Fans the Sorry Majority

Last summer, Ralph Nader launched a campaign to defend the rights of sports fans. At first, it seemed he may have gone off the deep end: The press rolled out mocking cartoons and the talk shows began featuring Peter Gruenstein, Nader's director of his new group, F.A.N.S. (Fight to Advance the Nation's Sports), who sketched details of the campaign for often incredulous audiences. However, it turns out there is a good deal more to F.A.N.S. than standing up for an all-beef, two-bit hot dog. Billions of tax dollars, for example. To get all the facts, we went straight to the sources, Nader and Gruenstein. Here's the story, sports fans.

In 1978, more than 300,000,000 fans will pay about two billion dollars to witness sports events, 40,000,000 will subscribe to magazines devoted to the pursuit of sport, the television networks (to say nothing of the local stations) will spend more than $350,000,000 for the broadcast rights to over 1200 hours of sports and in excess of 50 billion dollars will be illegally wagered on sports contests. In fact, for some fans, sports are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, occasionally even death:

• In 1973, a Colorado man shot himself through the head. His suicide note read, "I have been a Broncos fan since the Broncos were first organized, and I can't stand their fumbling anymore." Denver had fumbled seven times that day in its game against the Chicago Bears.

• A Florida cabdriver fatally shot himself in 1974 after missing Hank Aaron's historic 715th home run because his wife made him shut the TV off and go to work.

• In the fall of 1969, during a vituperative campaign in which John Lindsay was struggling to remain mayor as the Mets were fighting for their first pennant, a sociologist stood on a Manhattan street corner and inquired of 150 New Yorkers, "Who is going to win?" More than two thirds responded, "The Mets."

• When Bart Starr was still quarterbacking the Packers, author Michael Roberts reports in Fans: How We Go Crazy over Sports, a Methodist church school polled its students on which individual in the history of the world they most admired. Bart and Jesus tied for first place. Jesus' name was on the ballot; Starr's votes were write-ins.

• A group of Ohio State University students were asked to name various OSU officials. One half didn't know the identity of the university's president; only one freshman coed didn't know that Woody Hayes was the head football coach.

But to dismiss spectator sports as silly and their local adherents as aberrants is both misguided and heartless. It demeans some of childhood's lushest memories and denies the awesome coordination and artistry of our country's finest athletes. Moreover, sports create "an atmosphere conducive to having fun," sports philosopher and Chicago White Sox president Bill Veeck notes. They can help overcome fear of social intercourse and spawn a camaraderie within a community. Veeck compares sports to a natural disaster. "Only then do people come together. They aren't afraid to talk to each other, because they know they have something in common." He makes a valid point when he observes that sport is "the only place in society where justice is equal and immediate. Three strikes and you're out; I don't care if you have Edward Bennett Williams defending you. Wealth, power or color mean nothing."

Perhaps best of all, though, the rules rarely change. Sports--particularly baseball--are, in Veeck's words, "a beacon of stability in a confused and confusing society."

Or are they? The rules on the field may change little, but off the field, the beacon of SportsWorld, as author Robert Lypsyte has dubbed the athletic establishment, is being impersonalized, computerized and amortized, while the fans are ignored, duped and exploited.

It is the corporatizing of sport. And it begins with a con. For decades, the professional-sports leagues and their owners have perpetuated the myth that sports are not profitable. "You must be a fan or be nuts to get into this business," says Gene Cline, president of the N.F.L.'s San Diego Chargers. "It's not really a good investment, never has been and probably never will be." In reality, such self-serving assertions probably never were accurate. They certainly aren't today.

