NFL, Pshaw! XFL Promises More Violence, Sex

N E W   Y O R K, Feb. 2 -- It is rare these days that fans could attend a professional sporting event where the players on the field may earn less than the ticket holders.

When baseball, football, basketball and even golf stars command seven-digit salaries and extremely generous promotional contracts, it's hard to imagine their being hungry for victory when they could buy a world championship ring with their pin money.

But hunger is definitely at play in the new XFL football league — in fact, it's a major selling point. With a base pay of $35,000 to $50,000 for the season, XFL players receive a fraction of what their NFL or CFL brethren may get. (And since all teams are owned by the league, there would be no bidding wars among franchises for individual players' contracts.) But the money rolls in if they win — the victorious team splits a hefty bonus — hence the fire in the eyes of a leading team that stands to lose thousands of bucks should the other team score off them.

This new sports institution tries to stand out in a crowded entertainment field by having its teams compete not just for bragging rights but for Junior's college fund or a mortgage payment — and who knows, maybe even one of the curvaceous cheerleaders, exhibited in commercials bouncing around the showers in less than a towel.

And since the XFL encourages more forceful contact (rules of play have been, shall we say, eased — "Kill the quarterback!" will be de rigeur), viewers should not want for physical demonstrations of one team's antipathy for its opponent.

Why do you think they call it a contact sport?

NFL fans may feel that this looser, rougher, gaudier form of football is less a testament to strategy or finesse than to Darwinism. But for a start-up league whose role models are Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock, finesse is not the point.

The XFL (whose initials in fact don't stand for anything) was created last spring by Vince McMahon, the 55-year-old chairman of the World Wrestling Federation. As might be expected, the WWF mogul laughs in the face of other notable football failures. Most speculators who have tried to evolve a new operation to compete against the NFL have gone the way of the dodo: Remember the World Football League? (Historians of the financially strapped WFL joke that players who won the coin toss were happy to keep the coin.) How about the USFL? Or the PSFL, which folded during training camp without even making it onto the field?