Monday, November 30, 2009
Swoooooosh!
I had a strange experience this weekend. I was in a real rage…one of those blind, murderous rages where self-control vanishes entirely. You know what I'm talking about — if you're married, or have kids, or better yet, married with kids, you've been there. Anyway, something happened at home — what happened is really not important — and it was late at night, closer to my kids' wake-up time than their bedtime…and I, you know, got behind the wheel of my car and in my blind rage, kind of hit a tree. Or something.
The strange part is what happened afterward. I went to the hospital, got released, and when the police asked to question me, I refused. Maybe I got hit in the head in the accident, I don't remember. They asked a couple more times, and I refused each time — I figured what had happened was between me, my family, and possibly the tree.
Nobody was hurt, and if there was property damage involved, I'm good for it. And I'm insured. No biggie.
Anyway, there's nothing to tell. And I've cooperated fully with the authorities. Except that I've refused to talk to the authorities, but that's my right as a citizen. The people in my gated community understand, I can tell you.
Frankly, I don't expect that anything will come of the incident. Life goes on, you know.
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Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Hall Monitor
I'm not much of a museum guy. I'll chaperone my daughter's field
trip to the Milwaukee Public Museum, but I typically don't actively
seek out such places. So reading earlier this week about the National High School Coaches
Association's plans to build a $10 million high school hall of fame
in Easton, Pa. — and its "very conservative attendance estimate" of
75,000 to 100,000 people during the first year, according to NHSCA
president Bob Ferraro Sr. — gave me pause. After all, the Milwaukee
Public Museum, which has been around for almost 130 years, only
attracts 500,000 visitors per year, and its exhibit possibilities are much less limited. More specific to our business, the ambitious $100 million Sports Museum of America
opened in May 2008 with more than 45,000 square feet, 21 original
films, 30 interactive
exhibits, 1,100 photographs and hundreds of artifacts in 19 galleries —
along with great expectations of one million visitors per year. It's now closed and bankrupt after failing to come
anywhere near that number.
Sure, the high school hall of fame, to be funded by the City
of Easton and donations, sounds like a very cool facility, with an
athletic testing center, training facilities and talking holograms
expected to be part of the mix when it opens in late 2011. And
I wish the NHSCA well with this endeavor,
I really do. After all, I was a high school athlete (barely), I suspect
both of my children will be high school athletes, and I cover the
business of high school sports for AB. As Ferraro said during a
recent press conference in which he unveiled plans for the hall of
fame, “High school sports
deserve notoriety, and now [they] will get it.” I just hope that the
notoriety — perhaps Ferraro meant to use "distinction" or some other
more-positive term — doesn't stem from a failed venture.
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Friday, November 20, 2009
Fire and Mice
It's hard to imagine a worse week for a one-year-old sports venue.
Sure, there have been other stadiums and arenas with pyrotechnic setbacks or infestation issues, but Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis had to confront both fire and mice within a seven-day span.
On Tuesday, Nov. 10, local NBC affiliate WTHR aired a two-part report of its months-long investigation into food safety violations at the stadium. Critical violations — the kind considered a threat to public health — included the discovery of mouse droppings in storage and food-preparation areas. Droppings were even found inside an oven. Marion County Health Department food safety inspectors also witnessed dead mice, as well as live mice scurrying through a loge-level kitchen.
WTHR's Bob Segall reported that more than 1,400 violations, including 500-plus critical violations, had been documented since the stadium opened as home to the Indianapolis Colts in August 2008. (Food temperature and employee hand-washing violations also contributed to these totals.) As of this writing, 42 citations for repeat violations (or nearly a third of those meted out to all restaurants in the entire county) and nearly $4,000 in fines had been issued against the stadium's food service provider, Centerplate.
Segall's "13 Investigates" team returned to Lucas Oil last Friday, three days after the initial findings aired, to take samples of suspicious matter found on the stadium's event level. "They tried to tell us it was just material from the field surface," Segall told me yesterday, hours before airing a follow-up report last night. "We had the stuff tested, and that's not the case. Some of it is little rubber pieces from the turf, but that's not everything that's in there."
