Arena Football Begins Its Second Decade

Quick quiz: Other than the NFL, what pro football league has survived the longest?

The American Football League? Close -- it lasted 10 seasons before the NFL absorbed it in 1970.

The USFL? It got into its third year. The WFL made it into its second.

Try Arena Football, which begins its 11th season on May 1 with 14 teams, including two new franchises in the New York City area and one in Nashville, Tenn.

From its skimpy beginning in 1986, when a test game was played in Rockford, Ill., to gauge response to indoor football, Arena ball has become the most successful of all the adjunct sports -- more popular than indoor soccer, lacrosse or roller hockey.

And it’s still growing.

“We’ve kind of moved from being an emerging league to maturity and stability and continued growth,” says David Baker, Arena Football’s commissioner. “We are moving from smaller entrepreneurs to investors and institutional sports people such as Madison Square Garden and Jerry Colangelo (owner of the Phoenix Suns and Arizona Diamondbacks).

“I can’t emphasize this enough: We are a totally different game from the NFL,” he continued. “In many respects, we’re a totally different game from stadium football altogether. We have the components of football at the core of our game, but a lot of similarities to hockey and basketball.”

For the uninitiated, the players play both offense and defense, except for a specialist on each side of the ball. There are eight men on the field at a time and 20 active players on the roster. One substitution is allowed per quarter, barring injury.

Goal posts are 9-feet wide, with the crossbars set at 15 feet (for the NFL, it’s 18 1/2-feet wide and 10-feet high for the crossbars). While there are regular PATs and field goals, a drop-kick conversion is worth two points, and a drop-kick field goal is worth four. There is no punting, and balls kicked or passed off the netting at the back of the end zone can be caught as a live ball.

The field is 50 yards long, with 8-yard end zones. It’s 85 feet wide, with just another 5 feet to the wall -- and the crowd.

“Other than maybe golf, there is no sport that is as close to the fan at the game site and gives you the feel of the play like this does,” Baker says. “In our league, there is no out of bounds; you get hit by the defense, the wall and maybe by the fans, who can reach into the field of play. The fans are part of the game.”

The fans’ loyalty is impressive. Last year, for the first time, the league drew more than 1 million, with teams in Des Moines, Iowa; Orlando, Fla.; San Jose, Calif.; Phoenix; and West Palm Beach, Fla., playing at close to capacity.

That piqued interest in Nashville, where the new arena did not have any tenants until the Kats were born, and in the New York area. This season, the New Jersey Red Dogs will play in the Meadowlands and the New York CityHawks will call Madison Square Garden home.

Jim Drucker, league commissioner from 1994-96, sees all kinds of advantages in expansion, as long as the newcomers have the same commitment as longtime owners.

“We must must continue to expand with good owners in big cities and do well in big cities,” says Drucker, a founder of the Continental Basketball Association who will be the owner of one of the 1998 Arena Football expansion clubs. “Take a look where Arena is today in its 11th season; it’s light years ahead of where the NBA or NHL or NFL were in their 11th year.”

One of the true success stories is Arizona, where the Rattlers were born in 1992. In their first couple of years, they had to share America West Arena with World Team Tennis and indoor soccer. But those teams folded, while the Rattlers thrived, selling out 23 of their 35 games thus far.

Why? Maybe because people in Phoenix sought something entertaining to do in the dead heat of summer. The arena also offered the first air-conditioned venue for huge crowds in the city.

Major league baseball comes to Phoenix next year. Does that worry the Rattlers?

“We have a pretty solid base of 12,000 season ticket holders, and this year we had a renewal rate of 90 percent, so we don’t expect any significant drop-off,” says Gene Nudo, vice president of administration.

Nobody gets rich playing Arena Football. Each team has a $285,000 spending limit, a luxury tax that barely beats the NBA minimum for one player. But there are bonuses for victories, and the best players on the best teams can earn as much as $80,000.

Of course, the players aren’t nearly the caliber of those in the NFL.

“We put it in after my first season,” Drucker says of the salary ceiling. “There was a short-term need to control costs and generate revenue to put into marketing.

“With the luxury tax, we were able to protect the Albany (N.Y.) and Des Moines teams and not let the big cities pay so much for players that they drive those smaller teams out of business. And look who is still there: Des Moines is selling out and Albany is at 90-95 percent capacity.”

Critics say Arena ball is a gimmick, a creation for television. And television seems to love it.

ESPN has been televising Arena ball since 1987, and regional networks such as Prime, SportsChannel and MSG have shown games. The league is negotiating to get a future ArenaBowl on network television.

How long will the party keep building, particularly with so much competition -- Major League Soccer, Roller Hockey International, women’s basketball -- recently emerging in the spring and summer? Arena Football plans to add at least one team next year, probably in Los Angeles.

Jim Foster, who invented the game -- designing it on the back of an envelope while watching an indoor soccer game -- now runs the highly successful Iowa Barnstormers. He sees few limits for the league.

“The staying power we have enjoyed has been because it’s a fun game to watch,” Foster says. “It’s got a unique niche in the sports marketplace.”

Adds Drucker: “Arena Football already has broken away from the pack of other leagues and is starting to move up into another category. It won’t happen overnight, but it’s going to become the country’s fifth major league.”