Last week, I said that the folks involved with golf on TV could not admit that the absence of Tiger Woods would have a huge effect on the popularity of the sport. That would be sort of like having a Presidential candidate – of either party – admit that (s)he has some significant political debts that will have to be repaid when/if (s)he is elected. And to give you and example of how the TV execs will try to get everyone to look through rose colored glasses, consider that the head of The Golf Channel told Jeremy Fowler of the Orlando Sentinel that the draw for golf on TV now that Tiger Woods is out for the year is – drum roll please:
“Who’s going to win the FedEx Cup?”
No peeking; no Googling. Here is a Quick Quiz:
1. Who leads in the FedEx Cup standings at this moment?
2. Who is second?
3. What do the FedEx Cup and Ryuji Imada have in common? [And the famous Cliff Clavin answer of “Neither has ever been in my kitchen,” is unacceptable.]
4. Briefly describe the scoring system for the FedEx Cup.
5. Give the dates of FedEx Cup tournaments.
Another important golf event for later this year will be the Ryder Cup. The American team has been stomped in the last two competitions; and with Woods on the shelf, you would have to wonder if they should even show up. Except for the fact that Tiger Woods isn’t all that special in Ryder Cup play. I did use Google to come up with this statistic; believe me, I do not carry this kind of stuff around in my head. In Ryder Cup play, Tiger Woods’ record is 10-13-2. So, maybe the Americans can replace him with someone who can play over .500 this time around…?
Do you happen to recall the year before the WNBA started how the NBA and its marketing machine decided to create interest in the new league? The slogan that the WNBA players kept telling us was “We got next.” That was about a dozen years ago; and at the moment, the WNBA – truth be told – don’t got squat. Women’s college basketball has grown; the WNBA peaked in its second season (1998) when average attendance was announced as 10,869. Since 1998, attendance has fallen every year even though attendance figures and actual bodies in the arena have nothing to do with one another. You would have thought that the league would have given away enough tix in one of those years to claim an up-tick in attendance, no?
Well, there is a small up-tick reported so far this season. Average attendance so far in 2008 is 6,673, which is up 2.5%. The LA Sparks lead the league in attendance with an average of 10,121. Note that the leading attendance this year is less than the average attendance in 1998. The good news is there is an up-tick; the bad news is it is a small rise from a precipitous fall.
The WNBA “mystery” is why women players who generated interest as college players create little if any “buzz” as WNBA players. It may take a marketing maven to figure this out, but maybe the buzz they created as collegians would carry over if these players stayed in the same general area and played for a pro team near their college. Maybe the WNBA needs to use the old – and long defunct – NBA “territorial” draft for a while. Given the numbers, I don’t think it could hurt…
I have written more than a few times that the sport of horseracing survives despite the best efforts of the people who run the sport to drive it into extinction. With all the interest generated Big Brown this spring and with attention focused on whether or not he just had a bad day at the Belmont, you might think that the sport could start a drum beat to have fans anticipate a “showdown” with Curlin – last year’s Breeders’ Cup Classic winner and the presumptive “best horse in the world at the moment”. However, because of some bad planning earlier on, it looks as if that will not happen.
The folks who run the Breeders’ Cup put the races at Santa Anita this year and next year too. Santa Anita has one of those new synthetic track surfaces that some horsemen love and others detest. Curlin’s trainer detests it and says Curlin will not run on it; I believe he is the trainer who called the new polytrack surface a mixture of “kitty litter and old rubber bands”. Curlin has never raced on grass but will do that this summer with the aim of running on the turf in the Breeders’ Cup races. You would think that the people running the sport would recognize the strong feelings out there regarding synthetic track surfaces and not schedule their World Championship Thoroughbred races somewhere with such a racing surface until there was a more uniform acceptance of those surfaces.
By the way, if Curlin takes to the grass and wins his “prep race” on the grass, he might go to Paris to compete in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in October. Winning that race in France would make him the horse with the highest earnings in history – and that race will not be easily available to US race fans – or potential race fans – because of geography. Like I said, horseracing survives in spite of the dedicated efforts of the people who run the sport to kill it.
The NHL and the New York Rangers have so many lawsuits filed against each other that the parade of lawyers to the bar in the courtroom probably has to be choreographed as carefully as a pro ‘rassling match. In the latest suit, the NHL seeks to force MSG – run by James Dolan of NY Knickerbockers’ fame – to sell the NY Rangers. The NHL claims that part of the agreement of every team in the league which grants them a franchise is that the team agrees not to sue the league – - which the Rangers have done. Forget the legal intricacies here; the real question is whom does one root for in this latest suit:
In the red corner, we have Gary Bettman who has been NHL commissioner for about 15 years and the person generally regarded as the author of the lockout that cost the NHL an entire season.
In the blue corner, we have James Dolan who is generally regarded as a paranoid doofus whose rich father gave him MSG and the Knicks and the Rangers as play toys.
Nevertheless, imagine that the NHL prevails in that suit and forces Dolan to sell the team. You are now going to be the buyer and if you keep the team in NYC, you are going to have to play your games in Madison Square Garden where the landlord will be the guy who was forced to sell you the team. Alternatively, you could move the team to Kansas City. How deep into your pocket are you going to go to buy into that situation in order to own a team in a league run by Gary Bettman?
Finally, Bob Molinaro had this observation in the Virginian-Pilot recently:
“Quick hit: After NASA is finished exploring for signs of life on Mars, it should turn its attention to the WNBA.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…