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When the brilliant James J. Patterson started SportsFan Magazine roughly a decade ago, one of the cornerstones of its foundational ideology was outrage: Fans upset about the ethics, ethos and, most importantly, the economics of professional sports in modern times. That led to cover stories about everything from fans suing teams to the art and science of ticket scalping. It also led to a reoccurring theme throughout the magazine’s print run, which was how corporations had successfully purchased the fun in all American sports and stored it under lock-and-key in some kind of underground vault.
Advertising and other assorted corporate whoring has crept into every facet of sports, from the way they’re presented to the way they’re funded to the way they’re remembered. Stadiums have sponsors. Highlights have sponsors. Athletes have sponsors, and those sponsors have sponsors. It’s a small miracle that other professional sports have somehow avoided the blatant advertising on uniforms and equipment that NASCAR trail-blazed.
A great litmus test about the over-commercialization of sports is the way the game is presented on the radio. Take baseball, for example: The differences between coverage today and, say, 25 years ago are startling. Every single occurrence in games seems sponsored today, from the first pitch to the last moments of a post-game show. Back in the day, sponsorship seemed obvious, folksy and quirky: The local food market sponsoring a home run, or the homer announcer doing a live-read between innings. Today, it’s engrained and, in many cases, nearly subliminal.
In the words of one of most popular pieces in the halls of SFM HQ: Where’s the outrage? Has the complete assimilation of sports by corporate culture caused us to give up the fight? Do we all just accept naming rights, constant sponsorship and the undeniable ability of corporations to usurp the integrity of our games as unavoidable and irreversible?
I remember, in the not-to-distant past, a fan culture that was outraged over the fact that college bowl games had become de facto commercials for its sponsors instead of distinct experiences for college athletes and fans. Or maybe I’m the only idiot who’d rather tell his grandkids about playing in the Peach Bowl rather than the Chick-fil-A Bowl.
See, it used to be the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, but then the grilled chicken ate the peach. Now we have bowl games that have never been anything but corporate advertising ventures, like the PapaJohns.com Bowl.
Now obviously, the argument for all of this corporate whoring is that it subsidizes college and professional sports. Papa John’s helps create a bowl game for deserving college players, and that bowl game raises revenue for the schools and their conferences and the NCAA. ESPN Regional Television, according to Wikipedia, “owns and manages the bowl's operations, sponsorships and marketing.”
So everybody wins, right? Well, not always. According to Fox Business News, there have been no less than 19 deals for over $100 million for stadium and arena naming rights over the last decade. A recent story by FBR quoted Jim Grinstead — publisher of Revenues from Sports Venues, “a Nashville-based company that tracks how stadiums and arenas make money” — as saying that “fans do better when those deals are struck because the team has the cash to invest in the players without it coming out of the ticket prices.”
“Fans do better?” Players, and their agents, do better. Teams do better, if they’re not criminally mismanaged despite their high-priced talent. But fans? Grinstead mentions ticket prices, which is sort of ironic: For all the corporate whoring in professional sports, can you remember an announcement that a team had signed on with a major sponsor at the same time it announced ticket prices would decrease?
Me neither. But much like the infiltration of commercialization in sports, I guess the continued fleecing of fans is just implicit these days.
Published on the web and www.SportsFanMagazine.com since 1997, "The Jester's Quart" is a weekly satirical look at sports, pop culture and why NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman is a jackass. Columnist Greg Wyshynski is the Senior Editor for SportsFan Magazine in Washington DC, and the Senior Sports Editor for The Connection Newspapers of Northern Virginia. His book "Glow Pucks and 10-Cent Beer: The 101 Worst Ideas in Sports History" can be ordered now. Email Wyshynski at jestersquart@hotmail.com.
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