American track & field: a vision
Originally published June 2019.
What if?
We have an almost ridiculous number of competitive sports in the American mainstream culture. Pro team sports that operate as massive businesses like the NFL, MLB, NBA, The National Hockey League bring in millions in television contracts. Boxing. UFC. Hell, they even have so-called Ninja Warrior events on TV. College football and basketball bring in a ridiculous amount of revenue. March Madness is just that.
Tennis is huge.
Golf is huge.
(Note: This was originally drafted before the drama of LIV Golf, an effort by the Saudi government to sportswash it’s international reputation. We’ve addressed this issue under different cover here and here.)
Yet, running and track & field, still to this day one of the most vibrant participant sports in the country, barely registers on television coverage.
The sport exists in a severe state of have and have not. A very small number of stars make a star-level living while most of the so-called “pros” scramble for scraps from events and shoe company sponsors.
Not to mention it consistently battles a negative image of ubiquitous performance enhancing. A cheater culture second only to the Tour de France.
Why is that? Does it need to be so?
We love to watch people compete. We love to watch them race. We always have. Why isn’t track a bigger deal? Shouldn’t it be?
What might help bridge the divide from minor nerd sport to competitive sports juggernaut?
As a lifelong fan and competitor in an earlier life, I believe it is a question of vision; or lack thereof. It is a question, not of why not, but of what if?
Because if the right bridge is built, it will be good for every link in the chain from shoe company shareholders to athletes to governing bodies. They all need to stop thinking about it as a zero-sum game and raise the stakes or watch it all dry up into a pile of nostalgic dust and blow away in the draft of the next big game.
How???
What if we were to facilitate a league of Track & Field competitors and competitions in America? A major, professional league. What would that look like? What could that be?
The idea’s been tried before and tested before; promoted and undermined in the typical, predictable quarters by the typical, predictable people. It’s been well documented in both fact and fiction. But development within the crucible of the true team/league model used by every other major American sport has never been tried.
The mission of the endeavor would be simple – develop an entertaining, financially sustainable and profitable professional league that develops highly competitive American talent in Track & Field events including Cross Country, drives success in international, World Championship and Olympic competition and spreads an infectious public interest in the sport.
It would utilize existing clubs and create new clubs around the nation so cities/towns/regions could have a rooting interest in their local teams. Like British football has “supporters” of Newcastle United or Chelsea or Arsenal. It would play up that sense of community and let the teams battle it out in a points system earned in scheduled events over the course of the season.
Earn points for dual meet victories. Stage match races like Sea Biscuit versus War Admiral in 1938. Even stage event-only meets. Like Rodeo has a separate pro bull riding circuit, imagine a Pole Vault-only event. Earn points on other invitational meets during the course of the year so there’s always something outsized at stake (Millrose Games, Penn Relays, maybe fold in some road races and world/national cross country). Think about how golf’s FedEx cup or NASCAR’s Cup series determines an overall winner for the year.
Give the fans a Season they can follow
Create a team they can invest themselves in and a result or team championship they can root for. Celebrate victory and wallow in defeat until next year like Major League Baseball (MLB).
Simply, what’s missing in modern American Track & Field is the team and personal investment that gives fans multiple ways of engaging with the sport and their favorite athletes.
A brief & selective history of track:
1 successful & complicated professional sport
THE BIRTH OF A GOVERNING BODY
The USATF is the American governing body our sport, but to understand the opportunity, it is important to understand the development of other successful sporting models.
THE GOLF MODEL
The first “national amateur championship” of golf was contested at Newport R.I. Golf Club in September of 1894. The runner-up, Charles Blair Macdonald at that time called for the formation of a governing body for the game. The Amateur Golf Association, later the USGA, was formed at the end of the year by five charter clubs.