Much of the evidence of this corporatizing of sport is provided by the corporations themselves and their managers, who have recognized the unusual advantages of sports ownership. CBS purchased 80 percent of the New York Yankees in 1964. In 1976, subsidiaries of General Electric and Ford Motor companies bought the Houston Astros from Judge Roy Hofheinz. Storer Broadcasting owned the Boston Bruins until 1975, when the hockey team was sold to the Jacobs brothers, Max, Jeremy and Lawrence, owners of Emprise, a huge sports conglomerate that was convicted in 1972 of participating in an illegal scheme to buy into a Las Vegas casino (and since has changed its name to SportsSystems, Inc.). Budweiser's August Busch has the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team and Ralston Purina recently purchased the Blues hockey team there. Warner Communications, after conducting an intensive study of the profitability of sports ownership, bought the New York Cosmos soccer team several years ago and signed international star Pelé to a $4,000,000-plus contract. The entertainment conglomerate was frank in acknowledging that its motivation was profit. "We have all the glamor we need from working with movie and record people," one Warner director explained. An added inducement for Warner was a possible future tie-in between its cable-TV division and soccer. "Three, four, five years down the road, soccer could be very important to us when pay cable comes into being on a wide scale," one executive pointed out. Gulf and Western Industries, a huge multinational corporation, owns Madison Square Garden, which, in turn, owns New York's basketball Knicks and hockey Rangers. Both have been extraordinarily profitable; even in losing years, they have generally played to packed houses. And there is little reason to fear that sporting considerations will interfere with Gulf and Western's future profits. "If you ask me," Garden chief Alan Cohen has said, "whether I'd rather have a Stanley Cup and a basketball championship at the expense of a profit, I say no."

The new corporate managers' devotion to and knowledge of the game is frequently suspect. Billy Martin, after being fired as manager of the Texas Rangers in 1975, commented that owner Brad Corbett, a Dallas plastic-pipe magnate, "knows as much about baseball as I do about plastic pipe." The abrasive personality and bad management decisions of Paul Snyder, the largest stockholder in Nabisco and, until recently, co-owner of the N.B.A. Braves, earned him the nickname Cookie Monster in Buffalo. Oil tycoon John Mecom, Jr., owner of the perennially powder-puff New Orleans Saints, once remarked, "I'll tell you, this football team will not be allowed to interfere with the gas and oil business."

The temporal, fast-buck nature of many of the corporate owners' commitments to their teams has been reflected in a large turnover of franchises. Between 1963 and 1975, for example, as the N.B.A. expanded by nine teams, principal ownership of franchises changed hands 44 times. As N.B.A. Players Association chief Larry Fleisher told Sports Illustrated, "They buy in and take a very active role for two years or so, until the novelty wears off. Then they begin to disappear and are gone completely after four years, maximum five." Coincidentally, the player tax-write-off benefits run out after about five years.

No instance of this quick-buck ownership is more instructive than the case of Robert Short and the late, lamented Washington Senators. In 1969, Short, a wealthy Minneapolis hotel and trucking-firm operator, purchased the lowly Washington Senators for the inflated price of $9,000,000. In 1971, two economists, Roger Noll and Benjamin Okner, both with the prestigious Brookings Institution at the time, analyzed Short's investment. They discovered that Short, through a complicated series of transactions, some involving loans between himself and his other businesses, had bought the Senators with a cash outlay of only $1000. In return, he was entitled to depreciate most of the full purchase price of the team over a five-year period. By using these paper losses, Short could shelter income from his other businesses and realize $500,000 per year in tax savings. In comparison, an average investor would need about $6,000,000 to ensure such a return.

Unfortunately, as Okner, now working for the Carter Administration on tax reform, explains, Short encountered two major obstacles. First, the economy went sour soon after he bought the team and, as the country headed into a severe recession, his hotel and trucking firms produced little income in need of a shelter. Second, Short didn't have the foggiest notion of how to run a baseball club. He obtained a lot of high-priced "name" talent that didn't produce (remember Denny McLain after he won 30 games?). He determined that Senator fans should pay the highest prices in the American League to watch one of the worst teams, and attendance suffered. He even sold a number of his most promising young ballplayers for operating cash when hard times hit.

Two years after he had purchased the club, with his tax haven partly eroded, the team in worse shape than ever and the interest payments on his loans coming due, Short was in a fix. He announced he would be willing to sell the club--for $3,000,000 more than he had paid. Not finding anyone silly enough to fork over $12,000,000 for a flailing franchise, he successfully petitioned his fellow owners to allow him to relocate the team in Arlington, Texas, midway between Fort Worth and Dallas. The baseball-hungry Arlingtonians arranged for Short to receive, among other sweetheart terms, a $7,500,000 advance from several banks against future broadcast revenues. This allowed Short to pay off most of his loans.

