Rant by LeBron James speaks volumes about the real world of sports
TUESDAY, 14 JUNE 2011 16:14
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/rant-by-lebron-james-speaks-volumes-about-the-real-world-of-sports
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
Perhaps in the smoke and mirrors and laser light shows filled with loud music of 2011 sports, LeBron James should be introduced with some Billy Joel music the next time he goes onto the basketball court.
The song "My Life" seems apropos but if you think LeBron's post game rift was out of line, think again. High salaried athletes of the 21st century in America live in gated communities and don't have much to do with fans on a daily basis. It is no longer the 1950s — a time when members of the Brooklyn Dodgers lived in the Brooklyn community, members of the New York Giants baseball team lived in Dobbs Ferry, New York and were a part of that community.
Phil Rizzuto and Yogi Berra are no longer selling suits in a Newark clothing store in the off season to supplement their New York Yankees income.
Sports fans and sports media employees expect a lot out of their athletic heroes.
At one time LeBron James was a hero but he has become the equivalent of a wrestling heel, a bad guy after leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers franchise and announcing his intentions during a made for cable TV show on ESPN. Forgotten in the criticism of the show which was dubbed "The Decision" was that LeBron James made some money for charity. Athletes are supposed to be role models and the excuse is always because kids look up to sports heroes. LeBron has been clean, no drugs, no jail time yet he is a villain while scores of athletes are arrested on an annual basis for various crimes.
Plaxico Burress and Michael Vick seem to be coming back into sports as conquering heroes after doing jail time. LeBron James doesn't seem to have humility or has yet to be humbled by the sports media so he is a bad, bad guy now. Athletes are supposed to be humble. Entertainers on the other hand are applauded for being wild people. The Lindsay Lohans, Britney Spears of the world are great copy. The sporting media expects athletes lead the way by example because the kids look up to them.
Babe Ruth was hardly a role model but the Babe was out there signing autographs for the kids back in the 1920s and 1930s. But Babe was also a businessman and in 1930 made more money than President Herbert Hoover. Babe’s response drew chuckles when asked about making more money than the President of the United States.
“I know, but I had a better year than Hoover,” he said.
LeBron James problem seems to be his lack of a quick wit and humor. His statement was innocuous. LeBron James is not refusing to go into military service as a conscientious objector and not following Muhammad Ali’s 1967 lead. He wasn’t on the podium in Mexico City with a black glove raised in the air like John Carlos and Tommie Smith did in 1968 protesting poverty in America.
There was a no political statement here. It was just a pro wrestling type rant.
James should have been signing the final words from the 1978 song — I don't care what you say anymore, this is my life. Go ahead with your own life, leave me alone.
"All the people that were rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems they had today. I'm going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do with me and my family and be happy with that. So they can get a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be on being happy about not only myself, but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal. But they got to get back to the real world at some point," James said after the game.
James is getting excoriated for his statement.
James is saying publicly what athletes have thought and talked about privately for years. Athletes are not normal people as just everyday performers. LeBron James is in a different stratosphere from the average NBA player. Athletes are coddled, put on pedestals by fans — many of them adults who are in their 40s, 50s and 60s and wear the name of their favorite athlete on their back. They are pursued by autograph hounds and other jock sniffers and there are groupies who chase them. Their athletic exploits are recorded and chronicled for the ages.
Athletes are supposed to be happy just playing a child's game and at one time, great players like Honey Russell back before the days of the National Basketball League and the Basketball Association of America in the 1930s played for nothing. Even a great player like George Yardley played for nothing with the Los Angeles Jets of the American Basketball League (an organization that featured a Cleveland franchise owned by George M. Steinbrenner III). Yardley took the opportunity to play because he only participated in home games and select road games where his business would have taken him anyway. But as the late George Young pointed out in the 1980s while running the New York Giants in selecting player personnel and coaches that if a player says he will play for nothing, he is a liar.
It is a business and LeBron James is merely a businessman who let out a secret that is well known in his community, sports. You play a game and then get on with your life. Jim Bouton in his ground breaking baseball book Ball Four wrote that in 1970.
Sports is nothing more than a business even though fans are asked and give unconditional love for the team. But fans have to put up with an awful lot in exchange for a team. Madison Square Garden displaced the true "fans" decades ago when the building owners tore out the blue seats and replaced them with luxury boxes. The blue collar worker has been evicted from the best seats in that and other buildings.
All of the new buildings that have gone up since the 1986 federal tax code update (which shifted the way municipalities could charge owners for debt payment and put the onus of paying the bills for the facility on the taxpayers) also gave owners an excuse to hike ticket prices. The new places became malls complete with a sporting event, restaurants, shops and some new places included a Ferris Wheel or a swimming pool. In a 2000 interview, long time basketball executive John Nash, talking before Nets game at the Meadowlands, wondered if ticket prices for sporting events became too high.
"Cost is obviously a factor and it is directly related to players salaries," said Nash who was the General Manager of the New Jersey Nets at that time. "The players get 53 percent of the gross revenues by virtue of the agreement they made with the NBA. And as their salaries go up, the revenues streams necessarily have to go up."
In 2000 Nash and other sports executives were asking the same question. Were ticket prices hitting a plateau? The answer was no as ticket prices continue to escalate shifting the culture and social class inside of the arena to a high income "fan" and leaving behind the real sports lovers.
"That's a great question and I think every year teams have to decide for themselves," Nash said. "What has happened in many cases is that corporations have become our top customers as opposed to the everyday fan who cannot afford either the time commitment of 41 games or the cost."
In two weeks, NBA players may be locked out by the owners over money issues.
Politicians are willing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to build sports stadiums and arenas and in some cases go the extra mile and hand owners money so their cities can be considered big league.
This is the culture of sports and Lebron James is part of that culture.
There is a National Football League owners led work stoppage taking place right now. On July 1, there could very well be an owners-led National Basketball Association work stoppage. Looking down the pike, the possibility of a Major League Baseball work stoppage exists as the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the owners and players expires in December. That National Hockey League owners and players CBA ends in the summer of 2012.
Since the Nash interview, the three NBA franchises have been relocated. Vancouver lost the Grizzlies franchise when Michael Heisley went shopping for a better arena deal in 2001. Heisley took an offer from Memphis. George Shinn relocated his Charlotte Hornets franchise in 2002 to New Orleans also in search of a better arena deal. The Oklahoma City-based owners of the Seattle SuperSonics took the franchise to Oklahoma City in 2008 after Seattle officials refused to build a new arena for the team some 13 years after the city rebuilt the municipally owned arena that housed the NBA team. The owners left despite having two years remaining on the lease between the city and franchise.
New Jersey will be losing the NBA Nets soon as that team will relocate to Brooklyn.
Allegedly 22 of the NBA’s 30 teams are losing money.
National Hockey League owners locked out their players in 2004 and shut down the business for an entire year. The NHL figures to approve the relocation of the Atlanta franchise to Winnipeg in a few days. Glendale, Arizona is paying $25 million a year for the privilege of having an NHL franchise in the Phoenix suburb.
Hawaiian officials are questioning why they are paying the NFL $4 million annually to host the league's annual all-star game, the Pro Bowl.
Businessmen in the Los Angeles area are demanding Los Angeles taxpayers kick money into a stadium for a National Football league team. In Sacramento, police, firefighters, teachers and other municipal employees are getting fired but Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson is determined to spend taxpayers dollars to build an arena for the Maloof brothers Kings NBA franchise and keep the team in town.
Stadiums and arenas are costly projects and sports owners are smart enough to know that they don't want to build one on their own dime if possible.
Sports is filled with entitlement.
It doesn't matter if it is pro sports, college sports or in Lebron James case, the AAU. LeBron James and other talented young teens are courted by sneaker companies and push into colleges whose coaches have deals with sneaker companies. The money game starts very early in life for basketball players.
LeBron James talked and the sports world went into a tizzy.
He said nothing.
America is fighting two declared wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and is involved with NATO in Libya. There seems to be secret wars taking place in Pakistan and Yemen. The economy is still struggling; politicians are more concerned with ideology than settling real problems yet LeBron James' my life statement is being scrutinized.
LeBron James is nothing more than a highly paid basketball player and entertainer. He's right. People go back to their lives after a game and he has his own life. He just plays a game, nothing more, nothing less.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Belmont Stakes Odds: Final leg of Triple Crown will depend on slot machines
FRIDAY, 10 JUNE 2011 19:25
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/belmont-stakes-odds-final-leg-of-triple-crown-will-depend-on-slot-machines
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
The eve of the running of the annual June Belmont in Elmont, New York is a good time to review the "racino" industry. For those who have never heard of the time “racino” you better get used to it. A "racino" is a horse racing facility whether it is for thoroughbreds or harness or standard bred horses, which depends on a casino loaded with slot machines to survive.
For the most part, standard bred racing in the northeast United States would be gone by now without the “machines” and the thoroughbred industry would be on life support. Around 1950, baseball, boxing and horse racing were the crown jewels of American sports. Horse racing has diminished in popularity because of the abundance of state sponsored gambling through lotteries at local stores and in New York, keno in restaurants.
The horse racing business is now surviving in many areas, except New Jersey, through proceeds from on site slot machines and table games (in some states) at racetracks. New Jersey is not keeping pace with neighboring states like New York, Pennsylvania and Delaware and has no "racinos", preferring to keep operations going in Atlantic City.
New Jersey residents can go to Yonkers and bet the slots or into eastern Pennsylvania. Sometime this fall, they will be able to go to Aqueduct in Queens and deposit money into “machines” which may help bolster thoroughbred racing at Belmont, Aqueduct and in Saratoga.
“Too much in terms of gaming?” asked Charles Hayward, the President and Chief Operating Officer of the New York Racing Association, in response to a question about gaming and slot machine saturation on the east coast. “No, I think there is a fair amount of density in casinos throughout Pennsylvania, Delaware, West Virginia. The Aqueduct facility will be the first casino within New York City.
“We think the projects we have between $300-350 win per machine are very conservative. When we had our partner MGM, this goes back a few years; they said the biggest problem we were going to have would be managing the crowds on weekends when people would be lined up behind all of the 4,500 machines.
“There is no question there has been more saturation. Pennsylvania, which is much closer to that market you are speaking of (New Jersey), I don’t know how many slot machines and now they have gone to full blown table games but that had to increase the number dramatically and it has had a big impact on Atlantic City. But I think the Aqueduct "racino" is geographically situation to do well and I think more importantly Genting (Malaysia’s Genting Group-a casino operator) is a world-class operation. They are going to put more money into this, making the amenities better. It is not a destination resort by any stretch of the imagination but it will be a place people will want to go.”
The Aqueduct "racino" should be in business sometime after Labor Day.
The slot machines at Aqueduct figures to give a big push to help revive an ailing business – thoroughbred racing in New York.
“The money comes in in a bunch of different tranches,” said Hayward. “One is purses and that is probably an increase of somewhere around $30 million just to give you a frame of reference. Purses last year were about $103 million and it will be about the same this year. So that is about a 30 percent increase. We can tap X money, which again depending upon win per machine will be between $20-25 million. We get operating expense monies, so we can do more marketing customer service things and then there is a breeder award.
“So all in all, the racing industry and NYRA gets about 16 percent of the net win from the VLT (video lottery terminal or slot machine) so that is going to be significant. We have undertaken some studies for Cap Ex (Capital Expenditure) improvements at all three of the tracks (Aqueduct, Belmont and Saratoga) and we can start working on that once we got the money.”
