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Fink can finally
sleep a little easier

THESE days, it is very, very good to be John Fink.

This was not always the case. Even just a couple of days ago, the man was a mess. Specifically, last week, when he woke up in the middle of the night and there was so much buzz in his brain he didn't have a prayer of getting back to sleep.

"You have to imagine the games that have gone through in my head," he said.

So then he went to work that morning and there was a call to meet with Hawaii athletic director Herman Frazier at 8 a.m. "And I truly didn't know what the meeting was going to be about," Fink said.

And the butterflies swarmed him like that movie "The Birds."

"OK, I'm going in at 8 o'clock," Fink was thinking, "that means I'm probably going in before the other guys ... does that mean he's going to tell me no and then tell them yes? Or is he going to tell me yes and then ask me to shut up until he tells them no? I mean, this is what happens when you're up at 3:30 in the morning wondering."

But now, it is very, very good to be John Fink.

At the Honolulu Quarterback Club, former UH athletic director Paul Durham called Fink "Herman Frazier's hero." (He should be. No other AD in the country can count on local TV bringing in big money like this.)

Les Keiter said Fink had pulled off "a Herculean victory."

You know the story. Fink -- we know him from "Think About It" after Channel 8's news broadcasts -- is the KHNL/KFVE general manager who ended up, that Friday morning, on the winning end of the bid process to televise UH sports.

And Fink still looks tired, but he looks like he's feeling good.

Yes, many details are apparently still yet to be hammered out. But the two big ones are set -- KFVE will give UH $1.75 million a year. And you can still find your UH sports on TV's "Home Team."

There will be a few changes. No more free Saturday nights, for one. No more 10 p.m. replays. Don't blame your Sunday paper for giving you the score -- the first free UH football we'll see will be the next day.

"For two reasons," Fink said. "No. 1, we want to help the university drive people to the stadium. No. 2 is if you can't or don't want to go to the stadium, you will now be obligated to watch it on pay-per-view or the next day on KFVE."

Yes, Fink said a big part of the upcoming contract will be trying to get more people to watch the games live.

"And let's not forget there have been some misnomers out there," Fink said. "This deal does not put UH in the black, folks. This provides UH an opportunity perhaps to get closer to the black. But they still need to get bodies in the seats and have winning teams. Which somehow we've become somewhat of a fair-weather town here. They're going to have to do that if they really want to make their money."

Yes, this came up a lot.

"We can't have an empty stadium," he said.

"They've got to grow that revenue base," he said.

"We will be a conduit to help UH promote itself," he said.

So will it work? Will knocking off the free, same-night replay result in the fans coming back in droves? Well, no. Probably not. At least not right away. Which is why pay-per-view is so huge. The plan is, one way or another, if you're going to see Hawaii football, you're going to have to give UH some cash.

"We will probably experiment with a couple (other) sports on pay-per-view and see what that does," Fink said.

That sounds ominous, but it's the future. This is big business now. UH needs the money. And after three years of doing it for free (the rights fee it paid to air the games was much lower), now that KFVE is paying $1.75 million it wants a piece of the PPV pie.

(Fink suggested we just make a party out of it and watch the game for $3 each.)

Suddenly, games lost to ABC and ESPN (now the only way we'll see them for free) may hurt UH -- and its broadcast partner -- at the "gate" more than ever before: "We will have to put some wording in there that gives us some sort of a rebate or something like that for games that we lose," Fink said. "And we have something in there right now like that."

But that's a worry for another day. Now is a happy time. Fink will work on setting up a pay-per-view partnership in the next day or so. Oceanic will be his first call.

"We've been partners for three years," he said.

And there are possibilities to plan for -- getting game feeds to the mainland, Internet broadcasts. He envisions UH football playing on laptops around the world.

"It is there, and it will happen," he said. "It's not a pipe dream."

You get the idea he still wakes up at 3 in the morning, still unable to sleep with all the buzzing in his brain. But this time, with excitement, not worry.

"It's been a long, arduous road," he said.

And at the end of it, it's very good to be John Fink.