Thus, the Minnesotan's investment had come nearly full cycle by 1971. In just two years, he had converted $1000 into a bought-and-paid-for franchise and still had three years left to avail himself of the tax shelter, at which point he sold 90 percent of his interest in the Texas Rangers for $8,300,000.

This illustrates the truly impressive profit-generating potential of professional-sports ownership. Inept, unlucky and "unsuccessful," a sports entrepreneur, like Short, can still vacation in Palm Springs. The reason Short came away from his Senators gambit with his manicure intact was what the economists call "excess demand." And the key to Short's salvation was the $7,500,000 in bank loans against future broadcast revenues. He would not have received such an advance had he been talking about relocating an economically equivalent applesauce factory in Arlington. Why? Because anyone with the financial wherewithal can start an applesauce factory. There are no artificial legal barriers to competition in the applesauce business. There are in baseball.

Baseball is a legally sanctioned monopoly and has been since 1922, when the Supreme Court reached the curious conclusion that the game did not constitute interstate commerce and therefore did not fall within the purview of Federal antitrust statutes. (Football has received a specific antitrust exemption from Congress and is today in essentially the same protected position as baseball.) Only in professional sports (with the exception of legally created monopoly utilities) can the present operators determine with impunity which, if any, future operators will be allowed to do business, and where. Of course, anyone can attempt to start a new league. But that's difficult. It's like telling (continued on page 198)Fans(continued from page 100) our hypothetical applesauce entrepreneur that before he can go into business himself, he must find five other businessmen willing and able to start factories in five other areas and risk his capital in large part on their success.

So the people of the Dallas--Fort Worth area wanted a major-league baseball team, believed they had an adequate market to support a team profitably and had more than adequate capital to finance one. All the elements were there for a risk venture under the free-enterprise system. But baseball is set apart from the competitive vagaries of the free-enterprise system and the Texans could not just go about setting up a franchise on their own. The existing owners of the major leagues had limited the number of franchises. With an artificially controlled supply, there was excess demand. Thus, the Arlingtonians were forced to pay monopoly prices--in the form of the $7,500,000 advance to Short, a taxpayer-subsidized stadium and other favorable terms.

As economist Noll, editor of the Brookings Institution book Government and the Sports Business, observes:

Territorial rights [is] perhaps the most egregious wrong of all monopolistic practices in professional sports.... The number of franchises can be controlled by owners, who can dole them out just as any other monopolist would, creating a contrived scarcity. Many more cities could support teams if the supply were not limited. In recent years, as sports have become more popular, the response of the monopolist has been predictable--ticket prices go up and up and up. In a competitive industry, higher ticket prices induce new firms to compete, but the monopolist simply takes in higher revenues. Now the owners share in the take with the players and the union. The financing looks good, but the fan is being ripped off.

As Noll notes, one of the more blatant ways fans get ripped off is through ticket prices, and they have been soaring almost everywhere. The Washington Redskins, for example, charge up to $20 for one ticket; the New York Knicks, $12.50. If you wanted to buy a season ticket for the Dallas Cowboys, until the '76 season you had to come up with $250 for a bond to help pay stadium-construction costs, in addition to the price of the ticket.

Invariably, when a team announces a price rise, it cites increasing costs--particularly player salaries--as the villain. And in competitive industries, it is true that costs are the primary determinant of prices. If company A, for example, sets a price far it excess of its costs, it will presumably lose business to company B, whose price is more closely geared to its costs. But that doesn't apply to monopolies, including sports teams. Their motivation is profit maximization. That is, they charge what the market will bear. The Brookings study found almost no correlation between costs and ticket prices (two exceptions, not surprisingly, were the Wrigley family's Chicago Cubs and the late Tom Yawkey's Boston Red Sox). "Prices tend to be positively correlated with attendance, which indicates that team owners respond to higher demand by raising prices," the study found. In other words, owners reward loyal fans by gouging them.

