Last 4 Source Annotations....

Since I can't email you right now, I figure this is my best bet. I've spent just over the past 4 hours looking at various articles regarding my subject. Between google, google scholar, academic onefile, and academic premier, I've located the best, most relevant articles for my research. Any others that were remotely close were citing the same 2-3 main books for this topic as the one's I've already noted as source annotations. I am going into the library tomorrow to pick up 2 of the books that are widely cited from other research papers. Other than seeing what other books may be in the same section as these 2, I do not know where to find other meaningful sources. If you have any other suggestions please let me know, but at this point I've wasted too much time on it as it is. I'm surprised myself that there aren't more articles in those 4 search engines relating to my topic. I've tried using variations of the following criteria in every which way: alcohol, sports, fan, history.

Source Annotation 6: Stainback, Robert; Alcohol and Sport

Explains the extent and causes of alcohol problems among athletes, providing guidance for coaches, athletic trainers, sport physical therapists, and sport physicians who need to intervene in the lives of alcohol abusing athletes. Discusses addiction, its physical influences, the incidence of alcohol related disorders, and successful prevention programs in sports contexts. Also presents case examples of athletes experiencing alcohol related problems and diagnoses according to DSM-IV standards. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.


Just a review from Book News, couldn't find a full section of this book online. Need to check out before I can determine if it's going to be valuable or not for my research. It does however list in chapter 2 that it will be about the history of alcohol and sports. Hoping to find some info there that I can cite or check out the books that he cited.

Source Annotation 5: English, Richard; Drinking Games: An exploration of the timeless ritual of drinking your team to victory.

In the fall of 2001 outraged Cleveland Browns fans hurled beer bottles at NFL referees, and everyone was outraged. Tales came to light of Babe Ruth’s penchant for rampant boozing, before, during, and after hitting the bases, and everyone was outraged. Dozens of universities across the country have banned the sale of alcohol at sporting events, and the students were outraged. Some professional sports venues are considering a two-drink maximum, accomplished by the stamping of hands — two and you’re done — and season ticket holders are outraged.

Yuppified and rigidly safe factions of our country, bafflingly still referred to as the “home of the free,” has aimed their shrill moralism at the booze/sports partnership. As is usual with shrill moralists, those seeking to rid sports of Dangerous and Lewd Boozing are misinformed, ignorant of history, and interested primarily in enforcing their will on a group that vastly outnumbers them. Mostly, though, they are ignorant of history.
Try this on: booze made sports.

Without the first, we might never have had the second. It might appear, at first glance or from first-hand experience, that spectator sports got there first, and only later did folks realize that a tasty libation really made the thing exciting. After all, how many pints have you polished off while doing the wave, craning up at the Jumbotron, or belligerently coaching your favorite team from the comfort of a Lay-Z-Boy? Surely liquor came to the party second. How could it be otherwise?

Sometimes, and this is one of the big reasons we annoy other species so much, we think that we (our group, our circle, etc.) are operating on a level of sophistication unknown to previous generations. It comforts us to pat our psyches on the back, congratulations for being … well … just so with it. We tip our drinks, shout “rah rah shish boom bah,” and bask in the glow of our warm and inviting State of Progress. Quite frankly, we think the vast majority of those who came before us were dimwits. It simply cannot be that long ago the first sports fan got sozzled in the stands.

Roughly speaking, it was about 3,000 years ago, probably even more.
And the booze got there first. Spectator sports arrived late — then lost their keys, spilled the bean dip, barfed in the fish tank, and sang “We Will Rock You” every time something happy took place.

As everyone knows, the Olympics were first held in ancient Greece — running, wrestling, throwing things, and the whole scene, except instead of medals the victors got ivy wreaths put on their heads. (They also missed out on Nike ads, but that’s another story.)

For the most part, Olympic sports are all about individuals. Disregarding things like volleyball for the moment, it’s safe to say that Olympic athletes compete primarily against themselves. Putting groups of athletes together in groups, with group aims and group cooperation, was a somewhat later invention. Team sports are also almost completely dependent upon balls. No, not cajones, but real balls. Toys, ultimately. Play things. The big team sports we have with us today — baseball, football, soccer, basketball, etc. — all share a single-minded concern with getting your hands on a ball, and then, through skill and luck, putting the ball someplace where the other group doesn’t want it to be. There are lots of other rules, of course, but in their essence team sports — most popular among spectators — are quite beautiful in their simplicity.

But enough about sports. Let’s talk ancient alcohol rituals for a moment.
The world was (and still is) chock-full o’ drinking rituals. On every continent, among most cultures, people used intoxication to fuel their spiritual tanks, and as a muse for the creation of about anything you can name. And nowhere was the connection between drink and society as intrinsic as in ancient times.
Attic Greeks drank mead (ambrosia, the fabled Nectar of the Gods) and beer (brewed with techniques learned from the Egyptians), but the drink of choice, the T-Rex of ancient tippling, was wine.

Pretty much every aspect of Greek viticulture — from planting, to harvesting the grapes and pressing them, to storage and aging — was accompanied by splendid rituals. At harvest time, for example, the grape pickers sang a song for the fruit. It was a hymn-like ode to loss and rebirth — they mourned the killing of the grapes, but also celebrated next year’s abundance. While they sang a young boy carried a large wooden phallus among the vines, a symbol of the god of wine, Dionysos, whom the boy represented. Grape picking was considered something of an honor among Athenians. Equal care was taken with the remainder of the winemaking process; giving thanks, singing songs, honoring Dionysos in voice and action, until it was time to drink.

Long about the time of year we call November, Athens exploded in an uproarious, joyous, naughty celebration — the Great Dionysia, or Festival of Dionysos. It was during the Dionysia that the first of last year’s wine, having been aged underground in large clay vessels called amphorae, was finally brought out, sampled, and revered. The streets literally ran with wine for three full days and nights. The Great Dionysia made Mardi Gras look like Bingo Night at the Lawrence, Kansas VFW.

Before anyone got to taste the wine, priests of Dionysos performed the most important ritual of all — arguably the most important ceremony they performed all year. A bull, that had been specially nurtured all year, groomed, fattened, made as aesthetically appealing as possible (for Dionysos was also called the Bull God), was brought to a special altar, usually in the orchestra (“dancing place”) of a theater; a place sacred to Dionysos. After songs and prayers, the bull was cut down with a broad-headed ax, then dismembered.

The dismemberment was a reenactment of the most well known myth of Dionysos, wherein the young god — born from one of Zeus’s many dalliances with mortal women, this time a stunning young thing named Semele — was hunted down by agents of Zeus’s wife, Hera, and torn to pieces as revenge against her philandering hubby. Later, Zeus ordered the Nymphs to take the pieces to a sacred cave, and the Dionysos was reborn with the coming of spring. This is how he came by another of his appellations, the Twice-Born God.

The Athenians, not at all a wasteful culture, made use of the entire sacrificed bull. Its fat was trimmed away from the meat, then the meat from its bones, which were then wrapped in strips of its fat and roasted over a roaring fire. The cooked fat and bones were dedicated to all of the Olympian deities, a thank-you barbecue to appease the surliest pantheon this side of John Ashcroft’s misimagined Christian thunderer. The bull’s meat was boiled, seasoned, then passed out to the citizens. Its hooves and horns were carved into dice and jewelry.

And then there was its hide — the best part, the bee’s knees, the cat’s pajamas, the ne plus ultra of its ruminant soul, the Giradelli of mammal casings, a Coltrane solo of fresh leather.

Before the bull’s carcass was dismembered, it was carefully skinned, then stretched and scraped, and dried in the sun. When dry, it was sewn back together, retaining (roughly) its bovine shape. An opening was left at the neck, and the whole thing was filled with wine and stitched up tight around a spout. From this enormous bull-balloon splashed the first magical streams of wine. The people lined up for their communion with the god of the grape. They drank the skin dry, refilled it, drank it dry again. This went on for some time, until the celebrants were sufficiently sloshed, and the Dionysia broke free of its ritualized constraints and flooded into the city, filling it with song, dance, and freewheeling sex.

Not one bit of this sounds like it has anything to do with sports, does it? Wasn’t this document, before it turned into a verbose history lesson, supposed to be about how sports were spawned by intoxicating beverages?
Fine. Here you go.

Once the Dionysia was chugging ahead under its own besotted power, the bull’s skin was filled one last time with wine, but this time the spout was tossed and the hole sewn shut. The bloated, sloshing, bull-shaped sack was rolled to the center of a field and slathered with olive oil to make it slippery. Celebrants gathered around it, and commenced a game, sort of like keep-away crossed with king of the hill. The sack was crawled on, rolled around, held aloft, and tossed about. After a proscribed span of time passed, the person in sole possession of the hide was declared the winner. It is unknown what, if any, prize the winner received.

Here’s a thought experiment. Give it a go.

Imagine the natural tendency we humans have to form groups. Imagine our innate ability to cooperate (when the mood suits us). Imagine centuries of the bull-sack game, and how the passing of time would surely affect its dynamics. Imagine how when something is repeated often enough is begins to adopt its own structure.

Imagine soccer.

Better yet, imagine football, or rugby.

Shrink the wine sack. Form a group. Corral the chaos with a handful of simple rules. Invite your friends to watch. When they see something exciting they might cheer. Imagine the moment when you become so adept at this ancient ritual, this loving, joyous, burst of tipsy spirituality, that you become known for your abilities. You become a specialist. Then some more people do, and the ritual/game is now so fun to watch you attract a crowd that wants nothing more than to bear witness while your strut your stuff.

This weekend, when you and your friends gather in front of the TV to watch one group of people keep a small wine skin away from another group of people, and you pop the top on a beer, or knock back a tequila shot when the home team does something incredible, watch that wine skin (we’ll call it a “ball”, one letter shy of “bull”) and remember.

Our sports aren’t sacred. They aren’t acts of communion with Mystery.
What they are, when they elevate us and make us cheer, is a reminder of how we look nothing like, and exactly like, those who have come before. Trying to rid sports of alcohol is silly and pointless. You can’t have one without the other (or maybe you can, which would explain synchronized swimming, but that’s another story).

Spectator sports are, at their most primal, an echo, reverberating out of the past, of a time when alcohol meant something more than happy hour.

—Richard English


This article goes into detail about the history of the ancient greek's and their wine celebration. They would every November, bring out the previous year's wine stash. They would start a celebration lasting several days. After a bit he suggests that modern sport came from those events.

I do believe this article will help me in my research. It will at least give me some other topics to search with. I am trying to find more about the history of drinking and sports, yet most has to do with the shenanigans that tend to happen with people who drink too much while attending an event. This seems to have some credible information that I plan on checking against some more factual works.

Source Annotation 4: Collins, Tony & Vamplew, Wray; Mud, Sweat and Beers: A Cultural History of Sport and Alcohol

This is only a review by Andrew McNeill. It's a full book that I haven't checked out yet.

"Football is a fascination of the devil and a twin sister of the drink system", an Anglican vicar declared in 1893. The authors of this useful monograph concede that he was half right: football, and sport more generally, has always enjoyed a mutually supportive relationship with drinking. There was never a time when the two activities existed entirely separately. Most sporting trophies are, after all, cups the original idea of which was to facilitate the alcoholic celebrations of the victor.

In Britain, pubs and publicans were central to the early development of sport just as today sport is central to the marketing strategies of many of the major drinks companies. By the C16th the ale house was already well established as the main arena for staging skittles, quoits, bowls, wrestling, tennis, cricket and a large number of events involving animals, such as cock-fighting. To attract the crowds, the publican became the main promoter of sports, arranging matches, providing the prize money and being the bookmaker.

No sports had closer associations with the pub than prizefighting and cricket. Publicans were the principal promoters, stagers and administrators of prizefighting, and many fighters were publicans in waiting, taking up a tenancy of a pub when they retired. As the authors point out, if the violence of the sport did not do for them, alcoholism often did.

The origins of cricket, too, were inseparable from drinking places. The first known publication of the laws of the game was the 1755 `New Articles of the Game of Cricket', sub-titled `Particularly that of the Star and Garter in Pall Mall'. The support of the old brewing families for cricket and horse racing in the C19th was a precursor of modern alcohol sports sponsorship.

