A Grand Slam Deal

A Starting Lineup '97 Timeless Legends action figure of the man with the golden shoes.

A Grand Slam Deal

Pro Wresting, Race Car Driving and the Potential of a Grand Slam Track TV Deal

Words Jeff Merrill

On November 9, 1997, Bret ‘The Hitman’ Hart entered the ring at WWF’s (now WWE) Survivor Series Pay-Per-View event. Hart, the federation’s title holder, had been in talks with Ted Turner’s upstart league, WCW about jumping to their roster for the kind of money that could not be matched by Vine McMahon’s WWF. Montreal would be one of The Hitman’s final matches with WWF, and plans had been set behind the scenes by Hart and McMahon for Hart’s match with Shawn Michaels- a wrestler for whom he had a real life distaste for, to result in a disqualification. Hart would then lose the championship belt in a future bout, allowing both Hart and WWF to save face in an amicable break-up. In what is now infamously known as ‘The Montreal Screwjob’ documented thoroughly by Radiolab in a 2015 episode, Michaels did not adhere to the script, and instead locked Hart in Hart’s own signature hold- ‘The Sharpshooter Submission Hold’ and claimed the belt. Following the match, Bret Hart found Vince McMahon backstage and (really) clocked him in the face, knocking him out cold and leaving him with a black eye for which the league would have to explain to the media. It was at this point that Radiolab describes:

“Writers of the WWF started blurring the lines on a different level. Vince McMahon became Mr. McMahon, the character.” They wrote the commissioner into the show.

Drama has always existed around decision-making within the front offices of sports organizations, but in recent decades, the drama has been played up to the advantage of the league, team or athlete at the center, and WWE is often referenced as the model of how to do this effectively. Every piece of information is a potential story-driver and headline catcher. Trades, front office moves, broadcast deals can all be used for fodder to, in the hopes of the powers that be, increase interest in what takes place in the arena. If spun right, weaving decisions into the story arc can also be used as a valuable tool for convincing audiences to accept controversial moves. It’s all part of the show.

In 2024, in fact, HBO, the makers of the hit series Hard Knocks, a show that goes behind the scenes with an NFL team during training camp released their first season going behind the scenes with the Giants during the offseason, as the front office navigated the NFL Combine, NFL Draft, and free agency.

Grand Slam Track appears to have taken a page from the WWE guidebook, and has taken every opportunity to turn business developments into breaking news. The upstart league has been leaning heavily on its 4-time Olympic, 8-time World Championship gold medalist and world record holding commissioner for content.

In true WWE fashion, GST has already taken it upon themselves to poke the bear by trolling the pre-existing professional circuit, the Diamond League on social media last fall when Sydney McLaughlin, GST’s first contracted athlete attempted with some success to race at the Brussels Diamond League meeting without adhering to the league’s qualification procedures (she raced in exhibition heats rather than in official Diamond League heats).

In 2025, following the business of track may be just as interesting as following track, and especially with Grand Slam Track, who appears to take their role as entertainment seriously, the lines between the oval and the office are likely to continue to blur.

The question is, where will the show be shown?

Earlier in the month, Michael Johnson posted that streaming information will be made available for Grand Slam Track in the month of January. Since GST announced its plans last year to revamp the professional track and field scene, the eyes of hardcore T&F fans have been fixed on their every move. The league, consisting of 4 3-day meets taking place from April to late June has signed 48 of the world’s best to compete, with 48 rotating challengers for each meet yet to be announced. GST is backed by the private equity firm Winner’s Alliance, which has invested upward of $30 million into the operation. GST has stated that to avoid conflict with sponsors of the athletes on their roster, they would rather not commit themselves to sponsorship support from the footwear giants who currently float the sport, funding everything from meets to athlete contracts to creative storytelling around meets and athletes. The pro track world, in large part, is an advertisement for running products and also in search of an audience to advertise to.