Newport RI Golf Club
Shinnecock Hills Golf Club (Long Island)
The Country Club (Brookline, MA)
St. Andrews Golf Club (Yonkers, NY)
Chicago Golf Club
America’s first golf magazine, The Golfer, was first published at the end of 1894 and the next year, the first official national amateur and open championships were contested at Newport Golf Club. Horace Rollins won the first $150 champion’s purse. To acknowledge the growth the game of golf has seen, the 2019 winner, Gary Woodland, took home $2.25 million for his victory at Pebble Beach.
THE BIRTH OF A PROFESSIONAL TOUR
American golf professionals were considered working class, banned from clubhouses and paid accordingly only until fairly recently. In fact, professional bowling was a larger sport than golf until the late 1970s.
In the 1920s, a so-called “winter tour” was organized in California and throughout the South that allowed the club pros from the closed northern clubs to compete against each other for prize money and supplement their incomes.
In the early 1920s, Walter Hagen became the first purely touring golf professional in America. Not aligned with any club, Hagen traveled the country playing in pro events and exhibition matches making a very good living, indeed. He was the first to break the mold of the pro as a working class grunt. “I don’t want to be a millionaire,” he once famously said. “I just want to live like one.” What later became known as the PGA Tour bloomed steadily as popularity of the sport grew throughout the 1950s. It saw major spikes in revenue through the 1960s television revolution led by the sheer force of Arnold Palmer’s personality and again in the 1990s through the impertinent personality of John Daly and eventually breakthrough star Tiger Woods.
That said, the evolution and development of the PGA Tour, European Tour and World Golf Championship series is a particularly strong model for development of a USA Track Tour or Series.
It is important to note that golf in the United States has more than one governing body. The USGA governs the rules of the game. The PGA Tour and LPGA Tour operate under those rules with certain specific deviations for their tour operations. The PGA of America is the governing body of professional golf including instruction. Not to mention each and every club and course around the country has its own list of “local rules” that apply to their own properties. To say all of these governing bodies always operate harmoniously would be disingenuous, but generally, they all operate under the belief that what they are doing is in the best interest of the game, not necessarily just the industry.
This is something USATF would be wise to study.
What it might look like
AMERICA’S FIRST LOVE
We have a history of it. We love racing and we love underdogs and dynasties alike. Give us a chance to root for a team and we will. NASCAR is the most popular sport in the country. The Boston Marathon is the longest continuously run sporting event in America and the people of Boston and New England love it not because of the elite athletes, but in spite of them. Every November, the New York City Marathon hosts the same story. Millions of fans come out to celebrate and cheer on the 4-hour runners with every bit the same amount of enthusiasm as the winners – for the same reason. The last weekend in April every year sees Philadelphia light up with the joy of the Penn Relays Carnival, which, lets not forget is mainly a 3-day schoolboy and schoolgirl race meeting in front of 40,000 fans.
THE AMERICAN AUDIENCE
Throughout the late 1930s, culminating with an astoundingly publicized match race in 1938, SeaBiscuit was an inspiration to a nation suffering the depths of the Great Depression:
In 1973, a deeply divided nation navigating the chaos of the Watergate scandal embraced Secretariat making a run at the Triple Crown:
On a Monday in June, when Rocco Mediate and Tiger Woods teed off in an unlikely playoff matchup to decide the 2008 US Open Golf Championship, the New York Stock Exchange trading volume dropped 9.2%. Some called it the “Tiger Effect,” but it was the nature of the head-to-head competition and the personalities of the competitors that made it happen:
Track & Field has all of this drama built-in.
It doesn’t require excess production. It only requires an understanding of the personalities and the competition.
Why it’ll work:
120 years of the last weekend in April
WHERE TO START?
In the spring of 1895, a year before the first moden Olympic Games, a relay meet was first held on the grounds of the University of Pennsylvania along the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. This year, on the last Saturday of April, more than 50,000 people will descend on that same piece of ground, now inside a glorious brick facade known as Franklin Field, to watch kids, collegians and professionals run, jump and throw. More than 100,000 tickets will be sold over that last Thursday, Friday and Saturday in April.
