-is-ain%E2%80%99t-exactly-clear/
By Evan Weiner - The Daily Caller 05/04/10 at 2:17 AM
If you’re curious as to why your cable or satellite television bill will go up, this column is for you. The people who bring you the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Men’s Basketball Tournament, the event also known as March Madness, will also be bringing you a higher cable or satellite television bill. But you probably won’t have the rate hike explained to you by your local television provider. The NCAA just got a bump TV contract renewal for one of the crown jewels of American sports – March Madness –and a significant amount of that money will come from the people who pay the bills for cable Internet and wireless video.
You.
There is something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear, to quote Stephen Stills. Big-time college sports is yet again evolving, with the new contract serving as merely a jumping off point. The only certainty is that the cost of delivering college sports to the consumer will be going up, whether it is on cable, satellite TV, or broadband.
The winds of change in big-time college sports will be steered by the jet stream of the recently concluded NCAA-CBS/Turner Broadcasting (Time Warner) agreement that will see the over-the-air network, CBS and the cable/broadband/wireless distributor Turner Broadcasting, showing the Division I Men’s Basketball Championship between 2011 and 2024 on their delivery systems. The distributors, CBS and Turner Sports, will pay the NCAA members about $10.8 billion over the life of that contract. All the tournament games will be shown live across four national networks, beginning in 2010.
CBS Sports and Turner Broadcasting will help out on the NCAA’s corporate marketing program.
The good news for college basketball fans, consumers, alumni and gamblers (Like it or not, the gambling community makes up a sizeable portion of audience that follows so-called student-athletes playing games for colleges) is that all of the games will be available on television at the same time. The bad news is that people with no interest in the games will subsidize the $10.8 billion contract, which means they will be unknowingly subsidizing big time college sports to the tune of $740 million annually through 2024.
The new good news for the big-time college programs, as well as the smaller schools in Division II and III,is that they will get a chunk of that $740 million to underwrite their entire intercollegiate sports program, from football to fencing in both men’s and women’s sports. College sports is a financially losing proposition for most schools, with a handful of exceptions, like Michigan and Missouri. It costs an awful lot of money to run full sports programs, even if the students receive just a scholarship and a chance to get an education if they so desire.
The NCAA released a statement trying to clarify what the $10.8 billion will do by pointing out that “approximately 96 percent of the revenue generated from this new agreement will be used to benefit student-athletes through either programs, services or direct distribution to member conferences and schools. Further, the agreement ensures student-athletes across all three NCAA divisions will continue to be supported in a broad range of championship opportunities, access to funds for personal and educational needs, and through scholarships in Divisions I and II.”
Only football and basketball are sports moneymakers for college and universities that have decided to swim in the very deep end of the pool.
Just how will CBS and Turner Sports pay the actual bill? Sumner Redstone’s CBS has to hope that there will not be a deep recession anytime in the next 14 years which will scare advertisers away from the TV, because over-the-air TV has just one revenue source to cover the bills — sponsorship or marketing partners — while Turner Broadcasting (Time Warner) has a dual revenue stream, user fees and advertising.
Most of the money needed to pay off the cable/satellite TV bill will come from consumers. Although Time Warner will never give exact figures as to how much they charge consumers for TNT, TBS or truTV, those numbers are believed to be a dollar a subscriber for TNT (which has sports content like the National Basketball Association), fifty cents for TBS (which has a Major League Baseball deal in place, a $310 million, seven year agreement which started in 2007 and ends in 2013 for a package of 26 Sunday games during the season and the first round of the playoffs) and about a dime for the ratings-challenged truTV, which used to be the ratings-challenged Court TV.
Those rates will go up and will be passed onto the consumer. Someone has to pay the freight, and it will not be Redstone or Time Warner. They will play with other people’s money.
Time Warner is actually footing the bill, with CBS paying Time Warner back as much as $670 million a year. CBS will show the Final Four until 2015 and then the over-the-air network, CBS and the dual revenue cable company Time Warner, will alternate coverage on an annual basis.
CBS does own College Sports TV or CSTV, which is a digital cable channel, which will not be part of the CBS-Turner Broadcasting-NCAA deal. CSTV has coverage of NCAA Division’s I, II, and III, that features over 35 men’s and women’s college sports, in addition to nine NCAA championships. CSTV has multi–media and marketing rights for the Mountain West Conference, the Atlantic 10 Conference, Conference USA, the Big West Conference, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Navy athletics. CSTV is another source of revenue for college programs, but it is not the plum that schools are after.
Conferences want to own a network, like the New York Yankees YESNetwork or the Boston Red Sox-Bruins New England Sports Network or the New York Mets SNY (which is partially owned by Time Warner and Comcast) or the Cablevision New York Knicks-Rangers-Madison Square Garden Network or the Chicago Bulls, Cubs, White Sox, Blackhawks ownership with Comcast of the Chicago Sports Net. Or Stan Kroenke Altitude Sports Network, which features Kroenke Colorado Avalanche, Denver Nuggets and Colorado Rapids sports franchises.
That is where the real money can be made.
There is something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear.
Just how much will consumers have to pay once 2016 rolls around, and will Congress take a look at big-time sports events migrating to cable, along with lesser events? Time Warner will be renewing a good many of the company’s carriage agreements with multiple system operators (MSOs) like Comcast, Cablevision and Cox. Will Time Warner, which is also a multiple system operator, hold up the major and minor MSOs and demand more money from them because of the major investment in college sports? Will the other MSOs say yes and pass the added cost to consumers?
While Time Warner figures out strategy to maximize revenues on this deal, the big-time college conferences may be in an “expansion” mode. The Southeast Conference is eyeing “expansion” just in case. The “just in case” scenario will be played out if the Big Ten (which has a cable TV network with Comcast, the country’s largest MSO) decides to add a number of schools to reach 16 and go beyond the Midwest.
There is a lot of money available from the Big Ten moves east (perhaps Rutgers or Pittsburgh) or south or west from cable TV. The Southeast Conference isn’t hurting for capital as it has a $3 million, 15-year deal with CBS and ESPN for football games. The old argument of why expand because our new partners will take a share of the TV deal will certainly come up at the next SEC meeting in May. This SEC is not the Security and Exchange Commission. It is a college conference looking for more money.
College conferences have been adding schools because of the possibility of more money for the last decade. The Atlantic Coast Conference poached Big East schools and took Miami, Boston College and Virginia Tech, which annoyed Connecticut officials, and the state sued to first block the ACC’s actions and then to get some money for damages. The Big East went after other conference schools to replace the ones that defected. It caused a realignment of conferences.
The Big Ten kicked the tires and thought about adding Rutgers and then Pittsburgh. So far, there is just talk that the Big Ten will go from 11 schools to possibly 12, 14 or 16. To do that, the conference would have to poach possible Big East schools like Rutgers or Syracuse or Pittsburgh or convince Notre Dame to drop being an independent (Notre Dame has a deal with NBC, an entity that will merge with Comcast. Comcast is partners with the Big Ten on a cable TV network) or perhaps go after Missouri of the Big 12 Conference. The college to change conferences will trigger an avalanche of moves, all done for TV revenue, most of which will come from cable TV consumers, whether they like sports or not or watch sports or not.
Something may happen here, but what it is exactly ain’t clear. Big time college sports business is changing or evolving, and because of that it is not out of the question that NCAA officials, over-the-air and cable TV executives and college presidents and chancellors, along with conference commissioners and athletic directors, will be hauled down before Congress to explain the real business of college sports and how “super conferences” could be formed because of TV opportunities. Congress has given big-time college sports a lot of anti-competition protection over the years, including a tax-exempt status.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and lecturer on “The Politics and Business of Sports” and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2010/05/04/big-time-college-sports-something-is-happening-around-here-what-it-is-ain%e2%80%99t-exactly-clear/print/#ixzz0mxcfEskJ
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Could Santa Clara Voters Say Yes to Raising Taxes for a Football Stadium?
