Getting noticed
Football teams are scrambling to get publicity now that the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association have reluctantly concluded their over-extended regular seasons. It takes press agents with imagination to come up with attention-gripping story ideas.
How are you to sell football with a story about signing a second-string defensive back from Tulane University? It’s not easy.
This is why you hear about the higher-priced help while you cross your fingers and toes and hope the Tulane prospect will shift gears and take on a starry sheen.
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Getting noticed is essential but difficult in an era when would-be politicians, salesmen, stock brokers, welfare agencies, pizza parlors and dog and cat societies are hiring advertising agencies to focus attention on their needs.
Press agents can no longer get headlines because Doug Flutie has an ingrowing thumbnail. Doug Flutie has gone back to the land of his birth.
The Canadian Football League salary cap puts our teams out of the bidding competition for trophy-winning comers. Where we succeed is when we get under-sized over-achievers like Flutie or Ron Lancaster. Too often, when the CFL does get star-quality players they come with the baggage of super-inflated egos, nasty tempers or halitosis. In short, they are people the National Football League doesn’t want.
Perhaps a CFL team might build a powerhouse by hiring a full-time counsellor on personality disorders. Then it could sign a clutch of swollen-headed nasty footballers and convert them into mild-mannered superstars.
If they could be made so grateful and loyal that they didn’t jump ship for multi-million NFL contracts, it might work.
If it did, the job of a team press agent could be done from a backyard hammock.
