Leafs banish Watters ads

WILLIAM HOUSTON - From Saturday’s Globe and Mail

Out of the playoffs and under attack from fans, the Toronto Maple Leafs have turned their attention to the real problem — the media.

Reacting to criticisms from Bill Watters, Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, the company that owns the Leafs, has expunged from the Air Canada Centre all references to the Toronto broadcaster.

Advertisements promoting the Watters afternoon radio show on AM640 Toronto have been removed from the arena’s electronic display panel.

Posters publicizing the show have disappeared.

“We provided them with new material once we were told the Watters stuff had to come down,” Gord Harris, AM640’s program director, said yesterday.

John Lashway, MLSE’s senior vice-president of communications, said the company pulled the signage because it felt Watters’s criticisms were excessive and “deeply personal.”

“We made the decision really based on Bill’s personal attacks on us that we felt went beyond the standards of journalism,” Lashway said.

Lashway said it was a group decision involving marketing people.

AM640, as the Leafs’ radio rights holder, is an MLSE business partner. The station, owned by Corus Entertainment, is in the third year of a seven-year contract that pays MLSE between $1.5-million and $2-million a year. It’s the most lucrative radio deal the club has ever signed.

Although acknowledging AM640 is free to promote Watters outside the arena, Lashway said, “We just didn’t want to be a part of it in-house.”

Watters has been a harsh critic of MLSE chairman and part owner Larry Tanenbaum and also chief executive officer Richard Peddie, citing weak leadership, poor decisions and inadequate knowledge of hockey.

But he’s hardly been alone in assailing Peddie, who has come under fire for his decision to hire John Ferguson as the club’s general manager and his failure to move quickly enough to remove Ferguson, who was fired last month. If the team misses the playoffs, it would be for third consecutive season.

However, Lashway said Watters’s comments have crossed the line because of “name-calling.”

In the past, he has described Tanenbaum, who comes from a wealthy family, as a PhD, “poppa has dough.” After Watters called Tanenbaum and Peddie “stiffs,” Tanenbaum told The Globe and Mail, “A good friend of mine once said you don’t get into a pissing match with a skunk.”

No return telephone was received yesterday from Tanenbaum’s office.

For his part, Watters chose not to comment, except to say, “The whole thing seems sort of petty.”

Watters, a former MLSE employee, lost his job as the Leafs’ assistant general manager during a 2003 front-office reorganization. That leaves him open to accusations he’s a former employee with an axe to grind.

But hard-hitting, even personal, commentary is part of the shtick that resonates on talk radio. What’s more, the Leafs receive extraordinarily soft coverage on the club-owned regional digital channel Leafs TV.

After a career as a hockey agent in the 1970s and 1980s, Watters moved to broadcasting at radio station CJCL in Toronto, later renamed The Fan 590, and then was hired as the Leafs’ assistant general manager in 1991.

After four years at AM640 as the co-host of the noon-hour show Leafs Lunch, he was given the afternoon drive show last summer. He continues to appear on Leafs Lunch and is also a hockey commentator for Rogers Sportsnet, the Leafs’ television rights holder.

Harris said the station backs him.

“We support Bill 100 per cent,” he said.

It’s worth asking whether MLSE doesn’t have more important concerns regarding the Leafs than signage promoting a broadcaster.

Hockey’s demographic

NBC will resume its NHL schedule tomorrow with the Philadelphia Flyers playing the New York Rangers at 12:30 p.m. EST. The U.S. network’s ratings have not been good. Its average of 0.9 is less than last year’s 1.0. (A rating represents the percentage of potential households tuned in.)

But the good news for NBC is, in the male and adult (men and women) demographic, 18 to 49, the age group that advertisers pursue, NHL viewership is up 57 per cent and 60 per cent, respectively, from last year.

Source: Globe and Mail 2/29/08