For Cubs, a night to savor a historic year

Photo by: MARC BRYAN-BROWN

As the 2017 Sports Business Awards concluded last week in New York, a night dominated by the Chicago Cubs’ historic success last year, the room was filled with sounds of Eddie Vedder’s “All The Way.” The Pearl Jam frontman’s song, first performed a decade ago before Tom Ricketts and his family purchased the Cubs, is a hopeful, yearning ode for his beloved but long-suffering team.

But on this night, the song instead became the soundtrack of a celebratory victory lap for what has become one of the biggest stories in sports history, both on and off the field.

The Cubs, which last fall broke their 108-year championship curse and have remade their entire business operations and transformed Wrigley Field and the surrounding neighborhood, won Sports Team of the Year. Ricketts, the club’s chairman, won Executive of the Year, and Major League Baseball won Sports League of the Year in part due to a Chicago Cubs-Cleveland Indians World Series that drew the sport’s largest TV audiences in a generation.

Cubs win, Cubs win: With SBA trophies for Sports Executive of the Year and Team of the Year, the Cubs continued to pile up the W's. Photo by: CHICAGO CUBS

Vedder’s song says the Cubs’ faithful “are not fair-weather, but foul-weather fans, we’re like brothers in arms in the streets and the stands.” Similarly, Ricketts said the years of work that led to last year’s title and last week’s honors involved no shortcuts and a total commitment from the many employees and fans aiding him along the way.

“We asked a lot of people to keep the faith with us, and thankfully they did and allowed us to build it the right way and do it the right away,” Ricketts said. “And the people who did all the work, they’re the ones who deserve this award. … The monkey’s off our back now. We’re not a cursed team anymore. There’s no goats, or Bartmans anymore. Now, we can just look forward.”

And indeed, the Cubs are now looking forward with the creation of a new sales and marketing agency pooling its far-flung collection of assets (see related story).

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred similarly credited his top lieutenants for the league award win, part of a huge night overall for the sport that also involved key league business partner Fanatics winning Sports Breakthrough of the Year. Manfred in particular cited MLB President of Business and Media Bob Bowman for striking the $1 billion BAMTech investment deal with Disney, Chief Legal Officer Dan Halem for striking a new five-year labor agreement with the MLB Players Association, and Chief Operating Officer Tony Petitti for reshaping how baseball markets itself through efforts such as last summer’s Fort Bragg game.

“This was a really important year for us in a lot of respects,” Manfred said of 2016. “A lot of things like what Bob did to find us the right partner for BAMTech, and not just any partner, what Dan did to get the labor deal done, what Tony did to rethink how we market the game, particularly to younger audiences. These things are all going to be really impactful developments in the years ahead. And that’s what has me really encouraged. This is a great night for baseball, but we still have better days ahead.”

The importance of teamwork in the sports industry was a recurring theme throughout the evening. Turnkey Sports executive Tony Ponturo, who presented the first Sports Business Award in 2008 while still at Anheuser-Busch, began the 10th annual event with a poignant reminder of how the business “is built on relationships and trust.”

Fanatics’ win in the Sports Breakthrough of the Year category arrived as the company dramatically reshaped a highly staid licensed sports apparel business in part through an innovative three-way partnership with MLB and Under Armour for on-field and fan gear rights. Fanatics chairman and founder Michael Rubin said he appreciated how partners such as MLB pushed him to innovate and change and not settle for a status quo way of doing business.

“Those are the best kinds of partners, the ones that challenge you and drive you,” Rubin said.

While the Cubs’ triumph of last fall served as a key backdrop for the awards ceremony, last summer’s Rio Olympics also fueled much of the recognition for the evening. The Rio Games, widely questioned heading into the event amid a variety of logistical and planning issues, generated by far the most-streamed Olympics ever and a cultural touchstone across every platform, helping garner NBC Sports wins in both the Best in Sports Media and Best in Digital Sports Media categories.

The Rio Olympics helped NBC Sports win in two categories. Photo by: GETTY IMAGES

“It wasn’t just trying to deliver technologically but to be able to have it be digestible to users to get what they want to get to, and promote things that are important, and deliver an audience back to our advertisers,” said Rick Cordella, NBC Sports Group executive vice president and general manager of digital media. “It’s a Herculean effort.”

Perhaps the most emotionally impactful segment of the evening, however, was the presentation of a newly created Celebration of Service Award to Mel Young, president of the Homeless World Cup. The event now involves more than 100,000 homeless participants per year around the globe. Young said, “A lot of sports organizations do a lot in the community. We can probably do more. We started doing something, we did it well. Let’s do more and build a movement.” (see related story).

Staff writer John Ourand contributed to this report.