Blue Collar Sports
What Money Did to Sports
By Daniel Muniz

Being a devoted sports fan is expensive especially if you want to see the games in person. In the past, professional sports used to be a cheap form of entertainment accessible to everyone. Today, ticket prices are through the shiny new stadium roof.

What happened?

Perhaps the most substantial but subtle change was the sports fan.

At one time, professional sports had blue-collar audiences. The stadiums and arenas where the fans saw the games had few frills and even fewer luxuries and amenities. As a result, smaller cities like Buffalo New York could actually sustain a NFL team.

In fact, the primary reason that my hometown of San Antonio got an NBA team was because it did not have an NFL or MLB franchise to compete against. That allowed the Spurs to dominate the sports news and monopolize the local media attention.

Also at that time, the commercialization of professional sports was practically non-existent, especially prior to cable television. The streams of revenue were fairly simple and there wasn’t much left of it to go around.

But the role of a business is to make money and generate a profit. And the more industrious owners and team presidents found creative and imaginative ways to market their team to bigger and more lucrative audiences.

The Dallas Cowboys of the NFL quickly discovered that the popularity of football could be transmitted to places beyond the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. It didn’t take long for Cowboy football players to be household names in South Texas, northern Mexico, New Mexico, and Arizona. In my hometown, San Antonians are rabid Cowboy fans much to the chagrin and shock of out-of-towners, especially since Houston is half the distance from Dallas.
 

Story Continues Below ê

Today's Top Stories

● Are You Being Watched? - It is Difficult to Pass Unnoticed ● Teaching Kids at Home - In Defense of Home Schooling ● Preserving Marital Bliss - Good Credit Marrying Bad Credit ● No More Hosiery - Is Pantyhose Losing Its Legs?

Yesterday's Top Stories

● Embracing Liberalism - The Rush to National Suicide ● Billing School Districts - Charging for Remedial Education ● Liberal Ignorance - Receiving Liberal Hate Mail ● Voodoo Panties - Ex-Boyfriend Creates Voodoo Shrine ● Today We March - Tomorrow We Vote! ● Urban Sprawl Rules - Inner Cities Continue Decline

Also, television contracts and merchandising arrangements began to commercialize professional sports and create new streams of income. As revenues soared, the players also wanted a piece of the pie. Tough union negations resulted in astronomical salaries for the athletes. Other than sports, there are almost no other industries that employees can demand half of total revenues.

Professional sports now sought out more well-heeled audiences that quickly outstripped its blue-collar roots.

As a resident of San Antonio, I enjoyed perhaps the last days of the old school of professional sports.

The Spurs had signed a contract to become a tenant of the newly built football stadium, the Alamodome. Many San Antonians, including myself, voted for the city to construct a no-frills facility in the hopes of luring an NFL team. The evolution of sports was still in progress so it didn’t occur to many voters that this project could possibly fail.

In the meantime, the Spurs quickly moved into the stadium and created a basketball configuration for seating. The bigger seating arrangement meant that the Alamodome could pack over 30,000 screaming basketball fans. Tickets were cheap and plentiful. Even the expensive seats were not outrageous.

The cheapest seats were five dollars for the upper deck. Better seating in the upper deck that faced the half court was nine dollars. Anything below the upper deck was still very reasonable. And the management of the basketball team even promoted dollar night which easily packed the stadium. As a result, the Spurs consistently had the highest attendance in the entire NBA during that time frame.

In addition, a high caliber team of NBA superstars like David Robinson and Tim Duncan created a massive fan base.

By then, times had changed.

The Alamodome itself was a failure. Instead of blue-collar fans, professional sports targeted the more sophisticated clientele of white-collar fans who could spend a fortune on tickets and merchandise. The Alamodome only had a fraction of the luxury suites that newly built stadiums had, thus hopes for ever luring an NFL team were dashed.

And the high attendance of Spurs games was a strike against itself. Everybody loved cheap tickets except the ownership of the Spurs. Season ticket holders were at an all time low compared to other NBA teams and the lack of luxury suites created a bigger disparity. Dollar night did not bring the same kind of customer that a high-priced ticket could produce.

The team made the threat that unless a new arena was built, they would be forced to move.

Winning the first championship was more than enough motivation to convince the county to build it. Upon completion, team management was able to enforce the laws of supply and demand. In the Alamodome, demand was huge but so was the supply of seats. The new SBC Center (now called the AT&T Center) cut the attendance in half resulting in a surge of season ticket holders who wanted the scarce seats. The glitzy new arena had all the amenities of an upscale facility as well as the numerous luxury suites, thus it could command even higher prices.

As a result, ticket prices soared.

The blue-collar audiences that were once the backbone of the Spurs were now priced out of their own team which was now commonplace for most franchises of other professional sports.

I myself cannot afford NBA tickets anymore now that I am married with children and a big mortgage payment. That cheap form of entertainment is nothing more than memories although I have seen a handful of games from time to time (in which someone else gave me the tickets). But the days of cheap tickets are over. I just hope that in the quest for white-collar customers that professional sports doesn’t price itself out of existence.

We want your opinion! Tell us what you thought about this article. Click the Your Feedback menu item to send us your comments.