Could Santa Clara Voters Say Yes to Raising Taxes for a Football Stadium?
By Evan Weiner
May 2, 2010
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m5d2-Could-Santa-Clara-voters-say-yes-to-raising-taxes-for-a-football-stadium
(New York, N. Y.) -- In this day and age of Tea Baggers or the Coffee Party and other rabble rousers jumping up and down and shouting to provide TV and radio producers a chance of showing "Good TV" or providing "Good radio", people in Santa Clara, California may be leaning to saying yes to a proposal that would ultimately provide a partially publicly financed stadium for the San Francisco 49ers.
Stadium stories generally produce "good TV", sound bites that inflame, and that ultimately leads to radio pillaging. It is just how it works because "Good TV" or "Good radio" brings in advertising revenue and may have nothing at all to do with the merits of a story. We expect more from a ten year old than we do from a radio personality like oh say New York's WFAN radio's Evan Roberts who repeatedly called Philadelphia Phillies fans "animals." A ten year old acting up in school is marched to the Principal's office and reprimanded. In radio lying about a hockey player been drunk, calling a political leader in New Jersey after being fired for lying about a hockey player's drunkard state gets you a plum job.
So for all of you who decide what goes on TV news during this important May sweeps or for the barkers on radio, chew on this.
Santa Clara residents may vote to raise taxes for a football stadium which goes totally against the TV "news" chatter shows and the carnival barkers of talk radio's narrative along with tabloid newspapers.
Santa Clara residents may say yes to spending at least $114 million on the project and possibly be on the hook for as much as $444 million on June 8 for the stadium that may house not only the San Francisco 49ers but the Oakland Raiders as well. The reason why Santa Clara voters may say yes may have more to do with a perception that the San Francisco Giants ownership and Major League Baseball are playing a heavy handed role (along with San Francisco officials) in keeping Oakland A's owner from setting up shop in San Jose and that this is their way of getting even.
The National Football League would like both the 49ers and Raiders to share the facility in much the same way as the New York Giants and Jets each put a significant amount of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, into the new Meadowlands football facility which recently opened.
The cash strapped state of New Jersey, whose governor Chris Christie is sparring with teachers and stadiums over draconian cuts in education, is providing hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for infrastructure and providing tax breaks and incentives for the two teams.
In Santa Clara, only the 49ers ownership, the York family, is investing in the facility and based on track records in Vancouver and Minneapolis, that might not be the wisest decision the Yorks ever made if the stadium referendum does pass. The original owners of the Minnesota Timber Wolves, Harvey Ratner and Marvin Wolfenson, could not swing buying an National Basketball Association expansion team for $32.5 million in 1987 and then funding an arena in Minneapolis that had a corporate sponsor's name attached to the building. By 1994, Ratner and Wolfenson had enough and sold the team to a group led by boxing promoter Bob Arum who wanted to move the team to New Orleans.
The NBA blocked the move as league officials felt that moving from the bigger Twin-Cities market to the Crescent City was a step backwards. Eventually the state legislature worked out a deal that allowed Minneapolis to take over the building and the Timber Wolves franchise was sold to a local businessman who kept the team in Minneapolis.
There is a similar tale of woe that also enveloped an NBA owner. Arthur Griffiths owned a National Hockey League team in Vancouver in the 1990s. Griffiths looked at how the economics of the NHL was changing and decided to finance a new arena for his Canucks. The NBA was thinking about expanding in 1995 with Toronto as a primary target but Griffiths was planning a new building and seemed willing to give NBA owners about $100 million in exchange for an NBA expansion team in Vancouver. The NBA liked Vancouver's dynamics even though the Canadian dollar was faltering compared to the US greenback. The NBA had identified Hong Kong as a major non-American supporter of the league and with many Hong Kong residents moving to the Vancouver area in the anticipation of China taking over the area; the NBA figured Vancouver would be a strong 21st century franchise.
It did not work out for Griffiths who was saddled by too many bills. The NBA expansion fee along with the $160 million price tag, that in Canadian dollars, for the arena. Griffiths sold the Canucks, the NBA expansion team, the Grizzlies, and the arena. The NBA team would eventually move to Memphis where it is a financial liability.
The Yorks may not have the money to run a football team and build a stadium that could cost as much as $937 million particularly if the corporate naming rights train runs through Santa Clara and leaves the Yorks looking for a corporate naming rights partner like Jerry Jones in Arlington, Texas and the woody Johnson-Mara/Tisch partnership in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Jones' Dallas Cowboys Cowboys Stadium has a gaping hole where a corporate sponsor should be hanging a shingle at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas and so far no one has stopped up and replaced Allainz as the naming rights holder at the new Giants-Jets Meadowlands Stadium.
Allainz dropped out of the running as the Meadowlands naming rights partner in September 2008 after media stories appeared in the greater New York area about Allianz’s candidacy as a stadium sponsor. These stories covered the naming rights talks and in that context also addressed Allianz history as a major German company during the Nazi era. After the stories appeared, The Meadowlands Stadium Company decided not to pursue further talks thereafter bowing to pressure from various groups who had highlighted Allainz's activities with the Nazi Government in Germany.
There were reports that Allainz was willing to pay the Giants/Jets ownership somewhere between $25 and 30 annually to put the company name on the stadium.
The Yorks might be able to defer some of the stadium's annual costs if they can persuade Al Davis and the Oakland Raiders to join them if the stadium is built. So far the Yorks intend to go it on their own and Davis is saying nothing. But clearly a corporate sponsor will help. The go it alone route is something Ed Roski in Los Angeles or, more precisely, in the City of Industry is not an avenue he would like to pursue. Roski would like to attract an NFL owner to move to his proposed stadium to share in a real estate deal to make a stadium work.
It will be a tough road to hoe if the York family decides to build the stadium with no help. But Santa Clara residents seem willing to be York's partner and that doesn't fit the media narrative of no more taxes but that may not be "Good TV" or "Good radio" which is what journalism is all about these days.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and lecturer on "The Politics of Sports Business" and can be reached for speaking engagements at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
By Evan Weiner
May 2, 2010
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m5d2-Could-Santa-Clara-voters-say-yes-to-raising-taxes-for-a-football-stadium
(New York, N. Y.) -- In this day and age of Tea Baggers or the Coffee Party and other rabble rousers jumping up and down and shouting to provide TV and radio producers a chance of showing "Good TV" or providing "Good radio", people in Santa Clara, California may be leaning to saying yes to a proposal that would ultimately provide a partially publicly financed stadium for the San Francisco 49ers.
Stadium stories generally produce "good TV", sound bites that inflame, and that ultimately leads to radio pillaging. It is just how it works because "Good TV" or "Good radio" brings in advertising revenue and may have nothing at all to do with the merits of a story. We expect more from a ten year old than we do from a radio personality like oh say New York's WFAN radio's Evan Roberts who repeatedly called Philadelphia Phillies fans "animals." A ten year old acting up in school is marched to the Principal's office and reprimanded. In radio lying about a hockey player been drunk, calling a political leader in New Jersey after being fired for lying about a hockey player's drunkard state gets you a plum job.
So for all of you who decide what goes on TV news during this important May sweeps or for the barkers on radio, chew on this.
Santa Clara residents may vote to raise taxes for a football stadium which goes totally against the TV "news" chatter shows and the carnival barkers of talk radio's narrative along with tabloid newspapers.
Santa Clara residents may say yes to spending at least $114 million on the project and possibly be on the hook for as much as $444 million on June 8 for the stadium that may house not only the San Francisco 49ers but the Oakland Raiders as well. The reason why Santa Clara voters may say yes may have more to do with a perception that the San Francisco Giants ownership and Major League Baseball are playing a heavy handed role (along with San Francisco officials) in keeping Oakland A's owner from setting up shop in San Jose and that this is their way of getting even.
