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League of X-traordinary daredevils carves niche

The fledgling Dew Action Sports Tour descends on Orlando this week, pulling in X Gamers to chase points and big payoffs.

By BOB PUTNAM
Published October 12, 2006

The X Games has always been a celebration of daredevilry, a way to showcase young athletes involved in individual sports outside the mainstream.

The trouble is it only happens once a year. Athletes at these flash-point events compete at levels most of us can barely fathom, building up mountains of goodwill and some level of celebrity before receding from the public consciousness.

What they needed was a league to call their own. Now they have one.

The Dew Action Sports Tour, a five-stop nationwide series featuring BMX freestyle and motocross freestyle disciplines, is in its second season and is broadcast on NBC and USA Network.

The tour makes its final stop this weekend in Orlando, where overall winners in each of the disciplines will be announced.

"We're seeing a lot of growth in what really was a league created out of thin air," said Wade Martin, general manager of the tour.

The Dew Action Sports Tour is trying to succeed where others have failed. The now-defunct Gravity Games, a single-event competition that NBC also aired, lasted from 1999 to 2003.

This time things are different. NBC has invested $30-million to $50-million in the tour, according to published reports. It also has committed hours of broadcasting and attracted some of the top sports stars, such as skateboarder Ryan Sheckler, BMXer Dave Mirra and motocross rider Travis Pastrana.

"As athletes, we're all psyched to have a league like this," said Sheckler, who won the overall title last year. "It's lucrative, and you have to be at every stop to be in contention."

The setup is similar to the PGA Tour. Each stop is a four-day event, there are leaderboards and a pool of money paying the athletes according to how they place.

This year, there is a $3.5-million tour purse and a prize structure built around a points system that keeps many of the athletes in the hunt for the title, much like NASCAR's Nextel Cup Chase for the Championship. The winner in each of the disciplines each month gets $15,000. If an athlete accumulates the most points in a discipline by the end of the tour, they get a $75,000 bonus and a pickup truck.

The goal is to keep the athletes and fans interested.

But many of the A-list stars are high-tailing it before the season ends.

Skateboarder Shaun White decided to skip the last two events to go back to snowboarding, his primary occupation.

Pastrana, who electrified the crowd at the X Games with a double backflip on a motorcycle, has dedicated his career to rally car racing.

Nyjah Huston, a 11-year-old who is skateboarding youngest professional, was a no-show at the last event in San Jose and is not expected to attend.

"Of course, we would like to have those top guys here for the whole season," Martin said. "But I think the competition is still intense, and the crowds are just as interested."

And the finale will not be devoid of talent. Sheckler will be there. So will Anthony Furlong, a Tampa native.

"The biggest thing we have to preach is patience," Martin said. "But I'd say we're off to a pretty good start for being a start-up league."

[Last modified October 12, 2006, 01:55:53]