Word: durso
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Occasionally a sports book comes along that tries to put sports in a proper perspective rather than gratifying an athlete's ego and pocketbook. Paper Lion is, perhaps, one of the only intelligent, perceptive ones I can think of, Joseph Durso's The All-American Dollar-The Big Business of Sports, qualifies as another. Although Durso, a well-respected sports journalist for the New York Times, fails to destroy the sports myth or attack with much zest, he often offers an insight into sport as a capitalistic, cut throat enterprise, controlled by television, run by businessmen in the front office...
Armed with impressive research, statistics, and interesting anecdotes, Durso methodically examines each of the major professional sports, from baseball to boxing, from football to golf. He charts the skyrocketing purses and salaries, the mushrooming gates, and the high TV revenues in a calm, understated style. His collected, unassuming assurance sharply contrasts with his perplexing, chaotic subject...
...neglects nothing related to the business aspect of sport. Durso shows how football's history led from its early struggles for financial survical to an affluent state where a one-minute TV commercial for the Super Bowl costs $200,000. The concentration on the financial aspects of sports, however, are only initially interesting. The quotation of astronomically figures eventually becomes boring, and it is only Durso's good writing which rescues his intelligent intellectual approach from an oblivion of six-diget numbers...
...When Durso examines the intricate clockwork of sport he is most successful in jarring our conceptions. He tells us that sports became big business to maintain a profit. Athletic corporations frantically searched for new markets in the face of spiralling costs, wage and labor disputes, and a dollar squeeze. In the process, Durso thinks, sports businesses like Madison Square Garden, the owners of a racetrack, a basketball and hockey team, an ice show, and boxing interests, fomented a revolution which saw money supplant entertainment as professional sport's raison d'etre...
...GOLD had become so important, he says, that program directors routinely signal referees to call time for a commercial. Durso points out that increasing costs put the networks in a bind: "None of the networks could particularly afford to pay the escalating prices for sports, but then none of them could particularly afford not to pay them either...