In 1984, a young driver named Roberto Guerrero won the Indy Racing League's Rookie of the Year award. Fourteen years later, he signed a $350,000 sponsorship deal with Pagan Racing, a company owned by two brothers from Corpus Christi, Texas. Unfortunately, 1998 wasn't Guerrero's best year: He crashed three times in his first four races.
Though still early in the season, the Pagans had seen enough. They voided the deal, citing Guerrero's poor on-track performance as damaging to their image. (In the one race he didn't crash, Guerrero, who'd at one time finished second in the Indianapolis 500, dropped out with a mechanical glitch.) "There will be crashes in this business," Allan Pagan explained. "But Roberto -- his percentage of crashes was much higher than the other industry drivers. His constant crashes, early into races, were hurting the team."
A few months later, Guerrero sued the Pagans for $275,000, claiming that that was the amount the brothers still owed him from their sponsorship contract to support him during the previous year. In the lawsuit, he insisted that only one of the crashes was his fault -- that the remainder were the result of mistakes made by other drivers around him.
On one level, situations like Guerrero's and Borkowski's -- athletes sidelined not by injuries or retirement but by advertisers -- are no more than motor sports deserves. Anyone who reads Faust knows that in the end, selling your soul can box you in, and it should come as no surprise that a sport that takes money from -- indeed trumpets its affiliations with -- tobacco companies, alcohol manufacturers and Viagra was bound to confront the Devil sooner or later.
Still, might there be a bright side to advertisers demanding better behavior from their shills on the field? Imagine a world where a sponsor backs away from Roger Clemens after he tosses some split lumber at a batter, or publicly ditches Marty McSorley when he splits a player's face with a hockey stick, or loudly loses Karl Malone when he acquires his second technical foul in a game. In this same advertiser-driven -- and intensely moral -- world, supplement supplier EAS would cut Bill Romanowski loose after he incurred yet another fine for yet another illegal hit.
Naaaah. The real test, of course, is not how boorish an athlete's behavior can get in the whirl of competition before he loses his endorsement, but whether the sponsorship continues to pay dividends in moved merchandise and enhanced corporate profile.
"Of course we'd always like athletes whom we sponsor to display qualities on and off the field of a role model," explains Marlene Patter, a spokeswoman for Golden-based EAS when asked about Romanowski's on-field highlights: a spitting incident and cheap hit netting $27,500 in fines in 1997, and $42,500 worth of fines for three separate cheap hits in 1999.
"But," she adds, "things happen in the heat of battle. We certainly hope that Mr. Romanowski continues to have a long and productive career."
Just so. It's the same thinking that recently led the Marine Corps to sponsor the X-Games. The athletes -- radical, tattooed, pierced, occasionally stoned -- are the epitome of anti-establishment punks, an image they are careful to cultivate. Still, if a few thousand bucks in sponsorship fees continues to bring in the recruits, who in the Pentagon is going to lose any sleep over an image that is everything the military is not?
While Borkowski's lawsuit is only just beginning, two months ago Guerrero settled his tiff with Pagan Racing. The trial was already under way, and negotiations were held in private in the judge's chambers. The moment the deal was announced to the jury, however, two members immediately requested Guerrero's autograph. As he watched other jury members position themselves for a souvenir signature from the famous racer, the judge joked that Pagan's lawyers had probably made a smart decision settling the suit rather than going to trial. In the end, of course, it's always the fans who have the final say.
