SPORTS BUSINESS'S FAB FIVE

1) George Bodenheimer
When a certain company says in an advertisement that they’re “the best” or “the most trusted” in their industry, for even the uninterested consumer it instinctively never strikes a credible cord. You simply shrug it off and think, Eh, just marketing jargon, I’ve heard that one before. But ESPN, the “worldwide leader in sports” as the network calls itself, is just that. Since Bodenheimer (pictured) has been at the helm, here are the different ESPN extensions that have launched (in no specific order): ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPN News, ESPN Deportes, ESPN International, ESPN Original Entertainment, ESPN Mobile, ESPN 360, ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. I know I’m forgetting one, probably a few. Bodenheimer branded ESPN like Howard Schultz did with Starbucks. In the same way you can’t pass on a cup of coffee without thinking Starbucks, you can’t consider a sport a sport unless it’s been broadcast on ESPN. What do you think made dorm room poker such a cultural phenomenon?

2) Tiger Woods
Woods is literally in a category all by himself. Yeah, he may lose a tournament here and there. Yeah, he’s sort of a private guy off the course. But, he’s a gentleman golfer and a loyal endorser; get this: he backs up his Buick sponsorship by actually driving the car make to some of his match play rounds. Woods has single-handedly engaged a cross-cultural interest in the PGA Tour and has brought hipness and athleticism to a rather stuffy, white-collar, buttoned-up sport. In the next several years, Woods will become the first sports billionaire (boosted by Nike’s big pitch), unprecedented for an individual player; that fact alone makes him an automatic top five most influential person in the sports business industry.

3) David Stern
Everyone wants to talk to Mr. Stern these days. And Stern is no antagonist. It seems like he’s always doing a live online chat or featured in an interview with a major publication. It’s not that the commissioner is simply a nice, soft-spoken, down-to-earth guy; he’s in a bit of a predicament more than ever to play up the NBA, a league which has been tainted by a “thug” image. For that reason, in addition to Stern’s disregard for player feedback about the composite basketball he introduced at the start of the 2006-07 season, Tiger Woods gets the edge at the No. 2 spot. But there’s no reason to dwell on that slight scar. Stern is a one-man marketing machine. His business sense is ahead of the curve, he innovatively runs the NBA as an entertainment property and he’s begun to master player development (from the dress code to the NBDL), contrary to popular belief. He also knows a thing or two about international expansion, having really been the first commissioner of any major professional sport to envision that opportunity. Since the ripple effect of the '92 Dream Team, there are now around 100 international NBA players; in fact, several teams’ rosters are nearly half represented by foreigners. Stern’s next steps are to grow China and India as strategic basketball markets, which further punctuates that the NBA more than any other league is taking the most advantage of today’s shrinking world. Good luck or bad luck, Stern would tell you that it’s not about luck, but a love for the game.

4) Chad Hurley/Steve Chen
Simply put, there’s not a website out there that doesn’t link back to YouTube in some way. In the sports world, YouTube has become the user-generated ESPN Classic, to the point that actual licensed video content has been alienated. Now, the leagues are finally expressing their discontent with YouTube’s copyright infringements. But without suing, some of them, such as the NBA and NHL, are signing monumental partnership deals with YouTube because they realize that in order to reach their targeted sports consumer, they have to go where they are. That medium is YouTube, which has revolutionized advertising 2.0. Amazingly, Hurley and Chen, the website’s founders, have just sat back and watched users dictate their future business endeavors.

5) Dwyane Wade/LeBron James
When it comes to everyday, mainstream sports, where our attention is mainly, Wade and James are the two most influential athletes. Tiger Woods is a more iconic name because of his global stature, but he’s not on the radar (or the television) screen as regularly as Wade and James. It would be a disservice to discuss either of the NBA superstars separately. Considering the NBA’s supremacy and the league’s individualistic nature, Wade and James have emerged as the go-to guys in any sport for multi-platformed endorsement deals. As the new era Jordan/Bird rivalry, the pair has catapulted player marketing to distances Jordan and his peers never reached. When doing a McDonald’s commercial was seen as “out of the box” in the 1990s, Wade and James have creatively crossed over their appeal into industries that would seem unfathomable for an athlete. But Wade and James have done just that by designing a cell phone and endorsing a computer product, respectively, among many other breakthrough initiatives, which have set the tempo for other top-tier player marketing agreements.

