Honda, Miller Spike AVP As League Mulls Fate - Brief Article

The woes of the Association of Volleyball Professionals continue as two of its biggest sponsors, Honda and Miller Brewing, have pulled out, and league officials talk frankly about filing for bankruptcy. It's further indication that the 18-year-old beach volleyball circuit, once a premier second-tier sport in partnership with NBC, may be on its last legs.

"I think we are going to have a bankruptcy within 30 days or so," AVP executive director Harry Usher told Brandweek. "The question is whether it's one that just wraps it up and throws away the key and that's the end of it (Chapter 7) or cleans things up and starts again (Chapter 11)."

Usher, the former USFL commissioner, took the helm of the AVP last December when a player revolt ousted longtime player agent Jerry Solomon. The player-owned league has about $2.5 million in debt, with players owed about $600,000, and is on the block for around $1 million, plus debt payments. Usher said people are kicking the tires.

"Everyone knows this isn't a hard property to market," said Usher. "It just hasn't been run particularly well. But the AVP is a name that's worth something. It's a monopoly on the best players in an Olympic sport... But I can't do much building until I know we're going to have a foundation."

Sponsors still aboard: Sunkist, Speedo, Fila, Swatch and Schering-Plough for Coppertone.

It's still a crapshoot as to whether the NBA will tip off this November, and ABL CEO Gary Cavalli hopes to take advantage of that to get more basketball fans to sample his "other" women's league, whose season opens Nov. 5. The ABL has 10 regular season games, its All-Star Game and as many as five playoff games televised on Fox Sports Net this year, plus two of its championship games on CBS. Meanwhile, the league and New York production house/agency Emerald City are developing a four-spot, "seven-figure" TV ad campaign, set to break on the league's opening broadcast, that will employ stars Jennifer Azzi, Valerie Still, Debbie Black and KC Jones. A new tag, "Bring It On," replaces "Real Basketball."

"We're working on some [print] ads in our overlapping [NBA/ABL] markets with messages like 'There may not be an NBA season, but there's still some great basketball in town,"' Cavalli said.

With all the hoopla, Cavalli hopes to push last season's 4,333 average per-game attendance to 6,000 this year.

Extra innings: Fox NFL studio talents Howie Long and Terry Bradshaw signed with Frito-Lay to appear in POP displays for a January promo leading into the Super Bowl. .. New York Yankees Jorge Posada and Orlando Hernandez, along with Roberto Clemente Jr., cut Spanish and English TV and print ads for New York-based consumer electronics retailer P.C. Richard & Son, to break later in the postseason. The Marquee Group's EI Marquee subsidiary, N.Y., handles.

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