Sex sells, and that's a good thing, especially in sports

Attractive athletes can draw more fans to the game

ANDREW RENFREE, THE GATEWAY (UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA)

EDMONTON (CUP) — Attractive athletes — the ones who get more attention for their looks than their skills — actually benefit their respective sports more than most people give them credit for.

To highlight this, let’s compare two sports: professional women’s tennis and professional women’s basketball. If I had $20, and gave a dollar to every person who could tell me who won the WNBA title this year, I’d probably still have enough cash to see a movie.

Women’s tennis, on the other hand, has been gaining stature in the sports world, partly because its beauties receive so much media attention and fan interest. Maria Kirilenko, Maria Sharapova, Daniela Hantuchova and Anna Kournikova, to name a few, are a big reason why women’s tennis is more popular than both men’s tennis and the WNBA combined.

The main benefit of attractive athletes in a sport is that they actually draw people to watch the sport. Many years ago, I thought that tennis sucked — plain and simple. If I wanted to hear two people grunting and whacking balls around, I would have rented a porno.

Then, players like Anna Kournikova became popular and I started watching tennis — and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why: she’s beautiful! I would never have given that sport any of my time, but since being drawn in, I’ve realized that tennis isn’t all that bad.

This phenomenon isn’t restricted to the tennis court, either. Another prime example of an attractive athlete helping her sport is Natalie Gulbis, a female golfer. Recently, Gulbis came to Edmonton with three other accomplished male golfers to put on a clinic. The bulk of the press coverage, however, wasn’t devoted to the event but rather to Gulbis and her appealing attributes.

It wasn’t as if she was golfing alongside a group of amateurs either. Tom Watson, who has amassed five British Open victories, two Masters victories, and one U.S. Open title in his storied career got only a fraction of the press coverage Gulbis did, and I’ll bet you can guess why if you’ve read this far.

Gulbis also overshadowed Paul Azinger and Peter Jacobsen, who are both very good golfers in their own right. The thing is, though, that golf is even more excruciating to watch than tennis, yet Gulbis’s presence generated a lot of interest in the event and women’s golf overall.

It’s not only female athletes who leverage their sexuality to generate interest in a sport. For example, Sidney Crosby is used in advertisements for companies like Gatorade and Reebok all the time, while Alexander Ovechkin is relegated to endorsing jock-itch medication.

This is despite the fact that this past season Ovechkin played better than Crosby, won the Calder Trophy for best rookie and plays for a more competitive team.

It sounds bizarre doesn’t it? Crosby has become the poster boy for the NHL, not just for the fact that Gretzky told us he was the next big thing, but also because he comes from a marketable background and has a face that makes all the puck bunnies swoon.

Some may argue that focusing on athletes’ appearances detracts from the game and degrades them as people. However, here’s the bottom line: at the end of the day sports are just a form of entertainment and the sex factor only increases that entertainment.

Sports were founded on fair competition and rivalries between athletes, but today, sport is a business, and teams want to be as profitable as possible. If six years of business school has taught me anything, it’s that people don’t like losing money. And that applies just as much to sports franchises as it does to McDonald’s. For an owner of a sports team, or for the advertisers of individual sports like tennis or golf, the goal is to get as many people interested in the sport or athlete as possible.

The more people who are interested, the more revenue you see, and until this trend changes we’ll keep seeing “hot” athletes as spokespeople for their sports. It’s really a simple equation: sexy athletes equal more fans, which equals more money, which equals longevity of sports. I say, bring on the hotness; hell, if I looked like half of these athletes, I’d want to flaunt it, too.