Lacrosse Pushes West, Using NHL Playbook

The limitless capacity of human beings to watch other human beings engage each other in tests of athletic prowess has made pantsfuls of money for people like Rupert Murdoch, who provides his customers with broadcasts of everything from Major League Baseball to Australian Rules Football on his Fox Sports Net, depending on the hour.

So it’s not surprising that entrepreneurs keep trying to probe the extent of the sports audience’s attention span. This winter, the latest such attempt will roll into Anaheim and San Jose, two of the new host cities of the National Lacrosse League, an 11-team circuit that plays a turbocharged indoor cousin of an ancient game popular, in its outdoor version, in Canada and on Northeastern U.S. college campuses.

The moves are part of the 16-year-old league’s strategy to bust out of its parochial straitjacket. But even some of those closest to the venture acknowledge that transplanting a relatively obscure regional game to the West Coast will be a challenge. It’s probably no coincidence that the New York-based league has tried, wherever possible, to entrust its expansion to people who have proven experience in selling a regional sport to a national audience: the owners and operators of National Hockey League teams.

“There are plenty of us who thought when the NHL moved here, ‘Why are they putting a hockey team in San Jose?’ ” The speaker is Malcolm Bordelon, executive vice president of business operations at Silicon Valley Sports & Entertainment, which owns the National Hockey League San Jose Sharks and operates the downtown HP Pavilion, where the Sharks play to capacity crowds.

Bordelon’s group has assumed the task of managing the as-yet-unnamed lacrosse franchise on behalf of its owners, a consortium of investors from Canada and the Bay Area. He plans to undertake the same sort of marketing that introduced the expansion Sharks to the community upon their founding 12 years ago: They sent players out into the neighborhoods to conduct clinics for school-level players and make appearances at local fairs and festivals, held a public name-the-team contest and trusted that they could build on a core of fans, many of them emigre Easterners, familiar with the sport from childhoods spent in icier climes.

Bordelon and his colleagues are also counting on the fundamental appeal of a fast-paced, physical sport. Not only does the confined playing field of indoor lacrosse speed up the game, just as in arena football, but the league has tweaked its rules to produce the offense-heavy play that is so much to American tastes. It’s not unusual for each team in a match to score in double digits. (In baseball, one could count on that only if Angel starters were pitching for both sides.)

“It’s a fun game to watch,” Peter Wendell, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who is the San Jose team’s lead local owner, says of a sport that involves teams of five (plus a goalie) advancing a ball down the field by passes and carries in the netted pocket of a hockey-like stick. “It has all the physical contact and athleticism of hockey and two to three times the scoring.” The players, moreover, are not above mixing with fans after games, a valuable marketing tool.

“They’re normal human beings,” Wendell says, in part because their pay is so low -- the league average is $10,000 for a 16-game season -- that they play part time and maintain conventional day jobs, like early-1900s ballplayers.

The new franchise operators in San Jose and Anaheim, who are inheriting teams that underperformed in Albany, N.Y., and northern New Jersey, also take heart from the strong, if short-lived, performance of second-tier sports teams in the past.

On the surface, that might seem delusional. The history of secondary sports leagues in the U.S. is an ugly one, encompassing failed ventures in roller hockey, indoor soccer and team tennis, among other things. An attempt at a pro lacrosse league foundered in the 1970s, brought low by overspending. Even Major League Soccer, the standard-bearer for a ubiquitous cultural passion, has never been taken seriously as a major professional league, thanks in part to its failure to pony up for certified international superstars.

The HP Pavilion and the Pond have had their own experiences with such also-rans and never-wuzzers -- leagues that expanded rapidly beyond their fan base, spent money they hadn’t earned and displayed ambitions far in excess of their potential.

“Indoor soccer grew too fast,” Bordelon told me, referring to a league that folded in 1992. “They got their players into Ferraris before the money was there. We had a roller hockey team. Our local franchise did OK, but the league didn’t and we ended up with no one to play.”

