I love this kind of stuff, and I hope you do too.
Every night across the country, fans vie for prizes in contests staged during breaks in the action at sporting events big and small. In basketball, it might be halfcourt shots or length-of-the-court putts. In football, it might be throwing a ball at a target or kicking a field goal. In hockey, it might be taking a shot from center ice.
The vast majority of these real people efforts come and go with polite applause from the crowd, an amusing distraction while the real athletes are getting a rest. Some of them are a lot more fun than that, with explosions of joy and disbelief that something great just happened — and it’s been that way for a long time.
Jim Kahler, director of the Sports & Entertainment Management Program at Cleveland State University, said in-game contests have been part of the fan experience since the mid-20th century. Bill Veeck was famous for the wacky ways he engaged fans as a minor and major league baseball owner — you may remember his 1979 Disco Demolition debacle at a Chicago White Sox game — and Kahler said the late NBA Commissioner David Stern encouraged franchises to emphasize entertainment as much as the game itself.
“Those breaks at halftime and quarter breaks and two-minute timeouts became valuable inventory,” said Kahler, who previously was chief marketing officer and senior vice president of sales and marketing for the Cleveland Cavaliers.
“You could tie it to the growth of sponsorship,” Kahler said. “You’ve got more and more sponsors than ever before. Teams are smart enough to sell those spots. The sponsor and the team have to figure out something that’s interactive and engage with the fans in a way the fans appreciate. Then it kind of became the arms race of who can come up with the better idea.”
Of course, there is risk involved with offering prizes worth tens of thousands of dollars. About a half-dozen companies in the United States assume that risk for sponsors and make good on payoffs to contest winners.
Bob Hamman, who founded Dallas-based SCA Promotions in 1986, and his son and company vice president Chris Hamman base their fees on the odds they set for each contest. For example, Bob Hamman said, there’s a 50% chance a person picked at random will make a free throw. That drops to 14% for a 3-pointer and 2% for a halfcourt shot.
[…]
Chris Hamman said a watershed moment for in-game contests occurred in 1993, when Chicago Bulls fan Don Calhoun’s overhand throw from the opposite free-throw line swished through the hoop 80 feet away for $1 million.
The insurance company balked at paying because Calhoun had walked on to play basketball at two junior colleges a few years earlier and played in a handful of games. That was disqualifying, according to the insurance company. The Bulls — reportedly with Michael Jordan’s involvement — and sponsors ended up making good on the payoff.
This is risk analysis in its purest form. It’s no different than what actuaries at insurance companies do – calculate the odds of a thing happening, then offer to insure against it based on those odds. Not for the faint of heart or light of cash.
Two items of note for me. One, if you’ve read this blog for awhile you know that I used to play tournament bridge, mostly in the 90s. It was a lot of fun, and one of the joys of that particular interest is that you can sit down and compete against players who are legitimate national and world champions. Bob Hamman, a longtime resident of Dallas, is on anyone’s short list of greatest players ever. I had the pleasure of sitting down against him a couple of times. I knew his son Chris reasonably well in the 90s – he was pals with several guys I knew at UT at the time, and I played on a couple of teams with him, though I don’t think I ever partnered with him. Texas – Houston and Dallas in particular – have long been full of high level bridge players, and you don’t even have to go to the big fancy tournaments to run into them regularly. I haven’t played competitively in 20+ years and I miss it sometimes – I met a lot of really interesting people through bridge.
And two, back in the 70s when the New Jersey Nets were playing their home games at Rutgers University in Piscataway, NJ, my dad’s law firm had season tickets and I got to see a bunch of games. They had a regular contest in which you could enter a drawing to match or exceed the number of free throws a current or former player made (out of five) and win some modest prize. One night, when I was maybe 9 or 10, my name was drawn. The player they had for me to match made all five of his attempts, so no pressure at all. I did my free throws underhanded, because I was too skinny and short to have any hope of reaching the rim otherwise, and managed to sink the first one, which got me a rousing round of applause. It was all downhill from there as I missed the next two (they always counted the first contestant miss as a “practice shot”) and went away empty-handed. I can’t remember what the prize would have been, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t need any risk assurance firm to cover it for them.
(You should definitely watch the videos of Don Calhoun’s three pointer and that court-length putt some dude in Nebraska sank to win a Porsche.)