A Night of Sports in Arlington

This post originally appeared in the Blotch section of the Fort Worth Weekly's website. To consume it there : https://www.fwweekly.com/2017/08/24/sports-rush-sports-night-in-arlington/

If you mapped the traffic flow in North Arlington on your phone Saturday night, you no doubt saw a steady stream of red. The incoming vehicles weren’t all headed the same place, but almost all of them had one thing on their minds: sports.

Arlington did something no other city in North Texas can do, and it might be the first time it’s ever happened. It played host to three professional sporting events at one time.

None of the teams in question are actually named “Arlington,” but they all stage their home games there. Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers took on the Chicago White Sox at Globe Life Park in Arlington while the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys played the Indianapolis Colts at AT&T Stadium as the WNBA’s Dallas Wings hosted the Atlanta Dream at College Park Center.

North Texas hosts a plethora of professional teams. Our 13-county area is home to more than 200 cities and towns. Frisco is the only other one of them with three pro franchises (NBA G-League’s Texas Legends, Major League Soccer’s FC Dallas, and the Texas League’s Frisco RoughRiders baseball team). The northerners (relatively speaking) could conceivably host all three in a day if the Legends made a playoff run deep enough to overlap the start of the RoughRiders’ season, but they have yet to do so.

Based on official attendance numbers, 127,254 people watched live sports in A-town Saturday. Many thousands more tuned in on their preferred screens as all three games were televised. A lot of folks paid attention to Arlington at some level.

Arlington’s civic leaders have bet big on sports. An evening like Saturday magnifies the good (visitors patronizing local eateries and opportunities for nearby residents to conveniently attend high-level athletic contests) and the bad (brutal traffic congestion and locals declining to brave it to patronize Lincoln Square retailers). The economic impact studies produced to support such a project are notoriously unreliable and much of an individual’s assessment is subjective anyway. In my case, I like sports, so I enjoyed getting to go to one of the games while keeping up with the others’ progress online. Some people might prefer their city host a trio of quilting bees or renaissance festivals.

As you’re determining what you think about Saturday’s big sports night, does it matter that all three teams won? Sure, the Cowboys were in preseason, but a win’s a win. And the Rangers and Wings really needed their victories as they attempt to secure postseason spots. Does being able to host three Ws in a night make Arlington a city of winners? Should Arlingtonians talk trash to two-team Dallas or teamless Little Elm?

This could happen again September 10 if the Wings make the playoffs and the schedule falls right. That day the Cowboys and Rangers face the Giants and Yankees, respectively, both outfits having been named for a city that has hosted 3+ games in a day many times (although the Giants now play in New Jersey). The Wings could even conceivably host the New York Liberty if results and seedings so dictated. So if you think you’ll be in the mood for some live sports that day, come to North Arlington (I’d show up early, by the way). If you believe you’d like to browse used books, cruise Collins Street in your hot rod, or stroll through Bob Cluck Linear Park, maybe pick another day.

Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns, television programs, and related creative projects for sports entities through Rush Olson Creative & Sports, Mint Farm Films, and FourNine Productions.

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Gridiron Heroes : Leveling the Playing Field

This post originally appeared at the Fort Worth Weekly's website. To view it there : https://www.fwweekly.com/2016/12/20/leveling-the-playing-field/

Saturday in Arlington, AT&T Stadium hosted a big high school football event – a tripleheader of state championship games in Texas’s largest classifications. For DeSoto High School supporters, the trip from south of Dallas to Tarrant County would prove especially rewarding. Not only did their varsity squad win the school’s first state title that afternoon, a former player on the Eagles’ JV squad scored an important victory of his own.

A 2009 practice collision cost Corey Borner the use of his legs. When his devastating injury happened, a charity called Gridiron Heroes reached out to Borner. Eddie Canales and his son Chris helped the then-teenager and his family adjust to his new situation, as they steadfastly do for any high school football player who suffers a paralyzing injury playing the game they love.

On Saturday, the Canales clan, including mom and wife Pita, got to award Borner one of the most important items a family in his situation needs : an accessible van. They did so thanks to a fundraising drive orchestrated by the Texas Association of Sports Officials. Game officials and sponsors from across the state raised funds to buy a discounted van from Alamo Mobility. Borner’s previous vehicle had worn out and the new one will provide him and his family needed mobility and independence.

The Schertz-based Canales family has a special frame of reference when it comes to helping former players in Borner’s situation, since Chris has occupied a wheelchair since his own in-game mishap in 2001. They now use their own hard-won knowledge about facing such situations to ease other families’ struggles.