In view of their special importance to the marketing strategies of contemporary alcohol companies, - as the authors conclude, sport, football in particular, offers a unique avenue for the drinks industry to reach its most lucrative target audience of young males - it is perhaps an oddity that unlike many other sports, soccer and rugby were not children of the drinking house, originating in the public schools.
Thus, rather than football being an adjunct of the pub, the pub almost became an adjunct of football. In the earliest days of the modern, professional game, licensees and breweries provided frequent updates of matches in progress to ensure that football would attract customers rather than by providing an alternative pursuit, taking them away – an approach even more evident now than it was then.

Sport's importance to the marketing of alcohol, beer in particular, was shown most strikingly by the role played by the brewers in financing the 'football boom' of the 1890s and early 1900s. The huge growth in crowds spurred by the formation of the Football League in 1888 meant that many clubs needed substantial capital investment to improve their grounds. The financial support of the breweries was crucial. Aston Villa, Barnsley, Watford, Liverpool, Manchester United, West Bromwich Albion, Oldham Athletic, Wolverhampton Wanderers are all examples of clubs which depended on backing from the local brewer to finance their expansion during this period, and later, during the depression of the 1930s, to stay afloat. Hard economic calculation no doubt played its part, but brewers could also act from sentiment, being supporters in the sense of fans as well as bankers.

Of course, temperance campaigners opposed the many connections between alcohol and sport. They tried to develop non-alcoholic sporting alternatives, and objected to drinking by athletes and also to alcohol advertising which fostered the idea that alcohol improved sporting performance. Ironically, in view of the deep, mutually supportive relationship that developed between alcohol and football, both William MacGregor, the founder of the Football League, and C.E. Sutcliffe, its first Secretary, were committed teetotallers. Other teetotallers included Charles Clegg, Sheffield Wednesday's chairman and Arnold Hills, who created a works team that later became West Ham United. Hills once offered to clear the club's debts if it picked only teetotallers in the team. Under Clegg the Sheffield Wednesday board took a dim view of any player whose drinking or visits to pubs were deemed inappropriate, and there was a pretty restricted view of what was appropriate.. But generally, temperance and non-temperance people achieved a kind of peaceful co-existence for the good of the game.

The book also examines the influence of alcohol on the fans and on sportsmen. The chapter on alcohol and sports practitioners includes some history of their attitudes towards alcohol and the drinking practices of sportsmen, some information on modern scientific findings on the impact of alcohol on sporting performance and a discussion of drinking problems in sportsmen, particularly footballers.

As far as drinking by fans is concerned, the authors are keen to debunk the notion that alcohol is a cause of football violence and hooliganism. Leaning mainly on a research report produced for the alcohol industry, they conclude that alcohol was never more than a scapegoat. They are particularly offended by the double standard whereby drinking, they say, is less likely to be subject to draconian restrictions at sports events popular with the middle rather than the working classes. They complain that the Sporting Events (Control of Alcohol etc) Act of 1985 was misnamed as it was directed entirely at working class soccer and made no reference to any other sport. The authors' argument here is not altogether consistent. They may be right in saying that professional darts proves that the consumption of even vast quantities of alcohol does not necessarily result in crowd violence, but these crowds, whose drinking is on their own account unrestricted, are hardly drawn from the middle classes.

But then consistency is not the authors' strong point. They assert that the real cause of English football hooliganism was political rather than alcoholic. They invent an entity called `the English Empire' and suggest that its decline from the mid-1950s caused an upsurge of chauvinism and racism which took expression on the football terrace. Alcohol was no more than a useful pretext for the Thatcher government which, despite sharing the nationalistic and xenophobic world-view of the football hooligans, was determined to repress them because they were working class.

It is a shame that this convoluted and politically inspired rubbish, unworthy of a serious academic study, discredits a book which would otherwise have been a perfectly good introduction to the subject.


My understanding of this book is a bit about the history of sports and alcohol. From what I gather they were never seperate at anytime in our history. This is kind of what I thought, but I hadn't determined if that's a fact yet. Hopefully this book will help me with that.

Source Annotation 3: Johnson, William Oscar "Sports and suds; the beer business and the sports world have brewed up a potent partnership."

