BRIER ROCKS SOME STRONG TV NUMBERS
With some good drama at the Montana’s Brier national men’s championship last weekend at the Brandt Centre in Regina, curling continued to show it was a solid television performer in Canada.
Meanwhile, with the new Major League Baseball season just around the corner, a Sports and Fitness Industry Association survey released this week showed that baseball was played by 16.7 million Americans, the highest numbers for the sport since the SFIA research began in 2008. Add in softball and the combined U.S. participation figures total 25.3 million. That’s a real positive with the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games set to feature baseball and softball in four years.
Close may only count in horseshoes, but nevertheless, the movie Nyad gave the sport movie genre some good presence at the 96th annual Academy Awards at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood last weekend. Nyad stars Annette Bening and Jody Foster were nominated in the best actress and best supporting actress categories, respectively, but fell short to Oscar winners Emma Stone (Poor Things) and Da’vine Joy Randolph (The Holdovers). The only other Academy Award nominee to note with sport connections this year was international production Society of the Snow, the survival drama that retold the story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 and the gruelling experiences faced by the Uruguayan rugby team after their tragic 1972 crash in the Andes Mountains.
This week also saw Amazon Prime Video green light a
much-awaited Allen Iverson basketball biography that will be produced by Shaquille O’neal’s Jersey Legends and Steph Curry’s Unanimous Media.
Yet more than anything, it was another bullish week for women’s sports. On one front, ESPN’S coverage of the Iowa-nebraska regional college basketball matchup featuring Caitlin Clark averaged 3.021 million viewers. That was within striking distance of one of the longest-standing standard bearers in college men’s basketball, the Duke-carolina showdown that scored a television audience of 3.076 million for CBS Sports. That wasn’t all. In women’s soccer, the purchase of the San Diego Wave of the NWSL by the family of Levine Lichtman set a new record for franchise
valuation in women’s pro sport. The sale by Ron Burkle pegs the San Diego franchise at US$113 million, not bad for a team that cost an expansion fee of $2 million just four years ago.
BEARS OF THE WEEK
Back to the subject of sport movies, Air: Courting a Legend led the way in the Sport Market Movie Awards for 2023, winning seven categories including best picture, best director Ben Affleck, best cast, best soundtrack and best song in a sport movie. It was also a timely reminder of what Michael Jordan’s decision to sign with upstart Nike meant to the company back in 1984.
Forty years later, it’s a bearish market for the three stripes, with Adidas posting its first annual
loss since 1992. The setback is largely due to $1.2 billion in inventory writeoffs associated with the Yeezy line and Adidas’ parting of the ways with Ye (Kanye West). It makes one wonder how different the shoe industry would have been all these years, let alone the business of sport that was changed forever when Deloris Jordan insisted on the now-famous five per cent royalty on all Air Jordan sales. Tom Mayenknecht is the host of The Sport Market on Sportsnet 650 on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. The Vancouver-based sport business commentator and principal in Emblematica Brand Builders provides a behind-the-scenes look at the sport business stories that matter most to fans. Follow Mayenknecht at: twitter.com/thesportmarket.