Who’s your top five? Chime in with your choices.

WHAT'S NEXT?

I am struggling to write exactly what I want to say. I have a mixed bag of words under my fingertips, and I'm unable to choose the right ones to start this column. But I'll give it my best shot and type something anyway, hoping I will soon get a better grip on what's to come. That's what the business of sports does to me every single day.

It's a relationship I want to be involved in for the rest of my life, but it's been confusing my life lately. Every time I engage myself in various forms of media, I'm overwhelmed with the plethora of news items discussing "formation" and "expansion" of sports business properties. Not only are the athletes getting quicker, but off-the-court transactions are also gaining faster ground. Before, you could get away with saying "sports is my passion" in a job interview just being knowledgeable about the four major pro leagues; now to back up that statement, you have to be able to answer questions about NASCAR, the Arena Football League and... Major League Eating? That's right. That's a real league. (More on this later.) These emerging trends have complicated my sports intake, leading me to constantly question, What's next?

The thing is, there was probably always this much going on in the world of sports - we were just consuming current events on a smaller scale. Now, there are a lot more opportunities for content delivery and, therefore, bucks to be made off every little thing. As the pop-ups keep popping, I'm getting pickier at reading feature news articles, and I'm jumping past side stories that I don't have enough time to read in full. There's just so much time in a day, which gets me thinking, Should they create jobs for full-time readers for people, like myself, who have trouble staying in the know of their own profession? My leisure reading has become rushed catch-up skimming, and on more days than average, glancing at headlines help me just to get through the day. It's like I feel starved for sports consumption.

There is no saturation point anymore. If you visited Sports Business Daily's website today, you probably read about a new sports web 2.0 venture, a partnership being formed and a sponsorship deal that was just finalized. Tomorrow, it's deja vu like the movie Groundhog Day. I'm not denying that I don't accept this; heck, some of these developments partly motivated me to start a blog. But did you ever think that an energy drink could create a new sport, like Red Bull did with "Crashed Ice"? The business of sports has got me twisted like a wire fence and I'm strangling over my own premonitions. Let me fill you in on some of the recent clutter and help you make sense of it all. Here are my thoughts and observations on sports 3.0:

1) Let's start with "Crashed Ice" because you're probably already on the verge of Googling it. Here's what it is: Combining hockey, boardercross and downhill skiing, racers compete on a 500-meter ice track that winds through an urban environment, featuring a series of a hairpin turns and 45-degree vertical drops. It's not so much what it is, but rather the eye-catching name behind its creation. We all know that companies are trying to market younger; their commercials feature songs created exclusively for them, products represented as people, fast-paced editing techniques and... sports themes. Companies are sensing more than ever that they can best leverage their brand messages through sports, so, hey, why not create a sport? Red Bull entered the marketplace as cutting edge and then went ahead and bought their own MLS team, the New York Red Bulls. Now, "Crashed Ice." My hunch says that they'll be the first company to start a sports league in space. Then, they'll have to create the Red Bull Rocket to get everyone up there.

2) Speaking of space, do you think that once "the world is flat" according to Thomas Friedman - once leagues conquer international expansion and are successful getting kids in Botswana to wear their licensed jerseys - that space will be the next market? It's not far off from an inconvenient truth, especially if global warming continues faster than Andy Roddick's serve, that space may very well be our next civilization, and naming rights for the first "astro-turf" field will already be secured.

