ESPN.com - Szczerbiak a star in the making on, off court

ESPN.com: ESPN

Wednesday, January 9, 2002
Updated: January 10, 3:11 PM ET
Szczerbiak a star in the making on, off court

By Darren Rovell
ESPN.com

He's szczintillating on the court. He's szczizzling off of it. He szczo quickly could become the talk of Madison Avenue.


	Wally Szczerbiak has shown he has the moves to hang with teammate Kevin Garnett.

It's Minnesota Timberwolves forward Wally Szczerbiak, aka "Wally World," who is reemerging in the national spotlight for the first time since helping make Miami (Ohio) the Cinderella team of the 1999 NCAA Tournament.

Szczerbiak, the sixth pick in the 1999 NBA draft with the model-like good looks, is having another solid season, averaging 19.3 points on a team that was 25-9 after beating Seattle on Wednesday for its 10th win in its past 11 games.

"There are so many good players and so many good teams in the NBA, that in order to be really noticed you have to be on a winning team and be one of the top guys on that team," said Szczerbiak, who had his career-high-game of 37 points last Friday. "This year, we've been winning and I've been able to explode on the scene."

While the name Szczerbiak makes a return to the sports fan's vernacular as he takes care of business on the court, his agent, Gary Wichard, is preparing to shop Szczerbiak's unique appeal to companies looking for a different type of endorser.

"He's the Ben Affleck or Tom Cruise of the NBA," Wichard said. "All the little girls love him, they want his picture, they want posters of him. And all the older women, who companies try to appeal to, like him, too. He's the All-American boy who does the right thing, plays four years of college ball, graduates and is married."

Wichard said Szczerbiak, who will appear in GQ's May Issue featuring "Great Guys with Great Bodies," also appeals to the male sports fan because "men dig you when women dig you."

Szczerbiak signed a non-exclusive, multi-year licensing deal with Universal Studios in April, and Wichard said he plans to announce a couple of more deals in the coming months. Despite having to compete with teammate Kevin Garnett and Vikings wide receiver Randy Moss in the Minneapolis-St. Paul market, he has local deals with Nextel and Pepsi.

"I don't really see him emerging as an upper echelon NBA endorser unless the Timberwolves win the championship," said Peter Land, general manager of Edelman sports and entertainment marketing. "You can put Kevin Garnett in a milk mustache ad and everyone will know who he is. But if you put up a billboard of Wally Szczerbiak in Manhattan, not many people would recognize him."

Whether Szczerbiak will be a hot commodity depends on the exposure his Timberwolves get in the coming months. The back-to-back champion Los Angeles Lakers are scheduled to be on national television 20 times before the playoffs. The Timberwolves have only five scheduled appearances.

But Szczerbiak knows the team's exposure in May and June, during the NBA playoffs, count the most, and the Timberwolves control how much they're on national TV based on how far they can go.

"To have a ton of wins in the regular season and lose in the first round of the playoff again, (it) won't help me or the team much," said Szczerbiak, whose Timberwolves have been unable to advance to the second round in five trips to the playoffs.

Bob Williams, president of Burns Sports, said that if the Timberwolves do well, Szczerbiak might always be behind Garnett in the local and national markets, but "Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman did pretty well in endorsements riding off Michael Jordan's coattails, whose corporate roster was saturated and his price tag was too high for many companies.

"He'll only do as well as the team does," Williams said. "General sports fans, despite his run a couple years ago, still don't know that much about him yet, but that will take care of itself if the team gets into the playoffs."

The Dairy King?


	Cuban

Mark Cuban was fined $500,000 by the NBA for saying he wouldn't hire Ed Rush, the NBA's head of officials, "to manage a Dairy Queen." The publicity generated by the comments and the fine was worth as much as $1 million to $2 million in equivalent advertising for Dairy Queen, according to Eric Wright of Joyce Julius & Associates, a sponsorship evaluation firm.

"Maybe next time a sports fan is looking for some ice cream, Dairy Queen might pop into their head first because of Mark Cuban," Wright said. He suggested Cuban might be able to offset his future fines by featuring companies in his future tirades.

Michael Keller, Dairy Queen's executive vice president of marketing, was happy about the mention.