The National Football League would like both the 49ers and Raiders to share the facility in much the same way as the New York Giants and Jets each put a significant amount of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, into the new Meadowlands football facility which recently opened.
The cash strapped state of New Jersey, whose governor Chris Christie is sparring with teachers and stadiums over draconian cuts in education, is providing hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for infrastructure and providing tax breaks and incentives for the two teams.
In Santa Clara, only the 49ers ownership, the York family, is investing in the facility and based on track records in Vancouver and Minneapolis, that might not be the wisest decision the Yorks ever made if the stadium referendum does pass. The original owners of the Minnesota Timber Wolves, Harvey Ratner and Marvin Wolfenson, could not swing buying an National Basketball Association expansion team for $32.5 million in 1987 and then funding an arena in Minneapolis that had a corporate sponsor's name attached to the building. By 1994, Ratner and Wolfenson had enough and sold the team to a group led by boxing promoter Bob Arum who wanted to move the team to New Orleans.
The NBA blocked the move as league officials felt that moving from the bigger Twin-Cities market to the Crescent City was a step backwards. Eventually the state legislature worked out a deal that allowed Minneapolis to take over the building and the Timber Wolves franchise was sold to a local businessman who kept the team in Minneapolis.
There is a similar tale of woe that also enveloped an NBA owner. Arthur Griffiths owned a National Hockey League team in Vancouver in the 1990s. Griffiths looked at how the economics of the NHL was changing and decided to finance a new arena for his Canucks. The NBA was thinking about expanding in 1995 with Toronto as a primary target but Griffiths was planning a new building and seemed willing to give NBA owners about $100 million in exchange for an NBA expansion team in Vancouver. The NBA liked Vancouver's dynamics even though the Canadian dollar was faltering compared to the US greenback. The NBA had identified Hong Kong as a major non-American supporter of the league and with many Hong Kong residents moving to the Vancouver area in the anticipation of China taking over the area; the NBA figured Vancouver would be a strong 21st century franchise.
It did not work out for Griffiths who was saddled by too many bills. The NBA expansion fee along with the $160 million price tag, that in Canadian dollars, for the arena. Griffiths sold the Canucks, the NBA expansion team, the Grizzlies, and the arena. The NBA team would eventually move to Memphis where it is a financial liability.
The Yorks may not have the money to run a football team and build a stadium that could cost as much as $937 million particularly if the corporate naming rights train runs through Santa Clara and leaves the Yorks looking for a corporate naming rights partner like Jerry Jones in Arlington, Texas and the woody Johnson-Mara/Tisch partnership in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Jones' Dallas Cowboys Cowboys Stadium has a gaping hole where a corporate sponsor should be hanging a shingle at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas and so far no one has stopped up and replaced Allainz as the naming rights holder at the new Giants-Jets Meadowlands Stadium.
Allainz dropped out of the running as the Meadowlands naming rights partner in September 2008 after media stories appeared in the greater New York area about Allianz’s candidacy as a stadium sponsor. These stories covered the naming rights talks and in that context also addressed Allianz history as a major German company during the Nazi era. After the stories appeared, The Meadowlands Stadium Company decided not to pursue further talks thereafter bowing to pressure from various groups who had highlighted Allainz's activities with the Nazi Government in Germany.
There were reports that Allainz was willing to pay the Giants/Jets ownership somewhere between $25 and 30 annually to put the company name on the stadium.
The Yorks might be able to defer some of the stadium's annual costs if they can persuade Al Davis and the Oakland Raiders to join them if the stadium is built. So far the Yorks intend to go it on their own and Davis is saying nothing. But clearly a corporate sponsor will help. The go it alone route is something Ed Roski in Los Angeles or, more precisely, in the City of Industry is not an avenue he would like to pursue. Roski would like to attract an NFL owner to move to his proposed stadium to share in a real estate deal to make a stadium work.
It will be a tough road to hoe if the York family decides to build the stadium with no help. But Santa Clara residents seem willing to be York's partner and that doesn't fit the media narrative of no more taxes but that may not be "Good TV" or "Good radio" which is what journalism is all about these days.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and lecturer on "The Politics of Sports Business" and can be reached for speaking engagements at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Friday, April 30, 2010
Why isn’t Sonny Werblin in the Pro Football Hall of Fame?
Why isn’t Sonny Werblin in the Pro Football Hall of Fame?
FRIDAY, 30 APRIL 2010 13:42
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
COMMENTARY
A quick exchange with Joe Namath this week got me to thinking. Why isn't Namath's old boss David A. "Sonny as in Money" Werblin enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio? Werblin, the New Jersey guy, is pretty much a forgotten figure in the history of pro football even though both Werblin and Namath helped create the Super Bowl as a non-official national holiday in the United States.
Both the New York Giants and Jets are looking at draft picks and free agents and will have mini-camps this month at multi-million dollar training complexes in East Rutherford and Florham Park. The two teams have built a new stadium that cost over a billion dollars and will manage a real estate around the facility. Werblin's fingerprints 19 years after he died are all over the place within the businesses of the Jets, the Giants and the National Football League.
Sonny Werblin along with his partners Leon Hess, Townsend Martin, Donald Lillis and Philip Iselin bought the bankrupt American Football League New York Titans franchise in 1963, renamed the team the Jets, and changed pro football although the quintet didn't alter the history of the game the minute they bought the franchise. That would not happen for about a year and it was circumstance that brought Werblin to the forefront.
The National Football League or the initials NFL of the days prior to Werblin's arrival in pro football, and today have just one thing in common — the name or the initials. As the David Letterman frequent guest and Pro Football Hall of Fame defensive tackle Arthur J. Donovan (by way of the Grand Concourse in da Bronx) who played for the original Baltimore Colts in 1950, the New York Yankees in 1951, the Dallas Texans in 1952 and the Colts again from 1953-61 (the original Colts, the Yankees and Texans all folded) pointed out.
National Football League owners had a 12 team league in the 1950s and none of the 12 owners could figure out what to do with their business. Chicago's George Halas and Pittsburgh's Art Rooney along with Bert Bell have been glorified as football deities over the decades but the truth is that without Lamar Hunt the game might have strangled itself financially.
There was no forward thinking from Halas, Rooney, the Giants Tim Mara or NFL Commissioner Bert Bell in those days. They put a shingle up, "Football on Sunday" six times a year for six home games except in Chicago where there were two teams.
Hunt was unable to buy the Chicago Cardinals from the Bidwill family and move the team to Dallas. Bud Adams was unable to buy the Chicago Cardinals from the Bidwill family and move the team to Houston. Neither Hunt nor Adams could get an NFL expansion franchise in Dallas and Houston even though Halas and Rooney chaired an expansion committee starting in 1956. By 1959, Hunt decided he had enough and asked Adams if he wanted to join him in forming the fourth American Football League.
The AFL started play in 1960 and pushed the stodgy old football men into a different business plan, one they never wanted to explore. The AFL went to new cities and had a better TV plan. There were now two leagues and the older National Football League played follow the leader to the new league when it came to television. The AFL was able to sign a contract with the American Broadcasting Company, ABC, with each team sharing revenue equally. The AFL deal technically violated antitrust laws and was not originally a Hunt idea. Hunt borrowed a concept from Branch Rickey who was out of baseball and trying to form a third major league, the Continental Baseball League, and one of Rickey's ideas was for the 12-team Continental League owners to share national TV revenue equally.
Rickey's idea died but there are three living monuments to his league. The New York Mets, the Houston Colt 45s (now Astros) and the National Football League's "leaguethink" business plan.
The old line NFL owners didn't know what to do with TV as late as 1960 and NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle had to persuade Giants owner Jack Mara along with the Chicago Bears Halas and the Los Angeles Rams owner Daniel Reeves that sharing TV revenues instead of having teams have their own networks was economically better for the league. He did just that and got Congress to approve the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961 which allowed the NFL to sell all 14 teams as one to a TV network.
