Golden Era of TV Sports Melts Down

In years past, a wise man, the beloved and venerable Art Rooney, owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers football team, used to stand outside the practice field as his athletes came off, fix them with an accusatory stare, point a cigar at them and demand:

“What are you going to do when the red light goes off? How will you handle it then?”

To Mr. Rooney the question made perfect sense.

What he meant was: “What do you guys do when football goes back to what it once was, to the days when it is no longer a TV spectacular with the big bucks and big hype? Will you love it and play it when the big networks and big sponsors have gotten cloyed with it and it’s a game that depends on ticket sales again?”

Art Rooney is one of the few left who can remember football in an era when it was a hand-to-mouth business, a gypsy caravan of strolling players who dropped their bags wherever they could draw a crowd or pass the hat.

It is not likely the game will return to that era overnight. But it may be that the era of throwing money off the back of trains like sailors on leave may be on the way out.

At least, that is the view of a man very much in position to do something about it--Dennis Swanson, president, ABC sports.

TV sports is in big trouble, according to networker Swanson. The days of making instant millionaires out of moderately gifted ballplayers or of giving owners the kind of riches you used to have to own coal mines or railroads to achieve may be long gone.

If so, it figures to be bad news to cocaine dealers, agents, account executives and color commentators, to say nothing of placekickers, backup quarterbacks and members of the kickoff teams.

Swanson is in the unenviable position of being the guy who shot Santa Claus.

Swanson replaced Roone Arledge at the head of ABC sports and already that is like being the guy who replaced Babe Ruth.

Arledge practically invented the big-time televised sport. He dragged it single-handedly into the big bucks with his aggressive pursuit of the sports attraction that he well recognized as almost the only spontaneous, unplanned, unpredictable entertainment for sale today.

Before Arledge, network sports were just another Saturday afternoon serial, an Army-Navy game, the Yankees beating somebody in the World Series, a bowl game here and there. No big deal.

He made it a big deal.

Before Arledge, the Olympics were just that funny little track meet that took place in a vacuum at some funny place in the world. He made the Games into World War III.

He took pro football out of its Sunday afternoon ghetto and put it on prime time and Broadway. He made a downhill race on a glorified bed slat or barrel stave into a patriotic adventure on the order of the battle of Gettysburg. He hired the slickest tonsils he could find to hype this glorified exaggeration of games people play and made a sport into a happening.

The payouts were staggering, $2.1 billion for pro football, $1.1 billion for baseball, $309 million for the Winter Olympics, comparable sums for Kentucky Derbies, Wimbledons and U.S. Opens--tennis and golf.

Television became the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Unions were hastily thrown together to get in on the bonanza. Agents in fur coats materialized out of nowhere. New leagues were formed overnight. The world was a stretch limo, a Presidential suite and a mooring at Rye.

Nobody worried about cost. They were pursuing art, prestige, objects too priceless to be counted in mere money. Who haggles at a Super Bowl? Would you haggle at a Mona Lisa. Put a price on a Renoir?

Well, Swanson would. When the Capital Cities conglomerate took over ABC, they put him in charge to cut right through the trumpet fanfares, marching bands and fluttering pennants and go right to the bottom line. It was in a nice un-American red.

It all rather called to mind the exchange between the movie mogul Sam Goldwyn and the Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw.

Goldwyn extolled the benefits to Shaw of having his great works perpetrated on the screens of the world, a boon to mankind that transcended material gain.

Shaw replied, “That’s the trouble with us, Mr. Goldwyn. You’re interested in art, while I’m interested in money.”

Swanson is on Shaw’s side.

Capital Cities will release no figures but it has been estimated that ABC sports has been losing $30 million a year on pro football. It has lost $15 million on college football in recent years.

Swanson says the baseball picture is even more ludicrous. “They should put a statue of Eddie Einhorn (White Sox executive who negotiated the baseball contract) in the Hall of Fame at once--right between the statues of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig--for what he did for baseball.”

Explained Swanson: “Look what he did for the game: He got a $1.1 billion contract. Do you realize that, for $1.1 billion we could probably buy baseball? And not just the rights to take a picture. I’m talking about paying about $50 million for each franchise. Times 26, that comes to $1.3 billion. For that, you get not only the TV rights but the ballparks, the concessions, the players, the parking and the TV rights.”

Bottom Line Swanson says a massive correction is called for.

It will not be easy. The simple solution would be for sports to reduce their rights cost.

“It’s the purchase of rights which drive the cost up,” Swanson said. “It comes to 80% of the cost of putting the show on the air. Other production costs are in line.”

He is not optimistic that owners and players will see the light.

“The owners are not in a position to accept cuts because of stadium leases, payrolls and the high cost of doing business,” he said. “And the unions are weighing in with their demands (up to 55% of the TV revenues).”

Can cable or pay-per-viewer TV take up the slack, outbid the networks? Swanson is not sure.

“You may be sure Rozelle and the baseball owners will investigate it,” he said.

Sports is not going to phase out overnight on the tube. But the point is, unless the men who run sports see the light, it may--like Art Rooney’s--be blinking out and no longer there for them to see.