THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 14, 1996 TAG: 9601140203
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY HARRY MINIUM, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 139 lines
The century-old Canadian Football League was on its death bed when Larry Smith took over as commissioner in 1992. The eight teams were losing money, attendance and TV ratings were sliding, and Montreal, one of the league's two linchpins, had folded.
``To put it bluntly,'' said John Tory, who came on board with Smith as the CFL's general chairman, ``the member clubs were technically bankrupt. We were close to seeing this great league disappear.''
Smith, a star for the Montreal Alouettes in the league's glory years, helped devise a bold strategy to stop the fiscal bleeding: Expand south into the U.S. - an almost unthinkable notion in the Great White North, where the 3-down, 12-man game was one national treasure unsullied by American culture.
Smith and others were convinced it was the answer. A dozen American cities were clamoring for pro football, and the NFL would expand into only a handful. Why not fill the void with the Canadian game, and at the same time rake in millions of U.S. expansion dollars?
Four years later, the eight Canadian teams are solvent - partly due to the $18 million in expansion fees. Smith and Tory say most of those eight teams should be profitable next season.
Even Smith's critics, and there are many, acknowledge that expansion to the U.S. probably saved the CFL.
But now the question is: Can the CFL save its American division?
The U.S. branch clearly is sicker than the CFL of 1992. The six franchises have lost upwards of $30 million and at most, only four will operate next season.
Sacramento, the first expansion team in 1993, moved to San Antonio after two seasons, where the Texans lost more than $4 million last season.
Baltimore, an expansion franchise in 1994, is in financial distress and likely will move to Houston to make way for the NFL's Cleveland Browns.
The Las Vegas Posse, which joined the CFL in 1994, expired after one debt-ridden season.
Memphis and Birmingham, who joined the league a year ago, are also extinct, though Birmingham might resurface in Shreveport, La.
And the Shreveport Pirates have moved to Hampton Roads, where the team is being eyed warily by area politicians who have been asked to put up $400,000 for a stadium renovation.
Two months after announcing their relocation to Hampton Roads, the Pirates have neither a stadium lease nor the funds to renovate Foreman Field. Local politicians say they're afraid the Pirates will suffer the same fate as other American franchises.
CFL officials acknowledge that in their rush to expand they made critical blunders, including choosing the wrong cities.
Sacramento's stadium was inadequate. Las Vegas's population was too small and its desert heat wasn't conducive for a summer/fall game. Shreveport, officials say privately, is too small for pro football, though the league appears set to repeat its mistake of returning to that market.
At times, the CFL also chose the wrong ownership groups. Birmingham and Memphis were successful in the old WFL and USFL, but their CFL franchises were poorly run and promoted. Both exceeded CFL budget guidelines by millions.
Baltimore was considered the league's ideal market - a football-hungry major city. The team's on-field success was dazzling and it led the American teams in attendance. But the team has more than $1 million in unpaid bills and is being sued by the city of Baltimore amid reports of padded attendance figures.
The Pirates say they promoted and ran the team well in 1995, but acknowledge major errors in 1994, when they hired a coach from a Division III school who was fired after players nearly revolted during summer training camp.
Team owner Bernie Glieberman says the league, and the Pirates, have learned from their mistakes. He says Hampton Roads, a market of 1.6 million people without a major-league franchise, is the model for the future.
``Hampton Roads is the ideal place for us to be,'' he said. ``We're convinced it will work here, and that we can take this success and replicate it in markets such as Milwaukee, Portland and even Richmond.''
Most Canadians seem ready to cut the American teams adrift. They harken for the good old days - the '60s and '70s - when Toronto and Montreal were drawing crowds in excess of 50,000, the game was all Canadian and the CFL seemed to be a true major league.
The CFL traces its history to the 1860s, when the Hamilton Football Club was formed. Its zenith might have in 1983, when Toronto edged British Columbia, 18-17, in a Grey Cup game seen by a Canadian TV audience of 8.2 million. Carling O'Keefe Breweries signed a $33 million, 3-year advertising contract for the CFL on the Canadian Broadcasting Company.
All seemed right with the world.
But then the league began losing steam, primarily because of the invasion of American sports. The Sports Network, an offshoot of ESPN, was giving Canadians a flood of college basketball and football. Major League baseball had moved into Toronto and Montreal, and the NHL expanded into more Canadian cities, diluting the Canadian market of 24 million people.
The CFL lost its Carling O'Keefe contract in 1986, and with it $1.4 million per team. The league also signed onto the ``marquee player'' concept, allowing each team to spend whatever it wanted on one name player.
With attendance and revenues dwindling and costs soaring, Smith took over as commissioner. And though expansion into the U.S. may have saved the CFL for the short term, many are convinced that it's time to pull its game back across the border.
The Canadian media scoffed when Smith announced last week that the CFL would extend its deadline a third time, and give the U.S. franchises until Jan. 31 to declare when and where they'll play. Extending the deadlines has been a hardship on Canadian teams selling season tickets without knowing who and when they will play. Moreover, the three TV networks that broadcast CFL games can't yet sell advertising because they have no schedule.
A similar delay last winter cut deeply into television profits.
The American expansion also has brought into question the CFL's import ratio.
At present, only 17 of 37 players on Canadian teams can be Americans; U.S. teams have no roster limitations. The CFL has proposed radically increasing the number of Americans to give the Canadian teams a better chance to compete, and Smith admits that has struck a raw nerve in Canada.
The most-popular phrase used by Toronto sports writers to describe the U.S. division is ``failed experiment.''
``It would be wrong to say the CFL's American experiment has been a failure,'' Smith said, ``because we're still experimenting.
``The whole issue has nothing to do with the quality of the Canadian game. It has everything to do with whether the U.S. will buy Canadian cookie.''
Why continue selling a cookie that is crumbling? In part because the NFL is eyeing Toronto, an affluent city of 4 million people that is among the top draws in baseball, the NBA and the NHL. The Toronto Sun newspaper predicts that the city will be in the NFL by 1998.
If Toronto goes to the NFL, the CFL's Toronto Argonauts surely will fold or move. So then might the nearby Hamilton Tiger-Cats - and eventually, perhaps the entire CFL.
Smith is pushing hard to put a team back in Montreal, and if the NFL expands to Toronto, CFL officials see the U.S. once again as the league's key to survival.
More than a dozen potential ownership groups have contacted Smith, seeking expansion franchises. Smith predicts the CFL will have eight healthy American teams by 2000.
``We could grant some of them franchises now, but then we would be repeating the mistakes we've made in the past,'' he said. ``You don't want to do it so late in the year that they don't have time to promote their product. That was a problem in San Antonio last year.
``My interest is more in having franchises that will succeed than in having numbers. If we have two or if we have four, it doesn't matter, as long as they are teams that will succeed.'' by CNB