Fans are also victimized as taxpayers, at both the municipal and the Federal levels. About three quarters of all professional-sports facilities are taxpayer subsidized. Local governments subsidize professional teams to the tune of about $25,000,000 annually in operating losses on publicly owned facilities and in forgiven property taxes. A few cities have nearly gone into hock through their generosity. New York, while flirting with bankruptcy, spent $100,000,000 (more than four times the original estimate) refurbishing Yankee Stadium for George Steinbrenner. For that sum, the city could have bought the Yankees--and most of the other American League teams. The problem-plagued New Orleans Superdome (among other things, they forgot to cut holes in the ticket windows for the customers and ticket sellers to talk through) set the taxpayers there back $173,000,000. The Astrodome, completed in 1965, cost Houston $45,350,000.

Nor has it occurred to municipalities to ask anything of the owners--such as keeping ticket prices within a certain range--in return for their generous subsidies. The Redskins, for example, play in taxpayer-owned Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, on which they have a favorable lease. Ticket prices, averaging $12.47, are ridiculous. It costs season-ticket holders up to $280 for a couple of seats to the seven home games, plus two dollars or five dollars per game for parking in a lot they paid to build. And they must pay for the tickets four months before the beginning of the season. Obviously, few average Redskin fans can afford it. That is, if they could obtain tickets. Which they can't. All but 500 of R.F.K.'s 55,031 seats are sold to season-ticket holders. And the waiting list for season tickets is longer than Santa's list. Getting a couple of Redskin tickets, in fact, is tougher than finding a Congressman who will admit knowing Tongsun Park.

One reason the waiting list is so long is that just 14,849 parties have the right to purchase season tickets. And many of them are expense-account fans--the lobbyists and corporations who appreciate the Redskins more for their assistance in wooing potential business (and can write off the cost of tickets as an entertainment expense) than for their playing skills. The D.C. Armory Board, which runs R.F.K., has never thought to ask the Redskins to limit the number of season tickets one party can hold while there is a waiting list, or to rotate the season tickets every year or two among those desiring to buy them or, better yet, to allocate some tickets for sale on a game-by-game basis to the thousands of Redskin fans who can't afford to buy season tickets.

Local governments may take solace in the fact that the Federal Government has been at least as giving in its relations with the owners. Over the years, few industries have benefited more from Federal tax laws than have professional sports. One loophole--player depreciation--is large enough for Charlie Finley's mule to jump through. It would, in fact, make the oil industry blush. This is how it has worked:

When a franchise is purchased--say a baseball team for $10,000,000--the buyer acquires three distinct assets, the player contracts, the franchise itself and equipment. The value of the equipment (uniforms, balls, desks, etc.) is relatively tiny. Of the remaining two assets, the franchise is by far the more valuable, because it confers the right to do business in a contrived scarcity, monopoly situation and includes such benefits as the right to share in league broadcast revenues, which can amount to as much as $2,000,000 per team annually. The tax dilemma for the owner is that the proportion of the total purchase price attributable to the value of the franchise is a nondepreciable asset; historically, franchises increase in value. So costs allocated to the franchise can't be written off in order to reduce taxable income produced by the owner's other businesses.

Players are a different matter, however. Alone among businesses in the United States, employment contracts in sports are treated as depreciable capital assets. The justification is that a player's skills rapidly decline and have to be replaced (five years is the generally accepted period over which a player's cost may be written off). Thus, it is in the owners' interests to go as far as the IRS will let them in attributing the purchase price of a team to depreciable player contracts, instead of to the value of the franchise.

And the IRS let them get away with quite a bit for many years. In fact, the owners grew so emboldened by the IRS' laxity that when the Milwaukee Braves were moved to Atlanta in 1966, 99 percent of the total purchase price--$5,500,000--was allocated to player contracts. This was a tad much even for the friendly taxmen, who tenaciously fought the Braves' player allocation--all the way down to 90 percent.

To understand the magnitude of this extraordinary tax situation, consider this example computed by a Government tax expert. An N.F.L. team is purchased for $9,000,000; $8,450,000 is allocated to player contracts and amortized over five years. Assuming $1,000,000 in yearly net revenues and a 70 percent marginal tax rate, with depreciation, the owner has a positive cash flow totaling $7,415,000 over that five-year period--$1,483,000 annually. Without player depreciation, the owner nets only $300,000 a year--a difference of almost $6,000,000. Which is two thirds of the total purchase price! Economist Okner has calculated that, in the case of a 75 percent allocation to player contracts on a mere $2,000,000 purchase price for a team, the owner would have to show an annual bookkeeping loss of almost $1,000,000 before his personal after-tax cash position would decline. Bill Veeck wasn't kidding when he once remarked, "Selling a baseball team is selling the right to depreciate."

