Professional bowling has reached the bottom. It just can’t get much worse without disappearing from the radar screen.
However, at the bottom of every dark chasm, one can usually find a glimmer of sunlight. The question is, Will the leaders of Bowling, Inc., the PBA, and PWBA be wise enough to save the sport from possible total extinction? Will they be willing to take risks that might lead to relatively rapid recovery, or will they maintain the status quo and prolong the agony, which could lead to a slow, painful death?
Here are the cold, hard facts: The Professional Bowlers Association will lose over a million dollars this year. The Professional Women’s Bowling Association will lose over one-half million dollars this year.
The PBA’s loss is due to lack of sponsorship on its CBS television deal and a loss of one-third of its membership over the past several years.
The PWBA, which has never made a profit since its inception as LPBT in 1981, is in a big hole because Strike Ten Entertainment chose not to provide the television production support in 1999 that had been provided in 1997-98.
The PBA is an association owned by its members and governed by a board of elected officers. The PWBA is a privately owned corporation.
The symbolic glimmer of light I mentioned earlier is that several prominent leaders in the industry, most notably Roger Dalkin of the American Bowling Congress, are saying that the next major project for bowling is a restoration of the sport.
Rumors abound that the American Bowling Congress will soon take command of the PBA. With the resignation of Strike Ten Entertainment (STE) CEO Steve Ryan just prior to Bowl Expo in June, and the announcement of a new "partnership" between Bowling, Inc. and PBA, clearly, some major changes are underway.
Our sources tell us that $1.2 million will be diverted from the Bowling, Inc. coffers to bail out the PBA and keep it afloat this year. But what about next year, and the next?
Assuming that is true, what does Bowling, Inc. get in return? Will The Marquee Group (PBA’s New York marketing company) remain on board? It is certain that the CBS network television experiment has failed. The challenge now is to get the best possible package on ESPN.
And if Bowling, Inc. does take over the PBA as rumored, where does that leave the PWBA? Will Bowling, Inc. continue its practice of choosing sides as it did three years ago when it chose to support PWBA and reject PBA? Won’t it be sad if the whole thing flip-flops and PWBA gets left out in the cold like PBA was?
I’m not naïve enough
to believe that bowling
will ever reach the heights it once achieved,
but I’m enough of an optimist
to see a rewarding future for a legitimate sport.
Some of my peers in this industry have already given up on bowling’s return to prominence in the world of sports. I haven’t. I’m not naïve enough to believe that it will ever reach the heights it once achieved, but I’m enough of an optimist to see a rewarding future for a legitimate sport.
However, it has been, and will continue to be, an extremely complex evolution. Perhaps the sport has finally reached a level so low that it will take a heroic effort to save it. People like to be heroes.
The big question: Do we have people in this industry smart enough and brave enough to make the moves necessary to save the sport?
Some decisions will be very unpopular, especially to those who lean strongly to the recreational side. Even some manufacturers could get their feathers ruffled, but almost every battle worth winning has some casualties.
What can be done?
First of all, groups and companies in this industry must stop choosing sides. If the ABC takes control of the PBA, then WIBC should make a serious bid to help the PWBA.
Better yet, Bowling, Inc. should put together a plan to rebuild both groups, with equal effort extended toward providing a better future for both men’s and women’s professional bowling.
There are those who still believe that the PBA has a much better potential for profit than the PWBA, but were those people paying attention to the recent success of the women’s World Cup soccer events? Can they deny the success of women’s tennis? Have they seen the prize money being paid in women’s golf? Do they know about Title IX and its very positive effect on women’s collegiate sports, including bowling?
With that evidence in mind, let’s get busy restoring and promoting professional bowling for both genders. Let’s focus our efforts on getting the best television packages that can be obtained for both pro groups. If that means ESPN, so be it. In the near future, ESPN may be a better place for sports than the networks. ESPN2, however, where the PWBA is presently found, is not even close to as good a venue as ESPN.
Wouldn’t it be great if both pro tours could be put in a regular weekly prime time slot on ESPN? Maybe the shows could be back-to-back, or on consecutive nights, and each could promote the other. It may seem like a far-fetched dream, especially to those who have struggled with these challenges in recent years, but with the entire industry behind them, it just could be possible. Remember those bold moves I mentioned in the headline of this editorial?
Run this by the applause meter and see if it registers:
The PBA and PWBA should restrict the size of the field on its national tour and raise entry fees to a much more serious level.
What if only the top 100 men and the top 50 (to pick a number) women were allowed to compete on the national tours? And what if it cost $2,000 to enter a national tour event with a televised finals?
Before you scoff, think about this: If you are one of the top pros in the world, capable of winning an event in any given week, would you rather pay $2,000 to enter for a chance to win $100,000, or $400 to enter with a chance to win $15,000?