Video Lottery Terminals are saved a lot of tracks thorough New York and in Delaware. The horse racing industry is dependent upon the slot machines.
Hayward is hoping that people will return to horse racing as owners. Since the economic meltdown of September 2008, a lot of horsemen and horsewomen have left the industry.
Hayward is monitoring what is going on in New Jersey in the struggle between bolstering Atlantic City and saving the horse racing industry but doesn’t have much to say about the New Jersey legislative battle to help both industries.
“I wish Morris Bailey (who now runs Monmouth Race Track) a lot of luck on the thoroughbred side, I had the good fortune of meeting the gentleman at the Preakness (in Baltimore). I think he knows what he is getting himself into,” said Hayward. “Look, it is important for racing to have various circuits, it is important for us for Monmouth to be a strong track. Obviously, the Meadowlands was a premier harness track for many, many years and Jeff Gural (who has a lease at the Meadowlands) is a very talented guy. He has brought back some harness racing here in state (upstate New York). I don’t know what is going to happen but it looks to me that the current administration (Governor Chris Christie) is certainly protecting Atlantic City. Under that scenario, it would seem unlikely that they would do anything (installing slot machines) at the Meadowlands
“But as you know, those things can change very quickly.”
Don’t look for slot machines at Belmont race track anytime soon. There has been mention that as part of the New York Islanders quest to gain a new arena for the hockey team in Nassau County that land which could be used for a Shinnecock Indian Casino in Uniondale (as suggested by former New York Senator Al D’Amato) should be shifted to Belmont but Hayward isn’t interested in the idea.
“We have not been involved,” he said. “Our position and our board’s position, you know the state (New York) has an option. If they put VLT’s here, they have an option on 10 acres of land at the end of building here (at Belmont). But, our view is let’s get the VLT’s going at Aqueduct; it is only nine miles away. I think to bring another entity in the market until we establish what is going on and until Genting gets some return on their $380 million investment would be inappropriate. You know, Nassau County, you can understand given their financial situation why they would want more economic development but we have not been involved in any conversations about gaming at Belmont nor will he be or putting an arena here. We have about 400 acres so we got some room but we would like to do some expansion. We need to build a few new barns. This is a beautiful old building we have; it’s an old building that doesn’t have a lot of air conditioning or heat so we have some challenges.”
The horse racing industry seems to be surviving thanks to the slot machines in various states. NYRA has been on the ropes for a long time but like a number of other horse tracks, its future depends on slot machines and eventually table games.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.
FRIDAY, 10 JUNE 2011 19:25
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/belmont-stakes-odds-final-leg-of-triple-crown-will-depend-on-slot-machines
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
The eve of the running of the annual June Belmont in Elmont, New York is a good time to review the "racino" industry. For those who have never heard of the time “racino” you better get used to it. A "racino" is a horse racing facility whether it is for thoroughbreds or harness or standard bred horses, which depends on a casino loaded with slot machines to survive.
For the most part, standard bred racing in the northeast United States would be gone by now without the “machines” and the thoroughbred industry would be on life support. Around 1950, baseball, boxing and horse racing were the crown jewels of American sports. Horse racing has diminished in popularity because of the abundance of state sponsored gambling through lotteries at local stores and in New York, keno in restaurants.
The horse racing business is now surviving in many areas, except New Jersey, through proceeds from on site slot machines and table games (in some states) at racetracks. New Jersey is not keeping pace with neighboring states like New York, Pennsylvania and Delaware and has no "racinos", preferring to keep operations going in Atlantic City.
New Jersey residents can go to Yonkers and bet the slots or into eastern Pennsylvania. Sometime this fall, they will be able to go to Aqueduct in Queens and deposit money into “machines” which may help bolster thoroughbred racing at Belmont, Aqueduct and in Saratoga.
“Too much in terms of gaming?” asked Charles Hayward, the President and Chief Operating Officer of the New York Racing Association, in response to a question about gaming and slot machine saturation on the east coast. “No, I think there is a fair amount of density in casinos throughout Pennsylvania, Delaware, West Virginia. The Aqueduct facility will be the first casino within New York City.
“We think the projects we have between $300-350 win per machine are very conservative. When we had our partner MGM, this goes back a few years; they said the biggest problem we were going to have would be managing the crowds on weekends when people would be lined up behind all of the 4,500 machines.
“There is no question there has been more saturation. Pennsylvania, which is much closer to that market you are speaking of (New Jersey), I don’t know how many slot machines and now they have gone to full blown table games but that had to increase the number dramatically and it has had a big impact on Atlantic City. But I think the Aqueduct "racino" is geographically situation to do well and I think more importantly Genting (Malaysia’s Genting Group-a casino operator) is a world-class operation. They are going to put more money into this, making the amenities better. It is not a destination resort by any stretch of the imagination but it will be a place people will want to go.”
The Aqueduct "racino" should be in business sometime after Labor Day.
The slot machines at Aqueduct figures to give a big push to help revive an ailing business – thoroughbred racing in New York.
“The money comes in in a bunch of different tranches,” said Hayward. “One is purses and that is probably an increase of somewhere around $30 million just to give you a frame of reference. Purses last year were about $103 million and it will be about the same this year. So that is about a 30 percent increase. We can tap X money, which again depending upon win per machine will be between $20-25 million. We get operating expense monies, so we can do more marketing customer service things and then there is a breeder award.
“So all in all, the racing industry and NYRA gets about 16 percent of the net win from the VLT (video lottery terminal or slot machine) so that is going to be significant. We have undertaken some studies for Cap Ex (Capital Expenditure) improvements at all three of the tracks (Aqueduct, Belmont and Saratoga) and we can start working on that once we got the money.”
Video Lottery Terminals are saved a lot of tracks thorough New York and in Delaware. The horse racing industry is dependent upon the slot machines.
Hayward is hoping that people will return to horse racing as owners. Since the economic meltdown of September 2008, a lot of horsemen and horsewomen have left the industry.
Hayward is monitoring what is going on in New Jersey in the struggle between bolstering Atlantic City and saving the horse racing industry but doesn’t have much to say about the New Jersey legislative battle to help both industries.
“I wish Morris Bailey (who now runs Monmouth Race Track) a lot of luck on the thoroughbred side, I had the good fortune of meeting the gentleman at the Preakness (in Baltimore). I think he knows what he is getting himself into,” said Hayward. “Look, it is important for racing to have various circuits, it is important for us for Monmouth to be a strong track. Obviously, the Meadowlands was a premier harness track for many, many years and Jeff Gural (who has a lease at the Meadowlands) is a very talented guy. He has brought back some harness racing here in state (upstate New York). I don’t know what is going to happen but it looks to me that the current administration (Governor Chris Christie) is certainly protecting Atlantic City. Under that scenario, it would seem unlikely that they would do anything (installing slot machines) at the Meadowlands
“But as you know, those things can change very quickly.”
Don’t look for slot machines at Belmont race track anytime soon. There has been mention that as part of the New York Islanders quest to gain a new arena for the hockey team in Nassau County that land which could be used for a Shinnecock Indian Casino in Uniondale (as suggested by former New York Senator Al D’Amato) should be shifted to Belmont but Hayward isn’t interested in the idea.
“We have not been involved,” he said. “Our position and our board’s position, you know the state (New York) has an option. If they put VLT’s here, they have an option on 10 acres of land at the end of building here (at Belmont). But, our view is let’s get the VLT’s going at Aqueduct; it is only nine miles away. I think to bring another entity in the market until we establish what is going on and until Genting gets some return on their $380 million investment would be inappropriate. You know, Nassau County, you can understand given their financial situation why they would want more economic development but we have not been involved in any conversations about gaming at Belmont nor will he be or putting an arena here. We have about 400 acres so we got some room but we would like to do some expansion. We need to build a few new barns. This is a beautiful old building we have; it’s an old building that doesn’t have a lot of air conditioning or heat so we have some challenges.”
The horse racing industry seems to be surviving thanks to the slot machines in various states. NYRA has been on the ropes for a long time but like a number of other horse tracks, its future depends on slot machines and eventually table games.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Rio and Sochi Olympic Games are about to drive up your cable TV bill
TUESDAY, 07 JUNE 2011 10:49
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/rio-and-sochi-olympic-games-are-about-to-drive-up-your-cable-tv-bill
The groveling has started.
American media giants are genuflecting in front of International Olympic Committee chief Jacques Rogge and his associates in Lausanne, Switzerland begging them to take their billions of dollars so they can win the television and multiple platform video rights to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia and the 2016 Rio Summer Games.
The media brigade trying to win Rogge and his colleagues hearts are going to raise cable rates if they land the Olympic rights. Someone will have to pay billions for the two week corporate bazaar that happens to feature some sports events.
The IOC wants four billion dollars for the rights which means cable and satellite subscribers will be paying more on their monthly bill because whoever wins the rights will pass the bill onto consumers — whether they watch the games or not on cable TV.
Powerful people including heads of state and those who head up media companies became putty when it comes to business dealings with the International Olympic Committee. In 2009, President Barack Obama was criticized for being unable to move IOC delegates in Copenhagen and landing the 2016 Summer Games for Chicago. The noise crowd (media pundits and Republican operatives) was thoroughly unprepared in the criticism in that they did not know how the IOC works, they just saw Tony Blair lobbying the IOC while he was England's Prime Minister and secure the 2012 Summer Games for London or that Vladimir Putin's bended knee routine helped Sochi, Russia's chances for the 2014 Winter Games.
Sochi got the Games.
Because of Blair, heads of states had to go before the IOC and beg for either the Winter or Summer Games.
The International Olympic Committee, a group that somehow has "earned" permanent observer status at the United Nations, one of two entities with permanent observer status. The Vatican also has permanent observer status. But the International Olympic Committee is not a sovereign state, it just acts like one and powerful people allow them to act like a sovereign state.
Local politicians have created slush funds or have raised taxes to pay down the debt incurred by building huge sports complexes for a two week sporting orgy that has left financial messes behind. American television network executives have filled IOC coffers with billions of dollars, and American corporations have thrown billions to put their logo next to the Olympic rings. Canada changed laws protecting Olympic sponsorship during the lead up to the 2010 Vancouver Games.
The Olympic aura is just too strong for political and business leaders who are attracted to the five interlocking rings like a magnet.
The International Olympic Committee spited women softball players globally by dropping the sport because the Americans women were too good and the IOC could not get Major League Baseball to shut down the season, like the National Hockey League does, and send baseball’s very best players to the Olympics.
The National Hockey League may not send players to compete in the 2014 Sochi Games which might infuriate Rogge and his associates. They want professionals, not amateurs in their little sports orgy. Professionals can be used for cross promotional opportunities and are worth more money to the IOC — money is the IOC's only concern — than unknowns.
At present, the International Softball Federation is trying to figure out how to get the sport reinstated in the 2016 or 2020 Games. One suggestion was to move some of the Summer events indoors to create a bigger winter event but the games must go on in the winter on snow and ice. The International Softball Federation is trying to negotiate in a political maze.