3) So, let's talk about Major League Eating. I don't need to get into much detail here, but basically it used to be called the International Federation of Competitive Eating. That's right, competitive eating. The organization just changed its name to Major League Eating and hosts contests nationwide. Here's one "eater" bio for you: Sonya Thomas, who's 39 years old and weighs 109 pounds, once ate 65 hard-boiled eggs in 6 minutes and 40 seconds, and 44 Maine lobsters from the shell in 12 minutes. Think you can outdo that? Simply go to majorleagueeating.com and enter your name, address, phone number and your eating specialty, and you've officially submitted your name for a chance to join the league. Hey, in this user-generated world, anything is possible, including becoming your own professional athlete. The point I really wanted to make here is that the MLE reflects a trend in which emerging sports and leagues are finding ways to attract niche audiences. For example, footvolley (combining the skills of soccer and the playing field of beach volleyball) and night tennis (tennis played in fluorescent lights amidst a nightclub atmosphere) were created overseas and arrived in the U.S. to rave reviews for their innovation. Now, they both have cult followings. Same with up-and-coming leagues, such as the Arena Football League and the National Lacrosse League. Why are they gaining fans? Well, that's easy. Because they actually appeal to "fans" and not the buttoned-up executives who flood most arenas these days. In fact, with the AFL, after each game the players are required to sign autographs for 45 minutes. Some fans are becoming turned off with the corporate landscape of major pro sports, including the pretentious attitudes and off-the-field behavior of million-dollar athletes. Also, some fans simply don't have the luxury of an NBA or NFL team nearby where they live. On the flip side, year-to-year financial growth for all of these "underground" sports and leagues will be challenging. Because people are working longer hours during the week, less connected to live events but more connected through technology, traveling more when leisure time presents itself, it's harder to make time for anything new. At the end of the week, when all is said and done, what sports are the peak performers? College football and the NFL. Once a week, on the weekend, no work obligations, tailgating, tradition, pizza and beer - what more can a sports fan ask for? I think the niche sports and leagues have a better chance of succeeding by leveraging themselves with more prominent sports properties (for instance, footvolley tying into the AVP Pro Beach Volleyball Tour).

4) User-generated content. It's everywhere now. Recently, Sports Illustrated just acquired FanNation.com, an online community for sports fans to read sports news, track their favorite teams and players, and write blogs. ESPN has been hiring popular sports bloggers (most recently, NBA writer Henry Abbott who founded the award-winning True Hoop). Even the athletes themselves are involved in creating social networking websites (for example, SwimRoom, created by pro swimmers, such as Michael Phelps, for other swimmers) and their own MySpace pages to extend their marketing appeal in the web 2.0 world (for example, Carmelo Anthony). There are a lot of other websites I don't even know about it, and there's more to come. So if you have a solid pitch for a bull-riding site, get going on it before ESPN, which has been broadcasting the sport more lately, does something about it. The next frontier will be user-generated advertising. You will be the idea, the voice and the production behind a brand message. We've recently seen a pinch of this during the Super Bowl with the NFL's "Pitch Us Your Idea for the Best NFL Super Bowl Commercial Ever" and Chevrolet's "Chevy College Super Bowl Ad Challenge." It's not a coincidence companies are hiring younger and younger these days.

5) Here's something that I just don't get: Athletes, such as Gilbert Arenas and Richard Jefferson, who have recently starting using hypoxic devices, which are chambers (they look like tents) that simulate oxygen deprivation. They increase the production of oxygen-carrying red blood cells that is thought to improve endurance. I know this is a rare phenomenon right now, but it just goes to show where the future of training is heading and the far reaches some athletes will go to gain a competitive edge. I was speaking with a friend the other day who said that he ran into Joakim Noah, who just won a national championship with the Florida Gators, at a New York City restaurant with several "beautiful" girls and told him, "You must be the luckiest guy right now!" Noah responded by saying, "I wake up every day and realize how blessed I am." I thought about what he said for a second and then told him, "Next time you go out, you should put on stilts and see if you get those same beautiful girls Noah did." I mentioned to him that in the same way Hollywood wannabes get plastic surgery to make big bucks off their looks, it would be interesting to see how many aspiring athletes cosmetically change their bodies, such as getting leg transplants to become taller. He replied that there is an operation in which the doctor can break your leg and then add more bone to the cracked area. Could this kind of mentality become more prevalent? As we saw with Major League Baseball's steroid plague, several anonymous players came forward and said that they injected the illegal drug just to compete on the same level as teammates who were using it and playing well. It's like how in high school, kids will do whatever it takes to be part of the "cool" club. Unfortunately, this kind of obsession can lead to devastating physical and emotional results. In the end, Hercules-looking athletes is not what matters; it's about the purity of competition because sports across the board have lost fans due to cheating incidents and tainted images depicted in the media.