Full Text :COPYRIGHT 1988 Time, Inc.
YOU CAN PUT IT EITHER WAY. IT'S BEER, beer, beer that makes you want to cheer. Or: It's cheer, cheer, cheer that makes you want a beer. No matter which, you have spoken the one great truth about beer in the U.S. in the waning years of the 20th century: Nothing loves suds like a sports fan loves suds.
This is an indelible fact of contemporary American anthropology. It is a matter of demographic statistics. It is blessed chapter and verse in U.S. brewers' bibles of marketing and advertising. It is the reason that almost every kind of sporting event -- from a rinky-dink hometown road race to the Olympic Games -- is played out, as often as not, in an environment of beer slogans, beer signs, beer songs and beer salesmanship. And it is the cause of some ugly social problems, which leads some to wonder just what kind of cultural hypocrisy is going on when Americans relentlessly insist on immersing sport -- our most wholesome, most admired, even (sometimes) most heroic institution -- in a sea of intoxicating drink.
Whatever angle you view it from, beer and sport have come to be as inseparable in the American lexicon as mom and apple pie, God and country, ham and eggs, Jack and Jill and, of course, suds and Spuds. This wasn't always so. Beer has come a long way, through ferment of time and foam of tide, to get to its ringside seat as U.S. sport's No. 1 corporate team sponsor, media advertiser, event underwriter, cheerleader, troublemaker, thirst quencher and life-support system. THE THREE-HEADED BEER WHEN CONSUMED IN THE BALLPARKS, STADIUMS AND ARENAS OF America in the 1980s, beer means three things: profit, fun and trouble. Unfortunately, you can't have the first two without the third, and there lies the dilemma.
Take the Cincinnati Reds baseball club, that venerable 19th-century institution residing in one of the world's great brewing cities. Last season the Reds sold 12,610 half-barrels and 35,365 cases of beer, which works out to nearly a pint for every man, woman and child among the two million plus who attended the 81 Reds games played in Riverfront Stadium. Total sales, after taxes, for beer (and a tiny bit of liquor) came to $4,635,514. Profit? As with nearly all professional teams, the ball club shares the revenues with stadium concessionaires; the Reds get 33% (and give 10% to the city), meaning a neat take of $1,006,000 plus for the club.
And fun? Well, there's the annual and hugely popular Relief Pitcher Night (the first 20,000 people through the turnstiles get free beer pitchers with four tumblers inside) sponsored by sturdy old Hudepohl-Schoenling beer, which is made by the last of the 36 breweries that produced suds in Cincinnati before Prohibition.
And trouble? A few months ago, on April 30, 41,032 baseball fans produced one of sport's most memorable mass temper tantrums, turning Riverfront Stadium into a garbage dump and forcing an umpire to flee the field. Later, it was quite properly pointed out that the catalyst for the riot was not a gang of beer-soaked louts but an enraged Pete Rose, who was presumably dead sober. Nevertheless, beer deserved its share of the blame: the melee happened in the ninth inning, when the foam had been flowing for hours (even though the taps were shut off at the top of the ninth), and the crowd's reaction was far out of character for an old baseball town where the fans have been described by A. Bartlett Giamatti, president of the National League, as ''enormously knowledgeable and historically civil.''
Usually the trouble with beer is neither so massive nor so melodramatic. A short-list compendium of complaints drawn from an unscientific poll of fans produced these facts: 1) Everyone who had ever been a spectator at a sporting event of any kind had, at one time or another, experienced the bellowing of obscenities, racial or religious epithets (not always bellowed), abusive sexual remarks to women in the vicinity, fistfights between strangers and fistfights between friends. 2) Some people (about one third) had suffered such ugly experiences as having beer spilled on them by accident; having beer poured on them on purpose; witnessing vomiting in nearby seats, urinating in the aisles and indecent exposure; receiving insults from a drunk, blows from a drunk, spit from a drunk, as well as receiving insults from abusive ushers who had been asked to reprimand abusive drunks. 3) Many (about three quarters) noted that the beer sold at American sporting events almost always seems to taste so warm and weak that it is barely drinkable. 4) Most agreed that it was hard to understand how anyone could stomach enough of such swill to get drunk. 5) About half said that bad as it usually is, beer at a ball game is still enough of a pleasure that it is probably worth the trouble it creates. 6) The other half said probably not. BEER THROUGH THE AGES NO ONE KNOWS EXACTLY WHEN BEER FIRST SLAKED MAN'S THIRST, but it is the world's oldest alcoholic drink and was invented independently again and again by widely separated ancient races -- Incas, Egyptians, Babylonians, Hebrews.
In 1777, Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, said: ''My people must drink beer. His majesty was brought up on beer and so were his officers and soldiers. Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished on beer, and the King does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be depended on to endure hardships or to beat the enemies.''
Along that same line, a 1909 ad for Budweiser, under the headline BALL PLAYERS USE BEER IN TRAINING, quoted C.H. Ebbetts, president of the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, describing an ideal meal for his team: ''We would request a simple dinner with light beer as that is our idea of a proper drink for athletes in training.''
And just this past April that eminent nutritionist and philosopher Whitey Herzog of the St. Louis Cardinals said something amazingly similar after an epidemic of pulled muscles had hit his pitching staff: ''If they'd eat a blasted steak or drink a blasted beer once in a while, maybe their muscles wouldn't keep ripping off their rib cages. Grover Cleveland Alexander never pulled rib muscles. Paul Waner never did and neither did Babe Ruth. Babe lived on hot dogs and beer. Sometimes that might be good for you.'' BEER BARONS & BALL CLUBS -- CHRIS VON DER AHE OF ST. LOUIS WAS A BEER-AND-BASEBALL baron whose fascination with the national pastime was never so much with the game itself as with the drinking that went on around it. In the late 1870s von der Ahe noted that his saloon did particularly good business when the St. Louis Brown Stockings were in town, and around 1880 he decided he should sell beer direct to the fans at the game. Alas, he was not allowed in the park. In 1881, von der Ahe bought a piece of the Browns -- mainly so he could sell beer inside the park.
Von der Ahe's ballpark -- the original Sportsman's Park in St. Louis -- was a garish place featuring a shoot-the-chute amusement ride in rightfield and a three-eighths-of-a-mile horse track around the inside of the park, encircling the ballfield. He was roundly hated by other baseball owners for his showy, profligate ways. To their glee, he made a number of terrible real estate investments, went through a scandalous divorce and ultimately was ruined for good when a fire destroyed his ballpark, injuring several fans, in April 1898. He was forced to sell the Browns for a pittance and disappeared from the public eye. On June 5, 1913, von der Ahe died at the age of 61 of cirrhosis of the liver. A St. Louis Post-Dispatch headline called him a MAN WHO PUT ST. LOUIS ON MAP. -- Jacob Ruppert was a credit to baseball, beer and the human race in general. He was a New York socialite, a dilettante of good taste and eclectic interests. He was a breeder of racehorses and Saint Bernards, a yachtsman, and a collector of jade, porcelain, Indian artifacts, rare books and monkeys. He was also a four-term U.S. congressman from Manhattan.
Born in 1867 to a family already rich from the yeasty proceeds of the Ruppert Brewery, he grew up in the best of protected worlds -- yet somehow he became a baseball fanatic, his club being the Giants. He scorned the pathetic Yankees, but when the team came up for sale in the winter of 1915, Ruppert jumped to buy. The rest is magnificent history. He finagled the purchase of Babe Ruth from the inept Boston Red Sox; the addition of the Bambino to the Yankee roster was announced on Jan. 5, 1920, exactly 11 days before Prohibition banned all sales of alcohol in the U.S. In the very years when his mighty brewery was reduced to turning out near beer, the indomitable Ruppert assembled a brilliant baseball team, housed it in a new stadium that knew no equal, and went on to win 10 American League pennants and seven World Series in the 24 years he owned the Yankees. It all ended with his peaceful death in bed in 1939 at the age of 71. -- August A. Busch Jr. ushered the partnership of beer and baseball into the modern age. In 1953 the citizens of St. Louis were concerned that the Cardinals -- descendants of von der Ahe's Browns - - might fly the coop. The Cards' owner, Fred Saigh, a lawyer, had been found guilty of income tax evasion, and baseball commissioner Ford Frick insisted that he sell the club. Busch, president of the Anheuser-Busch brewery, stepped in with $3.75 million to buy the team and save the day. In general, he was lauded for this great civic gesture, but the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, sensing a double-edged motive, editorialized on Feb. 21, 1953: ''Mr. Busch gives every evidence that he thinks of the Cardinals as a baseball club and not as a device for selling beer. . . . There is a certain affinity between beer and baseball which nobody need deny. . . . It would be a mistake to forget that the record of his new property will be written not in bottles but in the box score.''
Well, Gussie didn't forget: There were plenty of winning box scores. But the bottles weren't totally overlooked. In an interview in The Sporting News in 1978, the 25th anniversary of his purchase of the Cardinals, Busch summed up the team's performance this way: ''Even though we've had losing seasons on the balance-sheet in recent years, the brewery is still ahead and so am I. We've both gained from the time we paid Saigh $3,750,000 for the Cardinals. The brewery's sales have gone up from fewer than 6,000,000 barrels a year to more than 35,000,000 now, partly because of our baseball association.''
Since that interview, the number of Anheuser-Busch barrels sold has more than doubled, and that, certainly, is due in part to the fact that every Cardinals home game for years and years has been a nearly nonstop Budweiser commercial, capped, of course, by Gussie's 1987 World Series rides through the outfield with the Anheuser-Busch Clydesdales. Here is a man who knows how to keep his eye on the ball -- and his other eye on the bottles. OF SUDS AND SPUDS THE MARKETING OF BEER THROUGH THE USE OF CUTE DOGS IS NOT an ancient and honorable tradition.
For most of its first 5,000 or so years on earth, beer was not marketed at all; it was merely scarfed down within a very short distance of where it was brewed. Then came all sorts of 19th- and 20th-century innovations and advancements. The railroads spread across the land. Then came refrigeration, then pasteurization, then flickering black-and-white television shows -- like the Pabst Blue Ribbon Bouts -- then four-color television with glitz events like the Super Bowl, then the invention of Miller Lite beer, then the belated invention of Bud Light. . . . Somehow all of that led, with perverse and mysterious inevitability, to Super Bowl Sunday 1987, when a female bull terrier with the inexplicable and decidedly unmarketable name of Honey Tree Evil Eye made her national television debut under the alias Spuds MacKenzie.
Alas, there is no one at Anheuser-Busch or anywhere else in the brewing industry who purports to understand what made this particular mutt such a great beer salesman. When confronted with the question ''Why Spuds?'' Michael Roarty, 59, a 35-year veteran of the company and for the past 11 years executive vice-president and director of marketing, just shakes his head and tells the truth: ''Some guy in our Chicago agency drew a rough sketch of a dog called the Party Animal, for a Bud Light poster. That meant we had to find a real dog that looked like his drawing. That meant Spuds. Orders for the poster of this strange-looking dog were monumental. We still can't explain it. It's like everything else in advertising. You just hope you get it right, but you never know for sure.''
Since Spuds first went on the air during the '87 Super Bowl, she has appeared in a dozen different commercials. Bud Light's sales rose 21% in 1987, by volume the biggest jump of any brand in the business. BEYOND THE SMOKESTACK HAVING REACHED THIS PINNACLE OF BUSINESS GENIUS AND MARketing sophistication, that point where we are able to send a dog out to sell beer to 87 million sports fans without knowing why it works, perhaps it's time to report in more detail exactly how this came to pass.
The marketing of beer through indirect and unexpected means is not entirely new. The more enterprising brewers in the old days used to commission songs about their beer, then send out the sheet music to local taverns for plinking and singing by the omnipresent piano player. This produced such hits as Under the Anheuser Bush, The Budweiser Rag and Budweiser's a Friend of Mine. But for the most part, brewers favored the stodgy and the obvious when it came to marketing beer: posters, coasters, billboards and, of course, the oldest and most reliable advertising of all -- word of mouth.
Alan Easton, 54, vice-president for corporate affairs of the Miller Brewing Company, sums up beer marketing during the first two thirds of the century like this: ''The beer barons of America were staggeringly small thinkers. If you asked one of them, 'Who is it that consumes your beer?' he woul d reply, 'The guys who buy it, who else?' They had no idea about market research or much of anything else that went on beyond the shadow of their own smokestacks. Most breweries were family businesses satisfied to sell enough beer to keep the baron and his family consistently provided with the enormously luxurious life they had grown accustomed to. This narrow-minded mentality prevailed in the U.S. brewing business right through the 1960s.''
Once in a while a brewer tried something new -- sometimes with disastrous results. In the 1950s the Piel Brothers Brewery of Brooklyn hired the hilariously low-key radio comedy team of Bob and Ray to do a series of commercials as the hilariously low-key brewer brothers Bert and Harry Piel. The ads ran for five years and generated massive popular admiration. The result? Piels beer sales went down and down and down, until the company finally was sold in 1963. What happened? Jerry Steinman, publisher of the newsletter beer marketer's Insights, explains: ''Unfortunately, the beer itself was not very good. Because of the great ads, all kinds of people bought it for the first time, hated it and spread the news everywhere about how awful it was. It was a case of terrible word of mouth caused by a wonderful ad campaign.''
Advertising beer on radio and television didn't ordinarily lead to such catastrophic results, but neither was it the fine-honed marketing art it is today. Robert S. Weinberg, a former Anheuser- Busch vice-president who is now a professor of marketing management at Washington University, recalls, ''In the '50s and '60s most of the beer ad campaigns on television either were silly comic things like Hamm's beer bear or they were deadly serious ego trips for the brewer that pontificated about excellence and fineness and quality. It was not until Philip Morris bought Miller that really sophisticated marketing programs for beer came into being. Nothing has been the same in the beer business since.''
Philip Morris, the tobacco conglomerate, completed acquisition of the lackluster Milwaukee brewery in 1970. Miller was then ranked seventh in the industry, far behind the top three -- Anheuser-Busch, Schlitz and Pabst -- and was also trailing Coors, Schaefer and Falstaff. Soon after that, Philip Morris unleashed a high-powered marketing juggernaut that had been primed and perfected in the brutal cigarette-brand wars of the 1960s. Says Miller veep Easton, ''Even our most heated competitors would agree that we were responsible for the marketing revolution in the beer business. We introduced them to segmented markets, target marketing, to image-oriented selling. We knew how to translate our products into media in a way that made the consumer feel good about himself when he bought them. The beer people hadn't a clue about this sort of thing until Philip Morris bought Miller.''
Although there had always been some beer advertising on TV sports programs, American breweries really hadn't taken full advantage of the sales clout the medium offered. Chrysler had recently overtaken Gillette as the No. 1 TV-sports advertiser. But the great truth about beer in the U.S. in the early 1970s was the same as the great truth today:
Beer drinkers and sports fans are one and the same -- indivisible, inseparable, identical! No one drinks more beer than a sports fan, and no one likes sports more than a beer drinker.