Women softball players only chance on the world stage has been ended because Rogge and his IOC delegates are mad at Major League baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, MLB owners and the former Executive Director of the Major League Baseball Players Association Don Fehr for not seeing it the IOC's way. Selig, the owners and the players just think their little endeavor, Major League Baseball, is more important than
Meanwhile, the IOC which loves to lecture the world about human rights has barred a women's only event from the 2012 Summer Games — softball — because Rogge and his cohorts are still angry with Major League Baseball for not including top players in an ersatz competition for an Olympic Gold Medal in baseball. The IOC awarded the 2008 Summer Games to China despite China's appalling human rights record.
The IOC leaned on the United States Congress to make Major League Baseball change drug policies that were collectively bargained to suit Olympics needs. The IOC didn’t care if baseball players were taking banned substances and some of those banned substances were legal in a number of players home countries like the Dominican Republic and Mexico; the IOC was bigger than Major League Baseball and flexed the group’s collective muscle.
Major League Baseball and the Major League Players Association have separated from the Olympics. Major League Baseball created the "World Baseball Classic", an event that will feature 28 countries in March 2013.
There seems to be just one organization that intimidates the IOC: FIFA, the governing body of football (soccer). Football’s World Cup is a much bigger event than any Olympics, and the IOC knows that. FIFA calls the shots in football, not the IOC.
The Walt Disney Company's ESPN, Comcast's NBCUniversal and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. United States media rights fees from a network TV-cable TV-multiple media platform funds a significant part of the Olympics. In 2010, General Electric's NBC unit lost millions on the two-week event. Yet like sailors on leave, TV executives feel the need to cozy up with their billions to Rogge and his crowd.
There are few global entities with the arrogance of the IOC.
The IOC has a pattern of corruption unmatched by any sports organization in the world. Salt Lake City, Utah won the rights for the 2002 Winter Olympics by bribing various International Olympic Committee delegates.
New York and New Jersey residents should feel very fortunate that London, England won the 2012 Summer Olympics bid. London taxpayers will be on the hook for millions of pounds to cover cost overruns for venues built specifically for the Games. A decade following the Sydney, Australia Games, venues used for the event are being maintained by taxpayers. Greece spent 5 percent of its gross domestic product monies on the 2006 Athens Games. It took 30 years to pay down the debt on the 1976 Montreal Olympics with all sorts of taxes, including a 17 cent per pack cigarette tax, being assessed for decades long after the closing ceremonies at Montreal's Olympic Stadium. The main stadium for the Beijing Games in 2008 is gone.
Despite all the evidence that the Olympics traveling show is a financial fiasco for host cities and now American TV networks, cities are still going after the Games. There is a question whether Annecy, France has the appropriate funding to remain in the running in the last month leading up to an IOC decision on the 2018 Winter Olympics site. That is the lasting Olympic legacy. A taxpayer draining two-week corporate bazaar that features a few athletic events and cable/satellite TV subscribers facing rising rates because someone has to pay for the television rights for the Games.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.
TUESDAY, 07 JUNE 2011 10:49
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/rio-and-sochi-olympic-games-are-about-to-drive-up-your-cable-tv-bill
The groveling has started.
American media giants are genuflecting in front of International Olympic Committee chief Jacques Rogge and his associates in Lausanne, Switzerland begging them to take their billions of dollars so they can win the television and multiple platform video rights to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia and the 2016 Rio Summer Games.
The media brigade trying to win Rogge and his colleagues hearts are going to raise cable rates if they land the Olympic rights. Someone will have to pay billions for the two week corporate bazaar that happens to feature some sports events.
The IOC wants four billion dollars for the rights which means cable and satellite subscribers will be paying more on their monthly bill because whoever wins the rights will pass the bill onto consumers — whether they watch the games or not on cable TV.
Powerful people including heads of state and those who head up media companies became putty when it comes to business dealings with the International Olympic Committee. In 2009, President Barack Obama was criticized for being unable to move IOC delegates in Copenhagen and landing the 2016 Summer Games for Chicago. The noise crowd (media pundits and Republican operatives) was thoroughly unprepared in the criticism in that they did not know how the IOC works, they just saw Tony Blair lobbying the IOC while he was England's Prime Minister and secure the 2012 Summer Games for London or that Vladimir Putin's bended knee routine helped Sochi, Russia's chances for the 2014 Winter Games.
Sochi got the Games.
Because of Blair, heads of states had to go before the IOC and beg for either the Winter or Summer Games.
The International Olympic Committee, a group that somehow has "earned" permanent observer status at the United Nations, one of two entities with permanent observer status. The Vatican also has permanent observer status. But the International Olympic Committee is not a sovereign state, it just acts like one and powerful people allow them to act like a sovereign state.
Local politicians have created slush funds or have raised taxes to pay down the debt incurred by building huge sports complexes for a two week sporting orgy that has left financial messes behind. American television network executives have filled IOC coffers with billions of dollars, and American corporations have thrown billions to put their logo next to the Olympic rings. Canada changed laws protecting Olympic sponsorship during the lead up to the 2010 Vancouver Games.
The Olympic aura is just too strong for political and business leaders who are attracted to the five interlocking rings like a magnet.
The International Olympic Committee spited women softball players globally by dropping the sport because the Americans women were too good and the IOC could not get Major League Baseball to shut down the season, like the National Hockey League does, and send baseball’s very best players to the Olympics.
The National Hockey League may not send players to compete in the 2014 Sochi Games which might infuriate Rogge and his associates. They want professionals, not amateurs in their little sports orgy. Professionals can be used for cross promotional opportunities and are worth more money to the IOC — money is the IOC's only concern — than unknowns.
At present, the International Softball Federation is trying to figure out how to get the sport reinstated in the 2016 or 2020 Games. One suggestion was to move some of the Summer events indoors to create a bigger winter event but the games must go on in the winter on snow and ice. The International Softball Federation is trying to negotiate in a political maze.
Women softball players only chance on the world stage has been ended because Rogge and his IOC delegates are mad at Major League baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, MLB owners and the former Executive Director of the Major League Baseball Players Association Don Fehr for not seeing it the IOC's way. Selig, the owners and the players just think their little endeavor, Major League Baseball, is more important than
Meanwhile, the IOC which loves to lecture the world about human rights has barred a women's only event from the 2012 Summer Games — softball — because Rogge and his cohorts are still angry with Major League Baseball for not including top players in an ersatz competition for an Olympic Gold Medal in baseball. The IOC awarded the 2008 Summer Games to China despite China's appalling human rights record.
The IOC leaned on the United States Congress to make Major League Baseball change drug policies that were collectively bargained to suit Olympics needs. The IOC didn’t care if baseball players were taking banned substances and some of those banned substances were legal in a number of players home countries like the Dominican Republic and Mexico; the IOC was bigger than Major League Baseball and flexed the group’s collective muscle.
Major League Baseball and the Major League Players Association have separated from the Olympics. Major League Baseball created the "World Baseball Classic", an event that will feature 28 countries in March 2013.
There seems to be just one organization that intimidates the IOC: FIFA, the governing body of football (soccer). Football’s World Cup is a much bigger event than any Olympics, and the IOC knows that. FIFA calls the shots in football, not the IOC.
The Walt Disney Company's ESPN, Comcast's NBCUniversal and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. United States media rights fees from a network TV-cable TV-multiple media platform funds a significant part of the Olympics. In 2010, General Electric's NBC unit lost millions on the two-week event. Yet like sailors on leave, TV executives feel the need to cozy up with their billions to Rogge and his crowd.
There are few global entities with the arrogance of the IOC.
The IOC has a pattern of corruption unmatched by any sports organization in the world. Salt Lake City, Utah won the rights for the 2002 Winter Olympics by bribing various International Olympic Committee delegates.
New York and New Jersey residents should feel very fortunate that London, England won the 2012 Summer Olympics bid. London taxpayers will be on the hook for millions of pounds to cover cost overruns for venues built specifically for the Games. A decade following the Sydney, Australia Games, venues used for the event are being maintained by taxpayers. Greece spent 5 percent of its gross domestic product monies on the 2006 Athens Games. It took 30 years to pay down the debt on the 1976 Montreal Olympics with all sorts of taxes, including a 17 cent per pack cigarette tax, being assessed for decades long after the closing ceremonies at Montreal's Olympic Stadium. The main stadium for the Beijing Games in 2008 is gone.
Despite all the evidence that the Olympics traveling show is a financial fiasco for host cities and now American TV networks, cities are still going after the Games. There is a question whether Annecy, France has the appropriate funding to remain in the running in the last month leading up to an IOC decision on the 2018 Winter Olympics site. That is the lasting Olympic legacy. A taxpayer draining two-week corporate bazaar that features a few athletic events and cable/satellite TV subscribers facing rising rates because someone has to pay for the television rights for the Games.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Bad owners like Time Warner ruin sports
THURSDAY, 02 JUNE 2011 13:35
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/bad-owners-like-time-warner-ruin-sports
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
The sale of the Atlanta Thrashers to a Canadian group of investors who will take the National Hockey League team to Winnipeg, Manitoba is yet another Time Warner failure. The media giant selected the wrong people in Atlanta to buy the company's National Basketball Association Atlanta Hawks, the NHL Thrashers and the lease agreement with the city of Atlanta for the use of the city built arena.
Time Warner officials, like an awful lot of other officials at media companies, in the late 20th century decided that getting bigger was better and buy out other companies. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp bought the Los Angeles Dodgers and attempted what was then called "vertical integration" and bring a sports franchise into the company. Murdoch's thinking or his advisors thinking was to put Dodgers telecasts into the homes of the Pacific Rim countries like Japan.
Murdoch failed and sold the Dodgers to Frank McCourt's group in 2004.
Time Warner ended up with the Atlanta Braves, the Hawks, Thrashers and control of the leases at Atlanta's new baseball stadium and the city arena. Time Warner then merged operations with America Online or AOL.
AOL Time Warner was a financial disaster.
AOL Time Warner got rid of World Championship Wrestling in March 2001 because it just didn't fit in with the corporate culture of the company. AOL Time Warner ditched the CNN's Sports Tonight program soon after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. The show would continue on the CNNSI network which started in 1996. But AOL Time Warner ended that channel in 2002. The Hawks, Thrashers and the arena lease was sold off in 2003. Turner South, a regional cable network that was founded in 1999 and carried Braves, Hawks and Thrashers games was sold off in 2006.
In 2007, the Braves franchise was sold. AOL Time Warner also got rid of its share Comedy Central along with a record label.
The company now known as Time Warner has a long history of getting rid of sports properties. After Murdoch attempted to take over Warner Communications (a Time Warner predecessor) in the early 1980s, the company decided that it no longer was interested in owning the New York Cosmos despite the team's success at the Meadowlands. It can be argued that Warner Communications ruined not only the Cosmos with handing out large contracts to big names but the North American Soccer League as well. Eventually the Cosmos and the NASL folded.
AOL was eventually spun off.
Time Warner has stomped all over Ted Turner's legacy in sports. The Hawks, the Thrashers, the Goodwill games, even a sports show on CNN. Time Warner has destroyed CNN as a legitimate source of news and turned Headline News into something that resembles bad daytime/tabloid television. CNN and Headline News are profitable because of the 1984 federal legislation that created a bundled tier that saved cable channels like CNN, Headline News and ESPN.
It is quite clear that Ted Turner was and remains the most important person in Atlanta sports. He bought the Atlanta Braves and turned the medium market franchise into a national brand thanks to WTBS. Turner hired top notch people to run his sports enterprises, Dr. Harvey Schiller, Jack Kelly, Stan Kasten.
