The Roar is one of those sports blogs that usually delivers more than it promises and has only recently begun to be inundated by advertising.
One of my favourite recent posts has been by Geoff Lemon, in the second half of a piece on sporting fakes and frauds.
Melbourne's hosting of the 1956 Olympics is one of the glory stories that Victoria sports chiefs gloat about, so I'm not surprised the story of young Sydney students successfully swapping the Olympic torch for a silver chair leg topped with flaming underwear has been kept quiet for decades.
Likewise, the monumental failure that was the Firepower magic proton pill or whatever it was meant to be wasn't publicised nearly enough, despite the massive amount of investors money the owner poured into sports sponsorship. I remember Crikey blogging heavily about this catastrophe in 2008 but more serious sports reporters and financial journalists should have taken notice when the company's failure led to the Sydney Kings basketball team collapsing.
Apart from that, Lemon's post is an entertaining read, as is much of The Roar's commentary. And seeing as I've had so little time to blog about sport, it's great to see more serious and indepth pieces on Aussie sport in the blogosphere.
It's funny that now I've moved further into sports marketing and sponsorship than in the last two years, I've had less time and inclination to write about it.
Partly because some of the stories I could have written about here could have got me fired but mainly due to the limited time I can give over to blogging, with the move back to Australia, settling in, finding work, moving house and all the rest.
Some amazing stories outside my current job are the current hot trend of verbally bashing AFL footballers, with non-sporting types deriding footballers as role models and those in the know supportive of their positive influence on kids.
Then on the US side are the challenges faced by college and pro athletes when using Twitter, as explored extensively in this article.
I attended a forum on sport and social media run the excellent Digital Sport Australia last night and athletes' Twitter tendencies was one of the topics. There was general agreement that athletes should tweet for themselves (rather than designate a publicity-hungry family member or staffer to do it for them) and they should be genuine and honest without using it to overly plug or attack sponsors. Pretty simple really but it seems beyond the ability of some players and celebrity sports stars to do that.
The Digisport people put on a top event so follow the hashtag #dssau for details on upcoming events and sports stories of interest.
It's an odd thing, planning to head back to my old industry of sport after nearly two years in health and medical public relations.
Many of my UK and US contacts are in health and science and I've had the occasional display of surprise when I say I want to return to sports PR. For science communicators, sports writing and promotion is often a foreign and unknown quantity, something that was made plain by this comment from a fellow science writer yesterday:
I had to Google the term 'double teaming' as I wasn't sure what it meant.
The comment related to a headline about two cancer-beating proteins, which when combined with a special drug, have been shown to effectively knock out cancer cells in the lab (if you want to know more, here some detail on the process).
So the company freelance writer's headline suggestion of 'Double-teaming cancer' as a basketball reference made complete sense to me and none to anyone else. And I just hope the commenter had Safe Search on when she googled that term.
One of the areas I’m relishing in working on is the reason I started this blog and my own Twitter account: the chance to combine sports writing, opinion, health news and social media.
On a corporate level this will be an interesting shift: after working in the aforementioned science field and handling SM for a small company, I have a better understanding of what types of stories scientists want to read about. And while I still regularly read sports news pages and blogs, talking solely to that audience will be a welcome challenge.
On the social media aspect, here's a link to a promotional video showing what my former employer in Australia has been up to while I'm away.
When I left Monash Sport two years ago, they were cautious of the uses, audience and effects of social media but have obviously grasped the basics after setting up Facebook groups, Youtube and Metacafe channels and an underfollowed Twitter account. It’s a healthy cultural shift and one that their members are obviously enjoying.
Well it only took a month for me to write another post and it took that long for whoever runs the NBA UK fan page on face book to upload photos and video from the Take to the Courts days in October.
I made the cut twice for their highlight video though in a watching not playing capacity.
As usual my full-time job and travel has allowed little time for blogging (I do enough of that at work) and there hasn't been much to say about basketball of late.
On the tennis front, whoever is handling the Lawn Tennis Association's PR account must have been saving a good news story for when someone attacked Roger Draper, as Pat Cash did in the now-heavily read London Evening Standard (because it's free).
Former Wimbledon champion Cash hammered Draper's LTA and the state of Brit tennis, sending the LTA PR machine into overdrive and resulting in a full-page tribute to the state of young British tennis the following day. How convenient.
Draper even had his say in a boring and dry column that did nothing to really tackle any of Cash's good points, and he had a few.
Cash may be a loudmouth but he's lived in London for a while now and could contribute a lot to attracting yougsters to tennis, if anyone bothered taking his advice. It's true that UK sports pages so often seems restricted to talking about football, despite what the rest of the country is doing.