Statistical curves indicate that the age of maximum beer consumption and the age of maximum sports involvement are the same, both for men and for women. Peak beer-consuming years are 18 to 29, as are the peak sports-consuming years -- for both participants and spectators. Among males 18 to 34, there is a core group of drinkers whose consumption is so phenomenal that even though they make up only 20% of the beer-drinking population, they consume an estimated 70% of all beer drunk in this country. Though the industry doesn't make a public point of it, these supersudsers are obviously an enormously important audience -- and most easily reached with sports-associated salesmanship.
As Miller's Easton says, ''Once you're into the demographics of sports, you are also into the total demographics of beer drinking. You get them all, from the couch-potato spectator to the high- action, participating jocks -- joggers, softball players, bowlers. Even at a very high price, it is an extremely cost-efficient buy. TV sports and beer commercials are a perfect marriage.'' So Miller plunged deeply into TV sports and by the late 1970s was buying more than half of all beer- commercial time on network sports programming. The company had introduced Miller Lite beer in 1974 and had found it a runaway success with the wildly growing population of fitness freaks. (In the first year that Miller Lite appeared, the so-called light beers -- 96 calories compared with about 150 in regular beers -- held an airy 1.08% of the market, virtually all of it Miller Lite; in 1987, the light share was 24.58%.) By 1977, Miller had vaulted from seventh to second place among U.S. brewers and was threatening the longtime leader, Anheuser-Busch.
And that meant a fierce, frothing beer war was ahead, for A-B -- as Anheuser-Busch is oh-so- respectfully nicknamed in the beer biz -- had never been one of those moldy old breweries afraid to step beyond its smokestack shadow. Far from it. THE KING, INC. LET'S START BY DECLARING THE OBVIOUS: MILLER BREWING DID not win that war, not by a long shot. At this moment, no company in the world is selling more beer than Anheuser-Busch. A-B, which is also involved in a variety of other products and enterprises -- including baker's yeast, snack food, amusement parks, turf farming and railroad car repair, to name a few -- ranked 47th on the latest Fortune 500 list, with $8.25 billion in sales. It has been the No. 1 brewery in the U.S. every year since 1957. In 1987, A-B sold 76.1 million barrels of beer, an impressive 5.2% increase over the previous year in a flat national beer market. This gave A-B an unprecedented 40% share of the American market. Miller was second with 39.3 million barrels, up 1.4% to give it a 20.7% share of the U.S. market, with the other breweries following far behind (see chart page 75).
A-B is no late-fermenting, newfangled, 20th-century M.B.A.'s dream. It has been a hard-selling, territory-grabbing company since the Civil War. In 1861, Adolphus Busch married the daughter of Eberhard Anheuser, a St. Louis soapmaker-turned-brewer. Three years later Busch went to work for his father-in-law and by 1874 he was a full partner and obsessed with the idea of selling Anheuser- Busch beer everywhere. In 1876 he created the brand Budweiser (a name derived from Budweis, a town in Bohemia), and it became America's first nationally marketed beer. Before the advent of pasteurization, beer would go bad if not kept cold. Adolphus first created a network of railside icehouses to cool the beer in his freight cars, then took the logical next step and launched a fleet of railcars that were themselves refrigerated.
The brainy brewer had determined that quality and consistency of product were the keys to selling an alien beer to drinkers used to consuming only local brews. Thus, for Budweiser he insisted on a traditional, time-consuming method of brewing that used high-grade barley, hops and rice, and guaranteed a constant quality of beer -- something not so easy to achieve in the volatile and delicate chemistry of beermaking.
Adolphus, who was as good at writing hyperbolic copy as he was at brewing beer, declared in his ads that Budweiser represented ''the very highest point known to the art of modern brewing.'' He promoted his beer with such giveaway items as pretty little pocketknives with corkscrews for opening the corked beer bottles of the day. With his combination of brewing and marketing genius, Busch led the company until his death in 1913. By then Budweiser was the biggest-selling beer in the world, with a volume of 1.5 million barrels a year.
Other Busches -- August A. Sr., Adolphus III, August A. Jr. and, now, August A. III -- have taken over since then and have dealt with war, Prohibition, the Depression, and recession; with the beer b attles of the '50s against its chief competitor, Schlitz; and with the explosive growth of foreign imports; to say nothing of keeping up with the vast and fast-changing terrain of marketing in a fiercely competitive, TV-dominated age. All the A. Busches who have led A-B through the 20th century have achieved much success. However, even genius goes stale. In 1974, when young August III was promoted to president at the age of 37, his father, August Jr., had been head of the company for 28 long years, and Gussie had, clearly, failed to keep up with the times. Says Weinberg, who had served as A-B veep several years before August III replaced August Jr., ''Anheuser-Busch was a $700 million company that was run like a corner grocery store.''
In contrast, Miller, powered by Philip Morris money and moxie, was going strong, building new breweries, introducing new brands. And Miller rode roughshod over all competition when it came to bright, intelligent mass-media marketing -- particularly with its funny, macho Miller Lite commercials, which created new careers for a whole contingent of over-the-hill jocks, coaches, comedians and thriller writers.
Mike Roarty, who was made director of A-B's troubled beer-marketing department in 1977, says, ''We had to dig ourselves out of a deep hole. They had Miller Lite; we didn't have a light beer at all. We were doing 36 million barrels to their 24 million, but we had a strike in 1976 and production was screwed up. We had to get our act together.''
August III and Roarty decided the time had come to start selling Budweiser and other A-B brands on network TV sports programs, which, amazingly enough, they had done rarely in the past. ''We went to the networks and innocently explained that since we had come to realize that it was such an efficient buy, we'd really like to get into a lot of network sports,'' Roarty recalls. ''They looked at us like we had just come to town on a bus, and they said, 'Where have you been? We've been sold-out for years!' It was true: Miller had something like 70% of all network TV sports at the time. We just had to wait until things opened up. It was very slow in coming, but we persisted.''
In the years since, A-B has effectively outpersisted all competitors in the brewing field, even surpassing Miller, in buying time on network sports shows. As of today, the two largest brewing companies in the U.S. hold what amounts to a near monopoly (despite some inroads by Stroh and Coors) on beer commercials run during all major league sporting events shown on network TV. Much of this is done through ''exclusivity clauses,'' which means not only that A-B and/or Miller are the exclusive advertisers of beer on these programs but also that, generally, the Big Two have the right to renew the sponsorships under the same terms before other beer companies get a crack. Some exclusivity contracts are shared by A-B and Miller, such as Monday Night Football on ABC; others are absolutely exclusive, such as the NBA on CBS, on which Miller products are the only beers advertised. Such exclusivity clauses for A-B and Miller exist in most every major sport from bowling to the Olympics (see chart page 80). In addition, A-B has been the exclusive beer advertiser for ESPN since that network's inception in 1979. This means that, with a limited number of exceptions (such as events sponsored and produced by other beer companies), if there's a beer commercial on ESPN, it's for an A-B beer.
Competing brewers have complained about being frozen out. Roger Fridholm, 47, president of the Stroh Brewery, now the No. 3 company in the country, says of A-B's ESPN deal, ''It's sort of a barrier to purchase. If we want to buy time, ESPN has to offer it at a comparable price to Anheuser- Busch first.'' In 1985 Stroh filed a complaint with the Justice Department, charging restraint of trade in the Big Two's exclusivity deals with TV. However, Justice Department lawyers ruled that there was nothing illegal in the arrangement.
A-B now invests two thirds of its $344 million advertising budget in sports-related areas and, according to Arbitron's Broadcast Advertisers Reports, spends $109,244,800 for advertising on the three major networks' sports telecasts. Says Roarty, ''We didn't go into sports in a big way until 1977, but since then we have jumped up from selling 22 percent of the national beer market to 40 percent -- and we are still rising. We think that came about largely because of our concentration on sports -- plus, of course, the quality and consistency of our product.''
Whatever it is, the King of Beers thoroughly wiped out Miller's threat to A-B's No. 1 position -- indeed, Miller is now working desperately to save its falling High Life brand even as its Genuine Draft climbs and Miller Lite holds its own. At the same time, A-B steamrolled dozens of brewers far smaller than Miller. F.X. Matt II, 55, is president of his family's century-old brewery in Utica, N.Y. Matt brands include Utica Club, Saranac, Matt Premium and Matt's Light, among others. The company also does contract brewing for some of the innovative young East Coast microbreweries that produce a wide selection of interesting and sophisticated brews. F.X. Matt is president of the Brewers Association of America, an organization of 62 mostly small breweries, all of which have been affected in one way or another by the ever-growing domination of you know who.
''A-B has things its own way, and with that kind of concentration of power, bad things can happen,'' says Matt. ''The federal regulators are afraid of them, afraid of their lawyers. Nobody should have unlimited power, but they are getting it. All sports are dominated by Mr. Big, all television, all markets. We need a diversity of breweries, and the renaissance of the small ones is a very nice phenomenon. But I'm afraid that the future holds simply more and more Budweiser and less and less of everything else.''
Anheuser-Busch has indeed moved into a stage of unprecedented domination among the world's brewers. There's even talk around A-B headquarters of the day, perhaps only four or five years off, when the company will sell fully 50% of all the beer consumed in the U.S. Budweiser currently outsells every other brand in the world, is on sale in 37 countries and, according to Impact International, outsells Kirin -- globally the second-place brew -- by a 2.4-to-1 margin. Spuds MacKenzie continues to sell more and more barrels of Bud Light, even though Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina has accused A-B of trying to target youthful drinkers through promotions that featured a stuffed-animal Spuds, a toy Spuds and Spuds-embossed T-shirts.
Meanwhile, Anheuser-Busch has sponsorship associations (which secure the use of local TV and radio and ballpark billboards for advertising, brand promotion and merchandising tie-ins) with all 24 U.S.-based major league baseball teams, 20 of 28 NFL teams and more than 300 college sports teams. A-B also has a large number -- Roarty says ''about a thousand'' -- of sponsorships of individual events, competitions and leagues, ranging from the Bud Light Ironman Triathlon World Championship in Hawaii to the Michelob Night Riders cycling circuit to the Carlsberg single-handed round-the-world sailing race. There seems to be no limit to the A-B reach when it comes to stamping the Bud logo on sporting venues -- many of which would probably not survive without it. AFLOAT ON BEER A-B IS NOT ALONE IN ITS SUPPORT OF THE SPORTING NEEDY. AND such support, of course, is motivated by more than altruism: The motive clearly is to enhance the image of the brewery and promote the sale of its beer. Nevertheless, sponsorship by the American brewing industry has done a good job in keeping all manner of tournaments, races, leagues, etc., afloat when they might have sunk -- or never have tried to swim at all.
These events and endeavors range from the minuscule to the monumental. For example, one of Miller's major commitments is a $1 million-a-year contribution to underwrite the 1981-to-1988 operating expenses of the U.S. Olympic Committee's training facilities. But even this effort pales in comparison with the Miller investment in motor sports -- its single largest area of commitment -- which includes sponsorship of teams on every major auto racing circuit. Miller also puts sponsorship money into a sports potpourri that includes tractor pulls, NASTAR ski racing and NBA All-Star balloting, and offers a cool $1 million to anyone on the pro bowlers tour who wins a three- tournament parlay called the Lite Slam.
The Labatt Brewing Company of Toronto -- which owns 45% of the Blue Jays as well as marketing and TV rights to the Montreal Expos and the Canada Cup, and Canadian TV rights to Major League Baseball and the NFL -- could be called the A-B of Canada (indeed, the company brews Bud and Bud Light in Canada). Labatt was a major sponsor of the '88 Winter Games; its sponsorship included a widely admired project that paid for all parents of Canada's 149-member Olympic team to come see their offspring compete in Calgary. First budgeted at less than $10 million Canadian, the final bill for Labatt's total Olympic commitment reportedly came to nearly $25 million. Undaunted, the company is now putting up substantial money for a harness-racing series called the Ontario Sires Stakes.
Other major brewers have recently gotten into the act as well. G. Heileman, the fourth-largest brewing company in the country and maker of such brands as Old Style, Colt 45, and Carling, put up a reported $6 million in April to sponsor the Chicago marathon -- now the Old Style Marathon. Stroh sponsors professional boxing tournaments, the NHL's ''power rating'' statistics program and a variety of motor sports teams. And Coors is big in softball, underwrites rodeos and the National Western Stock Show and sponsors the premier cycling event in the U.S., the Coors International Bicycle Classic.
With the big guys muscling in on all the major events, microbrewers are pretty much left with microsports. F.X. Matt sponsors the Matt's Winter Classic Arm Wrestling Championships. The Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. of Chico, Calif., sponsored the Chico Criterium bicycle race until last year, when Coors moved in with more money and bought the event. Sierra Nevada now settles for the Wildflower Classic Century bike ride (not race), as well as kayak races and Ultimate Frisbee competitions, all in California. At the even tinier San Francisco Brewing Co. -- which sponsors a squash tournament -- Allan Paul, founder and brewmaster, says of the sporting monopoly held by the largest brewers, ''On the one hand, I'm very unhappy to see the stakes so high that the underdog can't even get in the race. On the other hand, I'm glad the major breweries are supporting sports. I may not recommend their beer, but they're into a good cause.'' THERE'S TROUBLE BREWING THERE IS A SCHOOL OF THOUGHT, HOWEVER, THAT ARGUES VEHEmently that sport is not a proper area for brewer sponsorship. To many physicians, psychologists and social critics our incessant blending of intoxicating drink with athletic excellence is hypocritical, irresponsible and hazardous to the nation's health. Dr. Jay Caldwell, director of the Alaska Sports Medicine Clinic, wrote a scathing column last August in the Anchorage Daily News. After he decried the fact that the Alaska Midnight Sun Triathlon Championship had been summarily rechristened the Bud Light Triathlon, he fired away: ''For blatant, and apparently acceptable, commercial exploitation of our youth by drug merchants, this even takes first prize. . . . Lest we forget, alcohol is the No. 1 drug of abuse in the United States. . . . there are about 13 million alcoholics in this country and over 3 million of them are in the 14-17 age group. . . . I worry about the cozy connection between alcohol and sport. Beer merchants have very effectively linked the two. They have made it seem perfectly natural for an intoxicating drug to be consumed following a pleasant sporting activity. Through sponsorship of events such as a triathlon, beer comes to share the luster of healthy athleticism.''
Dr. William J. Beausay, president of the Academy for Sports Psychology International in Columbus, Ohio, says, ''It's really paradoxic that alcohol and all that it stands for should be associated with excellent athletic performance. You cannot have one and the other at the same time. If you're going to perform as a top-grade athlete, you have to cut out alcohol.''
In Austria, laws prohibit all public references at sporting events to ''alcoholic beverages, tobacco, pharmaceutical products, political parties and religious communities'' -- in that order. Ironically, in a country that brews some of the most beautiful beer in the world, the very idea of a brewery involved with sports is considered appalling. ''We could never think of it,'' huffs Dr. Klaus Leistner, director of the Austrian ski federation. ''Sports and alcohol should never be placed together.''
