Sunday, January 02, 2000
What will sports' future bring?
More games, more women, more high tech
BY SCOTT MacGREGOR
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Picture this: It's the eve of a new century, 2099. You're settling back on a comfy floating sofa, watching the countdown of the 21st Century's greatest athletes on ESPN14. You have a beer in hand. (As long as there are sports, there will always be beer.)
But what else will there be? Will you be watching high-definition television, virtual TV, the Internet or some fancy new gizmo that's still a twinkle in Bill Gates' eye? Will you have to pay-per-view? What will be the national pastime? Football? Women's soccer? NASCAR with souped-up spaceships?
And who will be on that list of greatest athletes? Jeffrey Jordan, son of Michael? Trey Griffey, son of Junior? What about that neighbor kid next door who keeps you awake hitting tennis balls against the garage door?
So many questions. Good thing we'll have 100 years to answer them.
One thing's certain: Sports in the 21st Century aren't go ing to look like sports at the end of the 20th. The 20th Century saw an exponential boom of sports in America, and with technology and our thirst for entertainment exploding even more rapidly, there seems to be no stopping the juggernaut that has made us Sports Nation.
“I don't know if sports themselves can get any bigger,” said Cincinnati-based sports agent Brian Goldberg, who represents Ken Griffey Jr., one of the country's biggest sports icons. “If sports gets any bigger, it's going to be the combining of sports with entertainment. You still have plenty of people who aren't sports fans, but they get interested when it's entertain ment.”
The 21st Century kicked off with six college football bowl games on New Year's Day, all televised across the nation. In September, the Summer Olympics will occupy every prime-time television hour on one national TV network for two weeks. Arguably the most recognized person in our culture, Michael Jordan, is a sports star.
It is difficult to see sports getting any bigger. Yet it is also probable.
“To me, the answer is absolutely yes,” said Nick Vehr, a former Notre Dame football player who is leading the charge to bring Cincinnati the Olympics as president of Cincinnati 2012. “I don't view the pie as being a finite size with only so many ways to split it. Technology is making the pie grow every day. The influence of sports is going to grow because of the advancement of technology.”
Vehr is talking about the effect the Internet will have on the way we watch sports. It will expand the business, he and many experts believe, by delivering more and more diverse sports to a greater number of people.
Perhaps, instead of watching sports on a television network, “you may see whistle-to-whistle coverage of volleyball, judo or equestrian events, online, viewed in your living room on a flat screen over the Internet. Television may not be a word that's in our dictionaries three or four decades from now.”
Vehr isn't daydreaming. The technology is being used already to put radio broadcasts over the Internet, and is on the near horizon with television. You may eventually be able to watch a Reds game on your computer when traveling on business in Berlin.
But Vehr also cautions against “the over-saturation of the sports market that could limit sports. It's impossible to predict. The pace of change in the last 10 years was faster than anyone could ever have expected.”
Imagine this
What issues will confront sports? There are the holdovers from the end of the 20th Century: Small market vs. big market economics, escalating salaries, ticket prices and television rights fees — all the old boring stuff still will be there.
“There's no doubt that keeping going to the live events affordable is the biggest challenge of any sport,” Goldberg said. “Some of that has to do with individuals (owners and players) showing self-restraint.”
But what new, exciting things will change sports? How about these?
• With the expansion and globalization of American professional leagues, could we see a National League baseball game between teams from Mexico City and Tokyo, starring a 38-year-old first baseman named Sean Casey? Or an NBA game between Paris and London with a former UC star named Kenyon Martin?
It's getting closer. Major league baseball has already played regular season games in Mexico, and will play its first regular season games in Japan next season. The NBA has already played regular season games in Japan.
• What physical changes will we see? Strength training is making athletes bigger, stronger and faster than ever. Will we see 70- and 80-home run seasons become as common in baseball as 40-homer seasons are now and 20-homer seasons used to be? Will we see the basketball rim raised or the court enlarged to accommodate taller, bigger players?
“The big, big story in all sports will be the physical strength of the athletes and the conditioning process with all the highly-technical training that's taking place,” said basketball television analyst Dick Vitale. “The specimens are going to be amazing. In basketball, we're already seeing 6-foot-9, 6-10 guys playing on the perimeter. Just imagine what's going to happen in the future. They may need to think about making the court a little longer and wider, with their size and agility.”
