It was shortly after 8 a.m., which isn't the best hour of the day for an underclass college student trying to keep an eye open during a tedious lecture on a hard-to-grasp subject like Macroeconomics 101.
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| Despite its troubles, Wachovia is still under contract as a PGA Tour title sponsor for years to come. (Getty Images) |
This time, he walked quickly to the chalk blackboard, picked up an eraser and whacked the guy squarely in the head from about 10 paces away. A minute earlier he'd been lecturing about the infamous Laffer Curve, but now it was about laughter and the fastball he'd fired with spot-on accuracy. The embarrassed student was enveloped in a cloud of chalk dust as everybody howled.
He had our attention, at least temporarily, which is all I am asking of you at the moment.
In an extremely roundabout way, this anecdote brings us to the issue of sports and the bloodied American economy, because we're chalking up plenty of calamity as it relates to certain entities that fund organizations like the PGA Tour or NASCAR.
The financial news worsens with every passing day and we're starting to get whiplash. Tuesday, the tour finally released most of its 2009 schedule, when purses are expected to climb yet again. Over the past few weeks, at least one prominent player interpreted the lengthy delay in releasing the '09 lineup as a sure sign the tour was going to lose sponsors as a result of the flagging economy. Commissioner Tim Finchem seemingly sent a comforting message Tuesday when he said, "We felt it was best to release the majority of what we believe is an outstanding schedule for 2009 that is fully sponsored."
Emphasis on the latter -- well, for now. Check back in a week and don't nod off. When automakers are bleeding so profusely that bankruptcy seems unavoidable and they are threatening to pull their decades-long sponsorship of NASCAR teams, it should get every sports fan's attention.
A few months back, we posted a story about the tour's Wachovia Championship that didn't exactly endear us to tournament officials. The bank had quietly extended its sponsorship deal with the tour, even as it was laying off hundreds of employees and preparing to publicly disembowel its top official. Families and careers were in ruin, but the bank elected to continue spending an estimated $7 million annually to host its tour shindig. Employees were sacked, but tour players got a sack of money, by god.
At the time, a former golf-industry marketing executive claimed I was being naïve, because in today's marketplace, companies have to advertise to move their product. Sponsoring a PGA Tour event was a drop in the financial bucket for Wachovia, he said. Of course, as we know now, the bucket has been kicked as Wachovia was left for dead and swallowed by another bank, red ink and all.
Six automakers sponsor events on the PGA Tour, including two by Buick, which is hemorrhaging money so quickly, it might not make it to the end of the year. Bankruptcy is an increasingly likely scenario, according to the automaker, which could and should jeopardize the two Buick stops on the '09 tour calendar.
Understand that when the tour signs a deal with a title sponsor, it is written in blood. Just because Wachovia and Buick are in hot water doesn't mean the tour contracts are void or that financial details will be changed. The suits at tour headquarters play hardball. Tournaments must buy their way out of deals if they wish to escape before the contract term runs its course.
Bankruptcy is another matter, however.
"That would really be the one scenario where (a contract could be voided)," tour communications chief Ty Votaw said two weeks ago at the Ginn sur Mer Classic, an event that is on life support because of the swan-diving real-estate market. "And if that was to transpire, we'd be standing there in line along with all the other creditors."
That sounds cold, no question. But here's the part that should eat at everybody's gut. Let's assume the auto and financial sectors receive the billions in proposed bailout money from the federal government. If that's the case, there need to be some major revisions in how these companies do business, as in taking a long look at what bang for the buck they get for sponsoring sports enterprises.
The current financial insanity should trump vanity. There shouldn't just be strings attached to these public bailout dollars, but metal cables the likes of which support the Golden Gate Bridge. Millions of people enjoy watching athletic pursuits for entertainment, but consumers already subsidize pro sports by buying tickets. Those who detest sports foot the bill unknowingly, too, by paying the increasingly high price for ESPN's half-dozen outlets in their monthly cable television package. If you buy Miller Lite, a massive sponsor of major league action, you are underwriting professional sports, and so forth.
If you live in a major American city, odds are decent that your taxes over the past decade have paid for a new athletic arena, which provides a new revenue stream for billionaire owners to pay their millionaire athletes. Some cities, like San Francisco, have been smart enough to revolt. Maybe we have reached critical mass.
Since Americans everywhere are hurting financially to some degree, it's time to eyeball the fine print. If federal money is the only way to remedy the situation in the housing, financial and automaking sectors, it must be used solely to help those who need it most -- the employees and blue-collar folks in the trenches, not CEOs, athletes or celebrity endorsers. Bluntly put, not a single red cent of federal money should be used to pay off Tiger Woods' eight-figure endorsement deal with Buick, or to fund either of the automaker's golf tournaments in 2009.
At least Wachovia was spending its own money to sponsor an event. This is different. It's going to be our cash.
We shouldn't care what marketing people believe about the necessity of advertising, or if this hard-line stance affects the financial bottom line of several big-league sports organizations over the near term. There's no way we should be paying for the gas in Vijay Singh's private jet or Tony Stewart's ride, with compounded interest, much less wining and dining over-compensated CEO types in a corporate tent overlooking the 18th green. Those purse strings must be severed -- right along with the executive noggins who created the mess to begin with.
Sure, this is an admittedly simplistic, cold and linear argument, and I could be wrong. Years ago, I got a C in that Cal State economy class, and it was truly a gift, because like those two other guys, I was both barely awake and not at all interested.
But we're all on full-blown econ recon now, and rightly so. If federal largesse results in public monies being used to prop up athletic endeavors, that shouldn't sit well with any of us. Jimmie Johnson and Zach Johnson won't starve if a few golf events, NASCAR teams or other entities vanish in a cloud of dust until the economic landscape settles.
If we allow our money to somehow underwrite sports, then take some chalk and draw a circle around all of us taxpayers. Because common sense will have officially been rendered dead.
