Sports Business Offers Compelling Story Lines

I'm a sportswriter who doesn't cover games. My beat is the business of sports, and while sportswriters' days generally are spent talking with coaches and athletes and watching ballgames and practices, mine are spent talking with lawyers, bankers, marketers and team owners and poring over financial and legal documents.

It always shocks my sports-crazy friends when I say - sincerely - that I prefer it this way.

Sports business offers all you could want from a beat: an unlimited supply of compelling and challenging stories to pursue.

A quick sampling of one city's major recent sports business stories:

• Two of Atlanta's four major-league teams (the Hawks and Thrashers) were sold two years ago, and a third (the Braves) currently is for sale.

• The group that bought the Hawks and Thrashers has been feuding in court for almost a year now.

• Another team (the Falcons) wants to upgrade the publicly owned stadium in which it plays - and in return wants a more favorable lease arrangement from the state.

• The city's most successful team (the Braves) sharply cut its payroll amid seven consecutive seasons of declining attendance.

• The city and state offered many millions in public money in a bid for two Super Bowls and the NASCAR Hall of Fame, failing to land any of the three.

• The city was awarded an NHL All-Star Game, then had it canceled by the league's lockout.

• Ticket prices have continued to soar.

• There have been major changes in local teams' television and radio deals. On and on.

Keeping up with what's happening in the boardrooms is an essential part of covering sports teams thoroughly.

As with teams and games, sports business is very much a local story. There are some stories that transcend geography - a labor dispute that shuts down an entire league, for example - but for the most part the big stories are local.

While the specific angles will differ from market to market, day to day, there are some themes that I think are always ripe for local sports business coverage.

•  Ownership issues. Corporations are getting out of the sports business, and teams generally have become too expensive for one individual to buy. So the new norm is group ownership, often with no single person owning a majority stake. The group dynamics - the motivations and goals of the different partners, the balance of decision-making power, the ins and outs of the partnership agreement - are an important story that affects not just the economics of a team, but ultimately the product as well. And in cases where there is still a corporate owner or a single majority owner, following what's going on in the owner's other (usually larger) businesses is important to anticipating or understanding decisions that will be made regarding the team.

•  Consumer issues. Readers are interested in what's happening on the field, sure, but they're also interested in what affects them. Examples of consumer-oriented stories that should not get short shrift on the sports pages: rising ticket prices that affect the affordability of the games, changes in television and radio arrangements that affect fans' viewing habits, the impact of new technologies, changes in stadium amenities, problems or solutions regarding stadium parking, the price of concessions at the ballpark, etc. It's all a part of covering the business side of teams as thoroughly as the sports side.

•  Public funding issues. Teams often want governments to fund a new stadium or a major stadium renovation, or to rework an existing lease. Similarly, leagues like to pit city vs. city in bidding for franchises or marquee events, such as the Super Bowl. Open records laws are helpful in covering these issues, where taxpayer money is very much involved, although organizations pursuing events sometimes will claim they are not subject to the laws. Public records can yield interesting and surprising information at times. Going through hundreds of pages of state documents pertaining to a Super Bowl bid last year, I ran across the NFL's projected ticket price for the 2009 Super Bowl: a whopping $900. That tidbit seemed to resonate with readers more than a lot of the detail about the bid itself. (Similarly, when teams or owners get involved in litigation, legal filings can yield information that leads to interesting stories apart from the lawsuit itself. Among the documents filed in court as part of the Hawks-Thrashers litigation were copies of e-mails among the owners debating a proposed basketball trade.)

Just as it's important that sports game stories be written in a way that can be understood by readers who are not necessarily hard-core sports junkies, it's important that sports business stories be written in a way that can be understood by people who are not necessarily business junkies.

The key is to spend enough time working a story so that you understand it fully enough to distill it and present it clearly to readers who might only give it a couple of minutes of thought. Clarity and context are essential. Often the stories will be complicated, but you must make them easily decipherable.

When I began focusing on the business of sports after many years of covering the games, some sources were resistant. "Just write about the players," they would say. But as a newspaper demonstrates its seriousness about covering the business of sports, as well as the games, I've found that the business-side newsmakers accept that they're a part of the story too.

And what they have to say often is more interesting than what you'll hear in any locker room.

Tim Tucker covers sports business for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.