Cynical, ironic, immoral, hypocritical as it may be, the juxtaposition of beer and sports in the U.S. is often simply a matter of cold business pragmatism. As Bob Whitsitt, president of the Seattle SuperSonics, puts it: ''We would be seriously hurt without beer companies as sponsors. It is a sensitive issue because you need the money, but you don't want to be seen as promoting the idea that people come to our games, get drunk and drive home. We'd be foolish to say we don't want a beer sponsor on moral grounds, but at the same time that doesn't mean we encourage 21-year-olds to down a case. We do make sure that our players are out in the community talking about the dangers of alcohol and drugs. That helps.'' MYTHS, MEN & BEER FOUR ACADEMICIANS UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE AAA FOUNDAtion for Traffic Safety recently compiled a study about beer commercials entitled Myths, Men & Beer. They analyzed the content of 40 such commercials broadcast on network television during February and March 1987. Their major concern was the effect of these messages on children, because as the report says, ''between the ages of two and eighteen, the period in which social learning is most intense, American children see something like 100,000 television commercials for beer.''
The study points out that through exposure to sales pitches for beer, children are given ''a particular view of what it means to be a man,'' as well as particular ''attitudes toward beer drinking and driving.'' According to the report, in the world according to beer commercials, men's work is mostly physical -- ''felling trees, loading hay, welding beams, rounding up horses.'' As for play, the ''men of beer commercials fill their leisure time in two ways: in active pursuits usually conducted in outdoor settings (e.g., boat racing, fishing, camping, sports) and in 'hanging out,' usually in bars.'' The authors point out that some risk or challenge is nearly always involved in beer commercials, even if it is only the risk and challenge of ''good-natured arguments'' in the barroom. And always, in beer-commercial country, the final prize to any man who succeeds in overcoming a risk or mastering a challenge or completing his day's work is -- what else? -- a beer.
The researchers discovered that the men who inhabit beer commercials tend to be a limited and simplistic breed: ''We found no sensitive men . . . nor any thoughtful men, scholarly men, political men, gay men or even complex men.'' Of the women who appear in beer commercials, they are ''largely reduced to the role of admiring onlookers. Men appear to value their group of friends over their female partners, and the women accept this. . . . they become the audience for whom men perform.'' The study summarizes the stereotyped men and women who populate beer commercials as being ''almost laughably anachronistic . . . a peculiar set of figures to offer the young of the 1980s as models of adult females and males.''
On a darker note the authors ask, ''Does the link in beer commercials between masculinity and beer drinking also promote an association between beer drinking and driving? On the basis of the analyses reported here, we conclude that the answer to that question is 'Yes.' '' The study refers to the many beer commercial scenes that associate beer with fast-moving cars, with the excitement of speed, with tests of manhood and with tests of self-control; it says that ''by omitting any references to drinkers' conditions and modes of transportation when leaving the setting where beer is consumed, beer commercials imply that drinking has no consequences or, at least, no consequences that are cause for concern.'' The final recommendation by the authors is tough and uncompromising: ''That the policy permitting the televising of commercials for beer be revised to prohibit such commercials.'' MYTHS, MEN & BUBBA BUBBA SMITH, THE EX-NFL DEFENSIVE END, PLAYED A BEER-COMmercial myth for a while in the celebrated Miller Lite series. In 1977, about a year after he left football because of a ruined knee, Smith was cast as a glowering, lovable, beer-can-ripping giant. Smith told Scott Ostler of the Los Angeles Times that he had been depressed, lonely and in need of work when the Miller people approached him: ''Making those commercials was a joy to me. I told myself I couldn't be doing nothing wrong. It seemed so innocent. . . . Making those commercials, we were a team. It was like football, without the pain.''
Then, in the fall of 1985, Smith went back to his alma mater, Michigan State, and performed as grand marshal of the homecoming parade. ''I was riding in the backseat of this car,'' he said, ''and these people were yelling. But they weren't saying 'Go, State, go!' One side of the street was yelling 'Tastes great!' and the other side was yelling 'Less filling!' It just totally freaked me out. When I got to the stadium, the older folks are yelling 'Kill, Bubba, kill!' but the kids are yelling 'Tastes great! Less filling!' And everyone in the stands is drunk.''
Smith decided he had to quit the Miller Lite team. ''I didn't like the effect I was having on a lot of little people. People in school. When kids start to listen to what you say, you want to tell 'em something that's the truth. . . . Doing those commercials, it's like me telling everyone in school, Hey, it's cool to have a Lite beer. . . . As the years wear on, you got to stop compromising your principles.''
Not everyone feels the same about these commercials, of course. After 10 years as a villainous but essentially faceless offensive lineman in the NFL, Conrad Dobler retired from football and was billed on a 1987 Miller Lite TV commercial as ''Famous Troublemaker.'' His life changed instantly. ''In all of my years in the NFL,'' he writes in his upcoming book, They Call Me Dirty, ''a visit to my hometown of Twentynine Palms, Calif., barely generated enthusiasm among my own family, let alone strangers. But when I visited three months after 'Famous Troublemaker' came out, everyone who saw me wanted an autograph. Men bought me beers. Women offered me sexual favors. . . . It's especially gratifying to be walking down the street or sitting in a restaurant and have people yell 'Tastes great!' so I can yell back 'Less filling!' '' TEAM IN THE STANDS ONCE UPON A TIME, LATE IN THE 19TH CENTURY, SERVING BEER AT baseball games was believed to be every bit as sinful as playing baseball on the Sabbath, or so said the then-omnipotent National League. But that all changed in 1882 with the founding of the American Association, whose teams played on Sunday and whose fans could drink beer. It is a little-known fact that Ladies' Day was introduced to baseball later in the 1880s as, at least in part, an attempt to bring some order and manners to unruly drunken fans. Ladies' Day didn't cure ballpark hooliganism then any more than it would now. But today there is a more modern device for confronting the problem, something called TEAM, which stands for Techniques for Effective Alcohol Management. It is a no-nonsense program for training ballpark, stadium and arena workers -- from parking lot attendants and ticket-sellers to ushers and vendors -- in the fine art of identifying and dealing with drunks. TEAM is now in use in 44 facilities in 37 cities with 15,000 trained employees.
It is an eminently sensible plan which was thought up in 1985 by Jerry Sachs, then president of the Capital Centre in Landover, Md., and developed by a coalition of organizations that includes the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The Capital Centre's TEAM training booklet states, ''In our society alcohol is a desired accompaniment to cultural and sporting events. Our business is entertainment. Part of that business is the promotion and sale of alcohol. . . . It's profitable. Its effects can be fun and uninhibiting. It can be the basis for social interaction and enhance the event experience. But . . . alcohol can be a dangerous drug when abused or mismanaged. The Capital Centre has to balance the sale of alcoholic beverages with a program of responsible action. Training our employees in effective alcohol management will help to: 1) protect our ongoing source of revenue from the sale of alcoholic beverages and 2) limit our liability.''
TEAM involves a four-hour course for stadium employees and includes instruction in distinguishing drunks from presumably normal sports fans and advises employees on how to deal with a potentially obstreperous drinker, counseling courtesy and a low-key, positive approach. This season baseball has turned the TEAM program into a full-fledged public relations campaign, with nationally telecast 30-second spots about ''drinking with responsibility,'' designed to promote safe driving. The campaign is underlined with the slogan ''We want you safe, 'cause we want you back.''
Has it worked? Bryan Burns, the senior vice-president in the baseball commissioner's office, who is in charge of TEAM, says, ''The bottom line is that in the year 1987 we put 52 million people into ballparks, nearly five million more than the previous year, and we also trained 15,000 people who work in our parks -- and the number and severity of alcohol-related incidents went down.'' PERCEPTIONS OF PLEASURE AS THINGS HAVE PROGRESSED, BEER AND SPORTS HAVE COME TO BE something like Siamese twins -- inseparable but clearly facing a complicated existence together. After the Cincinnati incident in April, Giamatti told The New York Times, ''Alcohol is a large part of this; I believe excessive drinking is at the heart of the deteriorating situation. But to think that if one declared prohibition there would no longer be any problems of fan violence is naive. If you turn the ballpark into a maximum-security situation, then you have changed the nature of the event. Not because the event depends on alcohol, but because it depends on the perception that the event is a pleasure.''
True enough. But it doesn't require storm troopers and police dogs to keep our sporting environments (or our perceptions of our sporting environments) pleasant. Nor does it require an absolute ban on alcohol. The vast majority of people at sporting events drink one or two beers -- or no beer at all. And of those who drink more, the great majority are not troublemakers or obscenity-shriekers or fistfighters. What has happened is that a small minority of louts and loonies have been allowed a kind of license in stadiums that they aren't given anywhere else. A drunken man shouting obscenities at the top of his voice over and over again for two consecutive hours in the middle of a crowd that includes women, children and even sober, civilized men is not tolerated in any other public environment in America. Such a foulmouthed misfit would not last long at a sports event either if only ushers and guards were required by whatever authorities prevail to enforce the same standards of public behavior that govern the rest of society.
Why doesn't it happen? Well, in some places it does. Milwaukee, a city with a beer belly if there ever was one, is oddly enough not renowned for drunk and disorderly behavior at its stadium events - - drunk, perhaps, but seldom disorderly. Bill Hanrahan, manager of County Stadium, says, ''People from Milwaukee know that if they're out of order, they'll be caught and ejected promptly. We have drinking patrols and we might keep a better eye out for it than they do in some cities. People here are apt to complain sooner when there are disruptive fans. People know we're going to get right on any bad behavior, and they act better here than at some other stadiums.'' Seattle, with one of the most tranquil (some would say tranquilized) sporting populations, actually did have one venue in town where young drunken fans frequently ran riot. That was in the 4,100-seat Seattle Arena whenever the Seattle Breakers junior hockey team took the ice. It became so bad that attendance fell off, until in the 1983-84 season the Breakers' crowds averaged fewer than 1,800 a game. New owners took over four seasons ago, changed the team name to the Thunderbirds and completely revamped the drinking regulations -- upgrading security, opening beer-free sections, limiting the beers bought by each customer and reducing cup sizes. The result? ''We went 35 games in a row without any incidents in the seats,'' says Bob Kaser, the Thunderbirds' director of marketing, ''and our attendance is now averaging 2,900 a game.''
So why does action against obstreperous beer drinkers so often seem to be the exception instead of the rule? Is it the greed of beer wholesalers, team owners and ballpark concessionaires eager to sell every last dreg they can? Yes, it is. Is it also the fear of team owners, league officials and various commissioners that any moves against beer drinkers -- however reasonable and logical -- may displease the brewing corporations that spend untold millions of dollars on advertising, sponsorships and TV commitments? Yes, it is that too.
One clear and disturbing example of what's going on: The New York State Assembly last month approved a bill mandating that every major professional stadium and arena in the state declare 6% of its seats alcohol-free and another 15% of the seats free of vendors but allowing consumption of alcohol. (The plan would be phased in gradually over three years and the alcohol-free sections could be as small as 2% of the seats in arenas and stadiums that ban vending in the stands.) The bill is hardly a radical example of prohibitionist reform legislation, yet it has been met with attack from all corners of the beer establishment, as well as vehement opposition from the Yankees and the Mets. (The Nassau Coliseum did not actively oppose it, and Madison Square Garden dropped its opposition.) Baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth supported the Yankees and Mets in their opposition. The bill was passed anyway and soon will be sent to Governor Mario Cuomo, who has not indicated whether he will sign it. As one sponsor of the bill, Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, said, ''We are not going to be bullied. They have mounted an intense and bitter lobbying campaign, and I'd hope that the people who read the bill understand it's not anti-beer. It's pro choice. But, of course, baseball has some vested interests in beer and the baseball-beer relationship seems to cause them some difficulty in terms of this bill.''
Despite heavy foot-dragging by some team owners and stadium operators, there has been a raft of new and encouraging ballpark policies instituted around the country, such as opening beer-free sections, offering low-alcohol beer, cutting off beer sales well before games are over, limiting sales per customer and -- one of the most effective techniques of all -- banning vending in the seats.
This last approach has been put into effect by nine major league baseball clubs over the past couple of years. It has proved to be a major revenue loser for concessionaires, but it has also been surprisingly effective in making those nine ballparks nicer places to visit. Why such a powerful effect? Vendors often work on commission and thus become supreme hustlers, pushing beer at both the sloshed and the sober as if their livelihoods depended on it -- which, at $200 to $300 on a good night for a good vendor, they certainly do.
Boston's Fenway Park, which over the years has probably produced more hooligans on parade than any place but Yankee Stadium, has cut out vending in the seats and installed a beer-free zone. How is it working? Rico Picardi, for 45 years the concession manager for the Harry M. Stevens Company there, told the Boston Herald: ''Yes, we're losing revenues -- our beer sales are down 14 percent -- but I can't say we mind. What we want most is to be sure the people come back to the ballpark. Hey, they come more often, they spend more money. And anyway, soda sales are up.''
Even the best efforts, of course, don't provide instant and perfect results. Last season the San Francisco Giants banned beer vending in the stands. But on a recent Tuesday night, July 26, in a doubleheader at Candlestick Park against the Dodgers, the fans, sparked by two Giants losses and a controversial balk call and fueled, undoubtedly, by many hours of drinking, created another ugly scene. The problem of fan violence is complex and has to do with more than beer. Still, recent efforts to slow the flow are encouraging. According to Pat Gallagher, vice-president of business operations for the Giants, the drop in profit from the ban on vending beer in the stands -- which cost the club roughly $600,000 last season -- has been well worth the increase in good times had by all. ''We knew it would have a negative financial impact on our beer sales,'' he says, ''but we also noted that 90 percent of the feedback from the fans was positive. They said thanks for making them feel safer and better about bringing families to the ballpark. And we also found that beer sales did go down, but the sale of other concessions like nonalcoholic beverages and food went up. Overall, our alcohol-related security problems went down. Overall, we're very pleased.''
Aha! Overall, is it possible that we have stumbled upon the inspiration for a brave new beer chant for the future? Let's try it:
Less profit! More fun! Less trouble! More fun!
Yes, I think we've got it. All together now: Less profit! More fun! Less trouble! More fun! Less trouble! More fans! Less trouble! More profit! More fun! More profit! More fun . . .
Source Citation:Johnson, William Oscar. "Sports and suds; the beer business and the sports world have brewed up a potent partnership." Sports Illustrated 69.n6 (August 8, 1988): 68(15). Academic OneFile. Gale. Boise State Univ/ Albertsons Lib. 12 Mar. 2008 .
Gale Document Number:A6545636