According to Segall, within days Centerplate went from outright denial of an infestation problem to having its president and other senior executives fly in to see food-stand conditions for themselves. The company released a statement Nov. 13 that reads in part, "[In] response to the recent food safety violations, Centerplate has hired additional operations management; more than doubled the internal health safety audit team; created a 24-hour hotline for fans and staff to immediately report any concern or known food service violation; and contracted with Orkin for daily inspections to accelerate efforts to remediate and prevent against pest control issues."
Anecdotal reports indicated thinned concessions lines at the Colts next home game.
If the food-related public-relations fallout wasn't enough, pyrotechnic material detonated after the home team scored its first touchdown against rival New England last Sunday night managed to set the stadium's synthetic turf surface on fire. A small blaze near the 50-yard line was quickly extinguished, but Darren Gill, director of marketing for the surface's manufacturer, FieldTurf, informs me that a repair crew will be in Indianapolis this weekend to address several areas of minor damage while the Colts play at Baltimore. Having noticed flames on the field, Al Michaels told his NBC "Sunday Night Football" audience, "Don't get me started on fireworks in indoor stadiums." And Al Michaels not wanting to get started on any topic tells me something, at least.
Lucas Oil Stadium representatives and Colts officials were likewise tight-lipped. AB's repeated calls to ask about potential changes to pyrotechnics policies went unanswered. I turned to WTHR's Segall. "I don't know any answers to that question," he told me. "I've kind of been up to my ankles in mouse feces."
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Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Turn Back the Clock?
The Wall Street Journal had an unusual take on the concussion debate last week: "Retire the Football Helmet," as the headline read. The argument put forth by Reed Albergotti and Shirley S. Wang is a provocative one that has been voiced off and on for some time. Helmets create a sense of invincibility that encourages athletes to collide with greater force and use the hard surface of their helmet to inflict the maximum amount of ass-whupping — "Helloooo, Brian Dawkins!" — on opposing players.
For proof that bare heads don't necessarily mean broken skulls, simply travel Down Under. Australian Rules Football players eschew head protection, kick some serious butt on the field (as with rugby, tampons are de rigueur in the first-aid kit for dealing with frequent broken noses), and are 25 percent less likely to sustain a head injury than NFL players.
Would the game suffer? It would be different, anyway — the league's ultimate Throwback Jersey statement. Do fans want to see the game return to the more genteel era of Notre Dame's Four Horsemen?
Silly question. Several generations of fans have grown up expecting the Greatest Show on Turf, and they pay a lot of money on season tickets. What's probably a better idea was advanced by Julian Bailes, a neurosurgeon who has conducted brain research for the NFL Players Association. Bailes suggested one rule change and made one general recommendation for coaches: Don't allow linemen to go into a three-point stance before plays (thus preventing the initial head-to-head hit in the trenches), and forbid head contact during practices (concussions are cumulative). And then, of course, officials could remove players from games or even serve players with multiple-game suspensions for helmet-to-helmet hits — rules are supposedly already in place to deal with headhunters, but the fines are a joke now that players make millions.
Whatever the NFL does or doesn't do, the National Hockey League will be paying close attention. With blindside hits and concussions in ascension in the second-tier first-tier professional league, there's some talk of going to lower-tech helmets in the NHL, too — even though simply putting an end to the mindless, away-from-the-play hand-to-hand combat of that sport would probably solve the problem.
Sure, players will still get concussions from hitting the ground while being legally tackled or sliding into the boards on a clean check, but they'll suffer far fewer head injuries with one simple change. The lowest-tech piece of equipment in all of sports is the whistle — if sports-team owners and referees would just use one, athletes could keep their helmets. Just a thought.
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Monday, November 16, 2009
Don't Try This at Home
I seriously doubt this is a trend, but "Upcycled Gymnastics Equipment" on Trendhunter™ suggests that making a funky table or bench is a good thing to do with your unused pommel horse. Two things make this unlikely to sweep the nation — a paucity of unused pommel horses (do you know anybody who has one lying around?), along with the possibility that one of your dinner guests might get carried away and send your expensive glassware crashing to the floor.