In those days, it was just CBS and NBC.
Rozelle worked out a deal for the 1962 season which brought the 14 NFL owners more than $4 million that year and beyond. In late 1963 Rozelle pitted CBS against NBC in a battled for a long term TV agreement and this is where circumstances came into play. The NFL was in a battle with the AFL for players and control of football and a big money TV deal would give them cash to go after talented players coming out of college. Rozelle signed a big money deal with CBS and William Paley in 1964 and that deal infuriated NBC's David Sarnoff.
Sarnoff wanted revenge.
Sarnoff had worked with Lew Wasserman's MCA where Werblin was employed. MCA was placing TV shows on Sarnoff's network. Sarnoff and Werblin had a relationship and Werblin became the point guy between the AFL and NBC. Werblin knew TV and entertainment inside out and knew that football was more than just a game play, it was entertainment and it was TV programming. That was not something that was an easy sell to football men who in those days viewed football as a game. It was easy to understand the football owners mentality of the day. Football business operations were open between July and December. In the 1950s, if someone wanted to buy a Chicago Bears season ticket package in April, they would have to hunt down George Halas at his sporting goods store. Nobody protected team logos because no one was thinking of selling t-shirts, underwear and hats with team logos.
Werblin got the deal done with Sarnoff, which brought the AFL $7 million annually between 1965 and 1969. Sarnoff also advanced money to AFL teams so they could sign players out of college, which Sarnoff knew would enhance the AFL on NBC. With some of that money (and revenues Werblin and his fellow Jets owners suddenly got from larger crowds at the new Shea Stadium starting in 1964), Werblin signed Namath to a three-year $427,000 deal, the largest contract ever given to a player at that point.
Namath was going to be the face of the Jets and ultimately the face of the American Football League. The Werblin-Sarnoff connection changed football and for that alone, Werblin should be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Werblin changed the dynamics of pro football and eventually the two leagues merged with the formation of the Super Bowl as one of the after effects of the June 8, 1966 accord between the warring leagues.
Ironically, Werblin, Hess, Martin, Lillis and Iselin were not interested in joining the NFL because the merger agreement required them to pay the Giants $10 million for "invading" the New York territory. Werblin never did see the Jets win the Super Bowl as one of the team owners as he was bought out prior to the 1968 season, the year Namath led the Jets to a Super Bowl championship.
Namath's guarantee that the Jets would beat Baltimore in Super Bowl III was the foundation that built the Super Bowl franchise.
Werblin was permanently exiled from pro football but the story didn't end there. In 1971, the New Jersey guy Werblin was back but this time as a state employee and again Werblin changed the NFL. Werblin convinced Giants owner Wellington Mara to commit to move the Giants across the river to wetlands off of Route 3. The deal was inked in November 1972. Yankee Stadium was slated to be rebuilt and Mara's Giants played at the Yale Bowl in New Haven in 1974 and shared Shea Stadium with the Jets in 1975. Mara had a new stadium in 1976 and Giants revenues exploded.
Werblin left the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority in 1977. Hess moved his Jets to the Meadowlands in 1984.
Werblin's pro football career was rather short as an owner compared to those of Mara, Halas and Rooney, the NFL's Mount Rushmore, but he was far more a visionary than any of the faces on the NFL's Mount Rushmore. Halas last had a real idea in 1925 when he signed Red Grange and put him on tour with the Bears. Grange's appearance before more than 70,000 people at the Polo Grounds in a game against the Giants gave Tim Mara the money he needed to keep the Giants solvent and in business. Rooney was a grand old guy of the game but in the 1950s, his Pittsburgh Steelers franchise was the last stop for a player. If a player was cut by Pittsburgh, his football career probably was at an end. Ironically because of Werblin, Pittsburgh eventually was able to spend top dollars on players. Rooney was paid three million dollars to move the Steelers from the NFL to the American Football Conference prior to 1970. Rooney used that money to invest in players and scouting and won four Super Bowls.
Werblin is in the New Jersey Sports Hall of Fame, but there should be a bust of him in Canton. Without Werblin, Namath might have ended up in St. Louis or maybe the New York Giants. The Titans might have been sold to someone who knew football but not the TV business and the Super Bowl might have just been another championship game without the "wow" factor which Namath as the Jets quarterback, who was signed to a record contract by Werblin, gave the game. Without Werblin, the Giants might not be in New Jersey and Hess might have looked elsewhere for a stadium with clean bathrooms.
Werblin is more than a footnote in NFL history. He was a game changer.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator, and lecturer on the "Politics of Sports Business" and can be reached for speaking engagements at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
FRIDAY, 30 APRIL 2010 13:42
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
COMMENTARY
A quick exchange with Joe Namath this week got me to thinking. Why isn't Namath's old boss David A. "Sonny as in Money" Werblin enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio? Werblin, the New Jersey guy, is pretty much a forgotten figure in the history of pro football even though both Werblin and Namath helped create the Super Bowl as a non-official national holiday in the United States.
Both the New York Giants and Jets are looking at draft picks and free agents and will have mini-camps this month at multi-million dollar training complexes in East Rutherford and Florham Park. The two teams have built a new stadium that cost over a billion dollars and will manage a real estate around the facility. Werblin's fingerprints 19 years after he died are all over the place within the businesses of the Jets, the Giants and the National Football League.
Sonny Werblin along with his partners Leon Hess, Townsend Martin, Donald Lillis and Philip Iselin bought the bankrupt American Football League New York Titans franchise in 1963, renamed the team the Jets, and changed pro football although the quintet didn't alter the history of the game the minute they bought the franchise. That would not happen for about a year and it was circumstance that brought Werblin to the forefront.
The National Football League or the initials NFL of the days prior to Werblin's arrival in pro football, and today have just one thing in common — the name or the initials. As the David Letterman frequent guest and Pro Football Hall of Fame defensive tackle Arthur J. Donovan (by way of the Grand Concourse in da Bronx) who played for the original Baltimore Colts in 1950, the New York Yankees in 1951, the Dallas Texans in 1952 and the Colts again from 1953-61 (the original Colts, the Yankees and Texans all folded) pointed out.
National Football League owners had a 12 team league in the 1950s and none of the 12 owners could figure out what to do with their business. Chicago's George Halas and Pittsburgh's Art Rooney along with Bert Bell have been glorified as football deities over the decades but the truth is that without Lamar Hunt the game might have strangled itself financially.
There was no forward thinking from Halas, Rooney, the Giants Tim Mara or NFL Commissioner Bert Bell in those days. They put a shingle up, "Football on Sunday" six times a year for six home games except in Chicago where there were two teams.
Hunt was unable to buy the Chicago Cardinals from the Bidwill family and move the team to Dallas. Bud Adams was unable to buy the Chicago Cardinals from the Bidwill family and move the team to Houston. Neither Hunt nor Adams could get an NFL expansion franchise in Dallas and Houston even though Halas and Rooney chaired an expansion committee starting in 1956. By 1959, Hunt decided he had enough and asked Adams if he wanted to join him in forming the fourth American Football League.
The AFL started play in 1960 and pushed the stodgy old football men into a different business plan, one they never wanted to explore. The AFL went to new cities and had a better TV plan. There were now two leagues and the older National Football League played follow the leader to the new league when it came to television. The AFL was able to sign a contract with the American Broadcasting Company, ABC, with each team sharing revenue equally. The AFL deal technically violated antitrust laws and was not originally a Hunt idea. Hunt borrowed a concept from Branch Rickey who was out of baseball and trying to form a third major league, the Continental Baseball League, and one of Rickey's ideas was for the 12-team Continental League owners to share national TV revenue equally.
Rickey's idea died but there are three living monuments to his league. The New York Mets, the Houston Colt 45s (now Astros) and the National Football League's "leaguethink" business plan.