• How will the face of sports continue to change? As we saw with the popularity of the U.S. women's soccer team last summer, it's already becoming more female — in participation and fan base. How will that base continue to grow? And will women's sports see a boom equal to the men?
“I think in the last half of (the 20th) Century, the face of sports was a guy in a football or basketball uniform,” Vehr said. “In the first half of the next century, it will be a woman in a soccer uniform or on a fast-pitch softball field.”
But the changes may be slower than others sports will face. “I don't know if the success of the women's World Cup has translated into marketing opportunities that further enhance the sport,” Vehr said. “Marketers tend to be very conservative in how they invest dollars. They have to be reassured it's a true trend. Most people think it is, and I certainly think it is.”
Cincinnati's future
Locally, Cincinnati's sports scene figures to change dramatically — at least physically — in the opening years of the century. Paul Brown Stadium, the Bengals' new $400 million palace on the river, will open this August. The Reds' new $300 million baseball park, also on the river, should be ready by Opening Day 2003. Xavier University's Cintas Center opens on its campus next basketball season.
That means big changes in everything related to the professional franchises, from increasing their revenues to improving the fans' experience at a game. But their on-field play, of course, will always come down to the old standbys: Good management and good players. Because of the new stadiums, both teams figure to stay here without threat of leaving for about 30 years, the duration of their leases.
Cincinnati could conceivably be a spot for future NBA or NHL expansion, but the possibility remains slim for now. The Firstar Center, with $16 million in 1997 renovations, could house a team, but by the time any league would consider expansion here, a new arena might have to be built with more luxury suites.
As the nation's 32nd largest television market, Cincinnati is the third-largest not to have either a major league professional basketball or hockey franchise, behind Hartford/New Haven, Conn. (No.27) and Kansas City (No.31).
“If you're looking at 2001, 2002, it's science fiction,” said Doug Kirchhofer, part owner of the Firstar Center and the minor-league Cincinnati Stuff and Cyclones. “But if you get beyond 2005, today's science fiction is tomorrow's reality. It's not a priority for us, and it's not something I see in the near-term. But when you look in the future, who knows?”
The single most important factor in expansion to Cincinnati, Kirchhofer says, is whether another major-league franchise could survive in this market with the expensive ticket prices of NBA and NHL teams.
The NBA failed here with the Royals, who moved to Kansas City in 1972. Would it do the same again? Would the NHL want to expand so close to one of its new markets in Columbus? Would the combined effect of the Reds and Bengals and the University of Cincinnati and Xavier basketball teams make selling tickets in a small market too hard?
“(Pricing) is the first question anyone faced with expansion would have to consider,” Kirchhofer said.
Then there is that little thing called the 2012 Olympics that could blow everything out of the water.
If Vehr and his group are successful in bringing the Summer Games to Cincinnati, expect “the most dramatic change in the history of this region, and not just for the sake of sport,” Vehr said.
“Sports will become the medium for focusing attention on this region. The Olympic Games coming to Cincinnati would introduce this region to the global economy. That will translate into every market segment and every industry.”
There would be physical changes, public enhancements and new living and training facilities for local high schools and colleges like UC, Xavier and Ohio State. But one thing there would not be, Vehr said, would be a flood of expensive, permanent new stadiums. What would need to be constructed would not be done “to build a white elephant that's never going to be used again.”
Short of the Olympics, though, the Cincinnati sports scene figures to remain essentially the same in character. Parents will still take their kids to baseball games on the river on a hot summer's night, or to football games on cool fall afternoons.
There will still be UC and Xavier basketball. The men's professional tennis tournament held in Mason every August turns the century as one of the world's finest, showing no signs of deteriorating.
And Cincinnati continues to grow as a hotbed of youth soccer (the area has produced two national-level women's players in the last four years), swimming (at least two or three area products are expected to make the Olympics in 2000 or 2004) and world-class gymnastics (Mary Lee Tracy's academy in Fairfield trains many of America's Olympians) — meaning our exports may be as important to the future of sports as our own local scene.
As Vehr said of the next 100 years, “Who knows? The future's going to be very exciting.”
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