As seen in the 1988 film Bull Durham, the Durham Bulls Triple-A affiliate of the Tampa Bay Rays has been bringing the Durham baseball community together for more than 120 years. The Bulls, originally known as the Durham Tobacconists, were purchased by Jim Goodmon of Raleigh’s Capitol Broadcasting Company in 1991, and the Goodmons continue to run the team and other media outlets throughout North Carolina.

The Durham Voice spoke with Michael Goodmon, senior executive vice president of CBC and leader of the baseball division, to learn more about what it is like to manage one of the country’s most successful and prominent minor league baseball franchises.

The Durham Voice: Tell me about the origins of CBC in Raleigh and then extending into Durham and the Triangle.

Michael Goodmon: CBC was started by my great-grandfather, Mr. AJ Fletcher, some 85 years ago. It was started when he got a radio broadcasting license, which became a TV broadcasting license. Our family’s been based here in the Triangle, helping to run and build this company now for multiple decades. We’re now on the third generation of leadership, with my brother as the COO and myself as the executive vice president. My dad’s still pretty active.

We are at our origins a broadcasting company and have grown over the years to a diversified company which has grown well beyond broadcasting into online news media, a lot of technology oriented investments and satellite companies. We also grew into sports through the acquisition of the Durham Bulls in the early ‘90s and in the relocation of the new ballpark. Over that time, we have also gotten involved in other sports interests including the Coastal Plain League for minority investors in the NC Courage, which is the NWSL team in Cary. Another business focus of ours is real estate. That started because of our sports interest with the Durham Bulls. We got involved and took the lead on the American Tobacco Project in downtown Durham. That really launched a whole other part of our business, which focused on redevelopment and operations of real estate, which has been growing ever since.

Why has the company chosen to stay in this Triangle area for so long?

One thing that my father beat into my brother and myself is that the company can’t be successful unless the community around us is successful. So for decades, the company has had a focus on running a great business, but also being a really active and engaged part of our community. We really enjoy living in a community and working in the same community and having a really direct impact. That’s an enjoyable life endeavor. It’s important because you care about where you live and you care about who you live with, and that really puts us in a position to run the company in a way that’s beneficial, first to our shareholders, but also to the community at large.

Tell me more about the acquisition of the Durham Bulls in 1991. Why did CBC decide to get into sports, specifically, the Durham Bulls?

There was a time when the Triangle didn’t really get along very well, and Raleigh and Durham and Chapel Hill didn’t act as one. My father really became focused around that time on regionalism, and he began to believe, and still believes, that our success as a community is tied to our behavior as a region, and that we needed to think of ourselves as one.

Triangle Central Park was one of the first things that he worked on from that standpoint. Triangle Central Park was going to be a regionally located sports complex out by the airport. The notion was simply, “We’re going to have all of our major sports assets in the middle of the Triangle so that everybody in this area can share those assets and be together.” We needed an anchor tenant to go out there. The owner of the Bulls was Miles Wolf, a very famous minor league baseball owner, and he didn’t want to move the Bulls out of downtown Durham to about eight miles down the road in Triangle Central Park. He was willing to sell the Bulls, so my father negotiated a deal and bought the team with the sole purpose of moving the Bulls out of downtown Durham and into, essentially, right out there by Briar Creek, but it didn’t work.

The project didn’t get the commitment or funding it needed, and the Durham political community really rallied around building a new stadium in downtown Durham and were able to do so by issuing certificates of participation, which didn’t require a public vote. They issued the certificates, and here we are in downtown Durham with a baseball team and some real estate assets. The idea was to have a sports team in the middle of the triangle, not in downtown Durham. But that’s kind of how things work. One thing leads to another thing leads to another thing. It was really an idea of creating regional assets for us to share that led to brave political decisions by the City Council at the time in Durham, and now we sit here with the ballpark and a revitalized downtown and a lot of great things as a result.

What were some initial obstacles with managing the Bulls, and how did CBC work through them?

The first obstacles were figuring out how to run the team, being in the sports entertainment business was not a business we were a part of before that. Minor league baseball at that time was a whole different world, it was just run different. It was not as sophisticated as a business as it is today by any means. The real challenge for us was knowing, “How do we create an operating business out of this make sense?” and “How do you operate within the old Durham Athletic Park?” which had a plethora of challenges to it, just from a facility standpoint. The lights would go off if the temperature was over 90 degrees in the middle of summer. There were huge issues with operating a team out of that ballpark, so not only was it learning how to run a team and developing our identity around running a team but also: How do we want to run? What do we want the Bulls to represent? What is baseball? What is family entertainment? What are all these things?

Starting with the Bulls, how did this lead to the growth of the sports division of CBC?

Honestly, we just really fell in love with the business. It’s a great business, a combination of family entertainment, marketing, food, beverage and all these kind of subsequent businesses that come together in one. We just really believe in the staying power of sports entertainment, and we believe that we offer really important community services by bringing people together, and even if just for a few hours. We offer some relief from everything going on and an opportunity to create memories. We always talk about being in the memory making business and our job is to help families and the people who make the Bulls. It’s a fun business that has an impact on the community, so as opportunities present themselves to expand into that realm, we’ve jumped on them.

Why is a day spent at a Durham Bulls game better than going to any other minor league game?

It’s hard to judge the reaction of the Durham Bulls versus another team, but our core principles are that we want to be a great value for a family, and to be able to choose where they want to eat and where they want to be entertained. We really pride ourselves on marrying the legacy and love for the game of baseball with the recognition that it’s an evolving thing, and that we want to create new ways of entertaining our crowd beyond just the game.

What would you say are some of your goals for the sports division of CBC within the next five to 10 years?

Our goal for the sports division is to continue to offer the great products we offer here in the Triangle number one. Importantly, going into next year, we’re doing a substantial reboot of all our technology: new sound systems, new video boards, new LED lights coming in, and the whole show is going to get revamped with a whole new technology package. We’re really excited to stretch our legs with that over the first few weeks of the season.