In recent years, however, the owners have had some difficulty in keeping their extraordinary tax benefits intact. In 1974, the Government finally challenged the N.F.L. Atlanta Falcons, which attempted to allocate to player contracts $7,700,000 of an $8,500,000 purchase price. Government attorney Jay R. Weill argued in court that the Falcon owners, Five Smiths, Inc., should not be allowed to allocate anything to player contracts because of the great value of the N.F.L. franchise itself and the difficulty in determining a player's value. Four months later, the district-court judge handed down a compromise decision, presently on appeal, which allowed Five Smiths to allocate about $3,000,000 to player contracts.

Then, in 1976, Congress approved a provision that allowed allocation of up to 50 percent of a team's purchase price to player contracts. Under the circumstances, it was a qualified victory for owners. They had their tax break reduced, but it was now protected against attack by the IRS. Unfortunately, it apparently never occurred to the tax-writing Congressmen that the whole concept of a player-depreciation allowance contributed mightily to the corporatizing of sports, at the expense of the fans. As Okner points out in the Brookings study:

Because the potential tax benefits from owning a team generally exceed the team's operating profit, only individuals and corporations having substantial i come from other sources can take full advantage of the tax provisions available to a sports enterprise.

Thus, only wealthy individuals and corporations can afford to pay the high prices that franchises now command. Conversely, an individual who must rely on the return from a sports franchise as his primary source and whose main interest is the club's operating profit can no longer afford to buy a team.

Moreover, the player-depreciation provision encourages instability and a high turnover among franchises. Since the tax benefits expire after five years, the owner is encouraged to sell the team after that period to a buyer willing to pay what would otherwise be an inflated price, so that he, too, might avail himself of the special tax shelter.

•

As already noted, the tax laws are not the only services Congress has rendered to the sports owners. In addition to enacting statutes in the Sixties that specially exempted the N.F.L.-A.F.L. merger from antitrust action, Congress passed an obscure piece of legislation, Public Law 87--331, in September 1961. It authorized professional leagues to pool the sale of broadcast rights without being subject to antitrust laws. In other words, the N.F.L. itself could, as a monopoly, negotiate on behalf of its teams with the various networks for exclusive national rights to broadcast the league games. Prior to the passage of the 1961 broadcast act, individual teams, not the leagues, negotiated the rights to their own games with stations or networks, so that it was quite possible that, on a given Saturday in a given area, three different baseball games might be broadcast on three different stations at the same time. It may be hard to believe in light of the sports blitz on TV these days, but there were many more hours of sports broadcast before 1961 than there are today.

The advantage to the owners of the 1961 act was obvious: In a monopolist bargaining position, they could get a great deal more money for the sale of fewer games. The major networks weren't too upset at that prospect. While they might pay more for those rights, the costs would be passed on to advertisers, anyway (and from them on to you). Furthermore, competition would be eliminated; the independent and regional networks were in no position to compete for a major national contract.

The big losers from passage of the broadcasting act were--of course--the fans. Not only did they have less access to sports programing but they paid more for it. Compare the prices of brand-name razor blades, such as Schick and Gillette (which are major TV advertisers), with the same-quality house brand.

One of those myths the owners have perpetuated is that income from the sale of broadcast rights is incidental compared with gate revenues; to hear some of them talk, it is almost an act of altruism on their part to allow their teams' contests to be shown on television at all. The facts tell a different story. In 1976, a total of about $250,000,000 was paid for the rights to broadcast sports (including amateur) events. The networks are presently paying the N.F.L. $60,000,000 per year--$2,100,000 per team--and that doesn't include revenues from the sale to local stations of either pre-season games or the radio rights to regular-season games. Next season, a new four-year agreement with the networks will take effect under which the N.F.L. will receive an astounding $656,000,000--which works out to more than $5,000,000 annually per team. (Recently, a closed-circuit-television promoter offered the N.F.L. $400,000,000 for the five-year broadcast rights to just the Super Bowl and the play-off games that precede it.) CBS pays the N.B.A. $10,500,000 for national broadcast rights. For baseball, the total national and local broadcast revenues are estimated at over $50,000,000, also an average of more than $2,000,000 per team. Asserts baseball player rep Marvin J. Miller, "Before one fan has purchased one ticket or parked one car or bought one hot dog, all player payroll costs have been accounted for, with something left over. Not one fan in 10,000 understands that." Or, as Roger Kahn, author of The Boys of Summer, has put it, "I have seen the future. It measures 19 inches diagonally."