Most of the top men and many of the top women pros have backers, or financial sponsors. Most of these sponsors have enough money to pay whatever entry fee is required.
Let’s say there are 20 televised events per year. As a sponsor, it’s going to cost me a minimum of $28,000 ($1,400 per week) to sponsor my pro bowler for a year. If my bowler has a great year on the men’s tour and wins $200,000 or a great year on the women’s tour and wins $100,000, my profit for the year is $100,000 and $50,000, respectively. Under a 50/50 split, the bowlers get $72,000 and $22,000 after expenses.
They may also get some endorsement or incentive money, but to keep it in simple terms, nobody makes a lot of money by today’s standards, especially in comparison to other professional sports.
However, if the entry fees are $2,000, that is $200,000 and $100,000 in entry fees from the players (sponsors). Now, if we can get matching dollars from corporate sponsors, you have a $400,000 men’s event and a $200,000 women’s event. If first place paid 25 percent, that’s $100,000 and $50,000 per event.
If each tour had 20 events, that’s a total purse of $8 million for the men and $4 million for the women. If my bowler has a great year and wins a couple of tournaments, he makes $200,000 just on those two events. If he plays well in every event, it would not be unrealistic for him to make $500,000. As a sponsor, my share would be $250,000, for an investment of about $60,000 ($3,000 per week for 20 weeks).
The women’s tour and men’s senior tour does not have the depth of talent to field 100 quality players right now, but there are some very talented players on the regional and collegiate levels who might move up quickly if it became a sensible move financially. By supporting the regional program of both tours, a talent pool will be developed, and collegiate players could eventually be recruited as they are in other sports.
Because of their precarious situation, we haven’t seen much long-range planning from PBA and PWBA. It’s been a day-to-day struggle since 1981 for PWBA/LPBT and not much better for the PBA since the loss of its television contract with ABC in 1997.
However, without a long-range plan, their future operations might always remain unstable. My advice to both tours is to invest heavily in their regional programs. The PBA has done a pretty good job over the years funneling some of the sponsorship dollars to its regional program, but as sponsorships dried up, those funds have been reduced drastically.
Speaking as a former regional member of the PBA, I dropped my membership several years ago for basically two reasons: (1) Too much of the regional prize funds were going to tour players, and (2) Too many restrictions were placed on members preventing them from bowling in other events.
I suspect that these two reasons were common among hundreds of others who walked away from the PBA. Not allowing regional members to bowl in events like the World Team Challenge, local events, megabuck tournaments, Team USA, etc., took its toll. And I remember looking at the prize lists in the region where I bowled to find that over 80 percent of the money was paid to about a dozen tour players.
The way I saw it, it was like minor league baseball pitchers throwing against major league hitters. It’s not a fair fight, and anyone with any common sense could see that.
As for PWBA, it’s difficult to comment because I am personally involved in its regional program, but it doesn’t take a genius to see that a stronger regional program will eventually lead to a stronger tour. Some progress has been made, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. The PWBA as an organization needs to get much more serious about building its regional program. If it does, a stronger tour will follow.
All of this still would not put bowling on the same financial plane as the major sports, but at least it could become a legitimate career choice for aspiring high school and college bowlers. I call this the "put your money where your mouth is" plan. It may take two or three years, but I really believe that potential tournament sponsors, both inside and outside the industry, would be a lot more likely to match existing dollars than to pay through the nose for exclusive title sponsorships.
Initially, television production costs and salaries would be over and above these prize funds, but if successful, and if ratings go up, ESPN would assume some if not all of these costs.
How do you get the players’ backers to go along with this plan? Only one way: Talk to them. Explain the "risk vs. reward," and ask them to invest in not just their player, but the future of the sport.
Do it the same way STE’s Jack McDonald got 2,000-plus proprietors to support Strike Ten Select™. It might be a tough sell, but given a chance, it could save professional bowling.
By implementing this plan, the pros would be asking private investors to bail out the tours instead of a "government bailout" (i.e., ABC/WIBC, Bowling, Inc.).
If we throw more industry sponsorship into the mix, it’s not far-fetched to have very big tours in a few years. Of course, the PWBA has always had a "private investor" in its owner, John Sommer, but what both tours need are several dozen John Sommers, and I’m confident that they are out there.
It might be a little like drilling for oil in West Texas. You get a lot of dry holes, but when that gusher comes in, boy, does it feel good!
Jim Goodwin, a BWAA director and PWBA’s regional program director, is the award-winning editor/publisher of Stars & Strikes, in which the preceding originally appeared. Subscription rates: $20 for one year, $32/$48 for two/three years (Pin Point Publishing, 2850 Red Valley Run, Rockwall, Texas 75087 … voice/fax: 972/771-0069.