The old line NFL owners didn't know what to do with TV as late as 1960 and NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle had to persuade Giants owner Jack Mara along with the Chicago Bears Halas and the Los Angeles Rams owner Daniel Reeves that sharing TV revenues instead of having teams have their own networks was economically better for the league. He did just that and got Congress to approve the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961 which allowed the NFL to sell all 14 teams as one to a TV network.
In those days, it was just CBS and NBC.
Rozelle worked out a deal for the 1962 season which brought the 14 NFL owners more than $4 million that year and beyond. In late 1963 Rozelle pitted CBS against NBC in a battled for a long term TV agreement and this is where circumstances came into play. The NFL was in a battle with the AFL for players and control of football and a big money TV deal would give them cash to go after talented players coming out of college. Rozelle signed a big money deal with CBS and William Paley in 1964 and that deal infuriated NBC's David Sarnoff.
Sarnoff wanted revenge.
Sarnoff had worked with Lew Wasserman's MCA where Werblin was employed. MCA was placing TV shows on Sarnoff's network. Sarnoff and Werblin had a relationship and Werblin became the point guy between the AFL and NBC. Werblin knew TV and entertainment inside out and knew that football was more than just a game play, it was entertainment and it was TV programming. That was not something that was an easy sell to football men who in those days viewed football as a game. It was easy to understand the football owners mentality of the day. Football business operations were open between July and December. In the 1950s, if someone wanted to buy a Chicago Bears season ticket package in April, they would have to hunt down George Halas at his sporting goods store. Nobody protected team logos because no one was thinking of selling t-shirts, underwear and hats with team logos.
Werblin got the deal done with Sarnoff, which brought the AFL $7 million annually between 1965 and 1969. Sarnoff also advanced money to AFL teams so they could sign players out of college, which Sarnoff knew would enhance the AFL on NBC. With some of that money (and revenues Werblin and his fellow Jets owners suddenly got from larger crowds at the new Shea Stadium starting in 1964), Werblin signed Namath to a three-year $427,000 deal, the largest contract ever given to a player at that point.
Namath was going to be the face of the Jets and ultimately the face of the American Football League. The Werblin-Sarnoff connection changed football and for that alone, Werblin should be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Werblin changed the dynamics of pro football and eventually the two leagues merged with the formation of the Super Bowl as one of the after effects of the June 8, 1966 accord between the warring leagues.
Ironically, Werblin, Hess, Martin, Lillis and Iselin were not interested in joining the NFL because the merger agreement required them to pay the Giants $10 million for "invading" the New York territory. Werblin never did see the Jets win the Super Bowl as one of the team owners as he was bought out prior to the 1968 season, the year Namath led the Jets to a Super Bowl championship.
Namath's guarantee that the Jets would beat Baltimore in Super Bowl III was the foundation that built the Super Bowl franchise.
Werblin was permanently exiled from pro football but the story didn't end there. In 1971, the New Jersey guy Werblin was back but this time as a state employee and again Werblin changed the NFL. Werblin convinced Giants owner Wellington Mara to commit to move the Giants across the river to wetlands off of Route 3. The deal was inked in November 1972. Yankee Stadium was slated to be rebuilt and Mara's Giants played at the Yale Bowl in New Haven in 1974 and shared Shea Stadium with the Jets in 1975. Mara had a new stadium in 1976 and Giants revenues exploded.
Werblin left the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority in 1977. Hess moved his Jets to the Meadowlands in 1984.
Werblin's pro football career was rather short as an owner compared to those of Mara, Halas and Rooney, the NFL's Mount Rushmore, but he was far more a visionary than any of the faces on the NFL's Mount Rushmore. Halas last had a real idea in 1925 when he signed Red Grange and put him on tour with the Bears. Grange's appearance before more than 70,000 people at the Polo Grounds in a game against the Giants gave Tim Mara the money he needed to keep the Giants solvent and in business. Rooney was a grand old guy of the game but in the 1950s, his Pittsburgh Steelers franchise was the last stop for a player. If a player was cut by Pittsburgh, his football career probably was at an end. Ironically because of Werblin, Pittsburgh eventually was able to spend top dollars on players. Rooney was paid three million dollars to move the Steelers from the NFL to the American Football Conference prior to 1970. Rooney used that money to invest in players and scouting and won four Super Bowls.
Werblin is in the New Jersey Sports Hall of Fame, but there should be a bust of him in Canton. Without Werblin, Namath might have ended up in St. Louis or maybe the New York Giants. The Titans might have been sold to someone who knew football but not the TV business and the Super Bowl might have just been another championship game without the "wow" factor which Namath as the Jets quarterback, who was signed to a record contract by Werblin, gave the game. Without Werblin, the Giants might not be in New Jersey and Hess might have looked elsewhere for a stadium with clean bathrooms.
Werblin is more than a footnote in NFL history. He was a game changer.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator, and lecturer on the "Politics of Sports Business" and can be reached for speaking engagements at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Monday, April 26, 2010
Rutgers basketball does not live in the world of academia
Rutgers basketball does not live in the world of academia
MONDAY, 26 APRIL 2010 13:17
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/rutgers-basketball-does-not-live-in-the-world-of-academia
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
COMMENTARY
It was a rather interesting week in New Jersey educational circles. Voters said no in many locations to approving new school budgets and a subsequent tax hike yet at one of New Jersey's schools of higher education, Rutgers, it was business as usual. Rutgers got rid of head basketball coach Fred Hill after four losing seasons and gave Hill a rather hefty going away present in the vicinity of $850,000. Hill won just 47 games and lost 77. Rutgers was near the bottom of the Big East during his tenure and to make matters worse, Hill apparently started yelling at University of Pittsburgh baseball coaches during a Rutgers-Pittsburgh baseball game after the season. Hill's father coaches the Rutgers baseball team.
The Rutgers athletic director, Tim Pernetti, didn't particularly appreciate Hill's
"discussion" with the University of Pittsburgh's coaches and ordered Hill to stay away from the Rutgers-Pittsburgh baseball series. Hill didn't and Pernetti found a reason to get rid of his failing basketball coach. In a state that is billions of dollars in the hole, where education is suddenly a major budgetary item for both the Governor Chris Christie and voters, Rutgers found money to say goodbye to Hill.
This is the same university that may have to accept a merger with Thomas A. Edison State College under a budget plan proposed by Christie. This is a university that is pumping money into sports while there are budget cutbacks that will impact students at the school. College sports happens to be a part of the educational system although in the money making sports, football and basketball, the sports programs seem to trump the academics in many instances.
Big time college sports lives in a world separate from the ivy covered walls of academia although school presidents, chancellors, and board of trustees provide cover for the activities of athletic directors, coaches and manipulating television networks, sneaker companies, boosters, alums and even politicians who know that sports is a business in academia ... not an extracurricular activity.
The catch phrase "student-athlete" is sold to college sports fans but the truth is that most of the college scholarship recipients at big time college sports program are athletes first and if they have time and a want to get an education that is a plus.
The big-time college/university sports programs no longer want average fans and alums supporting them. They want customers who will spend money for premium seating and will buy junk from the concession stands and dine in stadium restaurants. Schools want well-heeled alum to support the program. Fans can watch on TV, they really are not welcomed in a stadium although there is the charade of "student-athlete" and amateurism with the college kids playing for the love of the game.
Rutgers wants to be a major player in big-time college sports. The state built a stadium with lots of gadgets for the football team and is paying Greg Schiano very handsomely, roughly $1.5 million annually through 2016. To be fair, the university doesn't pick up the entire bill - some of Schiano's money comes from TV, deals with a sneaker company and other marketing partners. The Rutgers football stadium is not just a place where football fans show up six times a year on Saturdays during the fall. The football team doesn't play all of their games on Saturday, to get additional exposure; Rutgers has played Thursday night home games during the school week to get on national TV on ESPN. Rutgers' football facility has been built with maximizing revenue in mind. Just take a look at how the stadium has been expanded over the past two years.
