Making Room In The Market - sports-marketing - Industry Overview

Black Enterprise, Sept, 1999 by Wayne Clark

Blacks dominate the playing fields but don't have a strong hold on the sports-marketing industry. Not yet.

Doug Williams' story, had it been a made-for-TV movie, would have been a sports-marketing agency's dream: its plot was full of improbabilities. Here he was, a hero to many black kids who weren't used to seeing a man of their hue play quarterback in the National Football League. He was just like them: a kid from Louisiana who had played ball at Grambling State University. That he'd made it this far was a rags-to-riches-to-respectability tale nobody saw coming. Williams' ascent, at 34, was victory enough--for him and others who'd aspired to throw the football, not just catch it. But perhaps Williams knew he'd have to do more than just show up to even be mentioned in the same sentence with the NFL's golden boy, John Elway, the man everyone expected to steal the stage.

Williams' play that day in January 1988 would reveal he wasn't in the mood to share the spotlight--not with Elway, not even with Jay Shroeder, his backup, who lusted to be in his shoes. Williams put in record-setting performance, earning Most Valuable Player accolades en route to leading the Washington Redskins to a win in Super Bowl XXII and drubbing the favored Denver Broncos 42-10.

Now, with his name written in the Football history, books, Williams' face was sure to be plastered on billboards boards all over America.

There'd be shoe deals, commercials, the whole nine yards. Or so everyone thought.

"It's a shame that the most [money] he got was a half a million dollars in endorsements and John Elway got $4 million, $5 million," says Curtis Symonds, executive vice president of affiliate marketing at Washington, D.C.-based Black Entertainment Television. "What more could he do? The only black quarterback to be MVP in the Super Bowl?" Symonds is still be-wildered, 11 years after the fact. "But the stigma out there was that Doug couldn't talk real well, wasn't good in front of the camera and so on. So of course advertisers weren't gonna risk it once that stigma was laid out there."

And that's unfair. It was then, and it is today, especially when you consider that most of the jocks--black or white--who endorse sneakers and baseball gloves today don't speak any better than Williams did and aren't that much better looking, either, not that that matters. The reality is Williams' paltry deal represents another hurdle for blacks in sports to overcome: the one that says you can only go so far, the one that colorizes what the public sees.

A SLICE OF THE MARKET

Rudy Washington, a 15-year veteran of the sports business, says, "Marketing means something different to everybody. There are plenty of good PR people out there, but I don't know if black sports marketing exists, and I can say that in all honesty because I've looked." As with the William episode, Washington, commissioner of the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC), says the quarterback would have fared better if he had had familiar faces (read black faces) marketing him.

It's true. Everybody knows that our athletes rule the hardwood and the football field in terms of sheer numbers. But when it comes to controlling how we're marketed, and who's running the show behind the scenes--the IMGs, the Advantages and the Pro-Serves, white-owned and -operated sports-marketing powerhouses--are in control. Surely there's more than enough room for African American entrepreneurs to carve a niche for themselves and compete in this area. But as Washington says, it would have to be a collaborative effort. "In the SWAC alone, 60% to 70% of African Americans in this country live in five or six states in the South," he notes. "So there's sports-marketing dollars there. A few year ago, our attendance for football games alone was close to 700,000 people. There's money there in black sports, but television won't pay us."

Just how hot is sports marketing? Hot enough for even Johnnie Cochran to start Cochran Sports Management almost two years ago. Rapper M.C. Hammer and entertainment strongman Sean "Puffy" Combs have thrown their collective hats into the ring as well. But none of them seems to be having the impact that Percy Miller, a.k.a. Master P, has. The 28-year-old's Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based No Limit entertainment company showed the powers that be that he's a true player when he landed Heisman Trophy winner Ricky Williams, arguably the best player in this year's NFL draft. Miller is not an agent, but he's surrounded himself with qualified brothers, among them Leland Hardy, No Limit's managing director and chief investment officer, to marketing and player contract chores.

A former heavyweight boxer, Hardy laments that "we have lost a consciousness in sports that existed in the '60s. There was a kinship, a feeling that a common cause was the thread of our lives. Thanks to the almighty zeal for the dollar, that sense of consciousness was lost in the '80s and '90s."

But he's dealt with the heavy hitters in a number of arenas--from boxing to tennis--and offers his take on Venus and Serena Williams' experiences in terms of marketability. He says that Richard Williams, the girls' father, took great risks by holding off on inking any major commercial endorsements until he felt the girls were ready emotionally and mentally.