This article was published in Time Magazine in 1988. Its main theme was the association of major beer companies and major sporting venues. Caught in between were the target consumer and the non-beer drinker. It included quite a detailed history of breweries and how they each came into existence. It went through the history of marketing that didn't really occur on a full-scale until Philip Morris came into the picture. The problems that sporting venues have is the need for the advertising money that comes with the cooperation with major beer companies. But they also have to look out for the good of their product, when overly inebriated fans are causing sober fans to not enjoy their experience at the arena or park. In the end it showed the steps the venues were taking to control the situation even if it means decreasing profits in some areas.

Not sure how appropriate this article will be as its 20 years old. It did have a large history lesson describing how the major beer companies began their ascent into the major powers they are today. I believe they were very credible again because of the source and the information provided to help prove their point. I learned quite a bit about how important the beer companies are for sports on just about every level. They also discussed how the beer advertisements were having negative effects on young people. I would say this piece helps forward some of my own thoughts on the subject.

Source Annotation 2: Neal, Dan; Sugarman, Dawn; Hustad, John; Caska, Catherine & Carey, Kate "It's all fun and games ... or is it? Collegiate sporting

Abstract:
Objective: Heavy drinking is prevalent on college campuses, and collegiate sporting events may precipitate heavy drinking. Despite this, relatively few studies have examined student drinking on the days of sporting events. In 2003, Syracuse University won the men's National College Athletic Association basketball championship; ongoing data collection allowed an investigation of alcohol consumption at Syracuse University during the two Final Four game days, when the semifinals and championship games are played. The goals of the study were to examine the level of alcohol use on these days and to examine factors related to game-day consumption. Method: As a part of an ongoing study, 206 undergraduate students completed several questionnaires, then returned daily drinking diaries at 1-week intervals for 4 consecutive weeks. Results: Alcohol consumption levels on the two game days exceeded what is typical on campus. Further analyses conducted using zero-inflated negative binomial regression modeling demonstrated that heavier drinkers were more likely to drink alcohol, and drink alcohol heavily, on both game days. Furthermore, lack of impulse control was independently associated with an increased likelihood of drinking on both days. Conclusions: Although results from this study should be considered preliminary, these data document heavier drinking associated with high-profile athletic events. Sporting events may be a particularly opportune time and venue for collegiate risk-reduction programs.
Full Text :COPYRIGHT 2005 Alcohol Research Documentation, Inc.
HEAVY DRINKING IS PREVALENT on college campuses nationwide (Douglas et al., 1997; Meilman et al., 1997; Wechsler et al., 1995), and college students report a wide range of negative consequences due to alcohol use (Presley et al., 1994). Collegiate sporting events appear to be a particularly heavy-drinking context; sports-related alcohol use can occur in many places (e.g., at home, at a bar, at the stadium) and celebratory drinking is a frequently endorsed reason for drinking (Rabow and Duncan-Schill, 1995). Furthermore, celebratory drinking is more often related to alcohol intoxication compared to other drinking motives (Hunter, 1990). Therefore, sporting events that have important meaning may be a particularly risky situation for heavy drinking, increasing the frequency of alcohol-related rioting on college campuses after important sporting events.
Although the relationship between elevated alcohol consumption and participation in collegiate sports is clearly documented (e.g., Leichliter et al., 1998; Nelson and Wechsler, 2001), relatively few studies have examined college student drinking during sporting events. College students who are sports fans are more likely to drink heavily and experience alcohol-related consequences compared with those who are not sports fans, and students who attended schools where 40% or more of the survey respondents identified themselves as sports fans were more likely to experience negative consequences as a result of others' alcohol use (Nelson and Wechsler, 2003). However, additional research has found no statistically significant relationship between degree of interest in sports and alcohol consumption (Wann, 1998).
The National College Athletic Association (NCAA) men's basketball championship tournament runs from March through the first week in April. In 2003, Syracuse University won the national championship by defeating the University of Texas on Saturday, April 5, in a semifinal game and the University of Kansas on Monday, April 7, in the championship game. Data collection that was in progress provided an opportunity to investigate alcohol consumption at Syracuse University on these two days relative to consumption in the weeks surrounding them. The goals of the present study were to examine the level of alcohol use on these two game days and to explore factors predictive of drinking.
Method
Participants
Participants were 206 Syracuse University undergraduate students enrolled in an Introduction to Psychology course. The students received course credit in exchange for participating in the study; all gave informed consent. The sample was predominantly female (64%), white (83%) and freshman (77%). The average (SD) age among participants was 18.8 (0.98) and participants ranged in age from 18 to 25 years; 25% were involved in the Greek system (i.e., members of a fraternity or sorority).
Procedure
Participants were enrolled in an ongoing study involving questionnaire assessments and 4 weeks of self-monitoring using Daily Drinking Diaries (DDD). Questionnaire data were collected in small group testing sessions between March 26 and April 4, 2003. Measures included demographics, alcohol use and alcohol-consequences variables. Additionally, several measures that have been shown to be related to alcohol consumption were administered, including the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MCSDS; Crowne and Marlowe, 1964), the Short Self-Regulation Questionnaire (SSRQ; Carey et al., 2004), the Impaired Control Scale (ICS; Heather et al., 1998), the Eysenck Impulsivity Scale (EIS; Eysenck et al., 1985) and the Reasons for Drinking Questionnaire (RDQ; Farber et al., 1980). Participants received extensive instructions about completing the DDD. For each drinking episode, participants estimated the number of standard drinks consumed in a waking day. Participants returned the weekly diary sheets to a locked box. A total of 175 participants (85%) returned drinking records for all 4 weeks, and these data were subsequently included in the analyses.
Analysis strategy
Analysis of alcohol consumption data using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression can be problematic due to extreme non-normality of data, heteroskedasticity of residuals and excessive numbers of participants who abstain. Therefore, hypothesis testing was conducted using zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) regression models (cf., Cameron and Trivedi, 1998). This model incorporates two distinct components: (1) a logistic component to predict the likelihood of an always-zero score; that is, in this sample, the likelihood that a student would never consume alcohol on the game day and (2) a negative binomial component to predict consumption conditional on the likelihood that the student may consume alcohol. As such, the model can predict simultaneously both who chose to drink and how much they consumed. Likelihood Ratio and Wald Tests are used for hypothesis testing with ZINB models. The regression model was built using four hierarchical steps. First, drinking was regressed on gender. Second, drinking was regressed on gender, impulse control and drinking motives. Third, drinking was regressed on gender, typical drinking and drinking frequency. Fourth, drinking was regressed on gender, impulse control, drinking motives, typical drinking and drinking frequency. Such analyses allowed for understanding of independent and joint prediction of consumption with other covariates. Each set of hierarchical models was run on drinking data for both the semifinal game day and championship game day.
Results
Alcohol-use summary statistics from the questionnaire assessment (N = 206) and the DDD (n = 175) are below. For the questionnaire assessments, male students compared to female students had significantly higher peak consumption. The mean (SD) peak consumption for men was 11.5 (5.8) versus 6.6 (3.9) for women (F = 53.5, 1/204 df, p < .001). For typical consumption, the mean for men was 5.6 (3.3) compared with 3.4 (2.7) for women (F = 26.3, 1/204 df, p < .001). The DDD data revealed a similar pattern; male students compared to female students had significantly higher peak consumption. The mean peak consumption for men was 12.3 (7.1) compared with 7.7 (4.9) for women (F = 28.7, 1/173 df, p < .001). For typical consumption, the mean for men was 6.5 (3.5) compared with 3.5 (2.8) for women (F = 17.5, 1/173 df, p < .001).
Descriptive drinking data
On April 5 (date of the semifinal game), 69.7% of the sample consumed alcohol, and the mean consumption was 5.7 (5.9) drinks, with men consuming more than women. For men, the mean was 7.7 (7.2) compared with 4.7 (4.8) for the women (F = 10.8, 1/173 df, p < .01). On April 7 (date of the championship game), 66.3% of the sample consumed alcohol and the mean consumption was 4.6 (5.51) drinks, with men consuming more than women. The mean for men was 5.6 (6.3) compared with 4.0 (4.2) for women (F = 4.3, 1/173 df, p < .05). Restricting the sample to just those who reported drinking revealed mean consumption to be 8.2 (5.5) and 6.9 (4.8) drinks on the respective game days. The quantity of consumption on the two game days exceeded consumption for a typical Saturday (the mean was 3.2; 46.9% consumed alcohol) and Monday (the mean was 0.3; 7.7% consumed alcohol).
Predicting game-day drinking
No significant relationships emerged between criterion variables and the following demographic variables: ethnicity, Greek affiliation, grade point average and age. To reduce collinearity of predictors, SSRQ, ICS, EIS, and positive-and negative-reinforcement RDQ scores were submitted to factor analysis, and factor scores based on regression weighting (cf., Hamilton, 1992) were generated to represent impulse control (SSRQ, ICS and EIS) and drinking motives (positive and negative reinforcement). No significant relationships between gender and impulse control or drinking motives emerged. Impulse control was significantly correlated with typical quantity (r = 0.24, p < .01) and frequency (r = 0.30, p < .001), and drinking motives correlated with typical quantity (r = 0.40, p < .001) and frequency (r = 0.45, p < .001). Drinking motives and impulse control were correlated (r = 0.53, p < .001) as were drinking frequency and typical quantity (r = 0.64, p < .001).
Results of the ZINB regression analyses are presented in Table 1. For semifinal game-day drinking, the first step was significant ([chi square] = 13.4, 2 df, p < .001). Gender did not significantly predict abstainers, but among those who drank, men consumed more alcohol than women. Adding impulse control and drinking motives in the second step (i.e., Step 2a) significantly increased the predictive power of the model ([chi square] = 25.1, 4 df, p < .001). In this model, men still consumed more alcohol than women, and stronger impulse control was associated with an increased likelihood of abstaining from drinking. Adding typical quantity and drinking frequency in the second step (i.e., Step 2b) significantly increased the predictive power of the model ([chi square] = 83.5, 4 df, p < .001), with heavier typical quantity and drinking frequency associated with lower likelihood of abstaining and higher consumption. In the third step, which included all five variables, it is evident that the alcohol-use variables significantly increase prediction over Step 2a ([chi square] = 67.3, 4 df, p < .001), whereas adding the personality variables to Step 2b did not ([chi square] = 9.0, 4 df, NS). In this model, gender did not have a predictive effect; higher impulse control was associated with increased likelihood of abstaining from drinking, and heavier drinkers in general were less likely to abstain from alcohol and more likely to drink larger quantities.
For championship game-day drinking, the first step was significant ([chi square] = 9.9, 2 df, p < .01). Gender did not significantly predict abstainers, but among those who drink, men consumed more alcohol than women. Adding impulse control and drinking motives in the second step (i.e., Step 2a) significantly increased the predictive power of the model ([chi square] = 38.1, 4 df, p < .001). In this model, men still consumed more alcohol than women, stronger impulse control was associated with both decreased consumption and likelihood of abstaining from drinking, and stronger drinking motives was associated with a decreased likelihood of abstaining. Adding typical quantity and drinking frequency in the second step (i.e., Step 2b) significantly increased the predictive power of the model ([chi square] = 49.9, 4 df, p < .001), with typical drinking predicting heavier consumption, and drinking frequency predicting lower likelihood of abstaining and heavier consumption. In the third step, which included all five variables, it is evident that the alcohol-use variables ([chi square] = 50.9, 4 df, p < .001) and the personality variables ([chi square] = 17.0, 4 df, p < .01) both significantly add predictive power. In this model, men were less likely to abstain, stronger impulse control was associated with a higher likelihood of abstention, and heavier drinkers were less likely to abstain from alcohol and more likely to drink larger quantities.
Discussion
Important sporting events were associated with much heavier drinking than is typically seen on this college campus. The average student consumed 5.7 drinks on the day of the semifinal game and 4.6 drinks on the day of the championship game. On the day of the championship game (a Monday), more than 8 times as many students consumed alcohol than normally would. Not surprisingly, heavier drinkers were both more likely to drink alcohol and drink alcohol heavily on the two game days. On the day of the semifinal game (a Saturday) both typical consumption and drinking frequency predicted decision to drink and how much alcohol was consumed. On the day of the championship (a Monday), frequency of drinking predicted the decision to drink, and typical amount consumed was related to both the decision to drink and how much alcohol was consumed. Personality characteristics also had a significant influence on game-day consumption, but only when considered independent of typical consumption and drinking frequency. Before controlling for typical alcohol use, lack of impulse control was a significant predictor of choosing to drink (on both game days) and heavier drinking (on championship game day). Furthermore, number of drinking motives was associated with decreased likelihood of abstention on the day of the championship game. Importantly, even after controlling for alcohol use, lower impulse control was associated with increased likelihood of drinking on both game days. Thus, both previous drinking history and personality characteristics influence which students may drink heavily in this context. Although the results could be interpreted as typical drinking patterns mediating the relationship between these two factors and game-day consumption, we are reluctant to interpret the results as such, given the strictly correlational nature of these data.
Results from this study should be considered with its limitations in mind. Although this study had the advantage of being a prospective data collection study that coincided with Syracuse University winning the national championship, this study was not designed to examine drinking during sporting events. As such, one should not draw any causal conclusions about the effects of winning a national championship on college student drinking, only that the event was correlated with heavy drinking. Also, predictive analyses were limited to the variables available; although the original study included variables that are theoretically and empirically related to college student alcohol use, we did not include variables that were specifically related to celebratory and/or sport-related drinking. However, the correlational data presented here clearly document a large increase in drinking on the days of the semifinal and championship games. Therefore, it appears that sporting events, and particularly sporting events with significant meaning on campus, may be a good window of opportunity for prevention efforts.
Acknowledgment
The authors thank Michael Carey for the inspiration for this study. TABLE 1. Results of hierarchical zero-inflated negative binomial
regression modeling

