What does it take to get Vernon Davis to endorse your product?
A tight end in the NFL since 2006 who won a Super Bowl with the Denver Broncos last month, Davis said there are a lot of things that he looks at when he receives an off-field offer. Most important to a player who has caught 461 footballs, though, is staying true to a brand, and Davis shared a story about turning down what he called a lucrative offer from an unnamed hamburger restaurant.
“We look at TV so many times with ads with athletes, and one minute they’re doing an ad with Burger King and (then) they’re with Jamba Juice,” said Davis, the owner of seven Jamba Juice franchises who stressed that it was good for athletes to be consistent with their endorsements. “It’s imperative that we take our time and that we think about these things before we commit to them.”
Davis appeared on the "Pro Athletes Taking Control of Their Brand Destiny" panel at SXsports that explored athletes taking ownership of their own brands. Lineage Interactive CEO Anthony Rodriguez said he felt that companies were taking athletes of all genders and races more seriously now, and former LPGA golfer Anna Rawson echoed those sentiments.
“I feel like athletes can bring so much more to the table,” Rawson said. “You kind of know what your fans want, so I think there is so much value in that.”
Direct from the Source: Athletes Unfiltered: In what essentially was a commercial for his video web site for prominent athletes, long-time LeBron James associate Maverick Carter told an audience at the convention center he wants Uninterrupted to be an avenue where athletes can tell their "whole story."
Carter, a childhood friend and business parter of James, said he's in talks with Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton, who believes his actions were misunderstood after he stormed out of a press conference after losing in the Super Bowl.
UFC star Ronda Rousey, who joined Carter on stage at the convention center, called Uninterrupted “therapeutic” because she can verbalize whatever might be on her mind.
“It let’s people see you as a person and not an event,” Rousey said.
New York Giants receiver Odell Beckham Jr. called it “a backup way to explain fully what went wrong or what went good.”
Recently, Uninterrupted's film crew followed around Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green for the 72 hours prior to Green's first ever All-Star game appearance. Carter said that over the next year the site would like to do 10 to 12 more features similar to the one on Green. - RYAN AUTULLO
Death of a Stadium: Cities, which have won the right to host a World Cup or the Olympics, are taking huge financial hits. The ornate stadiums sit mostly unused once the spectacle games have finished. One stadium used for the World Cup in Brazil now is a bus station. Greece's economic core was shaken greatly by all the money spent to host the Olympics in 2004.
In the United States, it now costs more than $1 billion to build a new NFL stadium. Yet they maybe are utilized 20 times a year. How do you justify spending that much money?
Dan Meis, design principal/managing partner of MEIS, presented several ideas of how cities can tackle the financial issues of paying for stadiums.
He suggested transformational venues that allow for a massive building to be used for multiple sports, switching from a smaller basketball or hockey arena to a bigger soccer stadium in a matter of minutes. He presented an idea to Doha, Qatar, which is hosting the next World Cup, suggesting that one domed soccer stadium could be used as a hotel and office tower as well as a shopping mall.
Meis also suggested that cities hosting Olympics should settle for smaller, viewing arenas. They could utilize parks, bringing in bleachers, concessions and a giant screen. Fans could watch events on giant screens, allowing for a shared experience, but at a much cheaper cost. - SUZANNE HALLIBURTON
There is a time and a place to take on Internet trolls, says the three panelists of The Art of the Own: Internet Etiquette and Sports.
But it can be hurtful when done recklessly.
“Use discretion when deciding who to bombard,” former NFL punter Chris Kluwe.
Kluwe, who has 190,000 Twitter followers, says if he is attacked on social media he will research the attacker’s previous tweets to determine if the person was simply having a bad day or if they are indeed a jerk. If Kluwe sees a pattern of inappropriate posts, say, for instance, anti-semitic blasts, he’ll happily fire back.
“If I’m gonna put someone on blast, I’m gonna go through their feed,” Kluwe said.
A Barstool Sports NFL writer who goes by PFTCommenter said he felt remorse when, after retweeting a take he disagreed with about Panthers quarterback Cam Newton, his legions of followers (102K) took aim at the original tweeter, a TV broadcaster, and reached out to his station demanding that he be fired.
"I didn't know who the guy was," PFTCommenter said.
A third panelist, Lana Berry, a sports fan who is Internet famous, says fans are blindly loyal to their teams and cited apologists who defended a series of questionable actions by former Seminoles quarterback Jameis Winston. Berry said she once tweeted something she thought to be funny about Winston, which had nothing to do with his legal troubles, and was besieged with nasty messages for the next two days.
"I don't know how we can combat that," PFTCommenter said. - RYAN AUTULLO
Credit: American-Statesman Staff
Credit: American-Statesman Staff
The South Won: Sports, Music and the New South: Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton attended high school in Atlanta, and he made collegiate stops in Florida, Texas and Alabama. The focus on the non-football aspects of the NFL MVP's life – from mentioning family members and collard greens at press conferences to the way people defended his on-field dancing – has some arguing that he is helping redefine what it means to be from the South.
“There is a larger paradigm shift with Cam and broadening the (idea) of what a NFL quarterback is,” said ESPN’s Bomani Jones. “With Cam, it’s so undeniably southern and so undeniably black… the notion of the south means so much more than what it used to, and Cam embodies that.”
Jones appeared at a Sunday SXsports panel about the South’s new identity, and he was joined on a panel by rapper Bun B, New York Magazine’s Rembert Browne and SB Nation’s Spencer Hall and Elena Bergeron. In addition to Newton, the panel tackled topics like the ties between sports and music, the marketing of athletes from Texas teams and a generational divide in the African-American community about rooting for schools like the University of Georgia.
The panelists were also asked to decide whether the discussion was actually staged in the South. Houston’s Bun B said yes.
"This is Texas, we border Mexico," the rapper said. "You can't get more south than that. This isn't the South, it's da South." - DANNY DAVIS
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