ESPN’s "SportsCentury" list of the "greatest" North American athletes of the past 100 years, which has been heavily promoted by the media and is the topic of numerous discussions by sports fans, includes what a panel of 48 journalists and observers named as the top 100 athletes of the 20th century.
The SportsCentury panel itself reads like a "Who’s Who" of sports reporters, including such notables as Curt Gowdy, Dick Enberg, Mitch Albom, Sally Jenkins, Dick Schaap, Jim Nantz, Lesley Visser, Mike Tirico, Pat Summerall, and the late Shirley Povich of the Washington Post.
Perhaps the panel voting for the candidates of the ESPN SportsCentury project felt when they cast their ballots for these athletes that bowling is good for entertainment but should not be taken seriously as a legitimate sport.
The SportsCentury list features in its first 50 greatest athletes chosen 12 from basketball, 11 from football, and seven Olympians covering track and field, swimming, diving, and speed skating. Boxing includes four athletes, tennis has four, auto racing three, basketball three, hockey three, and golf has one athlete.
In the top 100, horse racing features five athletes, including two jockeys and three horses. With Man o’ War and Citation making the list and Secretariat ranked 35th, it makes you wonder if the panel deliberately tried to generate controversy or simply tried to spur sports fans into thought-provoking conclusions about what truly is an athlete. Or were they just horsing around?
The requirements to make the SportsCentury list must have stated that the best athletes needed to be, at the very minimum, animals that lived and breathed at some extended point in time and did not necessarily have to be human.
Pro bowlers meet these minimum requirements, but it seems they don’t meet the requirements in the opinion of the panel. It would make good horse sense to include at least one pro bowler on the list if you are going to include three horses in the top 100, but no bowlers made the list. Earl Anthony was on the ballot for the top 100, but he did not receive nearly enough votes to make the cut.
ESPN will conclude its current weekly SportsCentury presentations the day after Christmas when its sister network, ABC, telecasts an hour-long program on the top two athletes to climax the year-long SportsCentury effort.
ESPN’s Josh Krulewitz, who helps run the SportsCentury athletes program and ironically was the former media spokesman for pro bowling on his network, is sworn to secrecy until each athlete’s name is released in ascending order. The remainder of the names was released alphabetically in September when ESPN put its SportsCentury book on sale nationwide, and no pro bowlers were listed in the final top 20.
This occurred despite Dick Weber recently being voted bowling’s all-time best by Bowling Magazine’s panel of pollsters in the "20 Best Bowlers of the 20th Century" cover story in the August/September 1999 issue. The snub of bowling by ESPN’s SportsCentury list really hits bowling fans in the jaw because pro bowling now will be telecast exclusively by ESPN and ESPN2.
In the feature story entitled "The Summer of Bowling’s Discontent" in Bowling Magazine’s August/September edition, editor Bill Vint quoted ABC Executive Director Roger Dalkin in ABC’s official publication: "We gave Strike Ten Entertainment [the marketing division which negotiated TV contracts for Bowling Inc.] as long as we could to allow it to succeed—some people think too long—but now it’s time to step back and try a different approach."
The same feature story continues with an analysis on the fate of the PBA Tour. PBA Commissioner Mark Gerberich said: "We have a major shortfall in fulfilling our agreement with CBS Sports this year. In 1992, the PBA received $4 million a year in rights fees from ABC-TV. This year, we had to pay CBS $2.3 million for airtime and production. … We had the same deal with CBS in 1998, but we were very successful. This year we had sponsors that didn’t renew for one reason or another, and we weren’t able to replace them."
The shortfall, according to Bowling Magazine’s story, is nearly $1 million, and it forced the PBA "to confront some harsh realities concerning its future."
For example, the PBA Tour’s Spring and Summer tournament stops no longer will be televised as a part of the "CBS Sports Spectacular" presentation from April through June. CBS dropped the PBA televised finals because the PBA still owes the network $1 million mentioned in broadcast rights fees which the tour still is attempting to pay for those 1999 CBS presentations.
ESPN could broadcast the Spring/ Summer PBA Tour stops dropped by CBS, but those dates, times, and sponsors are all tentative and need to be negotiated by the PBA or the new Strike Ten marketing group, if the PBA can work out a deal to become a division of the American Bowling Congress.
According to Dalkin, "Under a partnership between the PBA and ABC, the ABC would bring grassroots marketing opportunities to the PBA, and the PBA would bring a sports division to ABC, and it could mean dramatic growth for the PBA. It could be a great story on Madison Avenue as the first sport to combine its pro tour and grassroots membership into one organization."
Lengthy discussions as to the delegation of power in such a joint effort of the ABC and PBA (and, for that matter, the PWBA) still need to be negotiated. Until final agreements are reached, the tours will suffer financially, and ESPN may also choose to pull the plug while negotiations continue ad infinitum into the next millennium.
The PBA Tour suddenly has become the unwanted stepchild of the major TV networks. The crux of the problem, as Gerberich mentioned, is that some sponsors don’t see bowling as a way to make a profit because of a ratings scale they use which compares bowling to other televised sports. Even though they make some profit on advertising returns, it may not be big enough to satisfy them.
It seems bowling has a credibility gap as a viable sport not only with sports- writers and sportscasters as observed by bowling’s snub in ESPN’s SportsCentury Awards, but it also carries over with sponsors of the tours on TV and any potential advertisers.
As Commissioner Gerberich said, when ABC-TV paid the PBA $4 million per year to be telecast on its network, every event was on TV. However, when Disney bought ABC/ESPN in the same year, their marketing executives said their ratings were down, and they were losing valuable advertising time for other sports on Saturday afternoons in addition to paying the PBA $4 million a year. Thus, they immediately stopped the bleeding of losing those millions.
Even though the Disney Company has the money to invest in sports, as proven by their all-time record Sunday/Monday Night Football package for ESPN/ABC in excess of $10 billion, they still don’t enjoy losing millions, as displayed by their recent efforts to sell Major League Baseball’s Anaheim Angels and the National Hockey League’s Anaheim Mighty Ducks, both housed near the original Disneyland.
Ironically, Disney doesn’t mind if the pro bowling tours pay for rental time on ESPN and ESPN2 because that makes millions of profits for the Disney Company, regardless of the ratings.
The PBA should benefit by putting its entire tour scheduled finals on ESPN because even though you lose some potential viewers by going to cable instead of a major commercial non-cable network, fans will know where and when to look for pro bowling exclusively on the same network.
If the pro bowling tours can come up with the money needed to finance their rental programs of bowling tournaments on ESPN and The Deuce, then the "Mouse" will be very happy and will roar all the way to the bank.
Syndicated columnist Richard Kolb is a member of the Bowling Writers Association of America.