Marathon Inc. : Businessman Bill Burke Is No Athlete. But He Knows How to Run a Race.

IT’S 8:45 ON A BRIGHT WINTER MORNING,and the World’s Champion Salesman is already well into his pitch. “See that picture up there?” he says, gesturing briskly to a 10-by-14-inch full-color photo depicting the start of the first City of Los Angeles Marathon last March. “This year we’re gonna have twice that many people.” Twice that many? Twenty thousand people? “That’s right, man,” he says. “And that’s conservative, man. That’s conservative.”

The World’s Champion Salesman--as his friends and business associates call William Burke, president of Los Angeles Marathon Inc.--is always talking numbers. Big numbers. There are the 3,500 marathon-related billboards that have popped up all over Southern California in the last few weeks; the 75 million Coca-Cola cans emblazoned with the event’s logo; the 6 million Vons supermarket bags displaying the same; the 1.5 million television viewers who will tune in the event. Above all, there is the $4 million in product, sponsorship and license revenues he hopes to bring into his 2 1/2-year-old organization.

Curly-haired, slightly cherubic, fond of describing himself as “black, over 40 and over 30 pounds overweight,” Bill Burke, 47, can talk nonstop about the L.A. Marathon, forever looking at what’s next for what he calls “an international marketing event with legs.” This morning he is on the telephone to a producer about plans for a half-hour television special, “The Making of a Marathon,” which he hopes to syndicate. As he listens, Burke strikes a pose that has become familiar to the dozens of volunteers and staff members swirling about LAM Inc.’s Century City offices: He swivels in his chair and nods his head knowingly. “I’d like to have the budget by Friday.” Enough said. Click.

Another call: This time it’s his marketing manager announcing that he’s just landed a major new sponsor: AT&T.; “Great. Great,” Burke says, his soft-featured face screwing into a cupid smile. “Now go get me Tecate (as a sponsor) and I’ll give you a gold pin.” Click. He turns and exclaims: “We’re the best-sponsored marathon in the world, man. No, forget that, man. Best-sponsored event. Period.”

Forgive Bill Burke the hyperbole. It would be hard for anyone to be modest given what he’s put together. In less than three years, amiable, smooth-talking Bill Burke has brought Los Angeles into the ranks of major city marathons. He’s done it with a mixture of political connections, marketing savvy and persistence--and not a little showmanship. When the runners gather at 9 a.m. next Sunday near the Coliseum, Burke’s promotional imprint will be everywhere: There will be official uniforms for the marathon workers, official film advertised at eight of the 16 entertainment centers along the route, an official drinking water, an official camera, car, juice, vitamin--even an official pasta.

The point is not that the L.A. Marathon has become too commercial; it is a commercial. In fact, it has almost nothing at all to do with organized sports. Unlike its counterparts in Boston and New York, the L.A. Marathon has no roots in the local running community, no runners’ advisory boards, not even a local running club as a sponsor. Instead, the L.A. Marathon was created out of thin air, legislated into existence almost overnight by a City Council still intoxicated by the “spirit of the Olympics,” not to mention the prestige and money that the event brought to Los Angeles. And while such glamour events as Boston and New York command sizable corporate sponsorships, none can match the L.A. Marathon for its ability to mold itself to the needs of Fortune 500 companies, marketing firms and public relations outfits. “The Los Angeles Marathon was created from a top-down process, rather than the usual bottom-up fashion,” observes Jeff Darman, a noted road-racing expert. “It’s not as much a race as it is a marketing organization.”

Burke likes it that way. “This race is not for the runners. This race is for the people and the City of Los Angeles,” he says. “This is the first major city marathon operating today to be run entirely by the non-running community. Sure, we may not know every

thing about a timing device, but we are highly analytical in our approach to problem solving, and when sponsors are spending as much money as they are with us, they appreciate that.”

