It’s funny how every so often someone asks me: Whatever happened to Slamball? In fact, just last week I had finished a speaking engagement in Atlanta, Georgia when a fellow came up to me and asked that exact question.
Well, for his and your information, I’m happy to reveal that preparations are now underway for the return of our extreme sport Slamball to national and international TV. Following two seasons (2002 and 2003) on Spike TV, the high-flying, hard-hitting sport toured through Europe and Asia with phenomenal success. So my partners (Mike Tollin and Mason Gordon) recently enlisted sports/entertainment giant IMG as an equity partner to help fulfill our dream of catapulting the action-sports league to the top of sports fans’ playlist. Chris Albrecht - former Chairman and CEO of HBO who championed super shows like The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Entourage to name a few – is now with IMG and our shining knight. He sees the UFC-like potential of Slamball and all of the ancillary rights, licenses, and merchandising opportunities.
Slamball tryouts are tentatively scheduled during the first week in April in Los Angeles and New York. I’ll provide more specific details as they become available. From those two tryout locations the best of the bunch will be invited to IMG’s elite training academy in Bradenton, FLA. The invited players along with veterans from the two inaugural seasons will then be put through two weeks of intense training and evaluation prior to the Slamball Draft. The draft - which will be chaired by the league’s Commissioner (me) – will fill out the sixSlamball teams comprising eight players on each team. The 48 athletes will remain at training camp for six more weeks – honing their skills and preparing their respective teams for the televised, action-packed tournament in June.
Bus Nazi Update:
To date I haven’t heard from the Chairman of American Airlines, Gerald Arpey, to whom I wrote the letter regarding my incident with the bus Nazi. But I did, however, receive a call from Jose Abreau, the Director of Miami International Airport, who was cc’d on the correspondence. We had a healthy 15-minute conversation on Tuesday where Mr. Abreau began by apologizing and stating he was very embarrassed by the situation and would do everything in his power to identify the individual. In fact, he said that just two weeks prior he was almost run down by one of the taxis on his property and when he confronted the cabbie, the cab driver called him an “asshole!”
Mr. Abreau went on to say that his airport is a residual cost airport totally subsidized my customers like me, and he can’t understand how employees don’t comprehend that without satisfied passengers, they’ll be out of work. He said he fully understood he had a serious customer service problem without me even saying as much since my incident was only a one time occurrence. But after listening to this passionate man and his uphill efforts over his two-year tenure, I can appreciate why he is in the process of engaging the Disney Institute to help alter his airport’s poor results on customer service surveys.
In addition to canvassing the employee time records to locate the bus Nazi and conducting a personal investigation into my incident, Mr. Abreau forwarded a copy of my letter to the vice-president of American Airlines who is stationed at Miami International Airport. Let’s see if the VP is as customer-savvy as Mr. Abreau.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 4:55 pm by Pat Croce
Leave a Reply
