On the Money Rooting for the Federal Expresses

By JOHN ROTHCHILD

Have you heard about the Federal Expresses? It's a potential football team in a new corporate league the cbs people have pinned to the drawing board. If this goes through, we will be rooting for the Union Carbides or the Meridian Bancorps, the Reynolds Metals or maybe even the Digital Equipments.

In auto racing, they plaster the cars with brand names and turn them into speeding billboards, but if companies get football teams, the fans will see 22 rampaging advertisements on every play. This will take the game back to its roots in the 1920s, when we had the Decatur Staleys, owned by Staley's starch company, which later became the Chicago Bears. There was the Oorang Indians, Jim Thorpe's team named for the Oorang Airedale Kennels. In Japan today there are many corporate teams, including the Nippon Ham Fighters, owned by a pork producer, but that's baseball. Back in our country, maybe someday we will get the Hormel Spams.

A lot of fans like to complain about too much shill in sports, where even the scoreboard has a sponsor. As it stands, a relief pitcher in baseball can't enter the ninth inning without announcers mentioning Rolaids or the NYNEX "call to the bullpen." If this keeps up much longer, expectorating on the field will have a sponsor. But there's a good side to corporate ownership. It gives the fan a new way to enjoy the game: buying shares in the company that owns the team.

Right now, the N.F.L. opposes corporate ownership of teams, and until it changes the rule or the new league comes along, the best opportunities in share buying are in basketball, baseball and hockey. Paramount Communications (soon to merge with Viacom) owns the Knicks and the Rangers, Comsat owns the Denver Nuggets, and Disney has the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, California.

For the price of a good seat at an Atlanta Braves game, you can buy a $17.50 share of Turner Broadcasting, which along with the cable and other stuff makes you the owner of 58 cents worth of the Braves and the Atlanta Hawks. For a $50 share of Anheuser-Busch, you get 39 cents worth of the Cardinals; and for a $60 share of the Tribune Co. in Chicago, you get $1.84 worth of the Cubs, not that you would want it, but some people are masochists. With Disney, your $42 gets you 9 cents worth of the Ducks.

These are only rough guesses, but what really matters is that buying a share puts you in partnership with the big shots. What comes out of your pocket when they raise the ticket prices can go back into your pocket if the stock price goes up. You can pay for your hot dogs with the dividends.

A pro team can be a huge potential moneymaker no matter how much crying you hear about selfish players who demand salaries greater than the GNP of small nations. For companies in the entertainment business, the idea is to end up with at least one pro franchise, plus the cable network to broadcast the games, the stadium with skyboxes and concessions, the movie rights and the foreign rights, and a shopping channel to sell the fan memorabilia. They can put Pete Rose on there eight hours a day signing baseballs while they show film clips of his greatest hits, with a special ceremony when he breaks the record and pens his one millionth autograph.

As a shareholding fan you benefit not only from these multiple sources of team revenue (some of it yours to begin with) but also from a chance to "do something about it" if the team is having a lousy year. You can make your suggestions for improvement directly at the annual meeting of the corporation, the way a disgruntled fan did at the recent gathering of the Tribune Co.

The guy shows up wearing a license plate around his neck that reads, CUBS WIN! and a hat that says, SOX SUCK! In the question-and-answer session he gets up to chide the management cheapskates for ruining Cub pitching. He's figured it out mathematically: "For less than 10 cents a share, you could have got three of the top pitchers in the game."

You will never have this chance with any of the N.F.L. teams or the baseball teams still owned by rich individuals, such as Gene Autry and his mediocre ball club, the California Angels, but what can disapproving fans do -- stop watching Autry's old movies? If this were the Federal Expresses, the fans could switch to United Parcel, or DHL, or another delivery service and force the company into beefing up the lineup.

For the fans' sake, we need more teams selling shares directly to the public, the way the Green Bay Packers and the Boston Celtics did. Green Bay is a nonprofit organization, so owning a Packers share is like supporting the local museum. The Celtics is a limited partnership, the only team that trades on the New York Stock Exchange (BOS).

When the Celtics first came out, at $18.50 a "unit" (another name for a share), the Boston papers scoffed and said it was a sucker play because the team was worth maybe $5 a unit at the time. But the fans are having the last scoff because all along they've got a 7% to 13% annual tax-sheltered distribution, and even without Larry Bird the value of the team is catching up to the original price.

A share of the Celtics has been better than money in the bank, and 90,000 unit holders can say the team belongs to them. Team officials once received a copy of a newspaper story about a Bostonian who got married in Ireland. The headline said: CELTICS OWNER WED AT BLARNEY STONE. They looked the guy up. He owned two units.