So, in a phrase, the Gardner brothers are jack offs? Who knew! I'm told that they practiced law before entering into paintball... to bad they quit, that industry is well suited to their brand of morals and ethics. Not that I care, nor am I surprised mind you. I never liked the NXL right from it's inecpetion, and I predicted way back then that precisely this would happen. Wanna get paintball on TV? Build an audience first. Regardless of any pipe dreams the owners may have had, paintball is not the NFL, or MLB, or even the NHL. It is a broken up, completely fractured scene at the professional level with no leadership or cohesion whatsoever, and nobody outside of the industry is terribly interested in seeing it on TV (not right now anyway, they don't what it is and they haven't seen it before). That's hardly ripe conditions for attracting advertisers to sponsor your $800,000 league. And now they want to start yet another multi-hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollar league? They couldn't get the NXL off the ground in the last, what 4 years? So what, do they think it's going to be any better now that paintball has been fractured even more than it was before by the creation of the NXL on top of the other pro leagues? Power to 'em, I'd like nothing more than to see the Gardners invest another million or so into yet another "TV league" that'll never get off the ground, but it seems like a terrible waste of time and resources. Unless things change in a big way, paintball will never be on TV, and it will never be a "professional" sport. Players will never be paid to play, and fans will never pack out stadiums to watch us play. Let alone getting into the Olympics (as some have dreamed of), or even the X-Games. This sport is a complete joke at the "pro" level. Until all of the "pro" leagues can agree on a format and rules, and all of the top level team owners, league owners, coordinator's, etc, stop acting like a bunch of bitchy, catty, hormonal, 13 year old girls (which seems to pretty aptly desccribe about 80% of the people involved with paintball in any capacity), this will always be a go-nowhere sport. Pretty tough to have a professional league(s) unless you have people involved who conduct themselves with professionalism, which is shunned like the plague in this industry.