In 2008, club seating and lounge was added. Those seats are not cheap. In 2009, the South end zone was closed in adding 11,000 seats with a "state-of-the-art Hi-Definition scoreboard and sound system." The stadium had new concession areas (designed to get customers to spend more money) and facilities.
The next new money making area will be the 7,656-square-foot football recruiting lounge and welcome center which will be built on the mezzanine level in the new south end zone of the expanded Rutgers Stadium.
According to the Rutgers stadium website, "anticipated uses of the facility, which will seat more than 300, include: Year-round football recruiting functions. In-game entertaining of appropriate groups. High end athletics fundraising opportunities and events. Recruiting tours for all other sports on non-football recruiting days. High-end fundraising for senior level university officials and the Rutgers University Foundation."
This is serious business which seems to have very little to do with the educational side of the school.
Rutgers men's basketball team has a long way to go in matching the success of the women's team led by Vivian Stringer. The Rutgers women's team, which is one of the best programs in college sports, was slammed by a remark by radio personality Don Imus and his sidekicks in 2007 which caused CBS and MSNBC to fire Imus and elevated Stringer into a more prominent national role as the national media decided to probe into the Imus "comedy bit."
Schiano and Stringer are two of the best paid New Jersey state employees. The next men's basketball coach will join them at the top of the Garden State's employees earning list.
Rutgers now needs to replace Hill and probably will hire an experienced coach and that coach will have to more than likely break his ties with a college or university to take the Rutgers job. Big time college sports has an ethics problem. Schiano twice was approached by other schools while under contract to Rutgers but decided to stay although he did get a major extension and money upgrade from the school.
There is also something rather interesting about the Athletic Director Tim Pernetti. The Rutgers AD is not really an athletic guy. His background is television and to understand college sports, you need to understand how television has a great deal of leverage in college programs. After all, ESPN, CBS-Turner Sports, FOX and various regional sports channels are paying top dollar for college sports which really is TV programming not unlike American Idol or Glee or Dancing With the Stars or Oprah. College sports contests fill hours of programming needs.
Pernetti joined ABC Sports in 1994 and within two years, Pernetti was overseeing ABC Sports' relationship with various college conferences. In 2003, Pernetti left ABC for the new College Sports TV network and signed programming deals for the fledgling entity with numerous college programs. Pernetti joined Rutgers as the Director for Intercollegiate Athletics in April 2009.
Pernetti, the TV guy, understands the college sports industry. Rutgers is now a member of the Big East Conference but the New Brunswick university has the only big time college football program in the nation's most populated market, New York, and in the past other sports conferences have expressed an interest in adding Rutgers, not for the university's football and basketball programs, but for the market. Rutgers is an entree into the New York market. When college conferences go through the next phase of realignment to satisfy television and broadband needs, Rutgers can be a pivotal player.
New Jersey has an education problem, Rutgers has a men's college basketball problem that might have nothing to do with education and grade point averages and graduation statistics but has everything to do with wins and losses. Fred Hill is taking more than $800,000 of someone's money, whether it is state dollars, alums, boosters, sponsors, marketing partners or sneaker money or even TV money to go away. Hill would still be running the Rutgers program despite his shouting match at a baseball game had his record been 77 wins and 47 losses along with appearances in the NCAA Men's Championship Tournament.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and lecturer on "The Politics and Business of Sports" and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
MONDAY, 26 APRIL 2010 13:17
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/rutgers-basketball-does-not-live-in-the-world-of-academia
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
COMMENTARY
It was a rather interesting week in New Jersey educational circles. Voters said no in many locations to approving new school budgets and a subsequent tax hike yet at one of New Jersey's schools of higher education, Rutgers, it was business as usual. Rutgers got rid of head basketball coach Fred Hill after four losing seasons and gave Hill a rather hefty going away present in the vicinity of $850,000. Hill won just 47 games and lost 77. Rutgers was near the bottom of the Big East during his tenure and to make matters worse, Hill apparently started yelling at University of Pittsburgh baseball coaches during a Rutgers-Pittsburgh baseball game after the season. Hill's father coaches the Rutgers baseball team.
The Rutgers athletic director, Tim Pernetti, didn't particularly appreciate Hill's
"discussion" with the University of Pittsburgh's coaches and ordered Hill to stay away from the Rutgers-Pittsburgh baseball series. Hill didn't and Pernetti found a reason to get rid of his failing basketball coach. In a state that is billions of dollars in the hole, where education is suddenly a major budgetary item for both the Governor Chris Christie and voters, Rutgers found money to say goodbye to Hill.
This is the same university that may have to accept a merger with Thomas A. Edison State College under a budget plan proposed by Christie. This is a university that is pumping money into sports while there are budget cutbacks that will impact students at the school. College sports happens to be a part of the educational system although in the money making sports, football and basketball, the sports programs seem to trump the academics in many instances.
Big time college sports lives in a world separate from the ivy covered walls of academia although school presidents, chancellors, and board of trustees provide cover for the activities of athletic directors, coaches and manipulating television networks, sneaker companies, boosters, alums and even politicians who know that sports is a business in academia ... not an extracurricular activity.
The catch phrase "student-athlete" is sold to college sports fans but the truth is that most of the college scholarship recipients at big time college sports program are athletes first and if they have time and a want to get an education that is a plus.
The big-time college/university sports programs no longer want average fans and alums supporting them. They want customers who will spend money for premium seating and will buy junk from the concession stands and dine in stadium restaurants. Schools want well-heeled alum to support the program. Fans can watch on TV, they really are not welcomed in a stadium although there is the charade of "student-athlete" and amateurism with the college kids playing for the love of the game.
Rutgers wants to be a major player in big-time college sports. The state built a stadium with lots of gadgets for the football team and is paying Greg Schiano very handsomely, roughly $1.5 million annually through 2016. To be fair, the university doesn't pick up the entire bill - some of Schiano's money comes from TV, deals with a sneaker company and other marketing partners. The Rutgers football stadium is not just a place where football fans show up six times a year on Saturdays during the fall. The football team doesn't play all of their games on Saturday, to get additional exposure; Rutgers has played Thursday night home games during the school week to get on national TV on ESPN. Rutgers' football facility has been built with maximizing revenue in mind. Just take a look at how the stadium has been expanded over the past two years.
In 2008, club seating and lounge was added. Those seats are not cheap. In 2009, the South end zone was closed in adding 11,000 seats with a "state-of-the-art Hi-Definition scoreboard and sound system." The stadium had new concession areas (designed to get customers to spend more money) and facilities.
The next new money making area will be the 7,656-square-foot football recruiting lounge and welcome center which will be built on the mezzanine level in the new south end zone of the expanded Rutgers Stadium.
According to the Rutgers stadium website, "anticipated uses of the facility, which will seat more than 300, include: Year-round football recruiting functions. In-game entertaining of appropriate groups. High end athletics fundraising opportunities and events. Recruiting tours for all other sports on non-football recruiting days. High-end fundraising for senior level university officials and the Rutgers University Foundation."
This is serious business which seems to have very little to do with the educational side of the school.
Rutgers men's basketball team has a long way to go in matching the success of the women's team led by Vivian Stringer. The Rutgers women's team, which is one of the best programs in college sports, was slammed by a remark by radio personality Don Imus and his sidekicks in 2007 which caused CBS and MSNBC to fire Imus and elevated Stringer into a more prominent national role as the national media decided to probe into the Imus "comedy bit."
Schiano and Stringer are two of the best paid New Jersey state employees. The next men's basketball coach will join them at the top of the Garden State's employees earning list.
Rutgers now needs to replace Hill and probably will hire an experienced coach and that coach will have to more than likely break his ties with a college or university to take the Rutgers job. Big time college sports has an ethics problem. Schiano twice was approached by other schools while under contract to Rutgers but decided to stay although he did get a major extension and money upgrade from the school.