At one time, New Jersey-native Kasten ran the Braves, Hawks and Thrashers.
Turner understood the value of having Braves baseball on WTBS and was mocked by baseball purists for turning Braves baseball into TV programming. Braves baseball games started at 5:05 p.m. on Wednesdays in a television block which served as a prelude to a Wednesday night movie. The Braves, a team out of Atlanta, had a national following and showed others in baseball that baseball was TV programming not just a game. Turner also brought the first Soviet player to the NBA as a part of the back and forth of staging the Goodwill Games.
Turner named the hockey team the Thrashers.
Turner ran a successful enterprise which was run into the ground by a company that got far too big, Time Warner and then AOL Time Warner. The company never replaced the sports people who ran Turner Sports, Dr. Schiller, Kelly, Kasten and a host of others. The only smart thing that AOL Time Warner did was to leave John Schuerholz and Bobby Cox in charge of the Braves but the big money that Ted Turner provided to the club was gone. Today, the Atlanta Braves baseball team is run as a mid market franchise and is no longer "America's Team."
To blame Time Warner for the demise of the Atlanta Thrashers may be a bit of a stretch as the company washed its hand of the team eight years ago. Back in 1997, it was a foregone conclusion that Ted Turner was going to get a National Hockey League expansion team in Atlanta and that Dr. Schiller and Kasten were the kind of people the NHL wanted. Turner had the checkbook to buy a franchise for $80 million, there would be a new arena opening in the city and he could put together a regional cable TV network. There was always a possibility that the NHL could get a cable TV network contract with Turner Sports. He could also get corporate support. But the Time Warner takeover of Turner's company and then the AOL-Time Warner merger ended that.
The AOL Time Warner debacle came under President Bill Clinton's watch. Clinton also signed the 1996 TeleCommunications Act into law, an act that virtually destroyed local radio and ended up created two radio giants—Infinity and Clear Channel—and changed the industry.
Vertical integration failed.
Time Warner's Turner Sports still has some major properties. The NBA on TNT, Major League Baseball on TBS, NASCAR on TNT, NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament on TNT, TBS and TruTV along with ncaa.com, nascar.com,nba.com, pga.com, pgatour.com. Atlanta Braves games are on Peachtree TV but Turner does not produce the games.
Time Warner was an original partner of the Fred Wilpon/New York Mets' SNY regional sports network. But Time Warner got rid of Time Warner Cable in 2009. Time Warner and Time Warner Cable are separate companies and Time Warner Cable has a piece of SNY.
Media companies got bigger and were too big to fail but failed. Time Warner and Clear Channel have been bad stewards of media properties. Time Warner is out of the sports ownership business. Bad owners ruin sports and the guys at Time Warner and then AOL Time Warner whether it was Gerald Levin or Steve Case is at the top of the list of bad sports owners.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.
THURSDAY, 02 JUNE 2011 13:35
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/bad-owners-like-time-warner-ruin-sports
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
The sale of the Atlanta Thrashers to a Canadian group of investors who will take the National Hockey League team to Winnipeg, Manitoba is yet another Time Warner failure. The media giant selected the wrong people in Atlanta to buy the company's National Basketball Association Atlanta Hawks, the NHL Thrashers and the lease agreement with the city of Atlanta for the use of the city built arena.
Time Warner officials, like an awful lot of other officials at media companies, in the late 20th century decided that getting bigger was better and buy out other companies. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp bought the Los Angeles Dodgers and attempted what was then called "vertical integration" and bring a sports franchise into the company. Murdoch's thinking or his advisors thinking was to put Dodgers telecasts into the homes of the Pacific Rim countries like Japan.
Murdoch failed and sold the Dodgers to Frank McCourt's group in 2004.
Time Warner ended up with the Atlanta Braves, the Hawks, Thrashers and control of the leases at Atlanta's new baseball stadium and the city arena. Time Warner then merged operations with America Online or AOL.
AOL Time Warner was a financial disaster.
AOL Time Warner got rid of World Championship Wrestling in March 2001 because it just didn't fit in with the corporate culture of the company. AOL Time Warner ditched the CNN's Sports Tonight program soon after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. The show would continue on the CNNSI network which started in 1996. But AOL Time Warner ended that channel in 2002. The Hawks, Thrashers and the arena lease was sold off in 2003. Turner South, a regional cable network that was founded in 1999 and carried Braves, Hawks and Thrashers games was sold off in 2006.
In 2007, the Braves franchise was sold. AOL Time Warner also got rid of its share Comedy Central along with a record label.
The company now known as Time Warner has a long history of getting rid of sports properties. After Murdoch attempted to take over Warner Communications (a Time Warner predecessor) in the early 1980s, the company decided that it no longer was interested in owning the New York Cosmos despite the team's success at the Meadowlands. It can be argued that Warner Communications ruined not only the Cosmos with handing out large contracts to big names but the North American Soccer League as well. Eventually the Cosmos and the NASL folded.
AOL was eventually spun off.
Time Warner has stomped all over Ted Turner's legacy in sports. The Hawks, the Thrashers, the Goodwill games, even a sports show on CNN. Time Warner has destroyed CNN as a legitimate source of news and turned Headline News into something that resembles bad daytime/tabloid television. CNN and Headline News are profitable because of the 1984 federal legislation that created a bundled tier that saved cable channels like CNN, Headline News and ESPN.
It is quite clear that Ted Turner was and remains the most important person in Atlanta sports. He bought the Atlanta Braves and turned the medium market franchise into a national brand thanks to WTBS. Turner hired top notch people to run his sports enterprises, Dr. Harvey Schiller, Jack Kelly, Stan Kasten.
At one time, New Jersey-native Kasten ran the Braves, Hawks and Thrashers.
Turner understood the value of having Braves baseball on WTBS and was mocked by baseball purists for turning Braves baseball into TV programming. Braves baseball games started at 5:05 p.m. on Wednesdays in a television block which served as a prelude to a Wednesday night movie. The Braves, a team out of Atlanta, had a national following and showed others in baseball that baseball was TV programming not just a game. Turner also brought the first Soviet player to the NBA as a part of the back and forth of staging the Goodwill Games.
Turner named the hockey team the Thrashers.
Turner ran a successful enterprise which was run into the ground by a company that got far too big, Time Warner and then AOL Time Warner. The company never replaced the sports people who ran Turner Sports, Dr. Schiller, Kelly, Kasten and a host of others. The only smart thing that AOL Time Warner did was to leave John Schuerholz and Bobby Cox in charge of the Braves but the big money that Ted Turner provided to the club was gone. Today, the Atlanta Braves baseball team is run as a mid market franchise and is no longer "America's Team."
To blame Time Warner for the demise of the Atlanta Thrashers may be a bit of a stretch as the company washed its hand of the team eight years ago. Back in 1997, it was a foregone conclusion that Ted Turner was going to get a National Hockey League expansion team in Atlanta and that Dr. Schiller and Kasten were the kind of people the NHL wanted. Turner had the checkbook to buy a franchise for $80 million, there would be a new arena opening in the city and he could put together a regional cable TV network. There was always a possibility that the NHL could get a cable TV network contract with Turner Sports. He could also get corporate support. But the Time Warner takeover of Turner's company and then the AOL-Time Warner merger ended that.
The AOL Time Warner debacle came under President Bill Clinton's watch. Clinton also signed the 1996 TeleCommunications Act into law, an act that virtually destroyed local radio and ended up created two radio giants—Infinity and Clear Channel—and changed the industry.
Vertical integration failed.
Time Warner's Turner Sports still has some major properties. The NBA on TNT, Major League Baseball on TBS, NASCAR on TNT, NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament on TNT, TBS and TruTV along with ncaa.com, nascar.com,nba.com, pga.com, pgatour.com. Atlanta Braves games are on Peachtree TV but Turner does not produce the games.
Time Warner was an original partner of the Fred Wilpon/New York Mets' SNY regional sports network. But Time Warner got rid of Time Warner Cable in 2009. Time Warner and Time Warner Cable are separate companies and Time Warner Cable has a piece of SNY.
Media companies got bigger and were too big to fail but failed. Time Warner and Clear Channel have been bad stewards of media properties. Time Warner is out of the sports ownership business. Bad owners ruin sports and the guys at Time Warner and then AOL Time Warner whether it was Gerald Levin or Steve Case is at the top of the list of bad sports owners.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Will the NBA become a 'fly over' league?
TUESDAY, 31 MAY 2011 14:28
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/will-the-nba-become-a-fly-over-league
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
The NBA Champion Final series is one of the National Basketball Association’s crown jewel events but behind the glitz and glamour of the competition is a real question that no one wants to discuss. Is the NBA in danger of becoming what Louisville lawyer and player agent Bruce Miller calls a fly over league?
A fly over league is a term that needs to be defined.
This seems to be the best definition. The NBA may become a league of just major cities with three teams in New York – Manhattan’s Knicks, Brooklyn’s Nets and a small market team moving to Newark. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has already told NBA Commissioner David Stern that Newark is open for NBA business as soon as the Nets franchise moves over to Brooklyn. New Jersey Devils owner Jeffrey Vanderbeek wants an NBA team in his Newark building. Three teams in the Los Angeles area, two teams in the San Francisco Bay Area
The Sacramento Kings owners, the Maloof brothers, have toyed with the idea of moving their franchise to Anaheim to give Los Angeles three teams, the Lakers and Clippers along with the proposed Anaheim Royals. Sacramento officials are scrambling to find hundreds of millions of dollars to build the Maloofs a new arena despite proposed layoffs of municipal workers along with the shut downs of public parks and scaling back of educational opportunities from kindergarten through 12th grade.
Anaheim doesn’t have an NBA team because city officials gave the lion’s share of the Anaheim arena revenues to the Walt Disney Company when Disney signed a deal to put a National Hockey League expansion team in the building. There weren’t enough revenues left over for Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling to move his team from the Los Angeles Sports Arena to Anaheim. That is why Anaheim lost an NBA team.
Priorities are priorities for a small market franchise that cannot keep up with the Knicks, Lakers and other large market teams.
National Basketball Association owners and players do not have a collective bargaining agreement after June 30th. The National Basketball Players Association has already filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board claiming that NBA owners are not negotiating in good faith.
NBA owners want to roll back salaries and there is a claim that as many as 22 of the 30 franchises are losing copious amounts of money.
Newark officials want to replace the Nets. San Jose is looking for an NBA. The NBA owns the New Orleans Hornets franchise; Wisconsin Senator Herb Kohl is not running for re-election and owns the Milwaukee Bucks, a franchise looking for a new facility. The Indiana Pacers franchise is heavily subsidized by local taxpayers in Indianapolis and surrounding areas. The very successful on court Oklahoma City Thunder franchise is also very heavily subsidized by Oklahoma City taxpayers.
That franchise was in Seattle until a few years ago when local elected officials decided not to build a new arena for the team. The then SuperSonics owners squeezed every last nickel they could out of Oklahoma City and state politicians.
This is the NBA today.
Miller is charge of an effort to bring the NBA to Louisville. The Kentucky market is small yet it is basketball crazy. The state has two “professional” basketball franchises already – the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville – but the city has not had a “big league” team since the American Basketball Association folded in 1976 and the Louisville Colonels owner John Y. Brown took some NBA cash and left the world of basketball.