Semifinals drinking
Hierachial
steps Abstained Quantity LR [chi square]

Step 1 [chi square] = 13.4
([double dagger]), 2 df
Gender -0.17 0.45
([double
dagger])
Step 2a [chi square] = 25.1
([double dagger]), 4 df
Gender -0.18 0.46
([double
dagger])
Impulse control 0.80 -0.07
([dagger])

Drinking motives -0.45 0.26
Step 2b [chi square] = 83.5
([double dagger]), 4 df
Gender 0.69 0.15
Typical drinking -0.26 * 0.07
([double
dagger])
Drinking frequency -0.15 * 0.05
([double
dagger])
Step 3 [chi square] = 67.3
([double dagger]),
4 df (a)
[chi square] = 90,
4 df (b)
Gender 0.67 0.16
Impulse control 0.95 -0.001
([dagger])
Drinking motives 0.80 0.08
Typical drinking -0.30 0.07
([dagger]) ([double
dagger])
Drinking frequency -0.14 * 0.04
([double
dagger])

Championship drinking
Hierachial
steps Abstained Quantity LR [chi square]

Step 1 [chi square] = 9.9
([dagger]), 2 df
Gender 0.34 0.46
([double
dagger])
Step 2a [chi square] = 38.1
([double dagger]), 4 df
Gender 0.50 0.53
([double
dagger])
Impulse control 0.77 * -0.20 *
Drinking motives -1.18 * 0.10
Step 2b [chi square] = 49.9
([double dagger]), 4 df

Gender 1.03 * 0.17
Typical drinking -0.05 0.08
([double
dagger])
Drinking frequency -0.17 0.06
([dagger]) ([double
dagger])
Step 3 [chi square] = 50.9
([double dagger]),
4 df (a)
[chi square] = 17.0
([dagger]), 4 df (b)
Gender 0.96 * 0.22
Impulse control 0.77 * -0.14
Drinking motives -0.53 -0.10
Typical drinking -0.01 0.08
([double
dagger])
Drinking frequency -0.13 * 0.05
([double
dagger])

Notes: Impulse control = composite of self-regulation, impulsivity
and impaired control; Drinking motives = composite of positive and
negative reinforcement motives. (a) Compare with Step 2a; (b) compare
with Step 2b.

* p < .05; ([dagger]) p < .01; ([double dagger]) p < .001.
* This research was supported, in part, by National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism grant R01 AA 12518 to Kate B. Carey.
References
CAMERON, A.C. AND TRIVEDI, P.K. Regression Analysis of Count Data, New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998.
CAREY, K.B., NEAL, D.J. AND COLLINS, S.E. A psychometric analysis of the Self-Regulation Questionnaire. Addict. Behav. 29: 253-260, 2004.
CROWNE, D.P. AND MARLOWE, D. The Approval Motive: Studies in Evaluative Dependence, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1964.
DOUGLAS, K.A., COLLINS, J.L., WARREN, C., KANN, L., GOLD, R., CLAYTON, S., Ross, J.G. AND KOLBE, L.J. Results from the 1995 National College Risk Behavior Survey. J. Amer. Coll. Hlth 46: 55-66, 1997.
EYSENCK, S.B., PEARSON, P.R., LASTING, G. AND ALLSOPP, J.F. Age norms for impulsiveness, venturesomeness and empathy in adults. Pers. Indiv. Diff. 6: 613-619, 1985.
FARBER, P.D., KHAVARI, K.A. AND DOUGLASS, F.M. A factor analytic study of reasons for drinking: Empirical validation of positive and negative reinforcement dimensions. J. Cons. Clin. Psychol. 48:780-781, 1980.
HAMILTON, L.C. Regression with Graphics: A Second Course in Applied Statistics, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1992.
HEATHER, N., BOOTH, P. AND LUCE, A. Impaired Control Scale: Cross-validation and relationship with treatment outcome. Addiction 93: 761-771, 1998.
HUNTER, G.T. A survey of the social context of drinking among college women. J. Alcohol Drug Educ. 35 (3): 73-80, 1990.
LEICHLITER, J.S., MEILMAN, P.W., PRESLEY, C.A. AND CASHIN, J.R. Alcohol use and related consequences among students with varying levels of involvement in college athletics. J. Amer. Coll. Hlth 46: 257-262, 1998.
MEILMAN, P.W., PRESLEY, C.A. AND CASHIN, J.R. Average weekly alcohol consumption: Drinking percentiles for American college students. J. Amer. Coll. Hlth 45: 201-204, 1997.
NELSON, T.F. AND WECHSLER, H. Alcohol and college athletes. Med. Sci. Sports Exer. 33: 43-47, 2001.
NELSON, T.F. AND WECHSLER, H. School spirits: Alcohol and the collegiate sports fan. Addict. Behav. 28: 1-11, 2003.
PRESLEY, C.A., MEILMAN, P.W. AND LYERLA, R. Development of the Core Alcohol and Drug Survey: Initial findings and future directions. J. Amer. Coll. Hlth 42: 248-255, 1994.
RABOW, J. AND DUNCAN-SCHILL, M. Drinking among college students. J. Alcohol Drug Educ. 40 (3): 52-64, 1995.
WANN, D.L. A preliminary investigation of the relationship between alcohol use and sport random. Social Behav. Pers. 26: 287-290, 1998.
WECHSLER, H., DOWDALL, G.W., DAVENPORT, A. AND CASTILLO, S. Correlates of college student binge drinking. Amer. J. Publ. Hlth 85: 921-926, 1995.
Received: July 8, 2004; Revision: September 23, 2004.
DAN J. NEAL, PH.D., ([dagger]) DAWN E. SUGARMAN, B.A., JOHN T. P. HUSTAD, M.S., CATHERINE M. CASKA, AND KATE B. CAREY, PH.D.
Center for Health and Behavior, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York
([dagger]) Dan J. Neal is now with the Department of Psychology, the University of Texas at Austin. Correspondence may be addressed to him at the University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station A8000, Austin, TX 78712-0187, or via email at: neal@psy.utexas.edu.
Source Citation:Neal, Dan J., Dawn E. Sugarman, John T.P. Hustad, Catherine M. Caska, and Kate B. Carey. "It's all fun and games ... or is it? Collegiate sporting events and celebratory drinking *." Journal of Studies on Alcohol 66.2 (March 2005): 291(4). Academic OneFile. Gale. Boise State Univ/ Albertsons Lib. 12 Mar. 2008 .
Gale Document Number:A132963341

This study was conducted at Syracuse University during the 2003 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. They wanted to determine if the amount of alcohol consumed before, during the game and afterwards, increased on game days that were deemed important for the school. Their basis being celebratory drinking is more socially accepted than binge drinking.

Again, it may be useable for some statistics. I would say it is reliable based on the methods and math involved in breaking everything down. Didn't learn anything that I hadn't already thought, other than some percentages I wasn't aware of. Again the reading didn't change how I had thought it would conclude.

Source Annotation 1: Nelson, Toben & Wechsler, Henry "School spirits: alcohol and collegiate sports fans"

School spirits: Alcohol and collegiate sports fans


Toben F. Nelson, and Henry Wechsler Harvard School of Public Health, Department of Health and Social Behavior, 401 Perk Drive, P.O. Box 15678, Boston, MA 02215, USA Available online 24 December 2002.




Abstract
While studies have addressed alcohol use and related problems among college athletes, little is known about the drinking patterns of non-athletes who are sports fans. This study examines the relationship between alcohol use and interest in collegiate sports on two levels. First, do sports fans in college binge drink more and exhibit more negative alcohol-related outcomes than other students? Second, do colleges with large numbers of sports fans have higher rates of heavy drinking and accompanying secondhand effects affecting other students? The study analyzed the responses of a nationally representative sample of students who completed questionnaires in the spring of 1999 regarding their extracurricular activities and substance use. The responses of 3445 student sports fans were compared to those of 8405 students who were not sports fans. More sports fans drank alcohol, engaged in binge drinking, had a heavy drinking style and reported alcohol-related problems than nonfans. The percentage of sports fans at a school was associated with binge drinking rates and the secondhand effects. The implications for those working with college athletics and for alcohol prevention personnel are discussed.
Author Keywords: Alcohol; Binge drinking; Athletics; Fans; College
Article Outline
1. Introduction
2. Methods
2.1. Survey
2.2. Subjects and procedure
2.3. Measures
2.4. Statistical analyses
3. Results
3.1. Student characteristics
3.2. Drinking behavior
3.3. Alcohol-related harms
3.4. School-level characteristics (sports schools vs. nonsports schools)
3.5. Sports-schools and binge drinking rates
3.6. Secondhand effects of alcohol at sports schools
3.6.1. Access to specially priced alcohol
3.6.2. Student activities
4. Discussion
Acknowledgements
References