There is also something rather interesting about the Athletic Director Tim Pernetti. The Rutgers AD is not really an athletic guy. His background is television and to understand college sports, you need to understand how television has a great deal of leverage in college programs. After all, ESPN, CBS-Turner Sports, FOX and various regional sports channels are paying top dollar for college sports which really is TV programming not unlike American Idol or Glee or Dancing With the Stars or Oprah. College sports contests fill hours of programming needs.
Pernetti joined ABC Sports in 1994 and within two years, Pernetti was overseeing ABC Sports' relationship with various college conferences. In 2003, Pernetti left ABC for the new College Sports TV network and signed programming deals for the fledgling entity with numerous college programs. Pernetti joined Rutgers as the Director for Intercollegiate Athletics in April 2009.
Pernetti, the TV guy, understands the college sports industry. Rutgers is now a member of the Big East Conference but the New Brunswick university has the only big time college football program in the nation's most populated market, New York, and in the past other sports conferences have expressed an interest in adding Rutgers, not for the university's football and basketball programs, but for the market. Rutgers is an entree into the New York market. When college conferences go through the next phase of realignment to satisfy television and broadband needs, Rutgers can be a pivotal player.
New Jersey has an education problem, Rutgers has a men's college basketball problem that might have nothing to do with education and grade point averages and graduation statistics but has everything to do with wins and losses. Fred Hill is taking more than $800,000 of someone's money, whether it is state dollars, alums, boosters, sponsors, marketing partners or sneaker money or even TV money to go away. Hill would still be running the Rutgers program despite his shouting match at a baseball game had his record been 77 wins and 47 losses along with appearances in the NCAA Men's Championship Tournament.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and lecturer on "The Politics and Business of Sports" and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Sports and Arizona's Relationship is Going to Become Quite Complicated Soon
Sports and Arizona's Relationship is Going to Become Quite Complicated Soon
By Evan Weiner
April 24, 2010
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m4d24-Sports-and-Arizonas-relationship-is-going-to-become-quite-complicated-soon#
(New York, N. Y.) -- Has Arizona once again risked losing the Super Bowl?
No, this is not about the Arizona Cardinals football team bowing to the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 2009 Super Bowl and returning to the “Big Game”. That is merely a game on the field. But off the field there is now a big question.
How will the sports world react now that the Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and the state's two legislative bodies have passed a tough immigration law? Could Arizona lose major sporting events like the Super Bowl? The National Football League is in the midst of the league's draft and probably will not get around to comment on the new Arizona law but given the very political nature of the league and how the league is very sensitive to the NFL's image, it is probably a good thing that Glendale, Arizona is not in the running for the 2014 Super Bowl.
The new Arizona law will go into effect sometime this summer assuming that there are no court orders to stop it.
The National Football League has a history of pulling a Super Bowl from Arizona and putting the political weight of the entity known as the NFL into a lobbying position. Arizona "celebrates" Martin Luther King Day as the result of direct intervention by the National Football League in terms of dangling a Super Bowl in front of voters. In 1987, newly elected Arizona Governor Evan Mecham's first act in his new job was to erase Martin Luther King Day from the Arizona calendar as an official state holiday. That decision set off a boycott of the state with entertainers like Stevie Wonder refusing to perform in any venue in Arizona.
Governor Mecham's reasoning was simple. The Arizona legislature in 1986 and Governor Bruce Babbitt, in Mecham's opinion, created the holiday illegally.
The National Football League, in an attempt to help the Phoenix Cardinals owner Bill Bidwill to sell more seats after he misread the Phoenix-area market following the move of his Cardinals from St. Louis to Tempe in 1988, awarded Tempe the January 31, 1993 Super Bowl. But Mecham's decision created a number of problems for the league, specifically the National Football League Players Association was not too keen on playing the NFL's showcase game in a state where a governor took away the holiday and the action was supported by Senator John McCain.
In 1989, the Arizona state legislature approved a law making Martin Luther King Day a state holiday but voters needed to approve the measure. In 1990, Arizonans went to the polls and rejected the making Martin Luther King Day a state holiday. Shortly after the voters said no, the NFL said no to Arizona and pulled the January 31, 1993 game from Tempe.
The Super Bowl allegedly pumps money into the local economy although in the Phoenix-area's case it is not as much as say putting the "Big Game" in Pontiac, Michigan or Detroit or Minneapolis since a good number of "snowbirds" vacation or spent winters in warmer climates like the Phoenix-area, South Florida or the Tampa, Florida area. What the Super Bowl does do is bring "high rollers" into town and the local community hopes that the "high rollers" such as corporate CEOs like a local area and will leave a piece of their business in the area and open up a local headquarters and create jobs.
That rarely happens but it is a selling point for the local group hoping to land a Super Bowl.
The National Football League after pulling the 1993 game went back to Arizona and laid the cards out on the table telling voters if they approved the holiday in a November 1992 vote, the NFL would award the next available Super Bowl to Tempe. Arizona voters approved the 1992 ballot initiative and five months later the NFL lived up to their part of the bargain and granted Tempe the January 28, 1996 game.
The next available Super Bowl is the 2014 game but Glendale and Arizona officials are not bidding for that event which is probably a good thing for everyone involved at this point. The NFL also holds a spring meeting once every four years or so at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix.
There is another real sports prize that could impacted by the new Arizona law. The Glendale, Arizona stadium, that is the home to the NFL's Arizona Cardinals and hosted the 2008 Super Bowl, is one of the 18 cities that has been proposed for use by USA Bid Committee in an effort to win the FIFA World Cup in either 2018 or 2022.
The FIFA World Cup is the biggest sports event on earth.
The new law will not play well with the FIFA delegates or some of the members of the USA Bid Committee which include Houston Dynamo and Los Angeles Galaxy owner Philip Anschutz, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, comedian and Seattle Sounders FC part-owner Drew Carey, former Goldman Sachs Vice Chairman (Asia) Carlos Cordeiro, U.S. Men’s National Team player Landon Donovan, Executive Director David Downs, U.S. Soccer CEO and General Secretary Dan Flynn, U.S. Soccer Foundation President Ed Foster-Simeon, Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber, U.S. Soccer President and USA Bid Committee Chairman Sunil Gulati, U.S. Women’s National Team former player Mia Hamm, Walt Disney Company President and CEO Robert Iger, former U.S. Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger, New England Revolution and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Motion Picture Director Spike Lee, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, University of Miami President Donna Shalala, ESPN Executive Vice President for Content John Skipper, Univision CEO Joe Uva and Washington Post CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth.
The Glendale stadium hosted the highest attended soccer match in the state of Arizona on February 7, 2007 when 62,462 fans watched the U.S. National team defeat Mexico, 2-0. Will the new Arizona law put a halt to international football "friendlies" in Arizona featuring Mexican teams?
Major League Baseball might be keeping a close eye on the developments in Arizona. The Chicago Cubs and the Milwaukee Brewers are looking for improvements at spring training bases in Mesa and Maryvale for their teams. Naples, Florida officials have made an offer to Cubs ownership to relocate the team's spring training facilities from Mesa to Naples.
If the National Hockey League's Phoenix Coyotes remain in Glendale, the franchise's new owners could be to host the 2012 or 2013 NHL All-Star Game. Glendale was supposed to venue of the 2011 event but the club's bankruptcy filing and financial uncertainty forced the league to move the game to Raleigh, North Carolina.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association held a "March Madness" men's basketball tournament event in Glendale in 2009. Will the NCAA bypass Glendale because of the new law?
Then there is another issue. Will athletes speak up either in favor or against the new law? Athletes now tend to shut up on issues with the exception of a handful of performers like then Dallas Mavericks basketball player Steve Nash who spoke out against the Iraq War. Wayne Gretzky supported the Iraq War. Ironically Nash now plays in Phoenix and Gretzky coached in Glendale.