•

New York Mets' president Donald Grant (who once forced star outfielder Cleon Jones to hold a press conference to apologize for being discovered nude in a car with a nude woman) trades New York's most popular athlete, Tom Seaver, as a result of a personal dispute. In a press conference, shipbuilding magnate George Steinbrenner, who had been convicted on felony charges for making illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon, proclaims eight commandments directed at Yankee manager Billy Martin. (Thou shalt not be so abrasive....) Ray Kroc takes to the loud-speakers at a Padres home game and calls his players a bunch of boobs. The Atlanta Braves' Ted Turner, figuring he can do a better job than those dumb baseball jocks, dons a uniform and anoints himself manager.

For the jock sniffer and the corporate mogul alike, ownership can be quite an ego trip. All those bodies to direct, buy, sell and trade. But the players--who are, for the most part, at least, extremely well paid these days--have little to complain about compared with some of the quirks and policies the fans must endure. Season-ticket buyers, for example, are frequently required to pay for their seats several months before the season begins--so the owners can collect interest on their customers' money. The teams hire shills to broadcast their games locally and the leagues often retain approval rights over network announcers. The story the fans get from these shills is frequently sugar coated, distorted and, perhaps worse, dull. Some of the most overpriced and undernourishing food in America can be found at sports facilities. In fact, if the quality of play were as low as the food foisted on the fans, stadiums would be empty. Awkward time-outs occur to accommodate TV commercials. Tennis matches advertised by networks as winner take all aren't really winner take all. The integrity of a network-arranged boxing tournament is suspect, with fans paying $15 to see Muhammad Ali throw six punches for $6,000,000 in a travesty with a supine Japanese wrestler.

The list of consumer abuses goes on, but the sports entrepreneurs' hauteur may well be most evident in the disregard with which they hold the opinions of fans. A soap company will undertake extensive market research to determine what kind of product consumers want. Not so with Sports, Inc. Have the fans ever been asked their opinions on the designated-hitter rule or interleague play in baseball or the two-point conversion in football? What about the old A.B.A. three-point rule in basketball? Are fans represented on the rule-making committees of the leagues? Have they ever been consulted on such issues as the use of artificial turf?

The story of synthetic turf, in fact, is a rather telling example of what happens when the perceived short-term-profit interests of owners conflict with one of the principal underpinnings of the long-term appeal of sports--tradition. "Mod sod" first appeared in the Houston Astrodome in April 1966 and it spread like weeds. The universal assumption, which was at least superficially logical, was that the mod sod had to be less expensive than the organic stuff, which required constant reseeding and resodding. But, in rushing ahead with the synthetic turf, its costs of replacement weren't adequately considered. Astro-Turfing an average football field, including side lines, at six dollars a square foot costs about $400,000, and its average longevity is only six years; maintenance costs for grass run about $50,000 to $100,000 per year. In other words, the mod-sod savings have generally been either nonexistent or relatively slight.

Given even smaller consideration by the owners was the likelihood that the less pliable synthetic surfaces might resuit in more player injuries, particularly in football. A recent Stanford Research Institute study commissioned by the N.F.L. confirmed that suspicion. In addition, the temperature on a baseball-pitcher's mound can reach over 120 degrees as a result of the plastic field.

But the principal impact of artificial fields on baseball has been to alter the nature of the game. Balls bounce higher and shoot through the infield like artillery fire; infielders must position themselves differently; bunting is far more difficult. Home teams, used to the peculiar dynamics of their own surfaces, gain a significant edge over visiting clubs, particularly those that don't play on artificial turf at home. Yet, while the question of whether or not a somewhat livelier baseball was being used last season (an issue that did not involve money) became the great controversy of 1977 within major-league baseball, the far more radical changes wrought by the introduction of artificial turf have been accompanied by barely a whimper of concern from the owners or the commissioner of baseball.

