I recorded and watched this movie on ESPN2 the other week called "Once in a Lifetime." Sounds like some sappy women's romance movie, but it was a movie about the rise and fall of the New York Cosmos.
I grew up, and still live, in New Jersey, and played a lot of soccer as a kid. I also went to as many pro soccer games as my parents could afford. And back then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a pro soccer league in the U.S. called the North American Soccer League, or N-A-S-L for short.
The New York Cosmos basically jump-started the whole league, and the signing of Pele, the Brazilian soccer star, jump-started the Cosmos.
At the time, Pele was the best-known athlete in the world (probably still is), and soccer wasn't even remotely on the radar of most people in the U.S. So how did bringing Pele here make any sense?
It made a ton of sense. The Cosmos went from playing on a dirt field to selling out Giants Stadium to the tune of more than 70,000 people. The NASL went from a semi-pro league with a couple-hundred "fans" (probably family members of players) to being a bona fide pro-sports phenomenon.
But the NASL blew up in the early 1980s. I was always curious what happened there. It grew and was going great guns, and then just disappeared.
From the movie, and some reading afterwards, it looks to me like these were the factors in the NASL's demise:
1. Too many expansion teams too quickly (too many guys with money trying to jump on the bandwagon), and a resulting thinning of the player talent pool and dilution of fan interest.
2. Too many franchises trying to field teams like the Cosmos, which at one point had almost all of the best-known players in the world. (It was awesome and will never happen again. Kind of like the old BASS Superstars tournaments.) In other words, overspending.
3. TV.
And there's the potential bass fishing tie-in: TV.
At the time, soccer was a sport that had a lot of diehard fans – who also played soccer – and the number of fans was growing slowly but surely, even taking into effect expansion-related issues.
Then ABC got involved. They televised games, basically without knowing what the heck they were doing – meaning they didn't know anything about soccer. They put the games on at bad times. They interrupted the games with commercial breaks, at times missing goals in the process – and goals don't happen all too often in soccer.
(Any of this sound familiar?)
Turned out the ratings weren't good enough. The NASL's TV deal went away. Team owners got scared. Sports newspaper writers duly (and maybe gleefully) reported on the bad ratings and the imminent demise of the NASL.
Some owners, who weren't soccer fans anyway, basically gave up and chose to write off a loss rather than build on what they'd already built.
The NASL, off to such a promising start, died.
Just to be clear here: The demise of the NASL wasn't entirely because of TV. And maybe I'm emphasizing TV's importance too much.
But I think people have to realize at some point that TV coverage is a double-edged sword. It can really help something, or really hurt it. It shouldn't be viewed as a goal or a "be-all, end-all."
In bass fishing, I see it as one thing in the basket of media offerings. Another way for angler-fans to be entertained, another way for pros to be exposed and another way for advertisers to reach those angler-fans. That's it.
I think anyone hanging their hat on an eventual millions of TV viewers of fishing is nuts. I'd love to be wrong, though – as long as it happens without corrupting the sport.
Public Radio Anecdote
I'm driving home from work that same week, switching stations, and I hear Mike Iaconelli's voice on the radio. Turns out National Public Radio did a piece on pro bass fishing, I think from the Table Rock Elite Series event.
Cool, right? Very cool. Never would've heard that on the radio 5 years ago.
But not all of it was cool. As I'm sitting there listening to the announcer reel off a couple statistics, I'm getting nervous.
Hey, I'm all for putting our sport's best foot forward. But not if that foot is supported by a house of cards. A couple things I heard in that NPR piece were flat-out not true – and it's not the first time.
I hope the leagues aren't out there selling with the stats and other info I've heard here and there. Maybe I'm naive, but I still believe honesty is best, especially in business.
Let's all be honest about the number of bass anglers in the U.S., how it all works, everything. The sport of bass fishing has a great case to make for itself without exaggeration.
Plus, overselling and underdelivering is a recipe for disaster. No non-endemic company is going to stick around under that scenario, and word will probably get around that "bass fishing" – not just the particular company that oversold and underdelivered – is a bad investment.
Did I say "probably?" We've already seen it happen a couple of times over the years.
Let's just sell what we've got – because it's great.
Bottom Line
Quality, honest TV produced by people who understand and even love bass fishing is important to everyone in this sport. It can help the sport "grow," whatever that means. (If it means the top leagues become more professional, it's already helped, and hurt a little too.)
Bass fishing already has all the ingredients for its own success, including TV, just as Ray Scott and company gave them to the rest of us.
That's not to say new things won't come in and help. But let's not sell bass fishing to corporate America based on some nebulous "potential" out there, or what some corporate exec wants the sport to be, or some sliced-and-diced statistics that make it look two or 10 times huger than it is.
That's just not good, and doesn't have the long-term future of the sport itself – not just making money off the sport – in mind.
I just don't want to see bass fishing "blow up" on the national radar like the NASL did.
Notable
> The fact that ABC – which now owns ESPN – was involved with the NASL TV broadcasts is coincidental. At the time ESPN did exist, though wasn't nearly the powerhouse it is now. But ABC didn't have an ownership interest, as it does now. ABC (owned by The Walt Disney Co.) currently owns 80% of ESPN, with Hearst Corp. owning the other 20%.
> Click here to hear and read the NPR piece.
