Taking It Inside

David Baker had been working for six years to lift his sport from near oblivion when he heard the words he longed to hear. It was the first Sunday of Gulf War II, and NBC anchor Tom Brokaw was wrapping up his report on the latest round of U.S. bombings in Iraq. "And now," Brokaw solemnly intoned, "back to arena football."

Baker, 50, is commissioner of the Arena Football League (AFL), whose 16 teams play an exciting, fast-paced version of the sport with eight-man squads on a 50-yd. field, usually set up in a basketball or hockey facility. Arena football has been around since 1987 but hasn't taken off until this spring when NBC having lost big bucks on overpriced major sports turned over a prime weekend slot to the AFL. The network has broadcast 56 AFL games over the past four months and will showcase the semifinals and the championship, Arena Bowl XVII, for most of June. And both the AFL and NBC are turning a profit on the deal.

The AFL's attendance is up 16%, merchandise sales are up 38%, and website traffic is up 88% over the last year. New sponsors include Gatorade and Nike. And in December the league signed a 10-year collective-bargaining agreement with its players that includes revenue sharing and a salary cap of $1.64 million a team. (The typical AFL player earns about $40,000, versus $1.1 million in the National Football League.) "We're in pretty good shape right now," says Casey Wasserman, owner of the AFL's Los Angeles Avengers, who share the Staples Center with the basketball Lakers. And, Wasserman adds, "it all starts with Dave."

Baker, 6 ft. 9 in. tall and, as he puts it, "just a cupcake over 400 lbs." until a recent diet, has been a sports fan ever since he played basketball for the University of California at Irvine and later for a pro team in Vevey, Switzerland. After returning to California, he became mayor of Irvine and a real estate lawyer, but he never lost the sports bug. In 1996 he bought an arena football team, the Sting, and moved it from Las Vegas to Anaheim, Calif. By that time, the AFL's high-scoring games and hockey-style hits along the boards had caught fans' attention and helped the league expand to 15 teams, mostly in such smaller markets as Albany, N.Y., and Des Moines, Iowa. But further growth seemed stymied by the lack of a broadcast outlet and by squabbling among the owners.

At his first owners' meeting, Baker gave a speech on civility. The next day his colleagues voted him league president, and 18 months later they recommended that he become commissioner. "I knew being commissioner was like being president of the Little League except that everyone has lawyers," he says. But he took the job and immediately wrote what he called the Fan's Bill of Rights, which promised a "total entertainment experience at an affordable price." Baker did not publicly release the document but instead demanded that the teams implement it.

And they did. The average price for a ticket to an AFL game is $22, in contrast with $50 for the National Basketball Association or the NFL. And AFL games are promoted with the kind of stunts minor league baseball has used to build a fan-friendly image. Before a recent game between the AFL's Avengers and the San Jose Sabercats, more than 15,000 of the Sabercats faithful shook cowbells and, like Larry Bird-era Boston Celtics fans, chanted "Beat L.A.!" as 16 bikers carrying cheerleaders stormed the field on Harleys. San Jose quarterback Mark Grieb, perhaps the league's best player, signed autographs for a full hour after the game. "I love that my kids can just chat with these guys," says John King, 42, a coffee importer who says he prefers the Sabercats' games to those of the San Francisco 49ers of the NFL.

Once Baker had spread his philosophy, he was ready to enlist help from the big leagues. In January 1998 he arranged a meeting with NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue. Unlike another football start-up, the U.S. Football League of the 1980s, the AFL was not competing for the sport's best players. (It couldn't afford them.) So Baker figured both leagues could benefit from a partnership. What was scheduled as a 15-minute meet-and-greet in Tagliabue's Manhattan office turned into a two-hour briefing on the AFL's business plan. Tagliabue was so taken that he quickly changed his league's bylaws to say no NFL team owner could purchase an interest in another football team unless it was an arena club within that owner's NFL market.

Baker hit the road to tap NFL team owners with deep pockets and experience. First on board was New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson, who paid $3 million for an expansion AFL team that will start playing next season. Three years ago, Baker met Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones in Oklahoma City, Okla., for a game between the AFL's Wranglers and the Orlando Predators. By the time his return flight landed in Dallas, Jones wanted in. The AFL now has nine NFL owners with stakes in its teams, and during Baker's reign the average franchise value has increased from $400,000 to $12 million.