Editorials
Manning Up, or Where is Don King when we need him?
By The Big Haired Gnome
Jun 1, 2007, 20:37

My apologies in advance to any female players out there who may feel left out by the title of this piece.  Some vestiges of male-dominated culture still remain in our world and among them are expressions that are meant to be inclusive of all of humanity.  On the other hand, by the end of this piece, I have a feeling that at least some women will be happy to have been at least semantically excluded.

Manning up.  It means taking responsibility, particularly in difficult situations.  Owning up.  Being a man.  Something that many of the so-called promoters in our industry seem unwilling to do, or be.

The recent announcement of yet another MAJOR EVENT has brought to my attention once again the paucity of risk-taking behavior found in paintball, something that would seem to run counter to the general in-your-face, bad-boy, gangsta culture that we all know, love and profess to be a part of.  The same pseudo culture that our wannabe Don Kings take advantage of on an almost daily basis by appealing to your need to prove your badness by winning an event.

I'm talking about the event promoters who don't have the guts, balls, heart, soul or whatever other body part you care to analogize, the ones who aren't willing to risk anything, the ones who put YOUR money where THEIR mouth is.  I'm talking about promoters who obviously believe so little in their product or their own abilities to promote that they've invented a smarmy little phrase called 'prizes contingent upon attendance' to hide their cowardly little selves behind.

Prizes Contingent Upon Attendance. 

Want to know what that means in plain English?  Let's ask Richard the Promoter.  (You do know the diminutive for Richard, right?)  "Prizes contingent upon attendance means that if I don't do my job, I still make money.  Prizes contingent upon attendance means that I don't really have a job to do-I can sit around all day sucking my thumb, hoping that a decent number of players will sign up, but I don't really care whether they do or not.  Prizes contingent upon attendance means I have a built in excuse for not delivering a professional product.  I can wait until the last minute to hire my refs.  I can wait until the last minute to find a field.  I can wait until the last minute to worry about the product prizes.  I can wait until the last minute to worry about sponsors, because in the long run, I can blame everything on the cheap, lazy, good for nothing players who didn’t sign up early enough."

Thank you Richard.  You’ve summed it up very nicely.  In other words, you're a con artist, preying on the gullibility and emotional desires of pubescent teenagers.  Talk about low life.  I saw some pond scum the other day that reminds me of you...but at least it was doing its job of digesting waste products…

I've heard all of the excuses, most of them coming down to money and how competitive the marketplace is.  They're nothing but excuses.  A real promoter knows that his job entails taking a risk.  Find a good thing, hype it properly, provide decent service and BUILD a reputation that will keep an increasing number of customers coming back for more.

Players want a good event.  Players want a fair event.  Players ask for a decent return from an event involving prizes, one reasonably commensurate with the fees they are expected to pay in order to attend.  When they show up, they want enough other players and teams to be there to have made the trip worthwhile.

I've long suspected that players and teams are very much like Ebay Buyers when it comes to the expenses involved in attending events.  They're all about the low winning fee and forget to check the shipping costs.  They won an Angel for $5-who cares if the seller is charging a thousand bucks to ship it one town over?  That's just the shipping.  After all, they got an Angel for five bucks!

Too often players and teams forget to factor in the costs of attending that aren't associated with entry fee, air and paint:  they forget the multiple $85 a night hotel rooms, they forget the almost three-dollars-a-gallon gasoline, the overly expensive restaurant meals, the replacement costs for things they forgot to pack, rental car fees, the added costs for things at home that didn't get done because they were out of town.  They seem to forget that the entry fee isn't their only expense when it comes to calculating the odds.  They all seem to forget that getting a return on the event is a crapshoot, an exercise in gambling that uses the house's rules, the house's dice and the house's table.  And all too often it's a crooked house.  By failing to take all of that into account before attending, they place themselves at risk of constantly paying for events that don't deliver a fair return.

Promoters should share at least some of the risk.  Casinos do.  If they’re offering a million dollar slot bonus, the prize money has to be insured and or in a restricted escrow account.  Can you imagine the national headlines if someone won that prize and the casino said 'sorry, the busses from the retirement homes broke down this week, you’re only going to get 10k?'  Prizes contingent upon attendance is totally absurd when you begin to look at it in a context outside of paintball.  Imagine the Daytona 500.  Imagine the winning driver crossing the finish line and being told that the stands weren't full so the winnings have been cut.  Imagine Tiger Woods winning the Masters and getting a pale blue jacket because not enough people were clapping silently on the sidelines.  Imagine a football team winning the SuperBowl and announcing on national TV "We're going to McDonald's Playland!" because the NFL didn’t fill the stadium.

Players and teams need to start taking some responsibility.  They've got to figure the real costs of attending events and make accurate assessments of the value of the return.  I know the return isn't all prizes and cash-based.  A lot of it has to do with the venue, the other folks attending, the theme, the desired level of competition.  But if the promoter isn't guaranteeing the one thing that you can actually measure (prizes)-how can you trust anything else they're saying?  When teams are more selective about where they spend their money, the true promoters will step up.

If players and teams want to see a higher degree of responsibility on the part of promoters-if they want to help contribute to improving the quality of the events they go to-if they want to know IN ADVANCE that an event is going to be worth attending, the solution is very simple.  Ask one question and then base your decision on what the answer is.  Ask the promoter if prizes are contingent upon the number of attendees.  If the answer is yes...

Say NO.