A big part of their message involves keeping a positive attitude and Borner provides an example to point to. In fact, the former DeSoto Eagle helps the charity out by showing off his optimistic disposition in making outreach appearances on Gridiron Heroes’ behalf when the Canales men find themselves spread too thin. You can get a feel for Borner’s outlook and his thoughts on Gridiron Heroes in the accompanying video interview.

I’ve written about Gridiron Heroes before, and I probably will again. If you work in the sports business, as I do, or if you love sports, it’s not hard to muster deep appreciation for the work the Canales family does. You can learn more about the Gridiron Heroes mission in my previous interview with Eddie Canales or at their website at gridironheroes.org.




Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns, television programs, and related creative projects for sports entities through Rush Olson Creative & Sports and FourNine Productions.

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Does an Election Affect Important Stuff?

This post originally appeared at the Fort Worth Weekly's website. To view it there : http://www.fwweekly.com/2016/11/02/sports-rush-no-sports-nation-without-representation/


This time of year, pundits remind us we need to vote because (choose one) :
1.      It’s your civic duty
2.      If you don’t, so-and-so candidate will ruin what’s left of the country
3.      You get a free sticker
4.      There’s not much else to do in Chicago when you’re dead
5.      It affects the important stuff : sports

The correct answer is point number five because, you’ll likely admit, you’ve paid more attention to your fantasy football roster than your state rep’s position on eminent domain. Let’s assume for a moment that your vote has some mathematical chance of affecting an election and that there really is such a thing as the “will of the people” to which government officials pay attention and that the act of voting doesn’t make you a tool of the man while obliterating your punk rock credibility. The government officials you sorta kinda elect, along with their appointed assistants, really do affect your sports.

Arlington’s ballot has become the most prominent example in recent weeks, with elected officials asking voters to approve spending large chunks of money on building a new baseball stadium in the city. Part of the argument for transferring funds from citizens and visitors to construction companies and team officials has revolved around the Vote Yes group’s fear that the neighboring government of Dallas would somehow find room under the state sales tax cap to entice the Texas Rangers to move east into a subsidized facility there.

From Texas cities creating football monoliths to Brazil and other countries constructing World Cup and Olympic venues, taxpayer-funded stadiums have been a highly-visible norm since ancient times. And those buildings have to conform to regulations set by other multi-lettered authorities, like OSHA and the ADA. Government involvement in your favorite sports goes way beyond bricks and steel, however.

As team owners have benefited from subsidization of their companies’ physical plants, players have gotten help from national labor law. They’ve been able to organize in union structures that have allowed them to collectively bargain with their employers. They’ve used these powers to negotiate a greater share of the revenues derived from those stadia and other sources. This has also resulted in labor disputes occasionally leaving those tax-funded facilities empty for extended periods.

In the early part of the last century, the courts gave the sport of baseball an exemption from anti-trust laws, though they later negotiated part of it away for purposes of labor relations. Whether one believes anti-trust laws to be a bulwark of freedom or worse than useless in world of technological innovation, the fact that a single industry received a blanket exemption from them is noteworthy.
One thing we know for sure about monopolies and oligopolies is that they are much easier to maintain with government sanction. So it was for much of the world’s experience with television. The U.S. long had four networks, with national law restricting new entrants. Other countries often got by with a single entity designated by the authorities. Such structures resulted in less programming choices of all kinds, with sports no exception. Even once cable TV started its rise, locally-awarded monopolies restricted its growth. Now, we have more channels and more sports.

The courts have seen plenty of action in recent years around NCAA restrictions on student-athletes, some of which have involved labor issues similar to those of pro sports. Many of the teams in this case, however, are actually owned by governments, with most of the prominent entities in the space being big state universities. The pre-eminence of public schools and parks and recreation departments mean governments run and influence much of the planet’s youth sports landscape, too.

The new media proliferation (If you get ESPN, you can also probably get TMZ) has put a spotlight on how law enforcement interacts with sporting entities. Colin Kaepernick’s controversial protests had their roots in how the authorities treated certain groups of people. His league has had no shortage of controversy about its handling of situations involving players and legal cases. Security concerns have necessitated involvement of the cops, too, as when bombers targeted a Paris stadium.

That incident came at a match between the national teams of Germany and France. Governments get involved with their national federations at various levels. We see more direct subsidies in other countries than we do in the U.S., but we do still have the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act of 1998, which confers special privileges on national governing bodies of Olympic sports.

Those NGBs get a lot of attention for how they handle testing for performance-enhancing substances. While leagues and teams theoretically make their own policies for what they permit athletes to ingest, much of sport takes its cue from the government-influenced World Anti-Doping Agency, and national laws criminalizing certain substances have long influenced sporting drug policies (just ask Rafael Palmeiro or Mark McGwire).