Burke wants to talk about that a bit more, but not right now. He has to go. There are sponsors to meet, advertisers to placate, problems to solve. One problem, in fact, has been giving him a headache all morning. The songwriting team of Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson has been trying to get him to name one of their songs the official L.A. Marathon theme, but Burke isn’t buying. “It just doesn’t work,” he says, brandishing the cassette and tossing it onto his desk like a frustrated kid. A frown crosses his face, but almost immediately he smiles again, recalling a conversation the night before with actress Cicely Tyson. Tyson had told Burke that perhaps she could persuade Ray Charles to sing “America the Beautiful” for the start of the race. “Get Ray Charles’ agent on the phone,” he calls to an assistant as he walks out the door. “He’ll be looking for money. Tell ‘em we don’t have any.”

BORN IN THE SMALL TOWN OF Zanesville, Ohio, Burke grew up in a middle-class family in Cleveland, later moving to attend Miami University. From an early age he was fascinated with communications, first taking courses in college, then specializing in the subject while an Air Force officer. By the age of 25, he had become deputy commander of the Armed Forces Korea Network, building studios, recruiting talent and producing programs.

In 1965, Burke entered a field much more dangerous than any that the military had to offer: California politics. Returning from Korea he ran into a friend who was working for an assemblyman. The friend introduced Burke to then-Assembly Speaker Jesse M. Unruh (now state treasurer), who was looking for someone to run the Legislature’s communications office. Burke soon made a name for himself by helping politicians obtain precious air time. The contacts garnered in Sacramento helped him to land a job in 1967 as deputy to L.A. City Councilman Billy G. Mills. Among Burke’s closest associates were such rising black leaders as Councilman Gilbert W. Lindsay, Robert Farrell and Mervyn M. Dymally.

He held that job for three years, and a series of business ventures followed: a wine company, two funeral homes, a gold-mining operation in West Africa, real estate on the Westside, a health-care firm. The way his wife, former U.S. Rep. and County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, tells it, her husband was always the “obsessive” type, a man who liked to throw himself into the gritty details of his projects. Once, while visiting a mining site, he donned diving gear and waded out to help workers vacuum underwater ore samples. “And he’d never done anything more than jump in the swimming pool before,” she recalls.

Then one day in 1982, Bill Burke received a phone call that would “change my life,” he says. The man on the other end of the line was Peter V. Ueberroth, a San Fernando Valley businessman who had been selected to head the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee. Ueberroth asked Burke to become commissioner of tennis for the Games. Burke accepted, despite an outcry from the organized tennis community, which derided his lack of experience in the sport. Still, he did what is generally considered to be a creditable job.

For Burke, the Olympic Games were more than just another job; they were something of a religious conversion--all those flags, all that ceremony, all those people . It was an extraordinarily personal experience, he says. “I decided what I’d like to do for the rest of my life, which is to see what I can do to re-create that feeling for myself and for some other people.”

The Los Angeles Olympics, of course, also demonstrated something else: that big money could be made on the corporate sponsorship of amateur sports events. The Olympics netted a surplus of about $230 million. So Burke recruited about half a dozen former LAOOC staff members and started his own special events company. After the City Council passed a resolution in 1984 to organize a marathon and began to solicit proposals, Burke was at the microphone, across from his old City Hall friends, smiling and waving his own proposal. Not surprisingly, the council chose his plan over two others, noting Burke’s connections with potential sponsors.

Burke then faced a task that many in the running world thought was bound for failure. There was no precedent for success: Four attempts at starting a marathon tradition had foundered in the early 1980s, largely because of the city’s geography and relatively fragmented running organizations. The Runner magazine had even dubbed Los Angeles the “Bermuda Triangle for marathons.” One of the most infamous moments in the city’s road-racing history occurred in a 1982 marathon, sponsored by Miller Lite beer, when many of the runners followed a press truck off the poorly marked course and got lost.

