Fri, Mar 05, 2004 page24

• Sports world gets handed TV ratings reality check

  • By John Levesque / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  That Mark Burnett would deliver a keynote address at an event called the World Congress of Sports should give us all pause.

  Burnett is the erudite producer who has parlayed umpteen versions of "Survivor" and more recently "The Apprentice" into boffo TV ratings and scads of dollars for himself and his network partners.

  As it happens, Burnett is a sports fan. A huge sports fan.

  He grew up in England watching boxing with his dad. His first big success on TV was "Eco-Challenge," a sort of "Survivor" for jocks that put teams of extreme survivalists through unimaginable paces in exotic places.

  Now a US citizen, Burnett adores the NBA and finds baseball a stultifying form of "Americanized cricket." He has been so busy with other projects that "Eco-Challenge" didn't happen last year -- more's the pity -- but sports is never completely off his plate. He is working with Sylvester Stallone and NBC on "The Contender," a TV series in which real-life boxers will slug it out for a lot of money. Picture Rocky wedded to "American Idol," minus the less savory aspects of the sweet science, we're told.

  Yesterday, in the ballroom of a Four Seasons hotel most sports fans (and sportswriters) can't afford to stay in, Burnett gave one man's view of sports television. Anyone familiar with Burnett's body of work won't be surprised to learn it's a lot like the Roone Arledge/Dick Ebersol vision of the Olympic Games. In a word: storytelling.

  "It's all about the depth of character," he said. "If you're invested in whether that man or woman wins the race, you care so much more.

  "All that matters," he added, "is that people are entertained."

  Burnett spoke of "character" the way we in the newspaper industry wistfully remember the colorful people who used to work in journalism -- the chain-smoking, hard-drinking profaners who've been weeded out in the interests of giving parakeets a more sanitized place to go potty.

  Over the top

  Mind you, he did not equate these colorful people to athletes who drink to excess or, say, take drugs to enhance performance. Perish the thought. He was a little more vague, using the Los Angeles Lakers' signing of Karl Malone and Gary Payton -- a "stroke of genius," in his words -- as an example of injecting character into a sports franchise, as if Shaq and Kobe and Phil Jackson simply weren't up to the task previously.

  "We fans want to see the legends play," Burnett said, apparently oblivious to the reality that legends have to begin somewhere. "Just pure sports is not going to deliver massive ratings. [It's] story, story, story. I am a living example. I now, quite frankly, am reinventing Thursday nights. Who would have believed that I would be pushing off sitcoms on Thursday night with `The Apprentice?'"

  After his remarks, Mr. Humility got little argument from a panel whose task was discussing the future of the sports industry. Only Tim Leiweke, brother of Seahawks CEO Tod and a member of the Lakers' board of directors, offered meaningful opposition.

  "This team gives us gray hairs," he said of the Lakers. "It's not supposed to be [about] one guy with his own agenda."

  This man knows sports

  Leiweke wasn't saying if that one guy might be Payton and his recent lamentation over a perceived dearth of playing time. But his point was clear, given that he is president and CEO of Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz's Anschutz Entertainment Group, which includes but is hardly limited to the LA Kings of the NHL, the LA Galaxy of Major League Soccer (not to mention five other MLS franchises), the Staples Center, the new Home Depot Center, the Kodak Theatre and 30 percent of the Lakers and the LA Sparks.

  With that many things going on, Leiweke subscribes to the traditional-teamwork theory of achievement, and he professed a preference for watching a great team with character as opposed to a team of great characters.

  Thus the schism between the so-called purists, who by their very identification suggest those who disagree have motives that are less than pure, and the new guard, who see traditionalism as a synonym for fear of change.

  The rating game

  In Burnett's view of sport, this evolution toward a story-driven formula is inevitable because TV ratings for sports events, by and large, are trending downward.

  Adding fuel to his argument is an online survey by Octagon, the sports-marketing agency that is co-sponsoring the two-day conference here with Street & Smith, publisher of Street & Smith's Sports Business Journal.

  Conducted two weeks ago among 250 males between the ages of 13 and 34, the survey -- surprise, surprise -- shows that boys and younger men are more amenable to a blurring of the line between sports and entertainment. The younger set (13-24) were much more enthusiastic, for instance, than the older group about the addition of music to sports programming and the presence of celebrities as an enhancement to sports viewing.

  "As the competition for viewers continues to increase," said Octagon CEO Rick Dudley, "we will see more and more crossover programming.

  "The challenge will be to deliver the right mix of programming to as large an audience as possible without jeopardizing a sport's integrity."

  Preserving a sport's integrity means keeping it real. This doesn't mean tinkering is prohibited. A 24-second shot clock here, a designated hitter there, and the sport tends to survive intact. But overpromise and underdeliver, as NBC did with the XFL, and failure is guaranteed.

  Just a good yarn

  So I hope Burnett will forgive my reluctance in welcoming to the sports world a guy generally considered to be the king of "reality" TV. Burnett says he never considered his shows to be reality, just good storytelling with the boring parts cut out.

  What's frightening is that some people are already saying, "Imagine what he could do for sports," while others fear what Burnett might do to sports.

  The sports world abounds with great stories, and packaging a competition around a compelling individual saga is a proven way to reel in the casual fan. The would-be tinkerers must remember that, to the serious fan, every game is a good story unto itself -- with a beginning, a middle and, ideally, an end not spliced together in an editing room.

  Good sports is always entertaining. Good entertainment isn't necessarily sport.
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