EDIT: Thanks for the traffic, Dale
When Mr. Ford emailed me to ask what my opinion was of the league’s use of the name I previously hosted events under, my response was to point him to this article.
Here is his initial question:
Allow me to introduce you to –
THE UNITED STATES PAINTBALL LEAGUE, also known as the USPL.
Here’s a mention of it in the Los Angeles Times:
“Getting hit by a paintball isn’t terribly painful, but it hurts enough to motivate seriously evasive action. Conceived in 1981 by three guys using modified tree markers, the game has since evolved into a worldwide phenomenon. According to Action Pursuit Games Magazine, paintball is played in 50 countries. The United States Paintball League is the foremost professional arena; I think it’s possible we may someday be watching Monday Night Paintball.”
Funny. The date on that article is 1999…
Here’s another mention of it, claiming that the television show is going to start in 2002. 2002? “The USPL television show is expected to start in 2002. For more information about the United States Paintball League, visit http://www.paintballleague.com”
Here’s a mention from Warpig. And that one seems a little dated too…
Wait a second. Here’s a VIDEO of the league’s first event that was actually televised… and, and, who’s THAT being introduced as President of the League…Steve Davidson?
I thought it was Chuck Hendsch?
Things sure have been confusing over on the tournament scene these days what with a whole new dictionary of acronyms sprouting up – RPL, WCPPL, the expanded GPL, something called the NPL – no wait, the USPA – no wait, the USPL…
Here’s where the confusion comes from. Back in 1999 I left the NPPL and founded the USPL – yes, the United States Paintball League – to introduce a new 7 Player format for the game. I hosted, along with my business partner B.F. Thiele, and in conjunction with both the NAAPSA and the NCPA tournament organizations, the country’s third largest paintball touurnament – no mean feat for a totally new event supposedly ‘competing’ with the NPPL, the GWS and other leagues extant at that time. We had well over 100 teams (127 if I remember correctly – and we didn’t count a team that entered the 7 player, the 5 player, the 3 player and the college event four times – only once).
We had some things going on that had never been seen before: A fireworks display, complete with grand finale that featured a giant Automag shooting flaming paintballs, a Million Dollar Target Shooting Contest and we were televised on Thanksgiving Day weekend by Adrenaline TV, with an audience share that would be hard to match, even today.
There were a whole mess of other cool, behind the scenes things going on: The teams attending our special, made-for-tv format game (a format that still suspiciously resembles X-Ball – or is that the other way around?) all PLAYED FOR FREE.
Coca-Cola USA sponsored the event, along with Pro-Caps, AGD, and a whole mess of companies that aren’t around anymore.
We had PAVED roads at the tournament, indoor staging for the teams, indoor bathrooms for the teams, special bunkers designed and developed by Brimstone Paintball and regulation tournament fields on natural grass that were built in two and a half days by five and a half guys – fields and set-ups that looked so professional, everyone assumed that it was a regular paintball facility.
But it wasn’t. It was a county fairgrounds and I only paid $2500 bucks for the entire facility for a five day weekend. Did I mention the paved and gated parking facilities, or the fact that we charged $5.00 per head for the general public to come in and watch – or the trade show that was emptied out of its vendors everytime a USPL game started because the vendors just had to go and watch?
Did I mention that a consortium of industry types came to me and said, “this is the greatest thing since sliced bread, we’re going to put our heads together, come up with a sponsorship plan and get back to you. How many events do you want to host next year?” – and then they went off and did something else?
What else had gone before? Oh, let’s see. We had a reffing crew that wasn’t involved with playing. We had a structure for local and regional leagues that would feed into the national events that was designed to REDUCE the cost to the teams all along the way: if you won a local – free entry to the regional championship; if you won a regional, free entry to the national championship. If you placed – you got reduced costs. If you didn’t – you could still attend those higher level events and take another crack at winning or placing your way to the finals.