Even more foreboding was the reaction of the local running community, which was furious at the idea of a non-runner presiding over the marathon. Turf wars broke out, with race directors in other cities charging that the L.A. Marathon would dilute attendance at their events. In his drive to enlist support from national running organizations, Burke also managed to alienate the Southern California Assn. of the Athletics Congress, a key vehicle for reaching runners. “It was seen very, very negatively,” recalls Bob Hickey, the organization’s president. “The local association felt that it had not been involved at all in the decision-making process that led to his selection.”

But Burke forged ahead. Like Ueberroth, he saw his task not as one of currying favor with the athletic Establishment, but as one of building a solid business strategy. “I’m no runner. I like to fish,” he would tell reporters. “I’m a manager.” In a 300-page battle plan he spelled out the marathon’s business philosophy: Hire experienced managers, sell hard and exploit every marketing niche possible. “We saw early on that as far as athletic management skills went, they were readily buyable,” he says.

Buy he did. To manage the tricky logistics of his first race, Burke hired Allan Steinfeld, race coordinator for the New York City Marathon. Widely regarded as one of the leading authorities on the technical aspects of organizing marathons, Steinfeld brought to Los Angeles a decade of experience in a new area of sports that few know much about. To oversee the race’s promotion and staff, Burke re-teamed with Marie Patrick, a manager of pro tennis tournaments who had also served as sports manager for tennis at the L.A. Olympics. He hired administrative and accounting employees from the Olympics staff as well.

In his planning, Burke relied on demographic data and marketing studies of the running community. For example, he commissioned a poll to find out whether runners cared if the race brought in big-name athletes, who can command upwards of $50,000 for an appearance. The results: Eighty-five percent said they did not care whether the race included elites. “What that told me, from a purely business point of view, was that they weren’t worth it,” Burke says. “It was better to spend the money on the runners and the marketing.”

There were setbacks. General Motors’ Chevrolet Division, which had indicated interest in sponsoring the race, pulled out at the last minute. So did another auto maker. Burke went back to the drawing table, where he pared more than $1 million from his budget. “I knew my integrity was on the line,” he recalls. “I knew I’d have to start relying on my own network then.”

Friends helped. One, John Attwood, then chairman of Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of Los Angeles, called Burke one night and pledged Coke as a sponsor. The Los Angeles Times agreed to become a major sponsor and supply almost half a million dollars in free advertising. Soon such prestigious corporations as Mercedes-Benz, Treesweet and Ricoh cameras signed on to be sponsors, and Orowheat, Ronzoni and Vons contracted as licensees entitled to use the marathon logo on their products.

By most measures, last year’s marathon was a success. Burke had hoped for 2,500 runners; he got nearly 11,000, the largest first-time field for a marathon. (In contrast, the 18-year-old New York City Marathon drew 126 runners its first year and about 22,000 in 1986.) KCOP-TV’s coverage of the race pulled the highest ratings for a single program in the station’s existence. True, there were too few bathrooms at the starting line, and some runners complained that the route might have been more interesting. But even Burke’s critics in the running community have praised his efforts. “He’s got the basics down--aid stations and a clear course,” says Brad Malamud, an attorney who represented one of the losing bidders for the city contract. Says Bob Hickey of The Athletics Congress: “The work Bill did last year proved that he can do it well. He’s done an exemplary job from a running point of view.”

There was just one hitch: Last year the Los Angeles Marathon ran a whopping $357,000 deficit.

THAT WON’T HAPPEN THIS YEAR, Burke says as he noses his black Mercedes eastward onto the Santa Monica Freeway. “Last year all we had was a dream. This year we’ve got a dream--and a videotape of the dream. This year the sponsors know we’re hot.” He pauses to point out a marathon billboard. “Why, we’re getting them a ticket into L.A., the hottest retail market in the country. We’re very hot.”

Companies are eager to sign on because of the lure of Los Angeles, a huge but highly fragmented retail marketplace that has long proven a frustrating target for corporations, especially those based in the East. The task is made even more daunting by the city’s far-flung geography and its rapidly growing and little-understood ethnic communities.

