Not long before trashing his knee at the U.S. Open, Tiger Woods did the same thing to the sport of hockey.
Asked who he was rooting for in the recent National Hockey League finals, Woods laughed and then cross-checked the entire sport: “I don’t really care. Let’s talk about the Dodgers,” he said of Los Angeles’ baseball team. “I don’t think anybody really watches hockey anymore.”
And while that shot stung the NHL, it was also felt at the headquarters of Versus, the cable network that—for now—is sustaining itself by using Canada’s greatest non-Pam Anderson export as its centerpiece.
Versus execs understand that hockey is far from the endgame. But even if a network built around a sport with a limited audience wasn’t Plan A and certainly isn’t Plan C, it is getting by, and quietly plotting for a second swing at a major property. And that’s when we’ll find out if Versus can become a true player.
When Comcast rebranded the former Outdoor Life Network as Versus, the idea was to snatch up a couple of the major sports and take a run at being an alternative to the ESPN behemoth. One thinking was that grabbing the new late-season package the NFL was introducing and then coupling it with another property like NASCAR, baseball or even hockey would be a good backbone.
So when ESPN balked at the asking price in the $70 million range, Versus grabbed hockey, but then got frozen out by the NFL, which kept the package for its own NFL Network. No dice on NASCAR or anything else, either.
Versus execs quickly had to scramble to Plan B, and began to cobble together a network around hockey, the annual cycling and pharmaceutical contest known as the Tour de France, mixed martial arts and even bull riding, which apparently is not just staged for Marlboro Reds ads. Rivals at ESPN and Fox
Sports took joy in quietly chiding the network and its “10-year plan.”
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