"We are obviously flattered that we are top of mind with Mark Cuban, and by the way the free publicity is always a bonus," Keller said. "But Mark might be interested to know -- and NBA officials might be relieved to know -- that a Dairy Queen is not all that easy to run."

Cuban admits to being a fan of Dairy Queen's "Blizzard," their trademark soft-serve ice cream blended with a candy topping.

Lords of the Rings
The folks of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee's brand protection unit, responsible for stopping the unauthorized use of Winter Games trademarks, don't let many things slip by them. Over the past two years, the unit has investigated more than 500 incidents, including Olympic Web site domain names associated with gambling and pornography, and a man who charged people $5 to see a cornfield maze carved in the shape of the Olympic rings.

	“	The Olympics doesn't really benefit too much by being associated with a 'Fat Bastard' competition. ”
		— Bryan Day, SLOC brand protection coordinator

The Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act protects the Olympics' marks and mottos, including the word "Olympic" and the five interlocking rings. On Friday, the SLOC brand protection unit sent a cease-and-desist letter to Cassadys, a private club in Salt Lake City that ran two weekly newspaper ads touting their bar Games promotion, "The Fat Bastard Old-Limp-ix." The ad also featured five beer cans stacked like the Olympic rings.

"We thought we'd be OK if we didn't say 'Olympics' or use the rings themselves, but I guess we were wrong," said Jill Payne, owner of Cassadys. Payne changed the name to "The Fat Bastard competition" just hours before the events were to start on Monday. "I don't want to go to court, and they have a lot more money than I do," Payne said. Bryan Day, a SLOC brand protection coordinator, said he was glad that Cassadys changed the name. "The Olympics doesn't really benefit too much by being associated with a 'Fat Bastard' competition," Day said.

Just the ticket
Many sports teams have complained that they don't benefit from the sale of their tickets on the secondary market through scalpers and independent brokers. But now some teams are taking a serious look at what the Salt Lake Organizing Committee has done: Auction premium tickets to the highest bidder. The SLOC makes money on the market value, rather than actual face value of the ticket.

Although tickets for front-row seats to the men's hockey gold medal games have a face value of $425, several buyers have paid more than $4,000 a pair. And all that money goes to the SLOC.

"An auction is really the way to determine the true market value of the ticket, with the organization benefiting from the experiment," said Jay Bartlett, the SLOC's director of business development, who structured the deal with eBay. The online auction site has offered bidders a chance to purchase choice seats to selected Olympics events since May. Tickets for some events will available through the end of January.

Only 940 of the Winter Olympics-record 1.36 million tickets sold to date have gone to eBay bidders. But a handful of NBA and NFL teams have called to find out about the idea, said John Tebaldi, U.S. public sales ticket manager for the SLOC. Although all the money raised above the face value on the eBay auction tickets are given to the Paralympic Games, Tebaldi said the next step might be for a professional sports team to use the system to set the market for their premium seats. "It can certainly help make a team financially more viable and allow the team to earn the profits, instead of the brokers making a living off their events."

Brokers with tickets to Salt Lake Winter Olympics events reportedly are having difficulty moving their inventory with the Games just four weeks away. To date, more than 85 percent of Olympic event tickets have been sold.

Check it out

Fleer might have the most innovative product inserts on the basketball card market this year in its Authentix basketball set. The 100-card base set with an old ticket design isn't original, but the special inserts featuring replicas of game tickets, dubbed "Authentix," carved into the card, as well as replica ticket cards with swatches of game-used jersey are like nothing that collectors have seen.

Random boxes will have real ticket stubs, including those from Larry Bird's last game, the 2000 NBA Finals, Michael Jordan's first game as a Washington Wizard and the Memphis Grizzlies' inaugural game. A five-card pack retails for $3.99.

Panthers ready to pounce on fan
For Wednesday night's game against the Dallas Stars, the Florida Panthers will shower one ticket holder -- No. 5 million in the organization's history -- with gifts. Among them are a year of skating lessons, a recliner, a hand-held organizer, a trip to Pittsburgh to watch the team on the road and five bottles of wine. The lucky fan also will receive two tickets to every event at the Panthers arena through June 30. The Panthers are confident they will be able to identify the right fan when he or she walks through the door. Electronic scanners will help out, said Mike Hanson, the Panthers' director of communications.

Darren Rovell covers sports business for ESPN.com. He can be reached at darren.rovell@espn.com.