The business of sport - 23 October 1992

As for Topic A, I think I shall lay off it one more week in order to satisfy even the lady from Dorset. She you may remember was the correspondent who wrote to me years ago, after I'd done three talks in a row about the presidential primaries of that year and said, "May I make a humble suggestion, instead of telling us now who might be president, would it not be wiser to wait until November and tell us who is right on." This time I want in the brief lull between the presidential debates and the fateful 3 November to hail a flash of light that appeared the other night in the middle of the dark tunnel from the point of view of sportsmanship and manners, the dark tunnel of professional sports.

As a regular fan of several sports, two in particular, I, like I suppose millions of other fans, have come to deplore in the past 20 years or so, the obliterating of most other values in sports by the value of money. I did a talk, it must be 10, 15 years ago, lamenting the unquestionable fact that tennis now thanks to the spoiled brat behaviour of players too famous and too wealthy to be thrown out of the game. Tennis had now joined boxing and basketball in this country and baseball as a sport whose public is hostage to the fortunes the stars earn.

It is predicted by the truly knowing ones that baseball over this coming winter is going to have to handle a crisis it has not seriously faced before, very like that of the United States itself, simply a crisis of income and outgo. The attendance at baseball games except at weekends has fallen drastically in the past two years. Of course, the telecasting of the games has much to do with that. In the early days of television. the late '40s the early '50s, the baseball clubs used to ban the broadcasting of their games within a 50-mile radius of the stadium they were being played in. This raised more Cain than income.

And in the fullness of time, baseball as much as football, American football came to depend for it's sustenance, for the prosperity of the clubs that is, on television advertising, baseball and football on beer commercials as much as anything. The beer companies and the motorcar companies – as also the soft drink people – pay the networks millions to get in their evangelical appeals between the innings and the clubs, of course, share in the take. But increasingly, the clubs have not been getting back from the television advertising enough to offset what they are paying out to players – even 10, 15 years ago, signing a player to a four-year million-dollar-a-year contract will have been breathtaking.

We do not catch our breath these days when we read of deals – transfers should probably call them – in which a player who's been doing fine lately is traded to another club on a five-year contract which will pay him $20 million. Where does any club get several $20 million to spare? They've been saying year after profitable year that the networks and their willing sponsors would provide, but in the long sluggish recession even President Bush has come to admit grudgingly that things could be better, though not as great as they're going to be if he can only sneak back in a week from Tuesday.

In the recession, finally the lovely fat-cat sponsors are beginning to grumble and say they've had enough. The going rates in the current World Series championships was $325,000 for a 30-second advertisement. Next season will be the last year of a contract that has brought the baseball clubs $1.4 or 1.5 billions. That's $1,450,000,000 from one network and one cable channel, which has national exposure that broadcasts nothing but sports. No more of that sort of money.

To turn a knife in the wound, the beer companies are facing a big lobby, several lobbies – environmentalists, school heads, parents, doctors, churches – urging that beer advertising should be banned from all television as spirits, hard liquor and cigarette ads have been banned for many years.

Several recent surveys about the ballooning drinking habits of college students, men especially and high school students have only served to reinforce this campaign. One or two of the most persistent, I suppose, popular beer ads are beguiling, that's what they're meant to be, to beguile you in to believing that, along with this delicious magically brewed by an ancient family beer, you get also a night on the town among dazzling skyscraper nightclubs and the smashing girls who'll be there to at least pour the beer for you. A simple little television play, but the companies say worth ten times all the advertising in newspapers and magazines and on billboards. If the beer people quit or are made to, the groan from the baseball owners will sound like the last trump.

Well, I hadn't meant to go into the coming financial plight of what we're entitled to call the baseball industry, I'll polish off this little piece by saying that the crisis was brewed in the first place not by the brewers and their enemies, but by the deserting fans. The grim basic fact is that the young males between the age of 12 and 17 who used to constitute the solid nucleus of the loyalists sitting out there. In the past three years 25 in 100 have stopped going, whereas three in 10 of them have switched to watching basketball, which is the most popular of all American spectator sports.

So we've pattered along this dark tunnel and noticed the potholes in the roadway, the cracks and the water leaks in the walls, what was that long bright light more like a shower than a flash that appeared in the Canadian sky or sky dome rather last Tuesday night? It was a brightness that will not be forgotten for many years.

The cause or inspiration, for it came on the previous Sunday when the second game of the World Series championships was played in Atlanta Georgia. Let me throw in briefly for the uninitiated, which I take it is most of us, that the current season came to its end two weeks ago, when out of all the competitive joisting of the two baseball leagues, there emerged two teams, each the champion of its league who met starting last Saturday for – you might call it the Cup Final. They played for the best, the most of seven games. What was unique about this year's championship was the presence of a non-American team to meet the Atlanta Braves, the Toronto Blue Jays. Twice before they had got to the play-offs in their league but gone down, but this year for the first time in the history of the game part of the World Series battles would be played on foreign soil. Toronto here they came.

The second game was played on Sunday and like the first was in Atlanta. Now before each game, the national anthem is sung and played. This year of course there would be also another novelty – two national anthems, very touching. But last Sunday very lamentable, very embarrassing and to the Canadians quietly infuriating, as part of the opening ceremonies, a Color guard of the United States Marines marched in carrying the American flag and also the Canadian flag but the maple leaf was upside down.

Looking back on it now, it is not to be believed that they had assembled back there under the stadium dressed down in marching order been given the cue and hip-hub into the majestic stadium, the spreading SkyDome without spotting their gaff or clanger. It was, of course, intentional, but also dumb. One American sportswriter hit the nail in writing, "the inverted maple leaf confirmed Canada's worst suspicions that the Yanks don't know much about geography or national flags for that matter and are particularly dumb" regarding Canada. That was the bad news.

Now for the happy, good, the bright light in the SkyDome came Tuesday, the third game of the series, the first ever in Canada. It's odd, by the way, that for baseball and for tennis it's two Commonwealth countries that have the most modern spanking and the most majestic and impressive stadiums, the other is in Melbourne where they play the Australian Tennis Open.

Anyway, Toronto SkyDome as well as having a glassed-in circular terrace where you can dine and watch the game and other amenities has the blessing of a retractable roof, which on rainy nights and wafting off the snowflakes last Tuesday closes over to the relief and the comfort of everybody.

Well, on Tuesday evening too, of course, there was an opening ceremony. Again and surprisingly, not a Canadian but a United States Marine Color Guard and stood at attention while the message from the commandant of the United States Marine Corps was read aloud over the resounding loud speakers. The United States Marine Corps wished to apologise to Canada and Canadians and had requested the honour of presenting the Canadian flag, they marched in bearing two standards, the Canadian flag with an upright maple leaf fluttering alongside the flag of the Corps itself, notice, no Stars and Stripes.

It was a rousing moment and the 50,000 people rose to it and thundered applause. The thunder boomed again and reverberated through the night skies as the commandant's word came in once more saying that the Marines had requested that the American flag be born by a Color Guard of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, "would everyone now please stand during the singing of the two anthems". The crowd roared to its feet and quickly demonstrate their acceptance of this graceful apology came in lustily on the Star-Spangled Banner.

The great hero of the Toronto team said it crisply, "I thought it was classy", so it was. It made the following game, which was and will remain a baseball classic all the more joyful to watch, but what will not be forgotten was that moment when the Mounties rode in bearing the Stars and Stripes for triggering the lump in the throat and the moist eye – it was as much of a cue as the mass singing of My Old Kentucky Home when the horse troop towards the gate at the Kentucky Derby.

Next week, stay tuned, something even more moving – a presidential election.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.