We were able to introduce those things because we didn’t spend a buttload on renting high-marquee style venues – we built them ourselves. What’s the difference between a stadium’s grass parking lot and a county fairgrounds with paved roads and indoor bathrooms? A WHOLE *%$#*@! LOT OF THE PLAYER’S MONEY – that’s what.
Yeah, we were going to do the franchise team thing too, but you know what – we built in a structure that helped the teams make back that money – not from industry sponsorship (which is like everyone trying to suck on the same teat at the same time, ya know) but from outside advertising dollars.
And we were thinking about the grass roots the whole bleeding time – giving local fields and stores direct and reduced entry to the trade shows, sponsoring playing clinics (run by those same teams – more ways to make their money back), hosting local games, etc., etc.
You can do a lot of development work in the decade that I spent putting that thing together; sure, some of it was like hacking your way through a jungle with a machete (which some might think I’d have good use for now), but most of it was simply following the lead of the successful sports that had gone before – learning from their mistakes and taking advantage of the things they’d learned and gotten right.
It might have been the nice, maybe even the right thing, for the ‘new’ USPL to have called me up to ask if I had a problem with their using the name. The corporation that put that name out there in the public BACK IN 1999 still exists – but given the industry’s history, I doubt very much if anyone bothered to check on that.
Yeah, it might have been the nice, professional, friendly thing to do, to ask. But this is paintball, so what the hell do you expect, right?
It might have been the proper thing to do. It would probably have been even smarter for the folks running the show over there to have gotten in touch to find out what we did wrong AND what we did right. Looks like they copied an awful lot of it pretty accurately – but I guess they’d much rather substitue a few months of meetings for a decade of research. They’ve got the teams kicking in franchise fees, the budget sounds like its pretty robust – so why not re-invent the wheel – right? It’s so much easier than making a phone call.
Am I pissed? No. What’s there to be pissed about? Another league going down the same path that everyone, including myself, has gone down before. Lot’s of hype, some people and teams that are so desperate to keep on playing ‘their way’ that they’ll just keep on throwing money at the dream.
I think one definition of insanity is obsessively repeating the same actions, while expecting the results to somehow be different.
A couple of months ago I said, here, that I was sad to see the NPPL go, but that it was a chance to focus on a single league, to get the industry to work together, reduce some of the costs and concentrate on finally using the headlinder of tournament paintball as the draw and promotional vehicle that it ought to be, rather than the elephant in the room that it had become. Or the bull in the china shop. Or the 900 pound gorilla. Or that cold virus rhinocerous under the sheet analogy.
And then the acronyms starting popping up all over. So I guess 2009’s chance to turn everything around is pretty much over and done with – even though there are a lot of folks who’ll disagree with me about that – which only brings us back to right where we’ve all been for the past 15 years: two or more leagues tearing themselves and the industry apart, trying to grab a piece of ever-shrinking pie and never thinking, for one little second, that maybe it’s time to start baking some more pies.
So, am I mad, or angry, are people going to be getting C&D letters or calls from my attorney? (I’ve been making the parties that were interested in this answer read all the way through this crap just to get to it…) No, not at all, not in the least and not in the slightest, because I know a couple of things that maybe most folks haven’t even thought of, and one of them is this:
I had a spanking brand new game format that everyone who saw absolutely loved; I had a partnering league that ran regional games all across the country, and several other regionals that had signed on board to serve as the underpinnings of the national structure; I had widespread industry support and pledges of financial sponsorship; I had a television show; I had a plan that didn’t just work on paper – it worked in practice. And I and my partner invested nearly a THREE QUARTERS OF A MILLION DOLLARS making it all happen and then, because of paintball POLITICS, it all went away.
And I know that virtually nothing has changed in all the time that’s gone by since.
The rest of the stuff I know that no one else seems to, I’ll keep to myself. Maybe I’ll still get that phone call…or maybe I’ll just continue to be very, very, very flattered.