Generation Gap

There is still something of a kid in David Baker, his toothy grin, the eagerness with which he recalls growing up in Downey in the 1960s. His childhood was marked by seasons: football in the fall, basketball in winter, summer evenings with Vin Scully and the Dodgers.

“I had a transistor radio,” he said. “I listened under the covers because I was supposed to be asleep.”

A part of him mourns the passing of that era but, as commissioner of the Arena Football League, Baker cannot spend too much time looking back.

“Now you have 500 TV channels and countless video games, film rentals, computers,” he said. “You have kids with cell phones and Palm Pilots and they have schedules to keep.”

His teenage sons are prime examples, and Baker keeps them in mind as he tries to attract new fans to his league. Forget the sheaves of marketing research that cross his desk, he takes Benjamin and Sam to games and asks their opinion.

“What you have is a more informed, more sophisticated young fan who has more things competing for his time,” Baker said. “Kids gravitate toward whatever grabs their attention.”

With rapid-fire scoring, players bouncing off walls and rock music blaring from loudspeakers--football as an extreme sport--the Arena game has made some inroads with this elusive audience. Other leagues have not fared as well.

The new generation is gradually losing interest in traditional sports, according to several key indicators.

While a majority of kids in the U.S. still follow pro football, basketball and baseball, a national poll shows the 12- to 17-year-old fan base eroding in the last six years.

Children still flock to youth leagues, but teen participation has dropped, especially when compared with the boom in snowboarding and skateboarding.

Even more important to the business of sport, television ratings for the under-18 crowd are shaky. Data compiled by Nielsen Media Research suggests the Big Four--the NFL, NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball--are playing to older audiences.

Consider the viewership for an average pro football game on broadcast television. Over the last decade, the 50-plus crowd grew by 3% to almost a quarter of the total. The under-18 segment shrank from 13% to 10%.

Add this demographic shift to a list of concerns for a multibillion-dollar industry already facing a decline in overall ratings and sluggish attendance. Baker is not the only one worried about courting a generation unlike any that came before.

“We will succeed or fail on how intelligently we work through these developments,” NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said at a recent industry conference. “All of our fans in the 21st century are going to be different than they were in the 20th century.”

Shorter Attention Spans

It is difficult to take an exact snapshot of the situation because different entities measure preferences differently. But the problem appears to begin when kids go outside to play. As NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said: “There’s a whole lot of competition out there.”

The number of U.S. children in youth football, basketball, baseball and hockey leagues remained steady or increased during the 1990s, according to the National Sporting Goods Assn. But teen participation fell off by as much as 23%.

During the same period, the number of children and teens involved with skateboarding, snowboarding and in-line skating jumped by as much as 538%.

This trend worries executives such as Tim Leiweke, president of the Kings and Staples Center, who said: “If they’re not playing traditional sports, that means they’re not watching traditional sports.”

His fears are corroborated by the ESPN Sports Poll, which suggests that fewer U.S. teens call themselves fans of the Big Four. The NFL’s popularity slipped by 3% from 1995 to 2001, the NHL’s by almost 14%.

Some industry observers suspect a backlash against pro sports’ corporate image, the astronomical player salaries and ubiquitous sponsor logos. That would help explain the success of the upstart Arena league, which showed a slight increase in the ESPN poll, and extreme sports.

Television ratings might be suffering for yet another reason. Researchers in New Jersey have found that kids have so many entertainment choices, they tend to flit from one thing to another.

“They are used to video games and doing things quickly,” said David Tice, vice president of Knowledge Networks/Statistical Research. “Kids just don’t have the attention span to watch games anymore.”

Ratings for the under-18 crowd will continue to decrease, Tice predicted, especially during the regular season when “so many teams make it to the playoffs in most leagues, there’s not a lot of incentive to sit through a whole game when it’s not really meaningful.”

Baseball is considered vulnerable because of its unhurried pace. A recent effort to speed up games might not be enough, said David Carter of the Sports Business Group, a Los Angeles consulting firm.

“Where’s the marketing sizzle?” he asked. “Just because a Royals game is four minutes shorter....”

Boxing also has suffered, lacking a marquee star and all but disappearing from broadcast television. While showing an uptick in the ESPN poll, it ranked below the likes of gymnastics and ice skating in a Knowledge Networks survey of what kids watch.

Speaking at an industry conference last month, HBO Sports President Ross Greenburg joked that his network is doing everything it can to hang onto its older boxing viewers: “We now have a research and development team working in our labs to create immortality so no human being will die, and everyone will continue to watch.”

They are testing the pill on Larry Merchant, he said.

A Different Consumer

Not all the numbers are ominous. When Knowledge Networks conducted research for ESPN and the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles last spring, 93% of boys and girls said they watch, listen to or read about some kind of sports. The ESPN poll suggests, despite decreases in popularity, the NFL and NBA still attract about three-quarters of U.S. teens.