The critical mass required to begin starts with a real interest from the athletes, the organizers and the management of each of the clubs initially involved. It’s not quite as simple as just scheduling a calendar of events like the beginning of the PGA Tour. A more achievable result may come from looking at the English Premier League in soccer.
STEP 1:
Depending on interest, level of sponsorship and organization, start with about five “charter” clubs with elite athletes from different geographical areas in the country. The likeliest first two regions are New York City as the largest market in the country and Eugene, Oregon as Tracktown USA. There are established clubs in both of these markets already, but we shouldn’t limit the idea to just established clubs. Nor should we limit sponsorship to just shoe companies, no matter how strong they may be. Experienced voices in the sport will likely consider this the toughest nut to crack, but shoe companies should not fear a restructuring. They should, rather, embrace it as a way of growing the sport rather than merely sucking the marrow out of it the way it’s been done for generations.
If other pro sports are any guide, we’ll likely need a commissioner or other governing entity for the league itself. Once established, add clubs from:
California (West)
Chicago/Michigan (Midwest)
Atlanta (South)
Houston or Austin (Southwest)
Boulder or Flagstaff (Mountain)
The clubs will be individual entities each holding a share in the “league” with an interest in its success and growth. Athletes could be incentivized with share or partner agreements.
Develop a mode of adding individual elite athletes from other locations competing for individual honors.
Fill out the fields with high-level local talent, both professional and amateur. Encourage school-age phenoms when they appear (like Alan Webb and Mary Cain in their generations).
STEP 2:
Schedule a series of different meets open to all of these clubs.
Let them compete, earning points toward team honors AND individual honors throughout the “season.”
Start with a ten meet series. This is not a revolutionary idea for those of us who remember the winter, indoor track circuit that lit up arenas through the 1980s with names like Millrose, Vitalis, Sunkist. Maybe five home meets for each club. One in each club’s location in the spring/summer and one during the fall/winter months.
The schedule could utilize a series of different types of meets – dual meets, relay meets, invitational-style meets open to any and all teams, even all-comers meets. The goal: make use of the excitement of a traveling carnival with the loyalty of the “home field crowd.” The model should take the best elements of the PGA Touring show combined with the head-to-head team battles of the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL.
Add primers for performances in major US road race competitions, international competitions and national and world record performances.
Make the events specific and over time, add unusual distances to the schedule for World and American record attempts. When rivalries crop up, as they most certainly will, stage match races for the top two or three or four competitors. Use pace setters where needed for the record runs.
Inevitably, some clubs will end up with more talent in specific areas. Field events versus sprints versus distance or middle distance talent. But the overall points for the team competition and a limited number of events in each meet should encourage the clubs to be diverse enough to go after the team championship. This is very much like, and just as compelling, as the races for different color jerseys in the European Grand Tour bike races every year. Think of the Tour de France yellow race leader’s jersey, the green sprinter champion and the polka dot king of the mountains.
SUPPLEMENTALS
Each meet could include youth and masters programs to drive attendance on either side of the “prime time” televised portion of the program.
A tent or other temporary facility could be put up with outdoor/temporary showers and locker rooms to support all athletes, elite AND youth/masters. This would engender a sense of community and familiarity between the pro athletes and the non-pro athletes that no other sport could possibly support or promote.
The locker room experience following the famed Paris-Roubaix bike race in France is as integral to that race’s legend as the massive cobblestones the racers ride on.
Over time, each event could support a corporate hospitality area in the vein of the tent-cities built around golf’s major championships and every PGA Tour event.
MINOR LEAGUES
Presuming the league generates a significant amount of traction with fans, there is another level of interest that could be leveraged – like baseball has with its minor leagues and unaffiliated minor league teams. The PGA Tour has likewise leveraged great success with what is now known as the Web.com Tour and its other mini-tours.