•

Teams can be run to the mutual benefit of fans, players and owners, and in order to reaffirm that occasionally elusive fact, it's worth taking a look at two franchises that don't fit the new corporate mold.

In 1938, Phil Wrigley decided that some of the seats in his tiny ball park of about 40,000 capacity on the North Side of Chicago were too narrow. So, at the cost of thousands of seats and hundreds of thousands of dollars, he had rows of 12 seats ripped out and replaced with rows of ten more comfortable ones. A while later, he decided--at the cost of a half million dollars--that some of the Cubs fans at Wrigley Field, even then one of the most intimate parks in baseball, would have a better view of home plate if sections of seats at the far ends of the park were realigned. He also removed the advertising that adorned the scoreboard and outfield walls--and lost that lucrative source of revenue--to substitute hundreds of ivy vines. When he realized that batters were having trouble picking up the ball out of the glare of white shirts in center field, he closed down the section and painted it green.

Most of all, however, the late chewing-gum king is remembered for his steadfast refusal to install lights so that night baseball could be played at Wrigley Field. "I like to say we're pioneering day baseball," says William Wrigley, Phil's son and current Cubs president, reiterating what Phil always said. "I think that's a good business decision. The majority of fans would rather go out and see a day baseball game played on real grass, with vines on the wall and no advertising. It creates a better atmosphere; it's certainly better for children.... And the players get to lead a normal life, to go home and have dinner with their families just like most working people."

All those costly business decisions--and seats priced as low as $1.50--have netted the Cubs some of the most loyal fans in baseball.

One need only travel across town in Chicago to find another untypical owner. When a fan calls the Chicago White Sox switchboard and asks for Bill Veeck, the next voice he will likely hear is that of the impish 64-year-old owner, who does not have a secretary screen his calls and who listens to the kudos and complaints of more than ten fans on a typical day. Before recent health problems forced him to stop, Veeck would walk through Comiskey Park during each home game and talk with the fans. Unlike the Wrigleys, Veeck is a promoter, an innovator and a showman best known for the time he sent a midget to pinch-hit for the old St. Louis Browns. But, like Phil Wrigley, for whom he once worked, Veeck understands the importance of nostalgia and tradition in sports, particularly in baseball. Thus, one of his first acts after taking control of the White Sox in 1976 was to rip out the artificial turf, "which drags in what people are trying to get away from--the asphalt of the city streets," and plant grass.

Veeck's ideas are designed to make coming to the ball park more fun, not to detract from or degrade the game itself. He has, for example, had announcer Harry Caray lead the fans during the seventh-inning stretch of every home game in a rendition of Take Me Out to the Ball-game. (Everyone sings along.) He set up a picnic area in left field and installed a cold shower in center field, so that bleacher fans could cool off on hot summer days. He catered to baseball fans' mania for statistics by having a "speed-o-meter" attached to the top of the scoreboard to display the times of the runners around the bases. He had parts of the stadium decorated with children's murals. He set aside a special section in the left-field stands for a group of loyalists known as the Sox Supporters. He and his wife talk--and listen--to fans on a weekly radio call-in show.

And the fans have responded, last season flocking to the Happening at Comiskey Park in droves. Aided by a surprising though abortive run at the pennant by the South Side hit men, attendance exceeded the team's all-time high. And the fans--who once, in order to encourage a player who had struck out twice, gave him a standing ovation--gained the undisputed reputation as the most rabid in baseball.

But, alas, the Veecks and the Wrigleys, who think of the fans as well as the balance sheet, are members of an endangered species. In fact, few consumers of any goods or services are generally as abused today as are consumers of sport. The special irony of this situation is that few, if any, industries depend on the loyalty of their customers as do professional sports. A consumer chooses one brand of clothing over others because he believes it to be best for his purposes; loyalty to the manufacturer of the product has little to do with his decision. But fans go to watch their team play not because they believe it to be the best but out of loyalty. To some extent as a result of this special loyalty, the realization that fans are consumers has been slow in coming. And, it has been argued, that is good; if fans started acting like consumers, if they began looking at sports as a business, it would take the fun out of it for them. Little more than a decade ago, one heard the same argument in relation to consumers of automobiles.