One attractive feature of marathon sponsorship is the access it buys to local communities, which are often difficult and costly to reach with traditional advertising. The course of Burke’s L.A. Marathon links 16 distinct communities, including Koreatown, Mid-Wilshire and Chinatown, many of which will be the sites of entertainment centers sponsored by Kodak. The centers will provide a festive focal point for spectators, creating the kind of all-inclusive event that is difficult to organize in a city of such immense sprawl. “The marathon creates a series of mini-events in diverse communities,” says David De Pinto, who is in charge of marathon sponsorship for the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of Los Angeles. “Once you have an event that piques the interest of the consumers and store owners, you have a tremendously compelling marketing event.”

Then there are the vaunted demographics of the runners themselves. Mostly educated, professional and upwardly mobile, they make up an attractive niche market for such companies as Mercedes-Benz, Kodak and Ricoh. And for growing companies that are trying to introduce new products or gain market share, the marathon is a vehicle that may be too compelling to ignore. To Vittel Imports, a French company struggling to grab a chunk of one of the world’s largest markets for bottled water, “the marathon offers tremendous exposure for a relatively modest expense,” says Vittel marketing director David Light. For Ronzoni, an Eastern food company trying to bolster its presence in Los Angeles, the $25,000-$30,000 in license fees paid to Burke is expected to bring the company something it can’t buy with regular advertising, says regional sales manager Anthony Scutti. “We’re going to see a lot of runners who will know Ronzoni and associate it with a very exhilarating and positive personal experience.”

Although marathons routinely garner corporate support these days, the L.A. Marathon is different in the way it handles sponsors. Burke knows how hot his event is. Unlike other marathon organizers, he is unwilling to relinquish control to sponsors. He does not grant blanket sponsorship of the whole event. Instead, he segments and sells parcels to different firms. Tandem Computers, for example, gets its name on the race application form; Kodak erects its name over entertainment centers; Vons sponsors the pre-race “carbo-loading” dinner; The Times gets its name on the trophy; Mercedes hosts the VIP hospitality tent. Observes Rick Feldman, KCOP-TV station manager and vice president, who has worked closely with Burke: “Bill doesn’t give away anything. He’s selling the damn lawn at the Coliseum to AT&T.;”

In the Ueberroth era of sports-event marketing, Burke understands that nostalgia counts. He has organized a free Finish Line Festival with family-style carnival games and hospitality booths at Exposition Park and sold the sponsorship to AT&T.; And as he gives talks to groups of backers he conjures Iacocca-like images, speaking of the marathon as “the very epitome of the Los Angeles melting pot.” Before he hits up a group of executives gathered at the Biltmore for new advertising commitments, he tells an inspirational tale of one handicapped athlete who is planning to traverse the 26.2-mile course on his hands. To get sponsors pumped up for committing to 1988, he dims the lights and shows a sentiment-laden film of the 1986 race that conjures the burnished emotions of the 1984 Olympic Torch Run. When the lights go on, there are more than a few teary eyes.

“Nostalgia plays a role,” he says. “It’s the attention getter. It’s like walking up to them and tapping them on the forehead. But these guys are very smart; they want to see proof of what you can do for them.”

Though he claims that he “would rather be fishing on my boat than giving an interview,” Burke seems comfortable in his increasingly public role. Those closest to him say he relishes the limelight, having long played out his career in his wife’s shadow. His style now is that of a man not afraid to wield power. At such events as the one at the Biltmore, as well as in private, Burke seems to operate much like the man who most shaped his early career at City Hall--Gilbert Lindsay, the wheeling, dealing councilman whom Burke calls his “mentor and godfather.” Burke takes great delight, for example, in meting out favors to friends who travel to his office to ask for help. When an associate calls and solicits his advice on organizing a five-kilometer race for charity, Burke listens thoughtfully, then tells the woman he’d be more than happy to designate her race the “official L.A. Marathon post-race.” That will enable her to use his computer banks to mail applications to all L.A. Marathon runners. When she leaves, he is beaming. “If I had my choice, I’d still be behind the scenes,” he insists. “If you think I’m enjoying myself now, you should have seen me before.”