There is an entire population of runners, jumpers and throwers graduating Div 1, Div 2 and Div 3 schools every year who did not have the opportunity or timely growth to develop during their school years who would certainly welcome an opportunity to continue competing after college. These are the athletes who have either not yet made the jump or don’t know if they can make the jump to the world-class ranks. But they are still rugged competitors and fun to watch for fans. There are masters athletes that fall into this category as well. A developmental league in non-competitive cities could and should be created as another feeder program into the big league.
Again, like the British soccer example, clubs that meet specific criteria during a season can be bumped up or down a peg in the different league levels.
To support its players during the off-season, baseball’s farm system in the 1920s and 1930s, would find players work in the towns where they played creating a largely semi-pro developmental organization that supported MLB. Corporate America has instituted similar programs to support Olympic athletes in the past with mixed results. Look at Brian Sell of the Brooks Hanson Project and others working for The Home Depot in preparation for the 2008 Beijing Games.
The Fans:
The inside baseball’ll kill ‘em
MAKING COVERAGE RELEVANT
The belief of mainstream sports broadcasting for track and running events has always seemed to be “well, they just want to see the sprints, so just show them the sprints and events where Americans win.” What has made this approach fail in the past is that the fundamental premise is NOT TRUE.
Distance running is enormously popular as a participant sport. Coverage of professional track suffers at the hands of sports departments that only care about football and baseball so the people who cover track do it on the side or worse, are the one track nut in the newsroom who despises people who don’t know who first broke 3:50 for one mile indoors. {Clue: He’s an Irish Senator now!}
More than anything else, fans want to be introduced to personalities doing something extraordinary. When you cultivate the personalities and the personas, the natural drama of the competition carries the narrative. American golf suffered this fate for a generation when all players seemed too mechanical. It took an outsized personality the size of John Daly to break the boredom. People new to something want to be coaxed into the back room to see how the engines work, not told they’ll never understand it because they didn’t run high school cross country.
Track and field in America has always been broadcast as some kind of novelty act. This approach needs to be discarded completely. It needs to be covered like any other sport. Use track-specific terminology. Describe things the way they happen and expect that the audience will understand, because they will.
Look to the expert coverage of Phil Liggot and Bob Roll throughout the three weeks of the Tour de France. The strategy of professional road cycling is as complicated as it comes. They don’t talk down to their audience like track analysts do, like when the most well-known commentator says, “a mile is about four laps of your typical high school track.” They explain things simply and use the real terminology – lead out man, breakaway, chase group, peloton, echelon, &c. And the audience goes with them. It doesn’t need to be a remedial class. That is disrespectful to the audience and what’s more, they know it. Which is why they choose not to watch.
The broadcasting style needs to be revamped entirely to inject a local/team perspective to get even novice fans invested in the outcome of the competition. Today’s coverage relies far too heavily on star reputation rather than potential outcomes or enthusiasm and fan obsession with the effort. So many of us want to put ourselves in the place of our heroes in our own minds. We need to stop putting them on Greek pedestal columns and let them just seem to be humans overcoming obstacles. Attainable admiration needs to become the term of art.
Venues:
Make ‘em memorable
DRAMATIC SOLD-OUT SPACES - or just look sold out
I still remember riding the long escalators into Madison Square Garden the night I saw my first Millrose Games. I can still smell the oddly satisfying mixture of funnel cake, liniment and fresh air from my first steps out of the tunnel under the Northeast stands of Franklin Field.
Track venues should be memorable the way the old Yankee Stadium and Wrigley Field are memorable. They don’t need to be cathedrals, but they need to carry that weight of memory.
The Weehawken track facility along the Hudson River overlooking the NYC skyline
The University of Colorado stadium looking up at the Flatirons
The New Balance banked track built on a NYC pier for advertising purposes
Franklin Field in Philadelphia is possibly too huge, but a grand cathedral with undeniable history
A DIFFERENT POINT OF ATTACK
Another intriguing possibility is staging events out of context to generate fan interest – Cinder tracks, cross country, street races and even winter events held outdoors. The NHL has utilized this strategy exceedingly well for more than a decade with their outdoor hockey series they call The Winter Classic.