Arrowhead Pond, the new home of the relocated New Jersey Storm, similarly hosted teams that did well enough as local attractions but got stranded as the tide went out on their leagues. “Roller hockey was not a mainstream sport, but the Anaheim Bullfrogs averaged 9,000 a game,” says Tim Ryan, the arena’s general manager. “Indoor soccer was not a mainstream sport, but the Anaheim Splash averaged 7,500. They provided high-energy entertainments in a first-class facility at affordable prices, but the leagues folded around the teams.”

Perhaps cognizant of such pitfalls, Ryan doesn’t talk as though pro lacrosse has to aspire to a history as storied as baseball’s or football’s to rank as a worthwhile business, especially if his arena can profit by filling in eight more home dates a year.

“I don’t think any of us has a plan for how far and how long it will go,” he says. “From our standpoint, if we can average five to seven thousand fans a game in the first year, we’d think we have a foundation for at least a few years.”

League officials, naturally, prefer to paint the future in brighter colors. To hear Jim Jennings, the league commissioner, tell it, the westward expansion is as much a milestone for lacrosse as the Dodgers’ and Giants’ migration here in 1958 was for baseball. “Our goal is to be the fifth major league sport.”

Some sports experts say there’s no point in the league’s aspiring to be anything more than niche entertainment. The factors that put the major in major leagues -- corporate sponsorships and luxury-box rentals -- are finite. “There’s only so much income out there for sports leagues, and the existing ones are using up all the corporate and high-income dollars,” says Andrew Zimbalist, an expert on pro sports economics at Smith College.

The lacrosse league, indeed, unashamedly positions itself as family-oriented discount entertainment; the average ticket price for both new franchises will be about $20, compared with $50 or more for their NHL partners. All the other numbers associated with the sport are correspondingly small: The San Jose team’s entire budget this year will be about $1.6 million, less than a tenth of the $19.6-million payroll alone of baseball’s most miserly team, Tampa Bay. The price for an expansion franchise is $3 million, Jennings says, which would scarcely count as a rounding error in the numbers being thrown around in the bidding for the Dodgers.

But the league has also signaled its intention to stick around for the long haul by trying to fix its weakest teams. The relocating Albany Attack averaged attendance of 3,000 to 5,000 per game, which would look like a throng only to fans of the Montreal Expos. The Anaheim-bound New Jersey Storm, which is saddled with a large ownership stake held by the former NBA star Jayson Williams, who will go on trial next year in the 2002 shooting death of a limo driver, didn’t do much better. This year the league shut down its Ottawa franchise, a fate that earlier befell teams in Baltimore and Syracuse.

The new venues are encouraged by the experience of Denver, to which sports magnate Stan Kroenke, the owner of the NHL Colorado Avalanche, the NBA Denver Nuggets and their home arena, the Pepsi Center, imported the failing Washington, D.C., lacrosse franchise last year. At first, the local sports establishment ridiculed the move -- sportswriter Bernie Lincicome of the Rocky Mountain News predicted it would turn Denver into a haven for trash sports like forklift racing and Afghan buzkashi.

But the Colorado Mammoth drew 15,000 spectators a game, which exceeded everyone’s expectations and matched what the league says it needs as a nationwide average to be judged a success and given a shot at a national TV contract. (It was also not far short of the per-game average of Kroenke’s arena football team, the last-place Colorado Crush.) League and team officials are working at securing regional TV coverage where they can; talks have been scheduled between the Anaheim franchise and Fox Sports Net in Southern California, for example, though they’re charitably described as “preliminary.”

And yet, it’s gratifying that at least someone in pro sports understands the value of the Southern California audience. “L.A. is the No. 2 TV market,” Jennings says, sounding like someone who has discovered an axiom that has eluded the National Football League.

“It’s very difficult to get any attention from the networks when you’re basically a Northeastern league.” With the move west, he says, “This is a breakout year for us.”

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Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. Michael Hiltzik can be reached at golden.state@latimes.com.