Petersen, NBC Take ‘Extreme’ Measures : They Plan Sports Festivals Rivaling X Games

Extreme sports such as street luge and in-line skating moved closer to the middle of the road Thursday as NBC and magazine publisher Petersen Cos. announced plans for a series of televised sports festivals that will challenge ESPN’s X Games, an increasingly popular television showcase for unconventional sports.

San Diego, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Miami reportedly are among U.S. cities being considered as hosts for the Gravity Games, to debut next summer. During a news conference at Rockefeller Plaza in New York, NBC and Petersen also said they would stage a winter sports festival next year and subsequently add an international competition.

The endorsement by two media giants is seen as further proof that alternative sports once dismissed as kids-only fads are coming of age. Giant media companies and powerful advertisers that traditionally have used professional and collegiate sports to reach free-spending young males in their teens, 20s and 30s are increasingly latching on to extreme sports.

The deal also comes at a time when major networks are scrambling to deal with the financial impact of unexpectedly low ratings for sports staples such as Major League Baseball’s World Series and regular-season National Football League games. NBC also stands to lose advertising revenue if the National Basketball Assn.’s first-ever work stoppage continues.

While younger males haven’t tuned out big-league sports, NBC executives believe that as many as 35 million young males are actively pursuing alternative sports such as motocross, in which athletes ride motorcycles on dirt tracks, and street luge, where athletes use oversized skateboards to jet down urban streets.

“Whether these kids play football and skate or simply skate, the point is that they’re generally not watching football [on television] and they’re an audience that has become terribly elusive for broadcasters and their advertisers,” said Stacey Lippman, president of Petersen’s brand and marketing division. “These kids have been disappearing from mainstream media at the very time more and more [advertisers] want them.”

With just 10 hours of programming next year, the Gravity Games--which will be jointly owned by NBC and Petersen--will be dwarfed by the thousands of programming hours that networks dedicate to professional and collegiate sports. The new games will also fall noticeably short of the 36 1/2 hours of X Games coverage that ESPN broadcast over the summer from San Diego.

But even though extreme-sports broadcasts aren’t yet competitive with professional sports broadcasts when it comes to ratings, observers note that some of ESPN’s X Games coverage over the summer drew higher ratings than some National Hockey League games and many World Cup soccer tournament contests.

And, at a time when networks are trying to control costs, observers say that the four-day Gravity Games should be cheaper to produce and broadcast than traditional sports contests. But NBC spokesman Ed Markey said the network will incorporate many of the same camera and editing techniques used to produce glossy programming such as that seen during Olympic Games broadcasts.

Rather than concentrating on straight competition coverage, NBC is opting to focus heavily upon the athletes’ personalities. And instead of live broadcasts, NBC will heavily edit competition footage to create 10 hours of broadcasts that include music, fashion and entertainment. “We’re looking at something on the order of ‘Extreme Lollapalooza,’ ” Markey said. “It should be about 85% competition and 15% lifestyle.”

Petersen executives sees extreme games as a natural extension for a company that already has 14 magazines aimed at alternative sports. Petersen’s Los Angeles-based Raw Sports Group magazine group has a readership of millions of young males. Magazines to be associated with the sports festivals run the range from Surfer to Dirt Rider.

With the new festival and programming, Petersen and NBC are taking direct aim at Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN, which was among the first television companies to recognize that extreme sports were more than a passing fad. But NBC and Petersen executives emphatically denied that they were “ripping off the X Games.”

“They were there first and deserve credit,” Lippman said. “But we think the opportunity is now there to wrap these extreme events around the athletes themselves, which is something the X Games hasn’t done.”

Aware that they’ll be bumping up against the older X Games produced by ESPN, Petersen and NBC promise to offer “record prize money” to lure top extreme games athletes. The media giants have hired San Diego County resident Biker Sherlock, a top street luge rider, to help structure 11 events at the first Gravity Games next summer.

NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol said he became a believer in extreme games during his family’s summer vacation when his children eschewed team sports for highly individualized, board-oriented sports. “I came back in September with a real passion to find something in this area,” Ebersol said.