The industry takes encouragement from these findings.

“Sports are still pervasive,” said Artie Bulgrin, an ESPN senior vice president. “The difference is the way they are being consumed.”

His argument goes like this: When kids gather in the hallway at school, they still want to talk about how Barry Bonds did last night, just like their fathers once talked about Hank Aaron. But with their attention pulled in so many directions, they need the information delivered in new ways.

Sports Web sites have succeeded in reaching a generation that spends much of its time online. At ESPN, quick-hit highlight shows such as “SportsCenter” and “Baseball Tonight” rank with the X Games in attracting young audiences.

“Kids get the same value without having to watch a 21/2-hour game,” Bulgrin said. “It allows them to squeeze all those other things in.”

The networks aren’t alone in trying to accommodate the new generation. Hockey is considering three rule changes, including quicker faceoffs, to speed things up. Teams have adopted hipper uniforms and marketing campaigns. In Washington, the Capitals enlisted a popular disc jockey to promote the team.

Some in the industry even think they can attract young fans with video games made realistic enough to show famous players’ faces. Tice said: “It’s probably true, just as much as kids who played Strat-O-Matic baseball grew up with a healthy interest in that sport.”

At the same time, the Big Four have asked players to be more fan-friendly by signing autographs and making community appearances. They have spent millions on youth leagues such as NFL Flag, the Jr. NBA and Jr. WNBA, the idea being that today’s athletes become tomorrow’s fans.

Skeptics question this assumption, arguing that a boom in youth participation has failed to produce commensurate ticket sales or television ratings for Major League Soccer. But researchers believe soccer--and hockey--suffer from a peculiar dynamic.

“A lot of it has to do with what’s important in our culture,” Tice said. “[Young players] move into high school and see the accolades and big college scholarships go to the people who play the major sports, the football and basketball and baseball players.”

Dallas Cowboy owner Jerry Jones believes this social conditioning endures from when he played football on the 1964 Arkansas national championship team.

“They hold ticker-tape parades for war heroes, astronauts and people who win ballgames,” he said. “That’s the [culture] we have.”

So the traditional sports seem eager to reemphasize their historical underpinnings.

Howard Schultz, chairman of Starbucks and owner of the Seattle SuperSonics, reminisces about sitting in the rafters at Madison Square Garden with his father, cheering for Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley and the rest of the New York Knicks. The way to get youngsters, he believes, is to lure families to the arena with discounts.

The SuperSonics reinforce this notion by having players go into the stands after games and hand a basketball to a father and son or mother and daughter. “It links old and new,” Schultz said.

Five Minutes

Among the traditional sports, perhaps only boxing faces imminent danger. “They’ve got an aging demographic they’re not replacing,” Carter said. With the controversial Mike Tyson and allegations of fixed rankings, he said, “This generation of kids can see just how ridiculous it is.”

Hockey’s future is harder to read: Even as it slid down the ESPN poll last season, it attracted a surge in young cable viewers. The rest of the old order figures to hold its ground for a while, football ruling the roost, basketball and baseball not far behind.

Meanwhile, extreme sports and other forms of entertainment are expected to siphon away more and more fans.

That would be good news for Arena football.

The league’s commissioner is a bull of a man, a former power forward at UC Irvine, preternaturally optimistic enough to have overcome past troubles: In a previous incarnation as mayor of Irvine, he was convicted of misdemeanor check forgery while trying to keep an underfunded congressional campaign afloat.

Now Baker has reinvented himself as an up-and-comer in the business of sport. Adaptability, he says, is the key to success.

When his sons and their friends wanted more action on kickoffs, he succeeded in eliminating the rule that blows a play dead if the returner steps out of the end zone while catching the ball. Acting on their suggestion to make extra-point attempts more exciting, he persuaded the league to experiment with ways to benefit rushers.

“If you look at some of the more established sports, they’re at the mature end of their product life,” he said. “We’re at the innovative end.”

Yet he doesn’t want his league compared to a video game and certainly not to the short-lived XFL. The Arena game is still football, he said, embodying old-school values and the notion of overcoming adversity that was critical to his own life. Thus the nostalgic leanings.

His previous career included a stint at a law firm that represented Gene Autry, and Baker still has season tickets behind home plate at Edison Field. A tinge of pride marks his words when he calls himself “one of those woeful and disillusioned Angel fans.”

The problem is, his sons won’t go to games with him.

“They think it’s too slow and too long,” he said. “They come from a video-game culture where everything has to be slam-bang-hit-boom.”

All the marketing research in the world cannot explain this attitude any better than 19-year-old Benjamin Baker, who says: “If something doesn’t happen in the first five minutes, I’m gone.”

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Traditional Sports Lose Teenage Fans

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