Brown returned to pro basketball after in 1976 when he purchased a piece of the NBA’s Buffalo Braves.
Louisville started seeking an NBA franchise about 10 years ago but struck out in efforts to land George Shinn’s Charlotte Hornets, Michael Heisley’s Vancouver Grizzlies and Leslie Alexander’s Houston Rockets. Shinn moved his team to New Orleans (which is a financial disaster), Heisley went to Memphis (another fiscal problem) and Alexander stayed in Houston.
Miller isn’t doing a whole of lobbying for an NBA team at the moment. No one is going to sink $300 million into a small market team without knowing what the new Collective Bargaining Agreement looks like.
Could Louisville work? Under the right set of circumstances, yes. But it has to start with NBA owners increasing revenue sharing between the large market Knicks and Lakers and the ownerless New Orleans, Milwaukee, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, Indianapolis and other small market franchises.
Will the Knicks Jim Dolan and the Lakers Jim Buss (the Lakers scored a huge deal with Time Warner Cable to form a Lakers regional cable station in English and in Spanish starting in 2012) to share revenues? One of the major coups of Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig’s career was getting New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner to give up some of his dollars in a revenue sharing scheme. Can David Stern, who really has never been very successful in twist the arms of Buss and Dolan to give up some of their dollars to help the smaller markets.
The NBA plans to manufacture what 2008 Republican Presidential candidate John McCain denounced. He claimed Barack Obama wanted to redistribute the wealth of the country.
NBA owners want a shift in wealth the in the business.
McCain, of course, was using a new campaign slogan but Stern and small market owners have been after a shift in wealth for four years now. Mainly the owners want to stop paying the playing enormous salaries over a long term commitment. A lot of players are not as productive as owners and general managers projected and a lot of contracts are bad investments on the court.
The National Basketball Players Association should not be in the business of protecting owners from a bad investment. The NBPA already gave the NBA owners a huge concession in the last go around for a CBA by agreeing to bar players just out of high school and high school graduates from applying for a job as a player in the league.
NBA Commissioner David Stern came up with flimsy excuses which included that he didn’t want to see NBA scouts at high school games. Does that clean up the high school game?
No.
The real reason Stern and his owners didn’t want 18-year-old out of high school players was simple. Why pay for research and development when you have a college willing to do just that? By getting a 19-year-old instead of an 18-year old, you have a more finished product and more importantly, a contract renewal comes at 22 or 23 years of age not 21 when a player still has a perceived upside.
Jermaine O’Neal was a total bust with Portland after getting millions from ownership as the 17th player picked in the 1996 draft. He cost Paul Allen a lot of money and did nothing for Allen’s Trail Blazers franchise. Allen though stuck with him and at 21 offered O’Neal a huge contract. O’Neal’s second contract was big but his playing time wasn’t and he languished costing Allen millions.
Portland traded him to Indiana where he flourished. Had O’Neal been in college, Allen would have invested his money in another player. Allen, under today’s CBA, would have been protected against a bad investment because O’Neal would not have come into the league at 18 and qualify for a new contract at 21. Players second contracts come at 22 or 23.
If the NBA owners don’t get rollbacks, Miller’s job of trying to get an NBA team in Louisville will be difficult. The league has not given up on New Orleans yet and is looking for a person who has an interest in keeping the team in New Orleans. The Sacramento arena deal has not been fully explained but the league is committed to remain there through spring 2012. Of course if the owners lock out the players and there is a long work stoppage, it doesn’t matter what will happen in New Orleans and Sacramento in 2011-12.
The new CBA may very well determine whether the NBA becomes a fly over league or not. Charlotte, Memphis, Oklahoma City, San Antonio, Sacramento, Portland, Orlando, New Orleans, Indianapolis, Cleveland and Denver may become fly over cities in the NBA owners minds if they don’t get what they want in the new collective bargaining agreement. The players? They just want status quo.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, “The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition” is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.
TUESDAY, 31 MAY 2011 14:28
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/will-the-nba-become-a-fly-over-league
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
The NBA Champion Final series is one of the National Basketball Association’s crown jewel events but behind the glitz and glamour of the competition is a real question that no one wants to discuss. Is the NBA in danger of becoming what Louisville lawyer and player agent Bruce Miller calls a fly over league?
A fly over league is a term that needs to be defined.
This seems to be the best definition. The NBA may become a league of just major cities with three teams in New York – Manhattan’s Knicks, Brooklyn’s Nets and a small market team moving to Newark. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has already told NBA Commissioner David Stern that Newark is open for NBA business as soon as the Nets franchise moves over to Brooklyn. New Jersey Devils owner Jeffrey Vanderbeek wants an NBA team in his Newark building. Three teams in the Los Angeles area, two teams in the San Francisco Bay Area
The Sacramento Kings owners, the Maloof brothers, have toyed with the idea of moving their franchise to Anaheim to give Los Angeles three teams, the Lakers and Clippers along with the proposed Anaheim Royals. Sacramento officials are scrambling to find hundreds of millions of dollars to build the Maloofs a new arena despite proposed layoffs of municipal workers along with the shut downs of public parks and scaling back of educational opportunities from kindergarten through 12th grade.
Anaheim doesn’t have an NBA team because city officials gave the lion’s share of the Anaheim arena revenues to the Walt Disney Company when Disney signed a deal to put a National Hockey League expansion team in the building. There weren’t enough revenues left over for Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling to move his team from the Los Angeles Sports Arena to Anaheim. That is why Anaheim lost an NBA team.
Priorities are priorities for a small market franchise that cannot keep up with the Knicks, Lakers and other large market teams.
National Basketball Association owners and players do not have a collective bargaining agreement after June 30th. The National Basketball Players Association has already filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board claiming that NBA owners are not negotiating in good faith.
NBA owners want to roll back salaries and there is a claim that as many as 22 of the 30 franchises are losing copious amounts of money.
Newark officials want to replace the Nets. San Jose is looking for an NBA. The NBA owns the New Orleans Hornets franchise; Wisconsin Senator Herb Kohl is not running for re-election and owns the Milwaukee Bucks, a franchise looking for a new facility. The Indiana Pacers franchise is heavily subsidized by local taxpayers in Indianapolis and surrounding areas. The very successful on court Oklahoma City Thunder franchise is also very heavily subsidized by Oklahoma City taxpayers.
That franchise was in Seattle until a few years ago when local elected officials decided not to build a new arena for the team. The then SuperSonics owners squeezed every last nickel they could out of Oklahoma City and state politicians.
This is the NBA today.
Miller is charge of an effort to bring the NBA to Louisville. The Kentucky market is small yet it is basketball crazy. The state has two “professional” basketball franchises already – the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville – but the city has not had a “big league” team since the American Basketball Association folded in 1976 and the Louisville Colonels owner John Y. Brown took some NBA cash and left the world of basketball.
Brown returned to pro basketball after in 1976 when he purchased a piece of the NBA’s Buffalo Braves.
Louisville started seeking an NBA franchise about 10 years ago but struck out in efforts to land George Shinn’s Charlotte Hornets, Michael Heisley’s Vancouver Grizzlies and Leslie Alexander’s Houston Rockets. Shinn moved his team to New Orleans (which is a financial disaster), Heisley went to Memphis (another fiscal problem) and Alexander stayed in Houston.
Miller isn’t doing a whole of lobbying for an NBA team at the moment. No one is going to sink $300 million into a small market team without knowing what the new Collective Bargaining Agreement looks like.
Could Louisville work? Under the right set of circumstances, yes. But it has to start with NBA owners increasing revenue sharing between the large market Knicks and Lakers and the ownerless New Orleans, Milwaukee, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, Indianapolis and other small market franchises.
Will the Knicks Jim Dolan and the Lakers Jim Buss (the Lakers scored a huge deal with Time Warner Cable to form a Lakers regional cable station in English and in Spanish starting in 2012) to share revenues? One of the major coups of Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig’s career was getting New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner to give up some of his dollars in a revenue sharing scheme. Can David Stern, who really has never been very successful in twist the arms of Buss and Dolan to give up some of their dollars to help the smaller markets.
The NBA plans to manufacture what 2008 Republican Presidential candidate John McCain denounced. He claimed Barack Obama wanted to redistribute the wealth of the country.
NBA owners want a shift in wealth the in the business.
McCain, of course, was using a new campaign slogan but Stern and small market owners have been after a shift in wealth for four years now. Mainly the owners want to stop paying the playing enormous salaries over a long term commitment. A lot of players are not as productive as owners and general managers projected and a lot of contracts are bad investments on the court.
The National Basketball Players Association should not be in the business of protecting owners from a bad investment. The NBPA already gave the NBA owners a huge concession in the last go around for a CBA by agreeing to bar players just out of high school and high school graduates from applying for a job as a player in the league.
NBA Commissioner David Stern came up with flimsy excuses which included that he didn’t want to see NBA scouts at high school games. Does that clean up the high school game?
No.
The real reason Stern and his owners didn’t want 18-year-old out of high school players was simple. Why pay for research and development when you have a college willing to do just that? By getting a 19-year-old instead of an 18-year old, you have a more finished product and more importantly, a contract renewal comes at 22 or 23 years of age not 21 when a player still has a perceived upside.
Jermaine O’Neal was a total bust with Portland after getting millions from ownership as the 17th player picked in the 1996 draft. He cost Paul Allen a lot of money and did nothing for Allen’s Trail Blazers franchise. Allen though stuck with him and at 21 offered O’Neal a huge contract. O’Neal’s second contract was big but his playing time wasn’t and he languished costing Allen millions.
Portland traded him to Indiana where he flourished. Had O’Neal been in college, Allen would have invested his money in another player. Allen, under today’s CBA, would have been protected against a bad investment because O’Neal would not have come into the league at 18 and qualify for a new contract at 21. Players second contracts come at 22 or 23.
If the NBA owners don’t get rollbacks, Miller’s job of trying to get an NBA team in Louisville will be difficult. The league has not given up on New Orleans yet and is looking for a person who has an interest in keeping the team in New Orleans. The Sacramento arena deal has not been fully explained but the league is committed to remain there through spring 2012. Of course if the owners lock out the players and there is a long work stoppage, it doesn’t matter what will happen in New Orleans and Sacramento in 2011-12.
The new CBA may very well determine whether the NBA becomes a fly over league or not. Charlotte, Memphis, Oklahoma City, San Antonio, Sacramento, Portland, Orlando, New Orleans, Indianapolis, Cleveland and Denver may become fly over cities in the NBA owners minds if they don’t get what they want in the new collective bargaining agreement. The players? They just want status quo.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, “The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition” is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
NFL lockout, failure of Atlanta Thrashers, and other sports struggles can be blamed on Ronald Reagan
WEDNESDAY, 25 MAY 2011 08:29
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/nfl-lockout-failure-of-atlanta-thrashers-and-other-sports-struggles-can-be-blamed-on-ronald-reagan
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
If and when the Atlanta Thrashers National Hockey League franchise is sold and moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, there will be those who will analyze the failure of the business to catch on in Georgia. Yes, the Thrashers ownership was bad, and there is enough evidence to completely convict the ownership of being thoroughly incompetent as a court proceeding proved.
But it is far more than just bad ownership that doomed the Atlanta Thrashers franchise and after a quarter of a century it is time to place the finger of blame on the real culprit on the potential Thrashers move along with the National Football League lockout, the potential National Basketball Association lockout and the struggles of various franchises to succeed economically in the sports arena.