Arizona is a hub of sports activities. Glendale is the home of the NFL's Arizona Cardinals and the NHL's Phoenix Coyotes. The NBA Suns and Major League Baseball's Diamondbacks reside in downtown Phoenix. There is a NASCAR event along with golf and tennis events. Fifteen Major League Baseball teams hold spring training in the Phoenix area, there are major college football, basketball and baseball programs along with minor league baseball and hockey teams scattered throughout the state. The United Football League holds training camp in Casa Grande.
There is a belief that sports is the "toy store" of life and that it is just a game, an entertainment diversion. The truth is that the toy store yarn that is constantly spun is a lie. The NFL proved that in 1991 and 1992 in Arizona. There will be a sports reaction to the legislation signed into law by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, it is just a matter of time before a powerful sports group reacts and it just might cost Arizona a big event if history is any indication.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and lecturer on "The Politics of Sports Business" and "Sports in Society." He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
By Evan Weiner
April 24, 2010
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m4d24-Sports-and-Arizonas-relationship-is-going-to-become-quite-complicated-soon#
(New York, N. Y.) -- Has Arizona once again risked losing the Super Bowl?
No, this is not about the Arizona Cardinals football team bowing to the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 2009 Super Bowl and returning to the “Big Game”. That is merely a game on the field. But off the field there is now a big question.
How will the sports world react now that the Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and the state's two legislative bodies have passed a tough immigration law? Could Arizona lose major sporting events like the Super Bowl? The National Football League is in the midst of the league's draft and probably will not get around to comment on the new Arizona law but given the very political nature of the league and how the league is very sensitive to the NFL's image, it is probably a good thing that Glendale, Arizona is not in the running for the 2014 Super Bowl.
The new Arizona law will go into effect sometime this summer assuming that there are no court orders to stop it.
The National Football League has a history of pulling a Super Bowl from Arizona and putting the political weight of the entity known as the NFL into a lobbying position. Arizona "celebrates" Martin Luther King Day as the result of direct intervention by the National Football League in terms of dangling a Super Bowl in front of voters. In 1987, newly elected Arizona Governor Evan Mecham's first act in his new job was to erase Martin Luther King Day from the Arizona calendar as an official state holiday. That decision set off a boycott of the state with entertainers like Stevie Wonder refusing to perform in any venue in Arizona.
Governor Mecham's reasoning was simple. The Arizona legislature in 1986 and Governor Bruce Babbitt, in Mecham's opinion, created the holiday illegally.
The National Football League, in an attempt to help the Phoenix Cardinals owner Bill Bidwill to sell more seats after he misread the Phoenix-area market following the move of his Cardinals from St. Louis to Tempe in 1988, awarded Tempe the January 31, 1993 Super Bowl. But Mecham's decision created a number of problems for the league, specifically the National Football League Players Association was not too keen on playing the NFL's showcase game in a state where a governor took away the holiday and the action was supported by Senator John McCain.
In 1989, the Arizona state legislature approved a law making Martin Luther King Day a state holiday but voters needed to approve the measure. In 1990, Arizonans went to the polls and rejected the making Martin Luther King Day a state holiday. Shortly after the voters said no, the NFL said no to Arizona and pulled the January 31, 1993 game from Tempe.
The Super Bowl allegedly pumps money into the local economy although in the Phoenix-area's case it is not as much as say putting the "Big Game" in Pontiac, Michigan or Detroit or Minneapolis since a good number of "snowbirds" vacation or spent winters in warmer climates like the Phoenix-area, South Florida or the Tampa, Florida area. What the Super Bowl does do is bring "high rollers" into town and the local community hopes that the "high rollers" such as corporate CEOs like a local area and will leave a piece of their business in the area and open up a local headquarters and create jobs.
That rarely happens but it is a selling point for the local group hoping to land a Super Bowl.
The National Football League after pulling the 1993 game went back to Arizona and laid the cards out on the table telling voters if they approved the holiday in a November 1992 vote, the NFL would award the next available Super Bowl to Tempe. Arizona voters approved the 1992 ballot initiative and five months later the NFL lived up to their part of the bargain and granted Tempe the January 28, 1996 game.
The next available Super Bowl is the 2014 game but Glendale and Arizona officials are not bidding for that event which is probably a good thing for everyone involved at this point. The NFL also holds a spring meeting once every four years or so at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix.
There is another real sports prize that could impacted by the new Arizona law. The Glendale, Arizona stadium, that is the home to the NFL's Arizona Cardinals and hosted the 2008 Super Bowl, is one of the 18 cities that has been proposed for use by USA Bid Committee in an effort to win the FIFA World Cup in either 2018 or 2022.
The FIFA World Cup is the biggest sports event on earth.
The new law will not play well with the FIFA delegates or some of the members of the USA Bid Committee which include Houston Dynamo and Los Angeles Galaxy owner Philip Anschutz, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, comedian and Seattle Sounders FC part-owner Drew Carey, former Goldman Sachs Vice Chairman (Asia) Carlos Cordeiro, U.S. Men’s National Team player Landon Donovan, Executive Director David Downs, U.S. Soccer CEO and General Secretary Dan Flynn, U.S. Soccer Foundation President Ed Foster-Simeon, Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber, U.S. Soccer President and USA Bid Committee Chairman Sunil Gulati, U.S. Women’s National Team former player Mia Hamm, Walt Disney Company President and CEO Robert Iger, former U.S. Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger, New England Revolution and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Motion Picture Director Spike Lee, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, University of Miami President Donna Shalala, ESPN Executive Vice President for Content John Skipper, Univision CEO Joe Uva and Washington Post CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth.
The Glendale stadium hosted the highest attended soccer match in the state of Arizona on February 7, 2007 when 62,462 fans watched the U.S. National team defeat Mexico, 2-0. Will the new Arizona law put a halt to international football "friendlies" in Arizona featuring Mexican teams?
Major League Baseball might be keeping a close eye on the developments in Arizona. The Chicago Cubs and the Milwaukee Brewers are looking for improvements at spring training bases in Mesa and Maryvale for their teams. Naples, Florida officials have made an offer to Cubs ownership to relocate the team's spring training facilities from Mesa to Naples.
If the National Hockey League's Phoenix Coyotes remain in Glendale, the franchise's new owners could be to host the 2012 or 2013 NHL All-Star Game. Glendale was supposed to venue of the 2011 event but the club's bankruptcy filing and financial uncertainty forced the league to move the game to Raleigh, North Carolina.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association held a "March Madness" men's basketball tournament event in Glendale in 2009. Will the NCAA bypass Glendale because of the new law?
Then there is another issue. Will athletes speak up either in favor or against the new law? Athletes now tend to shut up on issues with the exception of a handful of performers like then Dallas Mavericks basketball player Steve Nash who spoke out against the Iraq War. Wayne Gretzky supported the Iraq War. Ironically Nash now plays in Phoenix and Gretzky coached in Glendale.
Arizona is a hub of sports activities. Glendale is the home of the NFL's Arizona Cardinals and the NHL's Phoenix Coyotes. The NBA Suns and Major League Baseball's Diamondbacks reside in downtown Phoenix. There is a NASCAR event along with golf and tennis events. Fifteen Major League Baseball teams hold spring training in the Phoenix area, there are major college football, basketball and baseball programs along with minor league baseball and hockey teams scattered throughout the state. The United Football League holds training camp in Casa Grande.
There is a belief that sports is the "toy store" of life and that it is just a game, an entertainment diversion. The truth is that the toy store yarn that is constantly spun is a lie. The NFL proved that in 1991 and 1992 in Arizona. There will be a sports reaction to the legislation signed into law by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, it is just a matter of time before a powerful sports group reacts and it just might cost Arizona a big event if history is any indication.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and lecturer on "The Politics of Sports Business" and "Sports in Society." He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
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