I watched a bit of the Presidential debates on Wednesday night, and I have to say that I was impressed with both candidates. It’s remarkable that you could listen to them, and agree with everything that they said, even though their opinions may be diametrically opposed on the subject. The accomplished this by omission though. John Kerry kept mentioning that various issues could be fixed by rolling back the tax cut that Bush’s regime implemented. He seemed to want to spend that money a dozen different ways though, so it’s tough to see how it’s the catch all solution. Bush seemed to lay a lot at the feet of September 11, which to my mind was a way to absolve himself of any responsibility - an excuse. Don’t get me wrong, September 11 had a major impact on the US over Bush’s term, but I think that an important quality in a leader is recognizing mistakes and working to correct them. Having a ready made excuse for anything that could be construed as bad performance isn’t good leadership.

That’s my take on the 15 minutes or so that I watched before I fired up the playstation.

Yesterday, Erin brought William downtown, and we met for lunch. That’s something that we used to do regularly, but have fallen out of the habit of doing. It’s pretty fun to see the look on William’s face when he spots me after the elevator doors open.

And just so that you don’t think I’ve completely lost sight of hockey, I’ll devote some space here to talking about pro sports, and labour difficulties…

Pro sports is a pretty unique business. Each franchise is run separately, and they compete against each other. Of all the teams, (on average) half are going to win, half are going to lose, and more importantly, if you have a single champion, all but one are going to be viewed as failures most of the time. Ironically, the franchises share a common goal, and are bound by common constraints. As a whole, they need to generate and maintain interest in their respective league/sport. That’s what drives people to buy tickets, and merchandise. That’s what drives the TV networks to pay big dollars for broadcasting rights. If there is no perceived competition — no uncertainty, no drama — then people will lose interest. What’s important here is that the level of interest has to be high for all the teams, or you might as well not have them all.

What I’m getting at is that fans in every city have to believe that “their team” will some day soon be able to compete for the championship, or they will stop following the sport. There are very few places where fans are masochistic enough to stick with a team that’s been consistently bad for a long span of time, and even those places do have their limits. People will point to the Red Sox, or Cubs and say that I’m wrong. I don’t think so though. Even though the Red Sox and Cubs haven’t won a World Series in a combined 7000 years (give or take) they’ve put competitive teams on the field often enough to give their fans hope that this/next year could be the year. In this scenario, a team like the Yankees are actually working against their own success by winning every year. There’s no drama in the Yankees making it into the playoffs - they paid enough to do it, and if this set of players can’t, then they’ll pay some new ones to get the job done. Ultimately though, it will turn against them, and Major League Baseball will suffer, which in turn will affect the Yankees. It’s as if they’re saying “we’re content with the size of our market.”

But I shouldn’t just pick on the Yankees. The same is true of any sport where a team can become dominant over the span of decades. Sport has changed, and it’s now possible to keep up with your team, and watch all of their games, no matter where they’re played. This has transformed fanhood. It’s no longer enough to put an entertaining product on the field/ice/pitch. It’s just as important to put an entertaining product on the 700 cable channels that are covering your sport. If you don’t do it, people will start watching Nascar instead, or switch to Basketball, or Football, or Cricket, or Rugby, or Aussie Rules Football. My point is that people will eventually tune in to see Manchester United play Juventus to a 1-1 draw rather than to see the Yankees (here I go again) beat the Royals 18-3 again.

Where am I going with this? A defence of Vince McMahon. I bet that’s surprising to you. The XFL was a flop. It wasn’t without some good ideas though. The most important of the ideas was that the entire league was owned by one entity. Competitive balance could have been managed completely, to ensure that the size of the market didn’t dictate the success of the team. Sure, there would be teams that consistently lost, but over time, the people running those teams would get replaced with people who could win. All kinds of good things could have come out of the fact that the league was centrally owned. Unfortunately that baby was thrown out with the bathwater when the rest of the league’s entertainment value was perceived (rightly so) as bad. Comically bad actually. Vince misunderstood professional sports, and the professional sports fan. People weren’t going to tune in to hear some crazy ex-wrestler commentate a football game, and the product on the field took a back seat to the shots of the cheerleaders. The other mistake that Vince made was that he created the whole league based on the fact that it had to be a hit on TV. If instead, he’d built the league up for a couple of years before staking it on TV contracts, generate some fan interest by selling tickets, not soda. Football, not wrestling part two. People won’t watch a sport on TV if they’re not at least a little invested in the teams that are playing. Build up interest from the grass roots, don’t try to “force” interest by blasting it on TV. Even the WWF/WWE started out with local live shows, and got it’s momentum from fan interest that way.

That’s enough incoherent babbling for one day though.