In Australia it is a similar story: women's netball and soccer (ok, football) had dismal coverage despite being the top two sports played by teenagers in the whole country. That is now changing as both sports get more money, professionalism and international standing. Tennis doesn't suffer too much from all three but results by Brits seem to be the biggest block in its improvement here
The early sessions at the Beyond Sport conference have provided some inspiring moments. Compere Kevin Carroll discussed how hiw life "saved by a ball" and how he rose from a disadvantaged background to become head athletic trainer at NBA team the Philadelphia 76ers.
In the first session, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair described what sport does for us: excites, insipres, promotes tolerance andhelps many get out of a bad home environment. He also said he had learnt the power & limits of government to really develop and promote sport. Lord Puttnam received a round of applause for his points that educating girls creates systemic change and men are respomsible for a majority of the world's problems. Former NBA star Dikembe Mutombo has journeyed regularly to African countries, including his childhood home in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for the last 18 years to help children develop their social and sporting skills. He said basketball had made it possible for him to open a US$30m dollar hospital in the DRC and admonished FIFA and European football associations for often merely scouting talent in Africa when they could be doing good. Multi-Olympic gold medallist, swimmer Ian Thorpe, gave a powerful address on his own journey beyond sport, starting a charity at age 18 to help poor and disadvantedg people. He used the speaking opportunity to highlight the major health and socioeconomic problems in Australian Aboriginal communities and said it was disappointing that his own opinion was more important to the media and general public, because of his sports achievements, than that of the experts.
As a follow-up to the previous story about British basketball, it is heartening to see the mainstream media being seduced into writing basketball stories on the back of English players' participation in the 2009 NBA Live game and 4 Nations tournament in London this year.
Chicago Bulls star and injury-prone Luol Deng has garnered much of the media attention, though Brit-born Ben Gordon has had the benefit of serious game time in the NBA finals series to boost his profile.
Promoters for NBA Live and 4 Nations need to work out how to steal a sports page from the Sun, Mirror and Daily Mail on a regular basis in an effort to bring basketball into the public consciousness before these major events at the O2. While they are sure to be well-attended – ticket sales for the lower priced seats seem to pick up after each story – the longer-lasting benefits may be lost unless PR and marketing teams work on the ever present problem of grassroots participation.
As mentioned in a previous post, basketball courts around the country are lying dormant or solely used, with either permanent or improved goals at each end, for football. As a local example, I practice at an outdoor court in south London at least once a week and for the first time in six months, found basketball players using it over the weekend. The weather's obviously a factor but it appears people generally aren't learning a love for the game at an early age.
On a disappointing sidenote, the one publication to regularly feature a wide range of sports ended its print run last month. Opinions are divided on whether Sport rightly earned its title as the UK’s best sport magazine, but in my short experience it featured top-notch writing, interesting picture stories and a determination not to fill its pages solely with football stars, WAGS or poor-performing cricketers.
The worldwide battle for a shrinking tourist market is testing even those airlines who have spent millions in advertising. Virgin knows it can haul out Richard Branson for instant marketing impact but what are other airlines doing to get the edge over the competition? While the obvious answer is TV, billboard and magazine advertising, UAE-based airline Emirates seems to have made considerable ground with little ad spend thanks to their sponsorship of a wide array of high-profile sports teams and events. Having Arsenal FC players of the calibre of Arshavin, Fabregas and Adebayor wearing an Emirates-branded shirt on the pitch or the high street is among the best celebrity endorsements money can buy. It works on a conscious and subliminal level – fans begin to associate the brand with class, success and reliability. Likewise, a perpetually struggling team or one dogged by controversy would find it hard to retain a big-spending sponsor – no company wants to be associated with failure or a negative profile. Emirates appears to have picked its sports and events carefully, laying down upwards of US$200 million on more than 50 clubs and sporting competitions. Emirates chairman Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al-Maktoum has said sponsorship is vital in the airline’s marketing strategy. “We believe sponsorships are one of the best ways to connect with our passengers. They allow us to share and support their interests and to build a closer relationship with them,” he says on the airline’s sponsorship site. Of course the UAE air carrier didn’t come up with the idea of sports sponsorship equalling increased passengers: Australian airline Qantas has followed this policy for many years and has run successful campaigns in the lead-up to several Olympics, trumpeting their financial support of Games athletes. Qantas is also respected in this arena for sponsoring the rejuvenated Australian national soccer (football) competition, Australian Rules and the national tennis scene. A newer player on the scene is Etihad Airways, the national airline of the United Arab Emirates, which is using a mixture of traditional advertising and sponsorship in the hope of bumping up passenger numbers in 2009 by 15 per cent to a total of seven million. Etihad has put their name on Chelsea FC, Ferrari’s F1 team and also targeted the grassroots market with a junior rugby union festival in Abu Dhabi last year. Australian airline Qantas has played on its sporting affiliations for many years, running successful campaigns prior to recent Olympic Games' trumpeting its support for gold medal hopefuls. Having the company branding on a sports team could become as important as corporate social responsibilities or charitable donations. It will be telling how the level of sponsorship dollars rises or falls during the global financial crisis and whether airlines continue to see long-term benefits for supporting top-level teams.
