Just what the world didn`t need was another bowl game.
Eighteen wasn`t enough?
Especially when there are more defunct bowl games (22; surely you all remember the Camellia, Cherry and Great Lakes Bowls) than live ones?
Especially when the NCAA wants more bowl games about as much as the federal govern-ment needs more debt?
But here comes Bowl No. 19. It`s the Blockbuster Bowl, making its debut Friday evening, and, despite the odds, it`s a hit even before its opening kickoff. There`s nothing like the combination of money, power, brains and luck.
And nerve. The men who made this bowl-mainly Richard Giannini of Raycom Management Group and H. Wayne Huizenga of Blockbuster, the videotape rental chain-are not afraid to take chances, to defy the odds and maybe even the fates.
For which they may pay, a matter to which we will return presently.
It also helps to be in touch with the times. On Friday evening there will be a football game, Penn State against Florida State, potentially a whale of a game, and the talk will be of play-action passes and safety blitzes. But the Blockbuster Bowl is a likely success because it is the creature of men who talk of marketing, management, production, distribution and creating (perhaps refining) an image.
And, of course, television. But what is different about the Blockbuster Bowl is that it was not simply created for television but that it was created for television by television.
Or, to be precise, by a sports marketing firm, one of those companies that serve as middlemen between sports events and television stations. At first, the events existed, the stations existed and the sports marketing company put one in touch with the other, taking a cut of the advertising dollar.
Now, a sports marketing firm has created an event so it could market it.
This isn`t quite full circle. That will come when a sports marketing firm also starts a new TV station or network to telecast the sports events it creates.
But this is close enough. It`s like the California political consulting firms that originate referendums to create the need for more political advertising, which is what the consulting firms do.
Not that there`s anything new about bowl games being business. They always have been. But until now they`ve been local business, chamber of commerce boosterism to lure tourists to hotels and restaurants. This bowl is national business to lure viewers to their TV sets.
Sports marketing is a relatively new endeavor, and there are only four major firms. One is in New York and the other three, for reasons that are not clear, are in and around Charlotte, N.C.
The biggest of these is Raycom, whose ”bread and butter is college basketball,” according to Riley Fields, a promotion and information assistant at the firm. Raycom has the rights to market (that`s a fancy word for sell) to television stations the basketball games of the Big 10 and four other conferences.
A few years ago, Raycom spun off a subsidiary called Raycom Management Group, or RMG, to produce events for Raycom to market, perhaps including a bowl game. ”We were looking around to increase our involvement with bowls,” said Rick Ray, the chairman of Raycom.
As a business strategy, this might politely be described as risky. In Ray`s own words, ”bowls were struggling in general, getting weaker.” That`s because there were too many of them, and some were in places where it was cold outside.
One of these places was Memphis, home of the Liberty Bowl, for which Raycom had the TV rights and at which RMG Chairman Giannini found himself freezing two years ago.
”He called me from the stadium, his teeth were chattering, and he asked me one question,” remembers Bob Kuechenberg. ”He asked me if I knew Joe Robbie.”
And here was where the luck, skill, opportunity and daring all meshed. Football fans remember Kuechenberg as an offensive lineman for Notre Dame and the Miami Dolphins. But he was also a sometime-football telecaster for Raycom, so he knew Giannini; he was a good friend of Robbie, who owned the Dolphins;
and he was a South Florida patriot, a local businessman concerned about the image of his region.
So was Robbie (who died last January at 73), who owned not just the football team but the stadium in which it played, a very nice football stadium, with a natural grass field open to the sky, in northern Miami where it rarely gets cold. Robbie liked his stadium, which he named for himself. He didn`t like the Orange Bowl. Convincing him to lease Joe Robbie Stadium to what was then the Sunshine Football Classic wasn`t too difficult.
Neither was getting Ft. Lauderdale`s business community to change the name of its annual Winterfest to the Sunshine Classic Festival, which is one reason the new bowl game is headquartered here, even though it will be played in Miami.
The other reason is image. Between ”Miami Vice” and well-publicized racial troubles, Miami has not presented its best face to the world. Fast-growing, affluent Ft. Lauderdale, exuding an air of friendly snobbery, is better public relations.
Having a nice stadium and a firm that knows how to stage a big event is not enough to make a bowl game these days. Were it not for the inconvenience of the antitrust laws, the NCAA would ban new bowls. Instead, it makes it hard for them to get its imprimatur, without which no big-time team will play.
The NCAA requires would-be bowl entrepreneurs to post a $2 million promissory note and to get the blessings of several major-college football programs. RMG and Kuechenberg had the connections to do that, and as the bowl got sanctioned, RMG went looking for a big sponsor so the game could offer more than the $600,000-per-school NCAA minimum.
Enter Huizenga, co-founder of Oak Brook`s Waste Management Inc. and head of Blockbuster. A sports buff, Huizenga is now half-owner of Joe Robbie Stadium, part owner of the Dolphins and the man trying to woo big-league baseball to south Florida.
He decided to have his company sponsor the Sunshine Classic, as long as it was no longer the Sunshine Classic. So it`s just the Blockbuster Bowl, trademarked for maximum name identification. With the extra money, the game could offer $1.6 million per team.
Then came more luck. There was the Martin Luther King holiday vote in Arizona that convinced some major teams to skip the Fiesta Bowl. Penn State beat Notre Dame, Florida State beat Florida, Penn State wanted to play Florida State and FSU wanted the money. So in its first year, the Blockbuster Bowl gets what promises to be at least the third-best postseason game.
And about tempting fate? Well, two days before the game, Blockbuster was the subject of a Wall Street Journal story alleging the video rental firm was planning to sell its subscriber lists, complete with information about what kind of movies individual subscribers prefer. This would be legal, but an invasion of privacy.
And despite Ft. Lauderdale`s image concern, Joseph Paterno Jr., the son of Penn State`s coach, got himself robbed at gunpoint on a city beach at 2:30 the other morning.
And though it has been warm, it has been raining. Pouring, actually, and it might do so Friday evening.
Well, some things are beyond the control even of daring men with money, knowledge and a sense of the times.