He is not always so pleasant. When Ronzoni “backed out” of a previous agreement to prepare the food for the pre-race dinner, Burke “put ‘em out” of the 1988 race, he says. “I told ‘em, ‘Thank you very much, but I don’t think it’s appropriate for us to continue our relationship.’ ” He likes his sponsors and athletes to know who’s in control. When a group of KCOP-TV executives urged him to “keep the race as local as possible,” in keeping with the interests of the station, Burke brings up the fact that, well, he has been talking to the networks about next year. Who knows how much they might offer? And when the executives ask him about paying more to ensure the participation of last year’s winner, Ric Sayre, Burke bristles. He’d been on the phone with the athlete the day before and had grown incensed when Sayre asked for what he considered an “exorbitant” fee.

“He won’t get 20 cents from me,” Burke says quietly.

“But don’t we need him?” insists one executive.

“Ric will come around,” Burke says with a knowing smile. “He just needs to get rubbed around a bit.”

FOR ALL HIS BLUSTER ABOUT saving money, Burke must deal with the realities of putting on a large-scale event that is personality-oriented. In the case of Sayre, he had to pay $2,500, considerably less than the runner requested. And Burke will also have to ante up $118,000 in cash prizes, which have helped to draw such world-class athletes this year as Italy’s Gianni Poli, winner of last year’s New York marathon, and Nancy Ditz, who won the L.A. Marathon women’s division last year. (This year’s winners in the men’s and women’s divisions are to receive $15,000, a Mercedes-Benz, a round trip to Paris via Pan Am and a Ricoh camera package.) And only a few weeks ago, Burke learned that the amount the city was charging him for transportation services had tripled. Which raises the question: Can Burke’s organization make money this year?

It’s a subject that Burke, a man accustomed to quiet business deals, doesn’t like to discuss. Anyway, “there’s never enough money,” he says. “There’s always another hole to sink the cash into.” No, Burke likes to talk about all the “love” that goes into the event, how “it’s just like one big family working for the city and people of L. A.” In fact, wherever you go within LAM Inc., whomever you talk to at LAM headquarters, no one wants to talk about the money. “This is about sizzle. This is about glamour. This is about family. This is about real love for the people of this city,” says Don Janklow of Janklow & Associates, the official marketing arm of the marathon. Adds LAM Inc. Vice President Marie Patrick: “This is about having fun and sharing.”

But the money is on everyone’s minds. Terms of Burke’s deal with the city call for Los Angeles to get $140,000 in expenses and another $60,000 or 4% of the gross, whichever is larger. Burke figures that for each runner, after deducting the $20 entry fee, he must cover $135 in expenses--insurance, promotion, postage, salaries, prizes, cleanup. That’s why Burke has to keep the pace he does. That’s why money occupies his thoughts these days.

During a recent staff tour of Universal Studios, where Vons will stage the pre-race dinner, Burke strolls along slowly behind the babbling crowd of marketing directors, public relations people and sponsors. For a moment he appears lost. Then he brightens and turns to an associate. “You know what, man? We’re at break-even! I just figured it out. We’re at break-even! Did you realize that?” If all goes well, and if he can keep expenses down, he explains, all new license fees will be pure profit.

That’s enough incentive for the World’s Champion Salesman. In 45 minutes, Bill Burke is back at his office, staring out his window. Sunset-silhouetted palm trees bow to gentle Santa Anas. Lights begin to flicker on. He’d like to linger, but there’s no time. The phone is ringing. A staff member is knocking on his door. And there’s another visitor, a representative for a new sponsor. “See that picture up there?” he says, turning briskly to the full-color, 10-by-14-inch photo of the start of last year’s marathon. “This year there’s gonna be twice that many people.”

FO