Governments get involved in other sports vices, too. The tobacco settlement and related legislation effectively took out top NASCAR sponsors. Piecemeal gambling laws make it tough to wager on games. And taxes factor in here – event pricing isn’t the only reason beers cost a lot at stadiums.

So, wow, that’s a bunch of stuff. We’ve been told there’s a lot riding on this election and this column confirms it. Important issues like drug suspensions and labor stoppages can truly affect your quality of life via the performance (or lack of such) of your fantasy football team. Do you know where your candidate stands on these vital topics?


Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns, television programs, and related creative projects for sports entities through Rush Olson Creative & Sports and FourNine Productions.


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Fighting the Finals

This post originally appeared at the Fort Worth Weekly's website. To view it there : http://www.fwweekly.com/2016/06/14/sports-rush-a-playoff-crowd-sort-of/

 If the Cowboys played the Cleveland Browns in the Super Bowl at the same time a last-place Rangers team took on a first-place Oakland A’s squad, how big a crowd would the baseball game draw?

Yes, I realize it’s a preposterous scenario: the Browns in the Super Bowl.

This proposition occurred to me while walking past the “Free Draymond” shirts into the Oakland Alameda Coliseum yesterday to watch the Rangers play the Athletics. That same evening, the Oracle Arena next door hosted Game 5 of the NBA Finals, with the hometown Warriors having an opportunity to clinch their second consecutive championship against visitors from Cleveland. The games started one hour apart, with the Dubs tipping off first.



The two Oakland venues sit even closer to each other than Globe Life Park in Arlington and AT&T Stadium. They share parking lots and, until last season, long periods without championships (a distinction that unfortunately still applies to their Arlington counterparts). The Finals game sold out, as would a Super Bowl. But how did the A’s do attendance-wise?

I admit that I conceived this column with a bit of the stereotypical NASCAR approach: I wanted to see a wreck. See, the Green and Gold don’t draw well even without a North American championship match occurring next door. The perennially average in the bottom third of MLB, and the just over 18.5K they’ve averaged this season ranks in the bottom three. I imagined a crowd made up of the players’ families, the media, and Draymond Green.

They had pleasant weather for last night’s game, but that was about all it had going for it. Scheduled Rangers starter Yu Darvish might have drawn some walkup interest from local fans who followed him in Japan, but the Rangers put the righty on the disabled list just before the game with right shoulder discomfort. Darvish’s replacement César Ramos might have had some family drive up from his native SoCal to see his start, but apparently not quite enough Ramoses made the trip to fill the coliseum. It was probably for the best – he gave up six earned runs in 3 2/3 innings as Texas lost big.



I kind of thought we had at least a chance to have more Rangers fans than A’s supporters, but the Oakland faithful proved me wrong, although a lot of them did wear Warriors garb. During batting practice, we heard a few gratuitous cheers break out from fans following the hoops on their smartphones. That subsided once the baseball game began, though, replaced in at least one instance by a loud, out-of-nowhere “Texas sucks!” exclamation.

So the crowd may not have been big, but those who did attend had some personality, confirming what has always appeared to be the case on TV. For instance, I didn’t wear anything to indicate I had come from Texas, but a young man who appeared to be an A’s gameday employee nonetheless felt compelled to tell me he thought America had gotten past discrimination because two special ed students, both named Bush, had managed to get elected president. I feel like I’m reasonably creative, but I couldn’t have made that incident up.

I also spotted a guy with a Dave Stewart jersey and a Rollie Fingers/Salvador Dalí mustache. Heck, as far as I know, it might have been Rollie Fingers.

The games happened on a Monday, which is a tough baseball draw even in the best of situations. The Rangers would fight the calendar, too, if the NFL played our mythical summer Super Bowl as a Monday Night Football game. The ballclub has never played at home the same Monday the Cowboys played at AT&T Stadium. The last time the MNF and MLB overlapped in North Texas, the then-2nd place Rangers drew 13,356 on September 15, 2008, their second-smallest crowd of that season, as the Cowboys sold out Irving’s Texas Stadium.




Yesterday, the A’s announced an attendance of 13,453. You can look at the photos and judge whether the stadium (capacity 35,067 in its normal baseball configuration without the upper deck) looks more than a third full. They’ve reported 11 crowds smaller than Monday’s this season. I wonder what those looked like.



In fairness to the fans who stayed home or went next door, the team does play all the games in this particular stadium. It opened in 1966 and is the last remaining facility that still hosts both Major League Baseball and NFL football (at least until the Raiders move again). Tarps cover the upper decks to make the concrete monolith a sliver more intimate. I’ve kind of disliked the place since one of its denizens goaded one of my favorite players, Frank Francisco, into an ill-advised chair toss during a 2004 pennant race, but I actually didn’t hate it now that I’ve been here (not that there aren’t plenty of better stadia out there).

