The Changing Game

St. Louis is the 10th largest metropolitan area in the country, with a population of 2,351,000. Last spring Ben Kerner, a pro basketball owner for two decades and a pioneer in the game, sold the St. Louis Hawks to an Atlanta group and got out of the sport. There are several good reasons why the Hawks failed: a bad building, competition from other sports, a team that, however good, lacked a popular hero. But there was something subtler, as stated by Kerner himself: "I found out that even if everything worked well, I still couldn't make it."

Kerner did not want to leave the game. He looked into buying the Baltimore Bullets, a team that has two vital assets: a good arena and a dazzling young ballplayer, Earl Monroe. Baltimore is the 12th-largest metropolitan area. "Let me tell you, too," Kerner says, " Baltimore was a very fair deal. The price was just right. And then I put the numbers together. Like St. Louis, there is no way. You can't make it there. You got to go where you have people to have a chance."

It is a jarring commentary on the economics of modern professional sports that the 10th and 12th most densely populated areas in the country have too few people to support a franchise. It suggests that only the giant cities—possibly only New York and Los Angeles—are sufficiently large. "You can expect that," Kerner says. "Look at the history. The game started out with the Sheboygans and the Tri-Cities. Then it moved up to the Fort Waynes and the Syracuses. They fade out and the St. Louises and the Detroits come in. Now they can't make it any longer."

Despite such supporting evidence—more than half of the National Basketball Association teams lose money and in their first year all of the American Basketball Association teams did—pro basketball continues to draw investors, because it is still considered a low-overhead, get-rich-quick sport and one, moreover, in which one extraordinary player can make your venture profitable. Thus, while the past decade has been marked by expansion and wheeling and dealing in all pro sports, basketball has exhibited the greatest change. Baseball has grown 50%, hockey 100%, football 117% and basketball 213%. Where there were eight teams, now there are 25—many in trouble. While predictions are hazardous, there is good reason to guess that an era of contraction is lurking like a bear market for both basketball and baseball. Leagues, before long, may be made up of teams that represent whole regions, not single metropolitan areas. There will be fewer teams, but this shrinking need not indicate a defeat for either sport. Instead, if prepared for and understood, consolidation can prove a healthy move.

But why should basketball and baseball contract while football continues to thrive in, say, Green Bay, a country town whose population of 93,900 may at first glance be mistaken for its zip code? The answer appears to be that football might best be described as an Event Sport. Each game, separated by time, is celebrated as an occasion. There are only seven home games a year, and the same spectators, having given each other $50 season tickets for Christmas and arranged to meet each other in the same bar before every game, attend each week, pointing for the Event as much as the players. And since away games are televised, followers of a team see every game it plays and are totally involved.

The opposite of the Event Sport is what might be called a Linear Sport. It proceeds day upon day, game after game, with no time to isolate or especially celebrate games as events. What important occasions there are—a winning streak or a try for a record—can only be acknowledged near the end or after the fact, usually too late for the box office to profit.

Baseball, of course, is the ultimate in Linear Sport (though it does become an Event Sport at World Series time). Fans can become intensely involved in the game merely by watching the box scores, relating them to the past, to the whole, to infinity. Like the horoscope and stock-market listings, the statistics are always there in the paper, and even rabid partisans can follow their teams closely without ever attending a game. This is not a whole lot of help to an owner who depends mainly upon gate receipts for his revenue.

The two Linear Sports that are particularly interesting because they are successful are ice hockey and—don't snicker—the Roller Derby. Maybe it is more than coincidence that both are rough sports played on skates. Whatever, hockey succeeds while lousing up all the formulas. It is played almost entirely by foreigners, it has not proved appealing on TV and there is not enough scoring. But it thrives. Presumably, as H. Rap Brown said, "violence is as American as cherry pie."

The Roller Derby, on the other hand, offers serious lessons for all other Linear Sports. It plays almost every night for much of the year, but a home team plays at different locations within a wide home area. One city is not saturated by the action. The Derby becomes, in a sense, an Event at each different city when it plays there.

Certainly the Derby operates on a much smaller scale than do any of the more celebrated sports, but the principle of regionalism that has been successfully employed by Gerald Seltzer, Roller Derby president, is directly applicable to basketball and baseball. All Linear Sports, in fact, may soon learn that they cannot survive if they are to let themselves be bound by the ground rules for professional sports established half a century ago, when the population was centered in various downtowns, all connected by train tracks.