It was the 99th Congress that revised the 1986 tax code and President Ronald Reagan who signed those changes into law.
A good number of cities should never have had "major league" sports franchises but those cities decided to go into the sports business by building stadiums and arenas and handing out leases to owners that became an albatross around the necks of taxpayers.
The smaller market cities went after teams to show other businesses that their city was a great area for business. Memphis, Nashville, Jacksonville and other smaller towns all of a sudden became big league and paid handsomely for the “title."
The 1986 tax code revision redistributed the wealth and shifted the burden of paying for new facilities from team owners to taxpayers. Only eight cents of every dollar generated in new facilities could go to pay down the debt of the municipally built facility unless a local government got tough and negotiated a better deal.
In most cities, the local governments who were so desperate to build "major league" structures rolled over and gave owners whatever they wanted in an attempt to be "major league" and forced all sorts of tax hikes on local residents. The stadiums and arenas were peddled to voters as "economic engines" that would provide first construction jobs then build up an area. Local residents who had to vote on the expenditure were told that they would pay nothing (in some cities) that the money would come from hikes in hotel and motel taxes and car rentals. Other tax hikes were imposed on beer, alcohol, cigarettes, cigars, tobacco, water, sewer and a general sales tax hike to fund facilities. There were breaks given on property tax payments (the combined Giants-Jets real estate holding pays East Rutherford, NJ about $6 million a year in combined rent and taxes on the Meadowlands facility on a property that is probably worth about $13 million a year on the tax roll.)
Sports owners jumped on the 1986 Congressional act which Ronald Reagan approved. This is what the change in the tax code has brought. A 2011 NFL Lockout, the probable move of the Atlanta hockey team to Winnipeg, the Glendale, Arizona government paying the National Hockey League $25 million to keep a franchise in the city, the delay of a move of the National Basketball Association's Sacramento Kings to Anaheim, California until cash-poor Sacramento along with other local governments in the area find an arena funding formula. The move of the New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn has New York City and New York State politicians fingerprints all over it. The building will be heavily subsidized by New York taxpayers as are the new Yankees Stadium, the Mets ballpark in Flushing (complete with the logos of the taxpayers bailed out corporate sponsor--Citibank) and New Jersey kicked in well over $300 million for infrastructure for the Giants-Jets new stadium. New Jersey still owes hundreds of millions of dollars in paying down the debt at the departed Giants Stadium. New Jersey is not alone in paying for sports facilities that were blown up. Pittsburgh was paying off the debt at Three Rivers Stadium for years, Seattle and King County will be paying off the bonds on the long gone Kingdome until 2014. Those stadiums were replaced after the changes in the 1986 tax code.
The NFL lockout's roots can be directly traced to Ronald Reagan's signature in 1986. It is no coincidence that the majority of NFL cities built new venues after the 1986 legislation. As more and more stadiums were opening on the public dime, revenues kept rising. By the late 1990s, the New Orleans Saints ownership claimed it could no longer compete in the NFL unless they got a new stadium in the city because the team no longer was in the top of the NFL in stadium revenues and fell to the bottom.
Eventually the state of Louisiana came up with a $186.5 million deal to satisfy the owner, Tom Benson, and handed him direct checks every July 1 between 2002 and 2010 to make him happy and keep the team in town. As far as anyone could tell, it was the first time a state gave money to a team. New York State gives $3 million annually to make Ralph Wilson elated in Orchard Park, New York. Indianapolis virtually gives away the new football facility and all of the revenues generated inside the place to Colts owner Jim Irsay. Small market owners need help from governments.
In places like Cincinnati, the local government has to take money from other services to pay down the debt at the football stadium. The new stadiums have helped the owners but in cities like Minneapolis, Oakland and San Diego where the stadiums are old (although renovated in Oakland and San Diego) and cannot produce the revenues that are found in Arlington, Texas (Dallas Cowboys), East Rutherford, Philadelphia, Houston, Foxboro and Washington (Landover, Maryland) and that has hurt the franchises in Minneapolis, San Diego and Oakland. Those teams cannot keep up with the salary floor as NFL revenues rose. The old stadium franchises cannot keep up with the Joneses, Maras-Tischs, Johnsons, Krafts, Snyders, Laniers and the other big boys in revenues.
The NFL lockout is designed to help the old stadium owners who don't have the revenue sources in the local market that new stadium owners have. That's the whole reason behind the NFL lockout strategy. It's not a difficult concept to grasp even though the league and players continue to slug it out in the judicial system. The NFL has been reluctant to spell out the real reason it has locked out the players. They need taxpayers dollars to fix the problem in Minneapolis, Oakland, San Diego, San Francisco (Santa Clara) possibly Buffalo and certainly in Los Angeles and it is a tough sell for the prosperous NFL to beg for tax dollars to build stadiums to help the lower revenue teams. But the league needs taxpayers dollars to make everyone equal.
The National Hockey League came up with a grand plan to expand the business in 1990 from 21 franchises to 30 with most of the nine franchises to take root in the United States. The expansion scheme was hatched long before Gary Bettman became National Hockey League commissioner, something that seems to be conveniently forgotten by sportswriters who don't have any understanding of business and politics and sports.
The official line was the NHL needed to expand their United States footprint for television purposes and the unofficial line was that Wayne Gretzky popularized the NHL because he was in Los Angeles and attracted the Hollywood crowd to Los Angeles Kings games. But the truth was that cities were building arenas and ready to give away the house in exchange for a franchise. In Anaheim, the Walt Disney Company decided to capitalize on the success of the Mighty Ducks movie franchise and bought a team from the league after securing a sweetheart lease in the new Anaheim arena. Disney ended up with everything at the arena and apparently would not share revenues with say Donald Sterling and his National Basketball Association Clippers. Sterling and other potential NBA owners could not get into Anaheim because there was not enough money available for an NBA team to be financially successful thanks to the Disney lease.
Before Bettman got to the NHL, the league split the Minnesota North Stars franchise with some players staying in Bloomington, Minnesota and the rest ended up with an expansion team in San Jose although the franchise started at the Cow Palace in Daly City south of San Franchise. The league expanded into Ottawa and Tampa and then Anaheim and Miami. The NHL owners began splitting a lot of money, $50 million per new franchise. Bettman joined when they league had 26 teams. Bettman came into the league in 1993 when Norman Green was attempting to move his Minnesota North Stars franchise to either Anaheim or Dallas. Green moved to Dallas. In 1995, Quebec City officials refused to provide funding for a new arena and the franchise moved to Denver. Winnipeg officials did not build a new arena and the Winnipeg Jets franchise ended up in Phoenix in a poor conceived arena that was built to satisfy Phoenix Suns owner Jerry Colangelo need for a new basketball arena for his team. The facility was built in such a way that it had thousands of obstructed seats making it unusable for anything but basketball.
In 1997, the NHL expanded to planned new buildings in Nashville and Atlanta (two cities that could hardly be called hockey mad cities), along with St. Paul, Minnesota and Columbus. St. Paul Mayor Norman Coleman pushed heavily to build a taxpayers subsidized arena in St. Paul while private money was found to build a venue in Columbus, Ohio. Also in 1997, Hartford Whalers owner Peter Karmanos moved his franchise to Raleigh, North Carolina. That deal also came with Karmanos promising to move a piece of his Compuware business to the Raleigh area. Connecticut Governor John Rowland was too busy trying to get Robert Kraft to move his New England Patriots NFL franchise to Hartford. Kraft listened said yes and then got a deal in Massachusetts abandoning Rowland.
The NHL expansion gave owners $450 million which was split between 21 owners. That was not Gary Bettman's plan but it was the NHL's business plan was developed by league owners in 1990.
The NBA added four franchises after Reagan changed the tax code but those arenas in Orlando, Charlotte, Miami and Minneapolis were online prior to the change in the law. All four cities became problems for NBA Commissioner David Stern and the league. The buildings were not state of the art 21st century buildings as they were designed in the 1980s. Orlando, Charlotte and Miami didn't have the real revenue producers, club seats and luxury boxes for corporate customers. All three cities replaced arenas that were 20 year old or less. Minneapolis's building was funded by private money---which nearly snuck the franchise---and by the mid 1990s the building was taken over by the government.
The NBA lockout of 2011 will be caused by reckless spending. The NBA went into markets that cannot compete with New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and other large markets without a real revenue sharing plan. Those markets will never have had franchises without the Reagan signature. Memphis, Charlotte, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City, San Antonio have teams because of new arenas, Seattle lost a team because local politicians would not spend money for a new build some 12 years after renovating the city's arena bringing the building up to 1990s standards. Despite giving all the revenues away at the arena in Indianapolis, Pacers owner Herb Simon may eventually move his team. Indianapolis cannot make money even though the city has given away the building.
Major League Baseball went through the same dance. New stadiums, great leases and broken promises of stadiums being an economic engine.
Major League Soccer owners learned their lessons well as they sold local politicians on the benefits of new stadiums starting with the failed economic engine theory.
The NHL is still playing the arena game. Charles Wang's New York Islanders franchise needs a new building and Nassau County voters will be asked on August 1 to sell bonds for a building. Edmonton is seeking a new arena, Columbus wants the city to take over the building, and Calgary is looking for a new building. Major League Baseball wants new venues for the Tampa Bay Rays and Oakland A's. The NBA could become a league with three New York area teams, three Los Angeles area franchises and two franchises in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Taxpayers are on the hook for billions thanks to Ronald Reagan's signature. Reagan supporters and apologists will probably try to debunk the impact of the 1986 tax code changes on sports. It would be a futile argument. There is plenty of blame to go around starting with the House and then the Senate. Two Senators, New York's Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat, and then Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania (before he switched parties) tried to close the 92 percent loophole in the tax code but to no avail.
Reagan and Congress changed sports in 1986. A quarter of a century later the impact is astounding. The NFL lockout, the NBA lockout, the Sacramento arena problems, the Glendale subsidies, the Louisiana subsidies which continue to this day for Benson's NFL Saints and the NBA Hornets, Nassau County's vote, the Atlanta relocation, baseball's "Bay" problems in St. Petersburg and Oakland. It goes on and on with no relief in sight for sports fans.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.
WEDNESDAY, 25 MAY 2011 08:29
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/nfl-lockout-failure-of-atlanta-thrashers-and-other-sports-struggles-can-be-blamed-on-ronald-reagan
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
If and when the Atlanta Thrashers National Hockey League franchise is sold and moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, there will be those who will analyze the failure of the business to catch on in Georgia. Yes, the Thrashers ownership was bad, and there is enough evidence to completely convict the ownership of being thoroughly incompetent as a court proceeding proved.
But it is far more than just bad ownership that doomed the Atlanta Thrashers franchise and after a quarter of a century it is time to place the finger of blame on the real culprit on the potential Thrashers move along with the National Football League lockout, the potential National Basketball Association lockout and the struggles of various franchises to succeed economically in the sports arena.
It was the 99th Congress that revised the 1986 tax code and President Ronald Reagan who signed those changes into law.
A good number of cities should never have had "major league" sports franchises but those cities decided to go into the sports business by building stadiums and arenas and handing out leases to owners that became an albatross around the necks of taxpayers.
The smaller market cities went after teams to show other businesses that their city was a great area for business. Memphis, Nashville, Jacksonville and other smaller towns all of a sudden became big league and paid handsomely for the “title."
