Columnist Dean Juipe: New leagues may be fatal to old ones

Dean Juipe

Monday, Aug. 7, 2000 | 10:05 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

It's an apt phrase, one that doesn't leave any room for complaint.

"Survival of the fittest" is the law of the jungle, the basic bottom line that resolves any and all disputes.

And with the proliferation of professional sports leagues the past couple of years, the term has a business usage as well. Not every league that has come into being is assured of survival, just as some existing leagues may succumb in the face of new or renewed competition.

For instance, the Canadian Football League has existed since 1958, sometimes in good health and at times by the skin of its collective teeth. While it once fancied itself as a viable North American alternative to the National Football League, the CFL has since withdrawn to the safety of its frozen borders.

Like a curious turtle, the CFL poked its head around the United States -- remember the Las Vegas Posse in 1994? -- before determining it was a vicious world and that it was safer within its shell.

Today it goes about its business in something of a publicity vacuum, a purely Canadian venture with virtually no appeal south of Manitoba.

Yet the CFL is a football league that needs football players, and it will almost certainly be impacted in a negative manner with the opening of the XFL this fall. The latter, U.S.-based league -- which includes a franchise in Las Vegas -- will siphon players who might otherwise have migrated to Canada (and Europe) and the effect on the CFL in particular could be devastating.

Its brand of football figures to suffer; whether that causes Canadians to lose interest remains to be seen.

Likewise, Las Vegas has a franchise in a basketball league that would like to crush its rivals and stake itself on a rung directly beneath the National Basketball Association. The International Basketball League, including its Las Vegas Silver Bandits, is likely to become more vigilant as it goes head to head with the Continental Basketball Association (and the new American Basketball Association) later this year.

If the 2-year-old IBL really wants to displace the CBA, it will not only have to pay its players more -- which it says it will do -- it will also have to lure the very best players who are not in the NBA. To date, the IBL has yet to impact the CBA, but it doesn't take much in the way of imagination to see these leagues on a collision course.

Perhaps only one survives.

Of course inherent in the unveiling of every new sports league is the newcomers' belief that there is a market for its product and room for its growth, as if more is always better. It's a principle that seems foolish at times, although it has never been completely disproven.

How the CFL withstands the intrusion of the XFL and how the CBA fares in the face of the upstart IBL may provide the definite answer. If the football and basketball umbrellas are so large that new leagues can profit while coexisting with their established predecessors, then the era of sports expansion may have just begun.

But if any of the four capitulate a different message will be delivered, one that cautions you to take the biggest dog anytime there's not enough meat to go around.