JASON MOORE is the president and CEO of Moore Sports Int'l, the organization that brought two Major League Baseball games between the L.A. Dodgers and Arizona Diamondbacks to the Sydney Cricket Ground in '14. MSI is now behind a bid by the U.S. to host the 2021 Rugby League World Cup. Moore said that the Rugby League Int'l Federation will choose between the bids by the U.S. and the U.K. in November. MSI confirmed that the U.S. bid recently requested to be amended to include Canada, with games proposed to be held in Toronto and Vancouver. It is now awaiting word from the RLIF on whether that request has been approved. In addition to addressing that bid and what a victory by the U.S. bid would mean for the sport's int'l growth, Moore discussed takeaways from the MLB games held in Sydney, American football's potential appeal Down Under and sports that are on the rise in Australia.
On the Dodgers-Diamondbacks games in '14 ...
Jason Moore: It was huge. The Dodgers and Diamondbacks games that we did were an outstanding success. It captured everything that we wanted to do. It got people really looking at baseball in this country. The Diamondbacks and the Dodgers can comfortably say that they've got a growing fanbase in Australia that are buying T-shirts and buying caps and watching their games, and signing up to their Facebook accounts and their Twitter accounts. What it did for the game of baseball in this country was outstanding, but just as an event and a spectacle, it was so well received. From our point of view as a business in doing the promotion and operation and marketing of it, it was a fantastic full experience in American sports and the way that they work and the way that they're structured operationally, which gives us a high degree of confidence in doing anything to do with other American sports, whether we look at bringing those into this country or whether we look at taking rugby league to the United States.
On baseball's potential ...
Moore: I think if you're talking about sports to come here, the one that I see is baseball. Baseball can grow massively in this country, mainly because of our climate. We're in the southern hemisphere, we're very close to the American culture in a lot of ways. And when northern hemisphere baseball nations are in the middle of winter, we're in summer. And I think there's a great opportunity in this country in the future for a great offseason broadcast product into those regions because of our climate and the similarities between baseball and cricket. ... The only limiting step in this country is venues. We're full of rectangles and ovals, there's not many Vs with dirt on them.
On the impact of rugby league player Jarryd Hayne's stint with the NFL San Francisco 49ers ...
Moore: It's more about giving us a degree of confidence that what we thought is actually right. The exposure that he got back in this country, and in particular anywhere in the rugby league world, was outstanding. It probably wasn't as big in the United States as what it was made out to be here. But I know from people, particularly in San Francisco, for the 49ers fan there was certainly a talking point because he had such a big splash in that preseason. It was a good story, it was a different story: here's a guy that never played the game and was one of the best in another game. That he could come in and do what he did was an outstanding effort. What it showed us is that there's a lot of similarities [between American football and rugby league]. Take off the helmets and take off the pads and take out the blocking and there's not a great deal of difference in the games.
On the recent college football game between Cal and Hawaii ...
Moore: It was reasonably well supported -- they had 60,000-odd people at the Olympic Stadium. I went out there for it, had a look at it. It was good. From the Australian fans' perspective, those that aren't used to American football, the general comment that I got back was that the game seemed to drag on for a long period of time because there's so many stoppages and it just takes a long time to play the game, which was an interesting thing. But overall, you'd say it was a success, and I think that there will be more of those to come.
On the challenges American football faces ...
Moore: As far as American football in Australia, I think that's a little bit more challenging. I think there's a place for it from an event perspective. I'm not 100 percent convinced that there's the potential for a league or something like that to happen here. I'm not sure about that. This is a very cluttered sports environment. We're the only country on the planet with four professional football codes. We've got Aussie rules football, we've got soccer, we've got rugby league, we've got rugby union. There's nowhere else on the planet that has that, and we have only 22 million people.
On the popularity of the NBA ...
Moore: The NBA is massive down here. Just about every kid that's between 10 and 17 years old plays basketball now. That's the one thing with our culture, we're very, very sports participation-driven. You'll tend to find that the majority of kids in their teenage years will play three or four sports. Basketball is just going gangbusters. If the NBA and [Commissioner] Adam Silver could get some sense into him, he would know that this could be one of the most lucrative basketball markets on the planet, not only from viewership and fans, but also from participation. We consume a phenomenal amount of NBA down here. We're very keen to bring games down to this country. We've been talking to them for years, but for some reason they think it's more important to go to the Philippines and China. That's not my decision, that's theirs, but we're very, very keen to get NBA into this country in any number of forms -- whether its games, expos, All-Star tours, all sorts of things -- we think this market is ripe, big-time.
Hangin' With runs each Friday in SBD Global.
