In my Topical Rant about people I wanted to “Just Go Away”, I listed Kim Etheredge – the publicist who fronted for Terrell Owens. Now there are wire reports saying that Owens fired her. Of course, now that he is without a publicist, he hasn’t had the opportunity to get his message out; so these reports are unconfirmed at the moment. Earlier, Owens said that there were “snitches” in the Cowboys’ locker room who spread bad stories about him falling asleep in meetings and not practicing hard and stuff like that. He said he’d “deal with” the snitches when the time was right. Could she have been a snitch?
I was certainly not surprised to see that Mark McGwire did not make it into the Hall of Fame this year. I was surprised to see that he only got 23% of the votes cast. Since one needs 75% of the votes cast to be elected to the HoF, I’d say that McGwire is not a shoo-in next year; I don’t think this was merely a one-time gesture by the baseball writers to show that they are “steroid suspicious”. Remember, these are the same writers who covered McGwire and Sosa and Bonds and whomever all during those booming home-run years and never managed to tell us then what was going on. For the record, I would not vote for Mark McGwire to be in the Hall of Fame, but some of the moralistic posturing by baseball writers on this issue now is more than a bit disingenuous.
Have you noticed that the NHL season is half over? No, neither had I, but it’s true. NHL games are on “Versus” network – a cable entity that used to be the Outdoor Life Network – in case you go looking for them. Versus just announced that it has added another sport to its stable of broadcast properties, professional bull riding. I wonder if the NHL can outdraw the bull riders…
FIFA recently issued a “Final Report” on the World Cup. I’m not sure why they do that; but evidently, this is something that they always do for such a big event. According to reports, FIFA mentioned nothing about Zidane’s head-butt or his ejection from the World Cup Finals other than to say that he played in that game and that France lost to Italy in that game. Remember, FIFA was the organization that suspended Zidane for a couple of games as a result of the incident with the full knowledge that he had already retired from soccer. Talk about an organization dedicated to form as opposed to substance.
FIFA honcho, Sepp Blatter, issued an apology in Rome recently for his failure to award the World Cup trophy to the Italian team right after the match. Blatter said it was not a slight to the team; he had planned to avoid the postgame award ceremony before the match started because there were indications that the German fans “would whistle at the word FIFA”. All I can say is this:
That game was played six months ago yesterday. If you can’t come up with a better excuse/explanation for why you didn’t award a champion’s trophy right after the championship game in the world’s biggest tournament, then maybe you have publicists less competent than Kim Etheredge.
Baseball fans in Baltimore staged a protest by walking out of an Orioles game. They wanted Peter Angelos to know they didn’t like the way he was running the team. An estimated 1000 people participated in this. Detroit football fans held the Millen Man March to protest the fact that Matt Millen was still the GM for the Lions. Again, about 1000 fans participated. They don’t hold fan protests for WNBA teams because there aren’t 1000 fans of those teams who would care enough to organize/participate in one. Last week, the Charlotte Sting ceased to exist. That announcement came only a couple of weeks after the Charlotte Bobcats said they would no longer run that WNBA franchise and no buyers stepped forward. Last year, the Sting attendance was reported to be 5700 per game – but you have to remember that the WNBA counts attendance in ways other than “paying customers who actually show up and move through the turnstiles”.
David Stern is a staunch supporter of the WNBA. Since I don’t read minds, I have no idea if this support is based on some mental construct of equal opportunity or if he thinks this is a long-term investment in a business that will blossom one of these days or any of a dozen other possible foundations. Here are a couple of facts. The WNBA has been around for a decade and it has never come close to breaking even. Because the costs are tightly controlled, the losses have remained acceptable to most of the WNBA owners and the NBA owners who pony up to keep the WNBA afloat. But things are not looking all that good for the WNBA in terms of growth and the hope of breaking even anytime soon. So, here’s an interesting proposition:
After David Stern retires/resigns/leaves the job as NBA Commissioner, the WNBA continues to exist for 18 months. Over or Under?
Speaking of the business end of sports, I read that MLB’s 20 corporate partners spent a record $300M last year in terms of marketing and promotional plans. That’s a stunning amount of money – - until you know that the NFL has 21 corporate partners and those NFL corporate partners spent $1B last year in terms of marketing and promotional plans. On average an NFL partner spends about $50M on its marketing ties to the league (for baseball, it’s $15M) and I don’t know how anyone verifies that those tie-ins generate profits to cover the $50M in expenditures. Let me explain.
FedEx has the air and ground Player of the Week and Player of the Year Awards. So, I assume that FedEx is one of the NFL corporate partners. How does someone at FedEx calculate the amount of business that FedEx would not have gotten if it were not for that corporate partnership with the NFL that costs them $50M plus whatever they pay to the NFL for the privilege of being a corporate partner? I don’t think that any of the companies who have these relationships with the NFL are teetering on the brink of insolvency, but I don’t understand how anyone knows that this is a good expenditure of assets.
A couple of years ago, Urban Meyer was rumored to be leaving Utah for Notre Dame but he took a right turn at South Bend and wound up in Gainesville. The Notre Dame folks pompously announced that they had gotten a better coach than Meyer when Charlie Weis came to South Bend. To hear them tell it, they were glad Meyer went elsewhere because they came out ahead on the deal. I’m not surprised that the Notre Dame folks haven’t retracted any of those boasts in light of this year’s national championship game. And Urban Meyer hasn’t come out and said that all of his detractors up in South Bend ought to pound sand up their butts. Because Meyer has shown the restraint and dignity to avoid statements of that type, I’d suspect that he will not be hiring Kim Etheredge to handle his public relations any time soon.
Finally, a comment from Mike Bianchi in the Orlando Sentinel:
“If Mark McGwire does get inducted into the Hall of Fame, will he go in wearing a Cardinals’ hat, an A’s hat, or a pharmacist’s lab coat?”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…