The Big Lasso

Jac Sperling was paging through sports marketing research in the fall of 2004, in search of a new project. It was familiar work.

A sports attorney, Sperling was nearing the end of another significant hockey transaction: the successful sale of the National Hockey League’s Anaheim Ducks by Disney Corporation to his client, Henry Samueli, the billionaire cofounder of California-based high-tech communications giant Broadcom.

Sperling was also CEO of the Minnesota Wild hockey team and its parent company, Minnesota Sports & Entertainment. Over seven years in the chief executive spot, from 1997 until 2004, he’d helped build the team into one of America’s most envied sports franchises for its sell-out games and high fan satisfaction. But he was stepping back from that role now, decreasing his involvement with the Wild in favor of building the business he had founded that spring, Minneapolis-based Grit Rock Ventures, a sports and entertainment investment firm of which he is the sole owner.

So as Sperling paged through the marketing data this time, the task was familiar, but two things were different.

First, he wasn’t scouting for opportunities to cross-match buyers and sellers. “I like doing deals,” Sperling says. “I like helping people buy things. But this time, I was going to do it for myself.”

Second, instead of looking for a mere franchise opportunity, he was looking for a whole new sport to develop. And what he found jolted him like a kick from a bucking bronc.

It was rodeo. And the more he learned, the more intriguing the opportunity got.

In Sports Business Daily, he read that the 23.6 million fans who attended live rodeo events in 2003 comprised the seventh-largest sports audience in America, almost double golf’s 12.5 million. But because rodeo was composed of a loose confederation of regional events, its fan base had limited commercial appeal. 

Scarborough Research, a market research firm owned by Arbitron, projected the number of rodeo fans in the 75 major American markets that it had tested to be 30.1 million. And there was this pleasant surprise: Three big markets for rodeo—Los Angeles, New York City, and Chicago—were all virtually unexploited opportunities.

Within 24 hours, Sperling would be on a plane to Colorado Springs, the national headquarters of the Pro Rodeo Cowboys Association—and thinking about buying some Wrangler jeans and cowboy boots.