6) There was an article recently in the Los Angeles Times that discussed how prominent pro athletes, such as Reggie Bush and Peyton Manning, are as of late aligning their representation with Creative Artists Agency, the dominant agency in show business that includes clients such as Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. The reason: Crossover marketing appeal. Agents understand that to best leverage the image of their players is to extend their brand outside of sports into other industries and entertainment platforms. These days, Dwyane Wade still remains the leader of the pack, although LeBron James is creeping up with his new endorsement deal with Microsoft. Off the court, Wade has modeled for Sean John, endorsed Lincoln Navigator, launched his own T-Mobile Sidekick, appeared on the David Letterman show and MTV's Total Request Live and was named one of People Magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People in 2005. That's PR at its finest. So, what's next? Expect to see more athletes hosting or appearing in reality shows, like "Dancing with the Stars," and dating A-list celebrities, a la San Antonio Spurs point guard Tony Parker's relationship with desperate housewife Eva Longoria. Even big men should work on their crossover.

7) Have you seen the new Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2007 video game commercial? If you haven't, here's what happens: The opening shot shows the inside of a huge living room with a crowd of onlookers. Then, Woods walks in and heads over to a table where he picks up a Nintendo Wii numchuck. He sets his feet in front of a TV and swings away as the gallery cheers and applauds while watching the ball soar through the air on the screen and land near the cup. This promotion of the new interactive Wii system might represent what's to come. In a recent interview with Sports Illustrated, an EA Sports programmer said that he envisions a future in which people will watch other people play videos online as a form of entertainment. To take that step a further, could you imagine a video game channel on your cable provider where you could watch gaming tournaments, like in the movie The Wizard. To be honest with you, the evolution of video games has caused TV ratings for live sporting events to dip somewhat. Kids, especially, are consuming video games like they're candy. When you think about, why would you just sit there and watch a game, wondering what it would be like to actually be in it, when you could create yourself down to your eye wrinkles, be able to call your favorite team's plays and then throw bombs to Chad Johnson? Sounds like a dream job to me.

8) Last weekend, I went to the New York International Auto Show. If you had to guess which exhibit excited me the most, either for Maybach, Lamborghini or Jeep, which would you choose? Probably not Jeep, right? Well, it was. The car company featured "Camp Jeep," the brand's annual three-day mix of off-road driving and other family-friendly outdoor activities. After about an hour-long wait, visitors could actually drive brand-new Jeep vehicles through an obstacle course, featuring a steep hill and a diagonal slope. So, how does this all translate to sports? I'll tell you. When you arrive at a sporting event, you pretty much just wait in line, present your ticket and then head to your seat - perhaps picking up a beer and hot dog along the way. What if, before you did any of those things, you could enjoy a variety of interactive activities outside the arena or stadium? Obviously, auto show attendees don't really have to watch the clock; sports fans have to or they'll miss crucial segments of the game. So that's why you kick off the game-day attraction much earlier with a mini-festival. Let's face it: Besides the cheerleaders doing the tootsie roll, in-game entertainment is kind of boring. I'm always surprised to see so many people standing and screaming for a T-shirt. It's just a T-shirt, and you paid how much for your seat! They should be throwing you Treos.

9) Through the rumblings I've been reading, Nike is looking to take SPARQ Training, a new system for measuring overall athleticism by testing speed, power, agility, reaction and quickness, and revolutionize it on the high school level. Nike wants SPARQ to be the SAT for athletics, enabling colleges to recruit athletes more selectively by checking their SPARQ Rating. There's been a lot of talk in youth sports that kids are over-training and over-committed to sports. To counter that, there are programs to confront kids' obesity problems. Where's the middle ground? I have no idea, and I'm not sure parents will agree with SPARQ's purpose. Kids are already so focused on prepping for standardized tests and pressured on getting into a competitive college for academics. I think SPARQ is an extra weight for kids to carry; I say let their passion and sportsmanship speak for themselves.

10) I'll keep this one simple. Google is taking over the world.

More thoughts to come in a second part of this series...