In the current sports landscape, the way to recoup an investment of $30 million is to sign lucrative media licensing and broadcasting rights deals. That amount of cash will not be seen through tickets and concessions.

With the the Diamond League signing a deal with Flotrack- the track-focused streaming service that charges $30 per month to subscribers, it leaves an opening for GST to ingratiate themselves with US audiences looking for less burdensome ways to watch high-level track, and get a leg up on their rival.

The consequences of a crumbling cable package and shift to direct to consumer streaming are well documented. What we as consumers of niche subject matter believed would be a benefit to us- paying for only what we want to watch- has turned into a bigger obstacle than we expected. Production is expensive. What the cable package offered in a previous life was security and set real estate. Individual networks had more wiggle room to show a variety of programming, because they could not only rely on support from cable subscription fees that were distributed to networks in the bundle, they could rely on funding from sponsors who in turn could count on their commercials being seen because whatever was on tv was on tv, there was little to no ‘On Demand’. You could put a track meet on ESPN and people would watch, because that was what was on ESPN. The disintegration of the cable package has contributed to a flattening out of content on the biggest platforms because streaming giants who have the means to pay the most for content are eager to purchase the rights to what appeals to the broadest audience to not only secure advertising dollars but to grow and maintain a substantial subscriber base. The screws have been tightened and the scope narrowed. Not only does track have to put together a product appealing to its current fanbase, it has to grow that fanbase to be much, much larger.

Completely based on my own gut, I estimate that there are roughly 50,000 hardcore track fans in the United States. These are not casuals, but people who will actively seek out track on TV, not to say they will pay for it. The viewing audience for an average NFL game is 17.5 million, and this is with potentially 3 other NFL games going on at the same time. Even in an Olympic and election year, of the top 100 live viewed TV programs of 2024, football accounts for 76 of the slots. NFL games claimed 72 of the spots, including 15 of the top 20 and college football accounting for 4 spots in the top 100- the second most of any particular sport. In what NBC touted as a banner year for their Olympic programming, only 2 of their nightly primetime programs made it into the top 100, at places 82 and 89.

This is the landscape that track faces as Grand Slam Track or any meet or league attempts to sign a meaningful distribution contract.

There are some encouraging insights about the 2024 numbers, however. Live sports are still king. Live sporting events make up 82 of the 100 top programs, and with 2025 not being an election year, those 16 slots taken up by political programming will likely be occupied by other content. God willing.

The numbers from 2024 have also shifted from 2023, where 93 of the top 100 programs were football broadcasts. Maybe Americans are showing an appetite for something other than pigskin? Although, it is very possible that the programs that would take up the 16 political programming slots are football games. We sure do love our football. Of the top 20 live programs viewed all-time, 19 of them are Super Bowl broadcasts, with the only outlier being the Finale of M*A*S*H.

Grand Slam Track is currently trying to cut a deal in this marketplace, and with the risk aversion being shown by networks and streaming platforms, this is a difficult proposition for an upstart whose subject (track racing) has little to point to in the way of viewership success.

The Angle…

In 2019, Netflix debuted a groundbreaking show focused on the Formula One World Championship racing circuit called Drive to Survive. The project was a collaboration between Netflix and Formula One and showcased the teams and drivers competing for the title. Drive to Survive was a massive hit and its success has spawned copycats in other sports including Full Swing (golf), Break Point (tennis), and Make or Break (surfing). The viewership of Drive to Survive on Netflix translated to massive leaps in viewership for the Formula One races broadcast on ESPN in the United States and Sky Sports in Europe. The series was so successful that ESPN just signed a 3-year deal to broadcast Formula One races in the United States for between $75 million and $90 million a year. Their previous deal was for $5 million per year. In addition to this, Sky Sports has retained the rights to broadcast Formula One races to European audiences for £200 million (~$247m) through 2029 exclusively in the UK and Ireland.