The 1986 tax code revision redistributed the wealth and shifted the burden of paying for new facilities from team owners to taxpayers. Only eight cents of every dollar generated in new facilities could go to pay down the debt of the municipally built facility unless a local government got tough and negotiated a better deal.
In most cities, the local governments who were so desperate to build "major league" structures rolled over and gave owners whatever they wanted in an attempt to be "major league" and forced all sorts of tax hikes on local residents. The stadiums and arenas were peddled to voters as "economic engines" that would provide first construction jobs then build up an area. Local residents who had to vote on the expenditure were told that they would pay nothing (in some cities) that the money would come from hikes in hotel and motel taxes and car rentals. Other tax hikes were imposed on beer, alcohol, cigarettes, cigars, tobacco, water, sewer and a general sales tax hike to fund facilities. There were breaks given on property tax payments (the combined Giants-Jets real estate holding pays East Rutherford, NJ about $6 million a year in combined rent and taxes on the Meadowlands facility on a property that is probably worth about $13 million a year on the tax roll.)
Sports owners jumped on the 1986 Congressional act which Ronald Reagan approved. This is what the change in the tax code has brought. A 2011 NFL Lockout, the probable move of the Atlanta hockey team to Winnipeg, the Glendale, Arizona government paying the National Hockey League $25 million to keep a franchise in the city, the delay of a move of the National Basketball Association's Sacramento Kings to Anaheim, California until cash-poor Sacramento along with other local governments in the area find an arena funding formula. The move of the New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn has New York City and New York State politicians fingerprints all over it. The building will be heavily subsidized by New York taxpayers as are the new Yankees Stadium, the Mets ballpark in Flushing (complete with the logos of the taxpayers bailed out corporate sponsor--Citibank) and New Jersey kicked in well over $300 million for infrastructure for the Giants-Jets new stadium. New Jersey still owes hundreds of millions of dollars in paying down the debt at the departed Giants Stadium. New Jersey is not alone in paying for sports facilities that were blown up. Pittsburgh was paying off the debt at Three Rivers Stadium for years, Seattle and King County will be paying off the bonds on the long gone Kingdome until 2014. Those stadiums were replaced after the changes in the 1986 tax code.
The NFL lockout's roots can be directly traced to Ronald Reagan's signature in 1986. It is no coincidence that the majority of NFL cities built new venues after the 1986 legislation. As more and more stadiums were opening on the public dime, revenues kept rising. By the late 1990s, the New Orleans Saints ownership claimed it could no longer compete in the NFL unless they got a new stadium in the city because the team no longer was in the top of the NFL in stadium revenues and fell to the bottom.
Eventually the state of Louisiana came up with a $186.5 million deal to satisfy the owner, Tom Benson, and handed him direct checks every July 1 between 2002 and 2010 to make him happy and keep the team in town. As far as anyone could tell, it was the first time a state gave money to a team. New York State gives $3 million annually to make Ralph Wilson elated in Orchard Park, New York. Indianapolis virtually gives away the new football facility and all of the revenues generated inside the place to Colts owner Jim Irsay. Small market owners need help from governments.
In places like Cincinnati, the local government has to take money from other services to pay down the debt at the football stadium. The new stadiums have helped the owners but in cities like Minneapolis, Oakland and San Diego where the stadiums are old (although renovated in Oakland and San Diego) and cannot produce the revenues that are found in Arlington, Texas (Dallas Cowboys), East Rutherford, Philadelphia, Houston, Foxboro and Washington (Landover, Maryland) and that has hurt the franchises in Minneapolis, San Diego and Oakland. Those teams cannot keep up with the salary floor as NFL revenues rose. The old stadium franchises cannot keep up with the Joneses, Maras-Tischs, Johnsons, Krafts, Snyders, Laniers and the other big boys in revenues.
The NFL lockout is designed to help the old stadium owners who don't have the revenue sources in the local market that new stadium owners have. That's the whole reason behind the NFL lockout strategy. It's not a difficult concept to grasp even though the league and players continue to slug it out in the judicial system. The NFL has been reluctant to spell out the real reason it has locked out the players. They need taxpayers dollars to fix the problem in Minneapolis, Oakland, San Diego, San Francisco (Santa Clara) possibly Buffalo and certainly in Los Angeles and it is a tough sell for the prosperous NFL to beg for tax dollars to build stadiums to help the lower revenue teams. But the league needs taxpayers dollars to make everyone equal.
The National Hockey League came up with a grand plan to expand the business in 1990 from 21 franchises to 30 with most of the nine franchises to take root in the United States. The expansion scheme was hatched long before Gary Bettman became National Hockey League commissioner, something that seems to be conveniently forgotten by sportswriters who don't have any understanding of business and politics and sports.
The official line was the NHL needed to expand their United States footprint for television purposes and the unofficial line was that Wayne Gretzky popularized the NHL because he was in Los Angeles and attracted the Hollywood crowd to Los Angeles Kings games. But the truth was that cities were building arenas and ready to give away the house in exchange for a franchise. In Anaheim, the Walt Disney Company decided to capitalize on the success of the Mighty Ducks movie franchise and bought a team from the league after securing a sweetheart lease in the new Anaheim arena. Disney ended up with everything at the arena and apparently would not share revenues with say Donald Sterling and his National Basketball Association Clippers. Sterling and other potential NBA owners could not get into Anaheim because there was not enough money available for an NBA team to be financially successful thanks to the Disney lease.
Before Bettman got to the NHL, the league split the Minnesota North Stars franchise with some players staying in Bloomington, Minnesota and the rest ended up with an expansion team in San Jose although the franchise started at the Cow Palace in Daly City south of San Franchise. The league expanded into Ottawa and Tampa and then Anaheim and Miami. The NHL owners began splitting a lot of money, $50 million per new franchise. Bettman joined when they league had 26 teams. Bettman came into the league in 1993 when Norman Green was attempting to move his Minnesota North Stars franchise to either Anaheim or Dallas. Green moved to Dallas. In 1995, Quebec City officials refused to provide funding for a new arena and the franchise moved to Denver. Winnipeg officials did not build a new arena and the Winnipeg Jets franchise ended up in Phoenix in a poor conceived arena that was built to satisfy Phoenix Suns owner Jerry Colangelo need for a new basketball arena for his team. The facility was built in such a way that it had thousands of obstructed seats making it unusable for anything but basketball.
In 1997, the NHL expanded to planned new buildings in Nashville and Atlanta (two cities that could hardly be called hockey mad cities), along with St. Paul, Minnesota and Columbus. St. Paul Mayor Norman Coleman pushed heavily to build a taxpayers subsidized arena in St. Paul while private money was found to build a venue in Columbus, Ohio. Also in 1997, Hartford Whalers owner Peter Karmanos moved his franchise to Raleigh, North Carolina. That deal also came with Karmanos promising to move a piece of his Compuware business to the Raleigh area. Connecticut Governor John Rowland was too busy trying to get Robert Kraft to move his New England Patriots NFL franchise to Hartford. Kraft listened said yes and then got a deal in Massachusetts abandoning Rowland.
The NHL expansion gave owners $450 million which was split between 21 owners. That was not Gary Bettman's plan but it was the NHL's business plan was developed by league owners in 1990.
The NBA added four franchises after Reagan changed the tax code but those arenas in Orlando, Charlotte, Miami and Minneapolis were online prior to the change in the law. All four cities became problems for NBA Commissioner David Stern and the league. The buildings were not state of the art 21st century buildings as they were designed in the 1980s. Orlando, Charlotte and Miami didn't have the real revenue producers, club seats and luxury boxes for corporate customers. All three cities replaced arenas that were 20 year old or less. Minneapolis's building was funded by private money---which nearly snuck the franchise---and by the mid 1990s the building was taken over by the government.
The NBA lockout of 2011 will be caused by reckless spending. The NBA went into markets that cannot compete with New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and other large markets without a real revenue sharing plan. Those markets will never have had franchises without the Reagan signature. Memphis, Charlotte, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City, San Antonio have teams because of new arenas, Seattle lost a team because local politicians would not spend money for a new build some 12 years after renovating the city's arena bringing the building up to 1990s standards. Despite giving all the revenues away at the arena in Indianapolis, Pacers owner Herb Simon may eventually move his team. Indianapolis cannot make money even though the city has given away the building.
Major League Baseball went through the same dance. New stadiums, great leases and broken promises of stadiums being an economic engine.
Major League Soccer owners learned their lessons well as they sold local politicians on the benefits of new stadiums starting with the failed economic engine theory.
The NHL is still playing the arena game. Charles Wang's New York Islanders franchise needs a new building and Nassau County voters will be asked on August 1 to sell bonds for a building. Edmonton is seeking a new arena, Columbus wants the city to take over the building, and Calgary is looking for a new building. Major League Baseball wants new venues for the Tampa Bay Rays and Oakland A's. The NBA could become a league with three New York area teams, three Los Angeles area franchises and two franchises in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Taxpayers are on the hook for billions thanks to Ronald Reagan's signature. Reagan supporters and apologists will probably try to debunk the impact of the 1986 tax code changes on sports. It would be a futile argument. There is plenty of blame to go around starting with the House and then the Senate. Two Senators, New York's Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat, and then Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania (before he switched parties) tried to close the 92 percent loophole in the tax code but to no avail.
Reagan and Congress changed sports in 1986. A quarter of a century later the impact is astounding. The NFL lockout, the NBA lockout, the Sacramento arena problems, the Glendale subsidies, the Louisiana subsidies which continue to this day for Benson's NFL Saints and the NBA Hornets, Nassau County's vote, the Atlanta relocation, baseball's "Bay" problems in St. Petersburg and Oakland. It goes on and on with no relief in sight for sports fans.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Former New York Jets great Marty Lyons says retired players need health benefits now
THURSDAY, 19 MAY 2011 07:43
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/former-new-york-jets-great-marty-lyons-says-retired-players-need-health-benefits-now
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
NEW YORK. N.Y. — In October 1987, New York Jets defensive lineman Marty Lyons decided to cross a picket line and play football because he didn't like the way National Football League Players Association Executive Director Gene Upshaw was conducting the association's business. The NFLPA went on strike looking for a liberalized form of free agency and more money. The NFLPA didn't bother asking for after-career lifetime health benefits.
Lyons has never looked back at his decision to cross the picket line and in hindsight thinks the 1987 four week strike was a waste of time.
"I don't worry about it, I got more important things to do than worry about a labor dispute, worry about a lockout" said Lyons on Tuesday at the announcement that he was elected into the College Football Hall of Fame. "I got four kids, I try to be the best father, best husband that I can to them. Whatever happens in this dispute, they will settle it.
"If it is going to help the league, if it is going to help the players, if it is going to subsidize our retirement a little bit better. Great. If it doesn't, I can't worry about things I can't control. I am interested. I am still an NFL alumnus, I still believe in what the players are trying to accomplish but I cannot control it. If you can't control it, why get stressed out about it. I support (former Giants defensive lineman) George Martin and the NFL alumni. I was just at the NFL Draft with (Commissioner) Roger Goodell. I do a lot of work for the Jets. I see the issues on both sides of the fence. But I can't control any of it, so you know what, I get every morning and I go to work."
But Lyons is interested in the welfare of his former teammates and others who played in the NFL and thinks the old players need some help.
