Peter LaFleur's life was in shambles back in 2004.
The small business owner had 30 days to pay $50,000 after defaulting on his mortgage.
If Peter failed to get the money, his gym, his life's work, would fall into the hands of a corporate gym across the street that wanted nothing more than to turn it into an auxiliary parking lot.
Luckily for Peter, however, Gordon Pibb was one of a handful of members at his rundown gym.
Gordon knew of a way for Peter to raise the money to keep his gym and the solution was hidden away in the pages of an Obscure Sports Quarterly magazine.
Dodgeball was the answer.
Now you may not think that dodgeball, a game most people stopped playing in middle school, wouldn't have a big following.
But it does, and the national tournament in Las Vegas is broadcast live every year on cable television.
TV exposure for that obscure sport brought in sponsors for the $50,000 tournament that Lafleur, and his rag-tag team of friends from the gym, ended up winning.
Peter Lafleur's experience was a true underdog story that wouldn't have been possible without ESPN 8: The Ocho.
Image source: TheStreet
The Ocho Is Back
While The Ocho eventually faded away, Walt Disney Co.'s (DIS) ESPN is bringing the channel back for a 24-hour run on Aug. 5.
The Ocho will air on ESPN2 and will include 14.5 hours of live events from the Rock Hill Sports & Event Center and Manchester Meadows in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
The live broadcast of "seldom seen sports" kicks off at 8 a.m. ET with the Turf Wars Kickball Invitational and ends with the U.S. Air Guitar All-Star Air-off at 9 p.m.
ESPN 8 at 6 p.m. will broadcast The USA Dodgeball All-Star Showcase, but Peter LaFleur, Gordon Pibb and the rest of the team from Average Joe's Gym won't be there this year because they are characters from the 2004 film Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story and not real.
The Future of ESPN
Sports fans have long been asking for a version of ESPN+ that carries everything on the cable channel.
The problem is that the subscription fees made by cable packages are very lucrative. In an earnings call from the first quarter of 2022, Disney revealed that its channels ABC and ESPN earned $2.8 billion in the quarter that ended April 2. Most of this money was from the subscriber fees ESPN charges cable companies.
Disney is likely reluctant to lose those cable subscription fees and just go direct-to-consumer just yet. Disney’s streaming services are doing great, but they’re not so lucrative that the company can just walk away from the cable package fees just yet. As noted by Deadline, is that “the economic returns on streaming are much more uncertain than in pay-TV.”
ESPN+ had 22.3 million paid subscribers paid subscribers in the second quarter.