The idea of having a Drive To Survive-type series for Track is not a novel one, and every track fan out there has screamed through their fingers in comment sections about it. Track has attempted to grab some of the spotlight to limited success through the documentary series: Sprint, which followed specific medal contenders as they geared up for the Olympics and World Championships, but it didn’t get the momentum most dreamed it would.

The main hurdle to track commissioning a successful Drive To Survive type show has been the existence of a meaningful regular season where fans can reliably count on athletes to show up to regular competitions where there are real stakes. Without these checkpoints, each episode lacks a natural hook, focal point, dependable cast of characters, and conclusion. Grand Slam Track is attempting to clear this hurdle by signing athletes early to race at 4 set meets. I say ‘attempting’, because it remains to be seen whether all of the 48 athletes will make good on their commitment. Injuries inevitably arise and commitments to sponsors and health concerns leading into the world championships will be weighed.

That being said, what Grand Slam Track has been able to do in securing commitments from track stars more than 6 months in advance of races is revolutionary, and sets them up better than any entity before them to document the journey of contenders through a meaningful season with substantial prize money at stake ($262,500 per event grouping at each meet with the winner taking home $100,000).

GST’s positioning could be a convincing bargaining chip to sign a dual broadcast and series deal with a streaming platform or network- one where the series’ narrative carries meaning through the competitions between all the star characters that punctuate it.

The two entities that have both successfully waded into the live sports arena as well as seasonal documentary-style programming for leagues are Netflix and Amazon. Amazon built a broadcast production team and began streaming NFL’s Thursday Night Football in 2023, while Netflix paid $150 million to show 2 NFL games on Christmas Day 2024 following their live stream of the Mike Tyson vs Jake Paul fight in November. The Christmas Day games were by all accounts a massive success, with viewership reportedly around 30 million for both games, and Netflix able to secure advertising money through showing commercials- something NFL viewers are accustomed to. Curiously, on October 24th this past year, the GST roster took a field trip to the Thursday Night Football game during their Athlete Summit to watch the LA Rams defeat the Minnesota Vikings. GST Commissioner Michael Johnson was highlighted in an on field interview during the game… interesting…

In addition to Netflix’s recent NFL success, they made a very intriguing acquisition recently of a  beloved American sporting soap opera. The streaming juggernaut reportedly cut a $5 billion check in a deal to showcase WWE for the next 10 years. In language not dissimilar from the kind used by GST’s former star turned executive, WWE Chief Content Officer Paul ‘Triple H’ Lovesque says the deal is a “game changer”. The first Monday Night Raw streamed live on the platform on January 5th this year. In a piece in The Athletic, Netflix’s VP of Nonfiction Series and Sports referenced Drive to Survive in touting Netflix’s ability to “expand WWE into new markets.”

A key difference in the WWE deal and the Formula One deal is Netflix’s ability to not only show WWE live events, but commission content around the events in the form of DTS-style documentary shows. A consequence of the success of Drive to Survive for Netflix was its driving up of the value of the Formula One live racing broadcasts, making it more costly for Netflix to bid on those properties should they want to.

Netflix and Amazon’s ventures into live sports have by all accounts been very successful. Amazon has signed an 11-year deal with the NFL, paying $1 billion annually for Thursday nights. Netflix reported that riding their Christmas Day NFL and Tyson vs Paul live streams, they gained 19 million new subscribers, topping over 300 million subscribers worldwide. The past benefit of fixed cable time slots has turned into a negative for networks fixed to channels, as streaming platforms now have more freedom for programming than traditional networks confined to showing one show per time slot. On streaming platforms, subscribers can choose what to watch when they want with millions of people watching separate programs simultaneously- some of them live-streamed. Traditional channels do have streaming arms: NBC has Peacock and CBS has Paramount Plus, but for varying reasons, the networks have not made the financials work to their favor as much as the successful stand-alone streaming services have.