The fans who did come to Monday’s game had to pay $40 a carload to park, the inflated rate for an NBA Finals game. The A’s will make it up to any fans who return tonight by letting them park gratis, thanks to a Chevy Free Parking promotion.

The Warriors lost Monday, so if they don’t finish the series in Cleveland, the A’s will have to contend with Game 7 this Sunday when they host the Angels. Luckily for the baseballers, their contest that day starts seven hours earlier than the basketball game.

The Rangers have never drawn fewer than 26,131 against a same-day AT&T Stadium Cowboys game, that coming last September 13. That’s probably not an apples-to-apples comparison to how much a Cowboys playoff game might impact a baseball crowd, especially since the Rangers have mostly been a good team since the big spaceship opened. If they were lousy, all bets would be off.

Luckily, thanks to the way the schedules fall, they’ll never have to worry about it . . . although . . . given the Cowboys’ power to generate ratings, the networks might well be happy to look at moving the big game to June if it somehow made the Pokes more likely to play in it. If that happens, anything’s possible – even that the ‘Boys opponent might be the Browns.


Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns, television programs, and related creative projects for sports entities through Rush Olson Creative & Sports and FourNine Productions.


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Food + Football

This article originally appeared in the Blotch section of the Fort Worth Weekly's website. To read it on that site : http://www.fwweekly.com/2016/05/04/sports-rush-food-and-football/

courtesy of Lori Gunter

 

Would it seem stereotypical to assume tackles, guards, and centers should really love an event that revolves around food?

New Dallas Cowboys center/guard Joe Looney thought the characterization fit. “You get to eat and have a good time – nothing better for an offensive lineman,“ he said of Sunday’s 12th Annual Taste of the NFL event at AT&T Stadium. The Cowboys and their co-hosts, the North Texas Food Bank, bill it as the Ultimate Tailgate Party, and even the running backs do go there to eat.

“Some great eats and it’s benefiting a great cause“ said newly signed ‘Boys rusher Alfred Morris. “I tried every meal they had except the pork bellies.”

Morris had heard that the pork bellies were, in fact, superb and vowed to sample them before leaving. All of the food should taste good, considering the event books 20 of North Texas’ top chefs to prepare it. Kent Rathbun of Abacus in uptown Dallas organizes his local brethren to each prepare a single original dish. Attendees wander from station to station filling up on the various concoctions.
“Having a good mix of chefs and foods and wines makes the party,” said Rathbun.



Despite the myriad of tasty options, it turns out the Cowboys players and alums who involve themselves in the event do so for reasons beyond feeding their own bellies.

“Childhood hunger is near to my heart,” said center Travis Frederick.”It’s (the Taste of the NFL event) a great way to raise money.”

Frederick has become a leader among the linemen in supporting the Taste of the NFL. This year, he even volunteered himself to accompany some live auction winners on a bowling trip to PINSTACK. His enthusiasm for the cause inspires his teammates to participate as well.

“He volunteers for everyone to come here. He doesn’t tell us we have to come, but we want to be here for that guy.“ said Looney.

courtesy of Lori Gunter

Four members of the o-line even got to play quarterback Sunday. During the live auction’s final phase, auctioneer Wendy Lambert invited the crowd to contribute to an NTFB fundraising goal. The first twenty or so donors got an autographed football thrown to them from the stage by Frederick, Jared Smith, Tyron Smith, or Charles Brown. We saw more spirals than ducks from men whose day jobs often revolve around helping someone else pass effectively. Some of the donors/receivers even successfully caught the passes standing on the turf where the Cowboys play their home games.

The event took place mostly outdoors last year, with food stations and a stage set up on the plaza just west of the stadium. Weather concerns moved the 2016 event inside, where chefs, musicians (Downtown Doug and Jack Ingram played sets), and other VIPs could be sheltered. The function exceeded its fundraising targets, perhaps allowing the Cowboys to declare it the first win of the year on their home field. Those funds will provide nutrition for some important recipients.

“All the proceeds go to our child programs for the North Texas Food Bank. That includes Food 4 Kids. That includes our after-school programs,” explained Lora Farris, the food bank’s Senior Manager of Marketing.

In addition to the good they have done for local youth in need, the Cowboys can also make the case they have one-upped their biggest rivals.

courtesy of Lori Gunter

“This is an awesome event. At the Redskins, we didn’t do this one,” said Morris of his former team. “I’m going to give them a call and tell them to do this one.”

His first call should probably go to the linemen.

Disclosure : An event company associated with the event hired me to produce some videos for it


Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns, television programs, and related creative projects for sports entities through Rush Olson Creative & Sports and FourNine Productions.


RushOlson.com

Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports

Facebook.com/RushOlsonCreativeandSports