Analysis : A Look at Sports and Sponsorship in the ‘80s

Purity in sport keeps getting clobbered by dollar bills -- and the longer the flogging goes on, the more do sensible people applaud. Washingtonians experience the roots of this pleasant excess in their minds after Sunday’s Indianapolis 500 and in person at the Kemper Open this week.

Silly and serious was the business of getting the proper hat on Emerson Fittipaldi and a couple of swigs of milk over his lips the instant he popped from that 200-mile-per-hour billboard in Victory Lane.

Golfers have been selling their bodies (and their souls, many say) more aggressively for more years than any other athletes, the simple reason being necessity. They own themselves.

Everybody else has been playing catch-up as quickly as possible, with a lot of us witnesses puzzled and troubled about it. With a few tasteless exceptions, this money explosion in sports has been fine.

Fact is, a few civic-minded businesses could use some selling lessons from golf and help save money-strapped high school sports. They could sponsor Interhigh games; they could sponsor Interhigh teams. All that keeps it from happening might be prissy posture, too many noses turned too high just now.

Sports long have been separated by standards. What’s okay for golf is terrible for basketball. And what’s accepted at one level of athletic education is not at another.

In 1940, Sam Snead won the Anthracite Open; a year later, he prevailed in the Henry Hurst Invitational. So Glen Campbell and the Gatlin Brothers did not invent celebrity golf after all.

Snead, Ben Hogan and far earlier golfers who followed the sun for a living would have entered putting contests in a wind tunnel if the price were right. Long-driving contests are in fashion once more, bankrolled by an imaginative long distance phone company, MCI.

Truth be known, all that remains unsponsored in golf are the hazards. And some waste management company just might get involved there.

If golf were less tame, its promoters might try a boxing stunt. Legend has it that one bright hustler tried to sell ad space on the bottom of his bum’s shoes, on the near-certain chance they would be in full and unswaying view for at least 10 seconds.

Even many obscure pros arrive each day at Avenel in sponsor cars. They proceed to the course in sponsor shoes, sponsor socks, sponsor slacks, sponsor shirts and sponsor visors. They hit sponsor balls with sponsor clubs on holes patrolled by sponsor courses.

The real real estate in big-time golf now is not the middle of the fairway but out of bounds, those glitzy homes and condos that make it possible for the pros to own the land on which they play.

What’s the harm?

Traditionalists are sad that a wonderful course just up the road, Congressional, was abandoned for one of those made-to-order stadium sites that seem to clutter the tour.

For Washington area golfers, Avenel is a distinctive addition to our many and varied courses. Besides, it keeps more of the well-heeled riffraff off Redgate and our other public course treasures.

The NFL has become golflike in many ways, the Super Bowl having evolved into the focal point of 12 dozen corporate outings. Still, pro football is a better game than ever; Bill Walsh’s 49ers would beat Vince Lombardi’s Packers. And men who have devoted three-quarters of their lives to football now can retire comfortably from it.

The Olympics have gone corporate, over the long and loud protests of Avery Brundage and lots of other elitists. Look what’s happened: athletes are running, jumping and throwing better than ever -- and doing it far longer than was possible a couple of Olympiads ago.

Lately, fuss over corporate intrusion in sport has hit college sport, football especially.

Reaction to the Sunkist Fiesta Bowl and the USF&G; Sugar Bowl gives these holiday binges more of a sacred flair than they deserve.

Southern Cal now endows football positions. Fat-cat boosters are buying left inside linebackers and tight ends. That at last removes all hypocrisy from the buy-a-player process still called “educational foundations” at most schools.

Georgia Tech recently tried an innovation where corporations would underwrite games -- and got roundly spanked for it by the same folks who want college players to get more money.

How else is that going to happen? If the colleges wisely vote to give players a couple of hundred bucks a month, some way of raising it must be found. Or deserving sports dropped.

I would not be offended by, say, the Safeway Maryland-Penn State football game. No more than I am by the Shearson Lehman Hutton Andy Williams Open. Or I would be by the Cadillac Masters, so long as the proper players still honor their craft at Augusta National.

No one objects to youth leagues being subsidized, to kids wearing T-shirts with such as “Powl’s Feed Service” or “Clyde’s Auto Parts” stenciled prominently. At some point, sponsoring players, and giving them a fair piece of the action, becomes a sporting sin.