This argument is specious, because it assumes that in the absence of collective action by fans qua consumers, their interests will be protected by others, and because the argument is falsely premised on the belief that keeping spectator sports fun would not be a primary goal of such collective action. Quite the contrary, the goal of fans as consumers should be to ensure that the maximum number of people have the opportunity to enjoy competitive sporting events.

The problem is that the consumer movement in sports is still in the Stone Age. Without anyone to represent their interests, fans have been increasingly ripped off and have naturally grown increasingly frustrated and angry. The establishment of an effective organization of fans, run and financed by fans, is long overdue. What kinds of actions and goals could such an organization work for? A short list might include the following:

• Congress should abolish the right to depreciate players, or at least reduce the percentage of the franchise purchase price attributed to player costs from 50 percent to 25 percent and extend the amortization period from five to ten years. This would make sports ownership a less lucrative proposition for corporations and hobby owners, reduce franchise turnovers and make teams more affordable for individuals, like Veeck, whose primary interest is in the operation of a ball club.

• In partial recompense for the antitrust exemptions that have been bestowed upon professional sports, Congress should require meaningful public disclosure by teams and leagues of operating costs and profits. No longer would professional sports be what Marvin Miller calls "the most secretive industry in America," and fans and sportswriters would have the facts with which to evaluate ticket-price increases and owners' cries of financial woe.

• The 1961 broadcasting act should be abolished, thus opening up competition for the rights to air sports events and keeping down advertising costs.

• The opinions of fans on major policy and rules questions should be regularly and effectively represented before the leagues and the owners.

• The leagues should ban the future installation of artificial turf and require that facilities that presently use it (except in the case of domed stadiums) convert to grass as soon as the artificial turf requires replacement.

• The Federal Communications Commission should prohibit broadcast media from granting teams or leagues the right to hire or approve the selection of announcers.

• Wholesome, reasonably priced food should be sold at sporting events.

The list could go on almost indefinitely, but the point is simply this: It is time for fans to stop being spectators.

"It hasn't occurred to municipalities to ask anything of the owners in return for generous subsidies."

Fans' Bill of Rights

F.A.N.S. proposes that fans have the right to:

1. Participate in the formation of the rules and procedures that govern the play and operation of professional and amateur sports competition.

2. Be informed about the operations and practices of professional and amateur sports.

3. Purchase reasonably priced tickets to sporting events and receive fair value for their money. Tickets to sporting events should be made available to the greatest possible number of fans and should not be reserved only for the wealthy and well-connected.

4. Ensure that food sold at those events is reasonably priced and well prepared.

5. Have their interests represented before Congress and other Governmental bodies.

6. Have their interests in the broadcasting of sports events effectively represented to the electronic media.

7. Have their interests in the resolution of labor, contractual and other disputes involving sports effectively expressed and represented. Additionally, fans have an interest in ensuring, to the maximum degree possible, the health and safety of athletes.

8. Have their interest in maintaining or establishing the integrity of a sport, team or event effectively expressed and represented.

9. Have knowledge of relevant information concerning sports enterprises that receive special public benefits in the form of low-cost leases of publicly owned facilities, tax benefits and other subsidies and privileges. Those enterprises further have a special responsibility to serve the public interest.

10. Fans are also citizens, taxpayers and consumers and, as such, have an interest in seeing that the proper role of sports in America--as an enrichment of the quality of life--does not become exaggerated or distorted, and that those associated with sports not receive special legal, tax or other privileges detrimental to the public interest.

Ralph Nader has helped launch an organization called the Fight to Advance the Nation's Sports, of which Peter Gruenstein is executive director. F.A.N.S. represents the interests of fans before various Governmental bodies, the leagues, the owners and the broadcast media. It is financed by dues (nine dollars annually) paid by its members, who help determine the organization's policies.

If you wish to become a member of F.A.N.S., obtain additional information or supply F.A.N.S. with information that may help in its areas of interest, please address your comments and/or requests to F.A.N.S., P.O. Box 19312, Washington, D.C. 20036.