A proven benefit of live sports is the promotion of other shows on networks during live broadcasts. Networks have long used the Super Bowl to promote the launch of new shows. CBS promoted the launch of their new show Tracker during last year’s Super Bowl coverage leading to the show doing big numbers. This strategy is something that could also be valuable to Netflix and Amazon. In addition to this, the Netflix interface is extremely effective in promoting top shows and launches of new programs, displaying them prominently in their banner as well as identifying their Top 10 most viewed. Accessing a show on a traditional TV channel precludes this benefit.

A piece of the Netflix deal with WWE that GST may be able to use to their advantage is that it is not exclusive. As noted in The Athletic article, that is difficult to achieve with a long-standing media property whose distribution has been fragmented over time. If Netflix were to get in early with an upstart league like Grand Slam Track, it could allow them to negotiate exclusive ownership of the distribution of all content from live-streamed competitions to accompanying documentary-style series leading into each meet from a more advantageous position. The coupling of a documentary series with event live streams could be quite helpful to GST as well, as it would not only fuel anticipation for upcoming matchups, creating desirable properties for advertisers, it would allow the league to show exactly why particular athletes may not be racing in upcoming meets and dramatize their decision-making as the league navigates its early existence. Every piece of information could be used to further the story.

As referenced earlier, GST has expressed hesitancy to sign sponsorship deals with footwear brands. It has long been the opinion of Sports Marketers of footwear brands that they would support through participation of their athletes or otherwise, events or leagues that are highly visible and engaging. Visibility is, in fact, the reason athletes are signed to sponsorship deals with brands in the first place.

The model is proven out in the Formula One racing series where teams are named after their sponsors. Mercedes, Red Bull, Aston Martin, Ferrari (not all teams follow this naming practice). The managers of Formula One are well aware of the value of being involved. Before a team can enrich themselves through prize money, they must buy into the racing circuit each year, with the base price shifting with revenue from the previous year. 2025’s base registration fee per team was $680,203. Each team also must pay an additional fee for each point they achieved in the previous year’s circuit. For the reigning champion, that is $8,161 per point. For all other teams, it is $6,799 per point. Last year’s Constructor’s Champion, McLaren paid $6.1 million in entry fees for 2025. The total for entry fees for all teams this year amounted to just under $26 million. If a new team would like to join the circuit, they are on the hook for $200 million in their initial year, some of which is split between the existing teams to offset any dilution of winnings with the addition of a new team.

GST is currently not in the position to demand an entry fee from their participants, and instead is signing them to paid contracts of undisclosed amounts to race in all 4 competitions. If the league were to grow at a rate remotely close to the success seen by Formula One following Drive to Survive, it would be in every footwear brands’ best interest to try to get as many of their athletes as possible into the league. If the live broadcasts come with a corresponding documentary-style series following the athletes between competitions, the benefits in visibility for a footwear and apparel brand are obvious.

The benefits of increased visibility for a league like Grand Slam Track are exponential, the trouble for them is that they are in need of both visibility and cash flow to meet their investment at this point. This year is one grand experiment for the upstart league and they appear to be going all in, reserves be damned, to show future partners their potential value. My guess is that any contract signed with a streamer/broadcaster in the initial year will be a short-term deal. The goal will be to prove that they can achieve audience engagement, and then go back to the negotiating table. I think a joint live streaming / documentary series deal would be an unbelievable fit for the structure that Grand Slam Track has put together.

This kind of leap on a streaming platform’s part would rely heavily on their confidence in the long term viability of the league and would certainly be a risk. Michael Johnson has said that the investors at Winner’s Alliance are aware that Grand Slam Track is likely not going to be an overnight success and have committed to funding past the initial year. As comforting as that commitment is, GST will need to show in the first year that there is an appetite for track racing and the personalities that clash within it. Like many discussions surrounding the success and improvement of Track and Field, this is another chicken or egg scenario. In every case, the chicken and egg are funding and engagement.

If the wheels get turning, the sky's the limit, but it all depends on how you spin it.

Story is king.