Team Sports "Losing Ground”

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31006, 11 March 1966, Page 12

Team Sports "Losing Ground”

Team sports were losing ground all round the world and individual sports were gaining, Mr E. Parker, the president of Spalding International said in Christchurch last evening.

With Mr R. Molitor, a vicepresident, Mr Parker is making his first visit to New Zealand.

The trend towards individual sport was a result of a better standard of living, Mr Parker said. Gone were the days when a man had to join a baseball club, or a football club. Today he could get in his car and drive out to a golf course and there play with his wife or his children. And that was one reason that Mr Parker, a former professional tennis player gave up golf. His 14-year-old son

asked him: “Why play a shot like that?”

“What do you do then?” Mr Parker said. His attention then was given to the full-time administration of the Spalding “empire.” This consisted of seven manufacturing plants in various parts of the world and selling, agencies in 121 countries. New Zealand is the only country in which the manufacturing plant is not wholly owned by Spaldings, which have a head office in Chicopa, Massachusetts. Why had Spaldings given up the practice of gifts of tennis rackets to promising children? Mr Parker was asked.

“A sound merchandising project is what we aim for, and if we make a substantially better product we are entitled to sell it at a reasonable cost,” he said. He appreciated that in the past gifts by his company

had helped those in straitened circumstances to compete against those in a more fortunate position, but today his company wanted to produce the best equipment at the lowest possible price. Similarly, with oil companies, tobacco companies, and in some cases other companies with huge turnovers being able to offer more money for sponsored tournaments than the sporting

manufacturers, Mr Parker said that many of them had up to 200 times the turnover of the sporting goods manufacturers, but on a head of population, expenditi by the sporting goods manufacturers was still more than anyone else spent to promote sport.

The quality of the tennis balls? Mr Parker was sure that they were better than ever, and he added that he did not just speak for his

company, but for all the manufacturers. “Of course tennis is a constantly developing game and balls are getting harder and harder use,” he said. “But we are sure that we are keeping up with the demand.” Mr Parker is spending a week in New Zealand, and intends to return with his wife next June for a holiday. By then he hopes to have mastered the arts of fishing —another indivdual sport.