The vision must include making each meet an EVENT – a HAPPENING – A part of the community in which it occurs – A CARNIVAL that drives:
Ticket sales
Concessions
Music and performances
Booths outside the venue
Possibly even some kind of wagering games
Sponsors: can’t live w/ ‘em… can’t do it w/o ‘em
THEY CAN HAVE IT ALL
This model is perfect to support event sponsors, team sponsors and individual sponsors. It’s possible to have them all. Again, just look to European Soccer with stadium wall ads and sponsored team uniforms and individual players.
To address some of the shoe company issues, look at the international soccer teams and ask how quickly you can identify which team is which by their uniforms. They are all plastered with corporate logos and only in the team shop do the jerseys say Man U or Real Madrid. The teams are known by their sponsors AND their colors which is good for the Brookses and New Balances and Nikes of the world – and the individual teams, too.
Television:
Golf Channel. H&G Channel. Why not a track channel?
FACT: RUNNING IS REMARKABLY POPULAR IN AMERICA
Across the country, there are:
18 – 40 million people who run between 6 – 100 days a year
16 million Americans who finished a road race last year
Countless school track & field and cross country programs around the country with millions of kids (and parents) participating and cheering
Thousands of specialty running stores and even more chain sporting goods stores in every community
759 marathons on the 2013 calendar in the US – most with a retail expo and related events
Thousands of road races contested on every weekend throughout the year
More than 2,000 running clubs in almost every corner of the country
In short, THERE IS MARKETABLE INTEREST IN THE SPORT that, if channeled properly, could give birth to a true, entirely new professional industry. There are plenty of people out there craving it, they’ve just never been offered the right product.
Home & Away:
Enlightening the world view
DEVELOPMENT & SHOWCASING
Having a largely US-centered tour will encourage the development of home-grown talent and help our prospects in international competition, World Championships, and Olympic Games. Success in these events, in turn, will grow enthusiasm for the sport among the general US population and help grow the native sport overall.
That said, we can have invitational events where we bring in international talent to compete against our best. The Diamond League already has a corner of this idea, but both the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup and the European Tour’s Race to Dubai do it bigger and better. Let them earn points toward a big payday if they run enough of our events. With so many foreign athletes living and competing in America, this should be a simple prospect to entertain.
Questions:
Countering the known-knowns
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE OPEN QUESTIONS
Q: Is it imperative that the athletes be independent contractors?
A: Not necessarily.
Q: Can the teams create their rosters based on what they think their audience will watch?
A: Yes, to a point. But the league will need to regulate to keep the competition intriguing for the audience. This is imperative to the success of the endeavor.
Q: Will we end up with a slate of all 100m athletes because that’s what some TV network thinks the market will watch?
A: Possibly, but not if we’re careful. We know that kind of thinking is wrong, we just need to prove it.
Q: The league will have its own governance (commissioner), but will the governing bodies (USATF, IAAF) get behind an effort like this?
A: Unknown. But anything worth having is worth fighting for.
Stepping to the line:
Every journey begins with a first step
HOW DO WE GET THERE FROM HERE?
Build on a truly American tradition of track & field excellence that dates back to 1896 and before, but build it atop another truly American tradition of excellence in promotion and entertainment that dates back to PT Barnum. Track & Field is a sport, and a great sport, but it is also fan passion and as a result, entertainment. Make it fun and compelling for the fans and the rest will take care of itself.
Start with one event as a proof of concept, then reach out to the core teams to start building a schedule of events. Perhaps the first season is just 3 or 5 events, but give the fans a taste of something extraordinary and they’ll keep coming back for more.
Track and field, if not the sport as a whole, certainly the athletes, are under attack by the powers that be. This is no new phenomenon, but it is threatening the health and survival of the sport. In order to survive, we need something new to make it significant in the lives of the fan.