1. Introduction
Binge drinking may be regarded as the most serious public health problem facing US colleges and universities. Approximately two in five college students engage in binge drinking (Johnston; Presley; Presley; Wechsler; Wechsler and Wechsler) and a significant percentage of these binge drinkers experience serious negative consequences related to their drinking. These negative consequences include academic difficulties, antisocial behavior, psychosocial problems, medical issues, high-risk sexual behavior, and other risk-taking behavior, such as drinking and driving. In addition, students who attend schools with high binge drinking rates have a greater risk of experiencing the secondhand effects of other students' drinking than those who attend schools with low binge drinking rates (Wechsler and Wechsler).
One correlate of binge drinking is an interest in athletics (Wechsler and Wechsler). Increased risk of engaging in heavy alcohol use has been noted among athletes in several studies of college students (Leichliter; Nattiv; Nattiv; Nelson; Overman and Wechsler). However, only limited research has systematically examined the alcohol use patterns of another group of individuals invested in collegiate sports, the fans. Studies of alcohol-related fan behavior have focused on outcomes such as drunk driving or violent behavior at single sport venues (Bormann; Vingilis and Wolfe). These reports are not limited to college-affiliated events. Wann (1998) found no significant relationship between alcohol use and sport fandom among college students, although the sample for this study was small, nonrandom and limited to a single school.
The influence of alcohol in athletics may extend beyond those who participate on intercollegiate athletic teams to those who are interested in sports as spectators or fans. In a recent examination of collegiate sports, Sperber (2000) suggested that an institutional emphasis on athletics is strongly associated with heavy alcohol consumption among its students. In his book, Sperber used a variety of qualitative methods to develop a compelling case linking declines in academic expectations of undergraduate performance with increased emphasis on sports entertainment and an increased effort by the alcohol industry to market its product to college students, especially to male sports fans.
Despite the lack of quantitative evidence, the relationship between college athletics and alcohol has also drawn the attention of groups including the federal government. In 1998, then Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala called on universities and the National Collegiate Athletic Association “to sever the tie between college sports and drinking” (Shalala, 1998). Recently, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (2001) launched an advocacy campaign aimed at getting alcohol advertising out of collegiate athletics and several university athletic departments have developed an institutional policy against accepting alcohol-related advertising for their programs.
The present study seeks to answer two questions not addressed in previous research. First, do sports fans in college binge drink more often and exhibit more negative alcohol-related outcomes than other students? Second, do colleges with large numbers of sports fans have higher rates of heavy drinking and accompanying secondhand effects?
2. Methods
2.1. Survey
The study analyzed the responses to the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study (CAS), a survey of students attending 4-year colleges and universities in the United States. The CAS was conducted initially in 1993 and repeated in 1997 and 1999. The data for the present study are taken from students at the 128 schools that participated in the 1999 survey. The schools are a representative sample of 4-year postsecondary academic institutions in the United States. Nine schools were dropped from the 1999 data set for failure to achieve an adequate response rate. Inclusion criteria for response were rates of 50% in two of the three surveys and at least 40% in the third. The overall response rate for the remaining schools (n=119 colleges) was 60%. Response rates were calculated by dividing the number of returned surveys by the number sent to eligible students. The response rate at a school was not significantly associated with any of the outcome measures.
2.2. Subjects and procedure
Subjects were selected at random from full-time students and were provided by the registrar at each school. Participation in the survey was voluntary and the identity of the respondent was kept anonymous. In the spring of 1999, students were mailed a twenty-page questionnaire, which included questions on student activities, behaviors and attitudes related to alcohol use, and personal background characteristics. The design, sampling methods and procedure employed by the CAS are described in greater detail elsewhere (Wechsler; Wechsler and Wechsler).
2.3. Measures
Sports fans were defined according to responses to the question “How important is it for you to participate in the following activities?” “Attend sports events” was one of 12 activities listed. Sports fans were those respondents who indicated that attending sports events was either “important” or “very important.” Those who indicated that attendance at sports events was “somewhat important” or “not at all important” were coded as nonfans. Nonresponders to the sports fans question (n=71) were dropped from the analyses. In addition, the importance of athletics on a particular campus was measured on an aggregate level. Those campuses that had 40% or greater of the total respondents identify themselves as sports fans were considered to be sports schools. This cutting point resulted in 34 (29%) of the 119 schools being classified as sports schools. Athlete status was determined using the question: “In the past 30 days, how many hours per day on average have you spent on each of the following activities (playing or practicing intercollegiate athletics)” and were defined as those students who participated an average of 1 or more hours per day (Nelson & Wechsler, 2001). Athletes (n=2109) were included in the calculation of the aggregate sports school measure but were removed from all other analyses. The final sample included 11,850 college students, 3445 of which were classified as sports fans.
A “drink” was defined as 12 oz of beer (one can), 4 oz of wine (glass), 12 oz of wine cooler, or one shot of liquor. Binge drinking was defined as consuming five or more drinks in a row for men (four for women) on one or more occasions during the past 2 weeks; a measure of alcohol use among college students strongly associated with adverse social consequences (Wechsler; Wechsler and Wechsler).
School binge rate was determined by an aggregate measure of binge drinking at each participant school. Binge drinking rates ranged from 0% to 76% at the participant schools. High binge schools were those with rates in the top one-third of all schools and low binge schools were those with rates in the lowest one-third (Wechsler et al., 2000).
2.4. Statistical analyses
Differences in characteristics between sports fans and nonfans were measured using 2×2 χ2 analyses. Adjusted odds ratios (OR) were computed using multiple logistic regression to determine the degree of difference between the groups of interest on measures of alcohol use and alcohol-related problems. These analyses were also conducted using the Generalized Estimating Equation (GEE) procedure for the multiple logistic regression models to account for school-level effects (Liang and Zeger). No differences in the point estimates were noted between the two models and the results are reported using the logistic regression results. A school level variable was used in the analyses on the secondhand effects of alcohol use so the GEE procedure results are reported. Due to differences between sports fans and nonfans on several important variables, which have been previously found to be related to alcohol use (Wechsler, Dowdall, Davenport, & Rimm, 1995), the analyses were adjusted for demographic factors of age (under 21 years; 21 years and over), sex (male; female), race (white; non-white), and membership in Greek letter organizations (Greek; non-Greek) in all of the multiple logistic regression models.
3. Results
3.1. Student characteristics
The final sample on which the analyses were conducted included 11,850 students. Among these respondents, 3445 were classified as sports fans and 8405 as nonfans. Significant differences existed between these two groups by sex. More than two in five (43%) of the sports fans were male compared to one-third (33%) of the nonfan group (χ2(1)=107.4, P<.0001). Sports fans were also more likely to be under the legal drinking age compared with nonfans (55% vs. 47%; χ2(1)=68.0, P<.0001). Significant differences also existed for race/ethnicity between fans and nonfans; more sports fans than nonfans were white (81% vs. 74%; χ2(1)=63.3, P<.0001) and fewer sports fans were Asian/Pacific Islander (5% vs. 9%; χ2(1)=74.9, P<.0001). Sports fans were more often first year students than nonfans (25% vs. 21%; χ2(1)=27.5, P<.0001) and less often seniors (20% vs. 24%; χ2(1)=13.2, P=.0003). Sports fans more often reported being a member of a Greek organization (19% vs. 10%; χ2(1)=181.7, P<.0001) and were more likely to have never been married (93% vs. 88%; χ2(1)=74.4, P<.0001). Sports fans more often reported that they usually engaged in binge drinking when they were in high school than nonfans (36% vs. 27%; χ2(1)=80.1, P<.0001) and were more likely to have participated in high school athletics (75% vs. 56%; χ2(1)=390.6, P=.0001).
3.2. Drinking behavior
Table 1 reports the patterns of alcohol use by sports fan status and sex. A higher percentage of sports fans reported engaging in binge drinking. Fewer sports fans reported that they abstained from alcohol in the past year. Among drinkers only, more sports fans drank on 10 or more occasions and were drunk on three or more occasions during the previous 30 days, usually binged when they drank and reported that drinking “to get drunk” was an important reason for drinking alcohol.

Table 1. Drinking patterns of college student sports fans (in %)

3.3. Alcohol-related harms
Among students who drank alcohol in the past year, sports fans were more likely to experience negative outcomes related to their alcohol use than nonfans. These consequences included antisocial behavior such as arguing with friends, vandalizing property, getting into trouble with the police and health problems such as being hurt or injured. Overall, sports fans who drank alcohol reported a higher rate of experiencing five or more alcohol-related problems than nonfans who drank alcohol (Table 2).

Table 2. Alcohol-related problems among college student sports fans (in %, drinkers only)

3.4. School-level characteristics (sports schools vs. nonsports schools)
Sports schools were more often members of NCAA Division I (77% vs. 49%; χ2(1)=7.3, P<.01) and had enrollments greater than 10,000 students (65% vs. 35%; χ2(1)=8.5, P<.01). Sports schools and nonsports schools did not differ by geographic region of the country (Northeast, South, North Central, and West), location (rural, small town, suburban, and urban), religious affiliation (Roman Catholic, Protestant, None), admissions criteria, or whether the school was publicly or privately funded.
3.5. Sports-schools and binge drinking rates
A relationship was found between sports school status and high rates of binge drinking. The percentage of students who engaged in binge drinking was significantly correlated with the percentage of students who were identified as sports fans (r=.28; P<.01). Half of the colleges with the highest rates of binge drinking were sports schools (50%), compared to only one in five of the moderate binge schools (18%) and low binge drinking schools (19%). Sports schools were significantly more likely to be high binge schools than nonsports schools (χ2(1)=12.6, P<.01).
3.6. Secondhand effects of alcohol at sports schools
Students attending sports schools experienced secondhand effects of alcohol at higher rates than students at nonsports schools, including being assaulted, having property vandalized, having their sleep or studying disrupted or experiencing an unwanted sexual advance (Table 3). Nearly one-half of students attending sports schools experienced three or more secondhand effects of alcohol.

Table 3. Secondhand effects of alcohol use at sports schools (in percent)

3.6.1. Access to specially priced alcohol
Sports fans were more likely to report taking advantage of specially priced alcohol during the preceding 30 days. In an analysis of drinkers only, 38% of sports fans (n=2828) reported taking advantage of low-priced promotions at off-campus bars compared with 24% of nonfans (n=6557) (OR 1.99, 95% CI=1.79–2.23). Sports fans also reported taking advantage of special promotions by beer companies more often than their nonfan peers (19% vs. 11%, OR 1.64, 95% CI=1.43–1.89).
3.6.2. Student activities
More sports fans reported spending an average of 2 or more hours per day watching television (59% vs. 54%; χ2(1)=26.2, P<0.0001) name="toc16">
4. Discussion
The present study is the first to examine alcohol use and related problems of sports fans compared with their nonfan peers in a nationally representative sample of college students. It also examines drinking patterns at schools where many students view collegiate athletics as an important activity on-campus. Sports fans were less likely to abstain from alcohol than their nonfan peers and were more likely to engage in binge drinking. They also exhibited a more extreme drinking style. As a result of this heavier drinking behavior, sports fans were more likely to experience a variety of problems. Schools where many students had a strong sports interest were more likely to have high rates of binge drinking than schools where fewer students were interested in sports. In addition, students at sports schools were more likely to experience negative consequences from the alcohol use of others. Nearly half of the students who attended sports schools reported three or more problems due to others' use of alcohol.
One possible link to account for increased use of alcohol by sports fans is through the marketing and promotion targeted at fans. Sports fans were more likely to take advantage of special low-price alcohol promotions offered by local alcohol outlets. As such, they may be the target of local bar and alcohol industry promotions. Many alcohol outlets, particularly in college towns, emphasize sports themes. More sports fans also indicated frequent television viewing. Although the current study did not ask respondents to report on the content of the television they were watching, it might be reasonable to assume that at least a portion of that television viewing was sports-related content. Especially popular sports content television programs include the ESPN network, which feature college sports (Sperber, 2000). A previous analysis of advertising content on television programming found that alcohol advertisements were more frequent during sports programming than during other television programming (Madden & Grube, 1994). One hypothesis may be that watching sports programming where a higher rate of alcohol advertisements appears may “prime” viewers for heavy alcohol use. Once students are in an environment were alcohol is plentiful and easily accessible, such as college, they may be more likely to engage in heavy alcohol use. This hypothesis should be tested in further research.
The study has several limitations. As with other surveys, these data are subject to reporting bias. However, the binge drinking and other substance use rates reported by respondents to the CAS are similar to those found in other major national surveys (Douglas; Johnston and Presley). Self-report surveys are common in studies examining alcohol use, and are generally considered to be valid (Cooper; Frier and Midanik). A short form of the questionnaire sent to nonresponders found no difference in alcohol use between them and students who responded to the longer questionnaire. In addition, school response rates were not associated with rates of binge drinking (Wechsler et al., 2000). Another potential limitation of the study is the definition used to identify “sports fans” individually and “sports schools” at the school-level. Sports fans were defined according to the importance they placed on attending sports events. We asked about the importance of attending rather than actual attendance. The importance one places on attending sports events differs from whether or not that person actually attended an event and seems to provide a reasonable measurement of the level of interest in following sports (for a discussion of the definition of sports fans, please see Wann, Melnick, Russell, & Pease, 2001). Sports schools were defined using an aggregate measure of sports fans at a school level and a cut-off of 40%. This threshold was chosen by the authors prior to conducting any analyses as a proxy measure for high emphasis placed on sporting events by students, since it represents a significant minority of students at each school. Further research should examine whether this definition provides a meaningful distinction for the amount of institutional emphasis that schools place on sports.
It appears that high interest in sports may contribute to a high level of binge drinking and a “party atmosphere” on college campuses. The results from the present study suggest that the link between sports and alcohol is an important one for colleges to consider in their efforts to decrease binge drinking and the harm that it produces. One implication of the findings is that intervention efforts should be directed at reducing the heavy drinking of sports fans. Reductions in heavy drinking behavior should result in decreased harms for sports fans and a reduction in secondhand effects for their classmates. On an institutional level, athletic departments and college sports governing bodies should be encouraged to play an active role in reducing alcohol problems on campus. One area where they can show leadership is in sponsorships. Some schools and governing bodies of collegiate athletics have relationships with the alcohol beverage industry that allow the industry to promote their products through college sports events. Athletic administrators and officials should take the findings of the present study into account when considering the role of alcohol in athletic budgets. In addition, potential college students and parents of those students may want to consider the emphasis that schools place on athletics when deciding where they want to attend college. The increased risk of secondhand effects at schools with a heavy emphasis on sports should be a factor in their decision.

Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge Meichun Kuo for her assistance in the development of this article and Anthony Roman at the Center for Survey Research, University of Massachusetts-Boston, for his assistance with the data collection. This study was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Grant 030249.

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This study was conducted during the spring of 1999. It focused on the results of full-time college students enrolled during that semester. It ended up segregating the results into 2 sections; sports fans and non-sports fans. Any responses that suggested they were in between were omitted for the purposes of the study. Its purposes were to find out if sports fans engaged in binge drinking more often than non-sports fans and if they suffered any negative consequences in doing so. It also wanted to determine if colleges that were classified as a "Sports School" had a higher rate of heavy drinking and the negative side effects as well.

This study had quite a few good statistics that weren't pertaining to just one school or one area of the country. Some of this I will probably use in my paper, but nothing major. Throughout the reading my preconceptions of what to come were verified in the end. A lot of major stereotypes were proven with the statistics of the research. I believe the study was very legit based on the source (Harvard) and the statistics that were gathered and subsequently broken down several times over.