Which brings us back to the edge.
Drawing on controversies straight out of the headlines as well as a broad base of academic literature, this book synthesizes a vast amount of information to explore the edge, to try to make some sense of it all, and to offer the reader a provocative but clear new understanding of twenty-first-century sport.g
Make no mistake: although this book dives into the incredibly complex and interesting topic of sports governance, we don’t get close to the bottom of it. The book’s goal, however, is not to provide answers. The objective is to open a door to a fascinating topic so you can think about sport in new ways. Sport needs more thinking, more debate, and more out-in-the-open discussion. Many of the answers to the difficult questions facing sport won’t come from experts or authorities. Those answers—especially to the most important questions—will be shaped by all of us who care deeply about sport and its role in our society and our world. It is we who will ultimately decide what values we want sport to embrace and reflect.
This book covers some troubling territory. It is enough to make even the seasoned policy analyst more than a bit cynical. But please be aware at the outset that the book ends optimistically. If there is one thing that sport desperately needs in the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is a bit of optimism. But getting to that perspective requires an open-eyed look at the battles that confront sport. What we will see there won’t be pretty. But the first step in addressing any difficult challenge is to understand what we are up against. So let’s take a look.
a Specifically, for steroids. Conte also pled guilty to a money-laundering charge. He served four months in jail.
b Throughout this book. I use the term “soccer” to refer to what most people around the world consider to be “football.” To understand the origins of both terms and the evolution of their use, see Steve Hendricks, “A ‘Soccer’ Lesson,” Sporting Intelligence, December 6, 2015, http://www.sportingintelligence.com/2015/12/06/letter-from-america-happy-130th-birthday-to-english-soccer-071201/. The origin may not be what you think
c A World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) investigation of these claims concluded that more than 150 such medals had been awarded to athletes with suspicious blood values. See WADA, Independent Commission Report Part 2, 2016, https://www.wada-ama.org/en/resources/world-anti-doping-program/independent-commission-report-2.
d You can find recommendations for further reading at the end of this book.
e It was a short tournament for the Buffs, who were blown out 82–65 by Kansas in the first round.
f In 2016, Saban made about $7 million, enough for seven professors at $100,000 per year.
g This book does not consider issues associated with the rapidly growing world of “e-sports,” which refers to the playing and watching of video game competitions. This is a growing area, expected to reach $1.9 billion in revenue by 2018. It faces many of the governance challenges faced by more traditional sports, such as match fixing, doping, and accountability. For an overview, see Andrew Visnovsky, “Growth of Esports: Regulatory Concerns,” The Sports Integrity Initiative (December 16, 2015), http://www.sportsintegrityinitiative.com/growth-of-esports-regulatory-concerns/.
A Little Edge Can Make a Big Difference
Pop quiz. What do Nellie Kim, Yohan Blake, and László Cseh have in common?
If you said that they each won a silver medal at the Olympics, then you get an A+. But I’d bet you are more likely to recognize the names of Nadia Comăneci, Usain Bolt, and Michael Phelps. These are the three athletes who beat Kim, Blake, and Cseh, winning gold medals, not silver.
We live in a winner-take-all world where, as popularized by legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, “winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing!”1 As the late National Association for Stock Auto Car Racing (NASCAR) driver Dale Earnhardt, Sr., used to say, “Second place is the first place loser.”2 The difference between winning and coming in second can be exceedingly small. In three different swimming events in the 2008 Olympics, László Cseh won three silver medals when his finishing times were a mere 0.6 percent, 1.7 percent, and 1.0 percent behind those of Michael Phelps, but faster than everyone else on the planet.a Yet outside his native Hungary, Cseh is little known.
More than sporting pride is at stake between winning and coming very close to winning. Consider Heath Slocum, a golfer who turned professional in 1996, the same year that Tiger Woods did.3 From 1996 to the end of 2013, Slocum’s scoring average for each round on the Professional Golfer’s Association (PGA) Tour was 70.9, which he was able to translate into four victories and a cool $17 million in winnings (inflation adjusted), making him one of the top 100 money winners ever on the PGA Tour. Over the same eighteen-year period, Tiger Woods averaged about 1.6 strokes per round better than Slocum, turning that small score differential into a difference of $110 million in tournament prize money and becoming one of the most recognizable faces on the planet.
Here is another way to think about those numbers: Over eighteen years, Woods turned his 2.2 percent better scoring average into a 650 percent advantage in prize winnings over Slocum. (Slocum shouldn’t feel too bad; Woods did the same to everyone on the Tour over the same period.)b In sport, the smallest performance difference can be a very big deal indeed. No wonder athletes are always looking for that little bit of an extra edge.
Seemingly small differences in sporting outcomes can translate into outsized differentials in rewards. And that’s true not just for athletes. Coaches have long reaped the rewards of big-time sporting successes. In 1905, the twenty-six-year-old coach of Harvard’s football team earned a salary of $7,000, which was $2,000 more than Harvard’s highest-paid professor, and only $1,000 less than Harvard’s president.4 Eighty-six years later, in 1991, an academic observed that “today, a salary above $100,000 is not uncommon for the successful collegiate coach.”5 In 1987, Jerry Tarkanian, head coach of the highly successful University of Nevada, Las Vegas, basketball team, received a salary of $174,000 plus the use of a Cadillac. Swanky. But even those more recent numbers seem quaint today, when coaches are paid far, far more than professors and college presidents, and even more than many CEOs.
In 2013, Deadspin.com produced a map (see figure 1.1) showing the highest-paid public employees in each of the fifty United States. In forty states, that person was a head coach of a college football (twenty-seven) or basketball (thirteen) team.6 The head football coaches of the Army, Navy, and Air Force academies are paid far more than any general or admiral, or anyone else, in the US military, including its commander in chief, the US president.7
Figure 1.1. Highest-Paid Public Employees by State, 2013