One of the most influential videos around in my early teenage years was Michael Jordan’s Playground.
The brilliant opening sequence featured some of the most amazing and sublime dunks and opponent-beating layups I’ve ever seen, which no All Star or NBA Jam slam dunk comp has ever managed to match for sheer finesse. The film was also a reminder that being cut from the high school team doesn’t need to end hopes of playing at an elite level.
I played at an undersized indoor court earlier this year at a school near Elephant and Castle and was struck immediately by a 20 foot poster featuring the famous Michael Jordan Wings photo. This shot was plastered on my wall and that of millions of other young fans, inspiring us to take either take up the sport, train harder for a higher grade team spot or score an elusive triple-double, depending on which level we were at.
Basketball flourished in Jordan’s era – hoops were nailed up on garage/shed walls across the world. Jordan’s sponsors could try to take credit for his massive worldwide exposure but the truth was the sheer ability and marketability of the player made him an easy sell in almost any market.
The point of this background is to ask, 19 years after Playground was released, where the sport now rates outside of its American homeland. Pre-credit crunch in Australia, provincial and capital city teams who filled 10,000 seat stadiums in the late 1980s were struggling to maintain a fan base and either downgrading their operations or shutting up shop entirely. Many UK teams in the national league seem to have suffered the same fate.
Basketball has still not grown into a mass participation sport in the UK like it is in France, Italy and Germany. The game ranked as the 18th most popular sport in England in Sport England’s Active People survey published in 2006.
Based simply on investment in outdoor facilities (and disregarding English weather for a moment), this shouldn’t have been the case.
Back in September 1996, the English Basketball Association created the Outdoor Basketball Initiative (OBI) with, as their old website states, “the aim of providing Basketball For All.” “The then English Sports Council Lottery Sports Fund, Grant aid of £10 million has enabled 9,150 robust outdoor basketball Goals to be installed in 352 local authorities throughout England.”
I could be picking on word usage here but it shows an insight into the thinking of the bodies involved that they use the word “goals” here. Apt though, considering many of the outdoor courts I’ve seen in and around London so far have goals for football at each end and this seems to be their primary use.
In recent years, lottery funding bodies and sports councils have invested more than £315,000 to basketballscotland; contributed £19,950 to put up 21 hoops on the Isle of Anglesey, Wales; gave a Liverpool wheelchair basketball club £10,000 to purchase sports wheelchairs and equipment; and handed a Welsh club £20,000 to deliver a healthy living program to young people in primary schools.
The Welsh and Scottish sporting bodies seem to have matched funding with participation, where is the English association going wrong?
Sport England also offered to fund the sport to the tune of £1.7 million a year, on the condition England Basketball improved its administration, appointed a “high-calibre chairperson”, built sustainable grass roots participation and developed world-class British teams.
Basing their challenges on the 2007 Mallin Basketball Review, Sport England said these changes were urgently needed to significantly drive up participation and improve performance on the world stage.
Former NBA star John Amaechi backed this latter view in an interview with skysports.com late last year, slamming Great Britain's short-term approach to the 2012 Olympics. The ex-Orlando Magic and Utah Jazz star, who helped take England to bronze at the 2006 Commonwealth Games, said “right now our professional league is the worst in the world in terms of both the standard and professionalism”.
While Amaechi and NBA colleague Luol Deng, who finished eighth in the FIBA Europe Player of the Year Award for 2008, have good track records of promoting and developing the sport locally, England Basketball has to be hoping for a Michael Jordan figure to inspire the next generation of players and fans.
I'm passionate about sports PR, coverage of various codes and the good and bad ways clubs, sporting figures and PR professionals promote their game of choice.
Three years as a sports journalist in Central Australia and 18 months in sports PR, along with countless hours on the sidelines (as a fan and substitute on the bench!), has helped inform my views.
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