You know that old joke about going to a fight and seeing a hockey game break out? If you stretch the concept a bit, there are analogies throughout professional sport.
You can go to the playground, even give a pool party, and have a professional baseball game intrude. You can go to a carnival and see an NBA game take place when the acrobats, trampolinists and miniblimp pilots are on break. You can go to Sunday brunch and catch a few horse races between mimosas.
"The days of just opening the doors and selling tickets are over," said Jerry Colangelo, principal owner of baseball's Arizona Diamondbacks and basketball's Phoenix Suns.
This disclosure didn't exactly cause the oxygen masks to drop from the ceiling yesterday at Octagon/Street & Smith's World Congress of Sports, a two-day conference/trade show for major sports-industry players and those willing to spend about US$2,000 to sit in a room with them. Presumably, everyone in the room knows going to a game just to see a game is as dated as the trilobite. The modern parallel to "give me liberty or give me death," after all, is "give me a bobblehead or give me my money back."
The extent to which professional sports franchises will go to engender the warm-and-fuzzies among their paying customers is sometimes astonishing. The Chicago Bulls, long removed from the heavenly days of Jordan, Pippen and Rodman, still manage to fill the United Center with 22,000 people because they're hell on wheels when it comes to promotions.
At least that's the prevailing sentiment. The Bulls won't make the playoffs this year, but they are considered cutting-edge leaders on the NBA's entertainment side. Whether it's providing break dancers, tumblers, jugglers or some guys who beat the bottoms of plastic buckets with drumsticks for the enjoyment of the tympanically challenged, the Bulls take a back seat to no one.
Someday, probably in the near future, I can imagine a fan noticing a showy ring on the finger of a former Bulls player, who, when pressed, will explain he never won an NBA championship, but did play on a team that was voted best in the league at keeping fans occupied during TV timeouts.
As John Lombardo reports in this week's Street & Smith's Sports Business Journal, "Team executives know better than to peg ticket sales solely to wins, so they mix in some entertainment, maybe even enough to make you forget about your cellar-dwelling team's performance."
Which raises two obvious questions:
-- Are people so entertainment starved that they'll say, "Honey, want to go to the game tonight? They've got a kid who shoots free throws while standing on his head in a tub of goo."
-- Am I the only one who couldn't care less if the basketball floor remained devoid of dancers and other interlopers between periods?
Steve Schanawald, Bulls executive vice president of operations, explained to Lombardo "it's a 48-minute game, but the people are here for two hours."
Big deal. Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather talk to my seatmate than go deaf during the entertainment interludes. Not that someone is likely to hear my complaint. Anyone who works in an NBA arena is already deaf.
Winning teams have it a little easier, said Colangelo, who was part of a panel discussion on team ownership and fan satisfaction at the conference. His mates on the dais were fellow owners Bob Tisch (New York Giants), Peter Magowan (San Francisco Giants) and Jeremy Jacobs (Boston Bruins).
Still, fan enticement is part of the job, and all agreed that keeping the customers engaged and ticket prices down were as important to them as winning.
Insert your own joke here, but the owners apparently weren't kidding. Jacobs, for example, admitted that the NHL, whose very survival may be threatened by labor discord brought on by everybody's favorite tag team, greed and stupidity, is alienating its core fans by pricing them out of the arenas, mainly because hockey doesn't get much money from national TV.
Jacobs didn't say if he planned any adopt-a-player promotions or a bring-a-covered-dish night if things get really dicey, but he said a lockout or a strike would definitely peeve hockey fans. And still he didn't sound too optimistic that strife could be avoided.
Magowan believes major league baseball provides the best bargain in sport, though his Giants aren't above jacking up ticket prices on the weekends because the demand is greater. Magowan also resolutely refuses to offer partial-season packages to season-ticket holders. It's all or nothing if you're a Giants fan.
For those who have nothing, Magowan pointed out they can watch the game free from just beyond the right-field wall. But then they wouldn't get to enjoy the Coca-Cola play area in left field. Magowan says the 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds who come to games for the playground amenities are his future customers. He expects they'll be favorably inclined toward the Giants and PacBell Park, or SBC Park, or whatever park it'll be called when they're taking their kids to Giants games in 20 years.
No doubt owners are prompted to offer inducements, at least in part, to assuage recurrent pangs of guilt. Surely they figure if a family of four is paying more than US$200 for tickets, parking, food, drinks and tchotchkes for the kids, then there ought to be some value added to the base product, especially if the base product is in last place.
Yet merely walking up the ramp into a baseball stadium was enough for me when I was 8, just as it's one of the great pleasures of my job now.
Granted, my "local" stadium was Fenway Park, but that shouldn't matter. Yet for some customers, the special amenities are the attraction, and the thought of going to a game on a non-giveaway night is sacrilegious.
When I encountered him again yesterday at the Orange County Airport, I asked Colangelo, whose whole life has centered on sports as a baseball and basketball player, as a scout and as an executive, if he resented having to use come-ons to keep fans interested.
He didn't use the word resentment, but said: "There was a time when the game was pure and simple. Literally, those fans who were fans came to enjoy a game. There wasn't a lot of hoopla at all."
The economics of sport -- guaranteed contracts, free agency, etc. -- has changed the landscape, he said, forcing owners to make hoopla a cost of doing business.
"And it isn't all bad," he said.
Which is one way of saying it isn't all good, either.
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