"Eighty-seven, it was very difficult," he said the of labor action. "I think there was a lot of dissension between the players and the leadership we had in Gene Upshaw. When the replacement teams can in, some of us made the decision that it was in our best interests and our families best interests allow to let these people to come in and take our jobs."
Neither the 1982 nor the 1987 NFLPA strikes, in the long term, helped the membership. The "Money Now" mantra of the players should have been replaced by “what will your life at the age of 45, 50, 55 and 60 be like?” The players seem to have the same problems today as they did in 1982 with the exception of having more money than those who played 29 and 24 years ago.
"Probably not," said Lyons of whether the two strikes helped those players involved in the long run. "You know, I think the issues from 87 to where we are now maybe get magnified a little bit more because there is more money involved. Anytime that there is money involved and the issues are back and forth, I don't know who wins. Because you got the owners, because they want a little more money, you got the players...I see guys like Kevin Turner, a good friend of mine who played at the University of Alabama suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease.
"A lot of head injuries.
"He is 41 years old, 42 years old with three kids. What's the NFL going to do for him? What's his pension going to do for him and his family? He's just fighting every day to stay alive.
“There's another head injury. "
The National Football League does not acknowledge that head injuries may cause health problems down the line. In 2010, the league posted a warning about head injuries in each of the 32 team's locker rooms but other than a few words and some other forms of communications, players still are getting their bells rung and returning to the field as quickly as possible.
"You didn't worry about them (head injuries), you really didn't worry about injuries," said Lyons of his attitude and the attitude of his NFL playing peers during his time in the league in the 1980s. "Because the bottom line is, if you allowed somebody to come in and take your position, you may not get it back. So there was a big difference, everybody played hurt. If you were injured, it was a different story."
Lyons former coach Walt Michaels and former Sack Exchange teammate Joe Klecko are hurting like many others who played in the NFL.
"If you see Walt now and walks around, if you see Joe Klecko, he just had a shoulder replacement. The game does have a price to pay if you play it long enough. And I think man for man, the individuals that are playing the price now, myself I had eight operations, I would have gone through a few more if I had an opportunity to lace them up and play one more game. It is well worth the price now to get out of bed."
Lyons is doing well. He is a senior vice president of operations for a Long Island construction company, the Marty Lyons Foundation is still going strong after 27 years helping terminally ill children, he is a motivational speaker and has 20 years of broadcasting on his resume.
But Lyons knows that former NFL players need help.
"I would love to see the league and the committee (the players association or more correctly what is the decertified players association) to come to some sort of agreement that if you are a vested player (three or more years experience) and you leave the game, you have a lifetime benefit of health benefits. When you retire, you benefits stop (the post 1993 players get health benefits for five years and then it ends, Lyons career was done in 1989 after 11 years). You better hope you get a good job or have enough money to go on COBRA. So I think health benefits are the number one priority that we should be looking at to get retired players once they leave the NFL.
"If you are vested and you make a contribution to helping the league and the players then you and your family should have lifetime health benefits. When I left the game in 1991, I had to get my health benefits. In hindsight, I think it was a mistake (that the NFLPA did not fight for lifetime health care) because some of the players who are financially stressed or some of the players now who don't have health benefits maybe they would not be in this situation in their life and the time of the life if they had better benefits, better health care. Maybe they would have gotten the proper help needed."
Lyons, despite an 11 year career, never made big money that could last a lifetime. The "billionaires versus millionaires" slogan that sportswriters have attached to this lockout doesn't work. Very few players make huge sums of cash. Most careers are brief and players need to find other employment after their careers. But the problem is that NFL players might have short careers but their aches and pains last a lifetime and some become disabled and cannot work. Those players eventually end up on social security insurance and Medicare and are looked after by taxpayers.
That is where Upshaw and his associates which include members of the NFLPA executive board and player agents failed their constituency in 1982, 1987 and 1993. They took short term gains and didn't see the future.
Lyons looks at the dispute as a former player but notes that other people are getting hurt. NFL teams have been laying off or reducing employee’s salaries. Coaches are taking a pay cut and if games are missed per diem employees will be left out in the cold.
"Everybody wants a little bit more of the pie," he said. "And the bottom line is that the people at the bottom end of the food chain that are going to pay the price if they don't play the game of football. You got a lot of people that are relying on that added income every single Saturday or Sunday whether they are parking cars or working concessions or working the stadium. For them not to have an opportunity to feed their family when there is a lockout or labor dispute, it is a shame."
NFL owners and players go to court on June 3 to argue over whatever they are fighting for. Collective bargaining agreement negotiations pick up on June 8. The players want status quo and keep 59 percent of football revenues, the owners want the players to give back revenues, cut their salaries (contracts are not guaranteed) and help build stadiums in Minnesota and Santa Clara, California by kicking in part of their revenues. Meanwhile former players are still out in the cold with meager pensions and no health benefits and for many football players, getting health insurance is almost impossible because of pre-existing conditions.
This is the NFL, with the initials NFL standing for, "Not For Long."
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble
THURSDAY, 19 MAY 2011 07:43
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/former-new-york-jets-great-marty-lyons-says-retired-players-need-health-benefits-now
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
NEW YORK. N.Y. — In October 1987, New York Jets defensive lineman Marty Lyons decided to cross a picket line and play football because he didn't like the way National Football League Players Association Executive Director Gene Upshaw was conducting the association's business. The NFLPA went on strike looking for a liberalized form of free agency and more money. The NFLPA didn't bother asking for after-career lifetime health benefits.
Lyons has never looked back at his decision to cross the picket line and in hindsight thinks the 1987 four week strike was a waste of time.
"I don't worry about it, I got more important things to do than worry about a labor dispute, worry about a lockout" said Lyons on Tuesday at the announcement that he was elected into the College Football Hall of Fame. "I got four kids, I try to be the best father, best husband that I can to them. Whatever happens in this dispute, they will settle it.
"If it is going to help the league, if it is going to help the players, if it is going to subsidize our retirement a little bit better. Great. If it doesn't, I can't worry about things I can't control. I am interested. I am still an NFL alumnus, I still believe in what the players are trying to accomplish but I cannot control it. If you can't control it, why get stressed out about it. I support (former Giants defensive lineman) George Martin and the NFL alumni. I was just at the NFL Draft with (Commissioner) Roger Goodell. I do a lot of work for the Jets. I see the issues on both sides of the fence. But I can't control any of it, so you know what, I get every morning and I go to work."
But Lyons is interested in the welfare of his former teammates and others who played in the NFL and thinks the old players need some help.
"Eighty-seven, it was very difficult," he said the of labor action. "I think there was a lot of dissension between the players and the leadership we had in Gene Upshaw. When the replacement teams can in, some of us made the decision that it was in our best interests and our families best interests allow to let these people to come in and take our jobs."
Neither the 1982 nor the 1987 NFLPA strikes, in the long term, helped the membership. The "Money Now" mantra of the players should have been replaced by “what will your life at the age of 45, 50, 55 and 60 be like?” The players seem to have the same problems today as they did in 1982 with the exception of having more money than those who played 29 and 24 years ago.
"Probably not," said Lyons of whether the two strikes helped those players involved in the long run. "You know, I think the issues from 87 to where we are now maybe get magnified a little bit more because there is more money involved. Anytime that there is money involved and the issues are back and forth, I don't know who wins. Because you got the owners, because they want a little more money, you got the players...I see guys like Kevin Turner, a good friend of mine who played at the University of Alabama suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease.
"A lot of head injuries.
"He is 41 years old, 42 years old with three kids. What's the NFL going to do for him? What's his pension going to do for him and his family? He's just fighting every day to stay alive.
“There's another head injury. "
The National Football League does not acknowledge that head injuries may cause health problems down the line. In 2010, the league posted a warning about head injuries in each of the 32 team's locker rooms but other than a few words and some other forms of communications, players still are getting their bells rung and returning to the field as quickly as possible.
"You didn't worry about them (head injuries), you really didn't worry about injuries," said Lyons of his attitude and the attitude of his NFL playing peers during his time in the league in the 1980s. "Because the bottom line is, if you allowed somebody to come in and take your position, you may not get it back. So there was a big difference, everybody played hurt. If you were injured, it was a different story."
Lyons former coach Walt Michaels and former Sack Exchange teammate Joe Klecko are hurting like many others who played in the NFL.
"If you see Walt now and walks around, if you see Joe Klecko, he just had a shoulder replacement. The game does have a price to pay if you play it long enough. And I think man for man, the individuals that are playing the price now, myself I had eight operations, I would have gone through a few more if I had an opportunity to lace them up and play one more game. It is well worth the price now to get out of bed."
Lyons is doing well. He is a senior vice president of operations for a Long Island construction company, the Marty Lyons Foundation is still going strong after 27 years helping terminally ill children, he is a motivational speaker and has 20 years of broadcasting on his resume.
But Lyons knows that former NFL players need help.
"I would love to see the league and the committee (the players association or more correctly what is the decertified players association) to come to some sort of agreement that if you are a vested player (three or more years experience) and you leave the game, you have a lifetime benefit of health benefits. When you retire, you benefits stop (the post 1993 players get health benefits for five years and then it ends, Lyons career was done in 1989 after 11 years). You better hope you get a good job or have enough money to go on COBRA. So I think health benefits are the number one priority that we should be looking at to get retired players once they leave the NFL.
"If you are vested and you make a contribution to helping the league and the players then you and your family should have lifetime health benefits. When I left the game in 1991, I had to get my health benefits. In hindsight, I think it was a mistake (that the NFLPA did not fight for lifetime health care) because some of the players who are financially stressed or some of the players now who don't have health benefits maybe they would not be in this situation in their life and the time of the life if they had better benefits, better health care. Maybe they would have gotten the proper help needed."
Lyons, despite an 11 year career, never made big money that could last a lifetime. The "billionaires versus millionaires" slogan that sportswriters have attached to this lockout doesn't work. Very few players make huge sums of cash. Most careers are brief and players need to find other employment after their careers. But the problem is that NFL players might have short careers but their aches and pains last a lifetime and some become disabled and cannot work. Those players eventually end up on social security insurance and Medicare and are looked after by taxpayers.
That is where Upshaw and his associates which include members of the NFLPA executive board and player agents failed their constituency in 1982, 1987 and 1993. They took short term gains and didn't see the future.
Lyons looks at the dispute as a former player but notes that other people are getting hurt. NFL teams have been laying off or reducing employee’s salaries. Coaches are taking a pay cut and if games are missed per diem employees will be left out in the cold.
"Everybody wants a little bit more of the pie," he said. "And the bottom line is that the people at the bottom end of the food chain that are going to pay the price if they don't play the game of football. You got a lot of people that are relying on that added income every single Saturday or Sunday whether they are parking cars or working concessions or working the stadium. For them not to have an opportunity to feed their family when there is a lockout or labor dispute, it is a shame."
NFL owners and players go to court on June 3 to argue over whatever they are fighting for. Collective bargaining agreement negotiations pick up on June 8. The players want status quo and keep 59 percent of football revenues, the owners want the players to give back revenues, cut their salaries (contracts are not guaranteed) and help build stadiums in Minnesota and Santa Clara, California by kicking in part of their revenues. Meanwhile former players are still out in the cold with meager pensions and no health benefits and for many football players, getting health insurance is almost impossible because of pre-existing conditions.
This is the NFL, with the initials NFL standing for, "Not For Long."
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble
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