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Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Hit 'Em Straight
 When the AB editors dedicated our July issue to best environmental practices in the athletics, fitness and recreation industries, we managed to overlook one egregious hazard to our planet's health: golf balls.
In our defense, golf really isn't AB's bag — at least not as a consistent editorial focus. I covered the glut of course construction back in October 2004, only to have Sports Illustrated run essentially the same article six weeks later. But that's neither here nor there.
When cnn.com reported Tuesday that golf balls sprayed into woods and waters, never to be found again, can take between 100 and 1,000 years to decay, and that when they finally do their cores can release heavy metals such as zinc into the environment with the potential to poison "flora and fauna," well, a red flag went up for me. (You can pull the flag, please. Thank you.) Most alarming, the article cites an unattributed estimate that Americans lose or discard 300 million golf balls annually. I'm pretty sure I'm personally responsible for about a third of those, but that's only because I sometimes play twice a year.
So if you've signed up a foursome in the 8th Annual Athletic Business Golf Classic, to be held Dec. 2 at Celebration (Fla.) Golf Club amid (as our promo copy clearly states) "native marshes, grasses, pines, old oaks draped in Spanish moss and a vast array of wildlife," please hit 'em straight. The future of the world may depend on it.
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Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Money Has Always — Always — Bought Championships
I'm about to make myself sick.
Okay, let's get this over with: Bud Selig is right.
As the Yankees wrapped up their one-thousandth championship and fans from all over Wall Street feted their heroes with a ticker-tape parade — the Yankees have been the sole reason for the beleaguered ticker-tape industry's existence since about 1995 — Selig was called upon to defend the competitive balance of Major League Baseball. "We've had more competitive balance than at any other point in our history," noted the onetime used-car salesman. "I'm not in the least bit concerned."
It is a fact that the Yankees' $201 million payroll dwarfed (for example) the $80 million payroll of Selig's former team, the Milwaukee Brewers. It is also true that major markets dominated the postseason proceedings this year, with both New York and Los Angeles well-represented. True, too, that the Yankees were and are the rare professional franchise that can take what was already the most expensive everyday lineup in baseball, add Mark Teixeira for $180 million and then retool its pitching staff with the likes of C.C. Sabathia ($161 million) and A.J. Burnett ($82.5 million).
But buying a championship requires smarts as much as it requires money. The Yankees went eight years without winning the title, a time during which they acquired Alex Rodriguez without immediately winning it all and threw $40 million at Carl Pavano. You heard few complaints from fans about buying a championship when Pavano was on the hill (or, more frequently, on the DL).
The Yankees have been buying pennants since the day they traded for Babe Ruth in 1919 in exchange for $125,000, three $25,000 notes payable every year at 6 percent interest and a $300,000 loan. Yes, they were a team in the league's biggest market fortunate enough to have a deep-pocketed, free-spending owner. They also completed the conversion of one the league's most effective pitchers into its most feared everyday slugger. They sent five players and $50,000 to the San Francisco Seals for Joe DiMaggio in 1934, paid Joltin' Joe a starting salary of just $8,000, and won five of the next six World Series. During the team's longest run of championships (15 World Series berths and 10 championships in 18 years), the Yankees plucked player after player from small-market teams (most famously, the Kansas City A's, who gift-wrapped Ralph Terry and Roger Maris, among others) and invested in scouting and infrastructure that regularly beat other teams to talents such as Mickey Mantle.
What the Yankees did this year is similar to what they did in 1977 — they took a team that was plenty good already, saw an opportunity to win immediately, seized the opportunity…and got lucky. Sabathia amazingly didn't blow out his arm, A-Rod didn't wilt in October, and the Yankees won in six. Next year, things may look very different.
And, getting back to Bud Selig: As he noted several times during the playoffs, 23 of the league's 30 teams have earned playoff berths in this decade, and eight different teams have won the World Series during that time. Only the 1980s, which crowned nine different champions, was more of a monument to parity.
So, I feel queasy saying it, but I'll say it again: Bud is right. Urp.
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