"I've never seen it in my 21 years like it is right now."

I listened in the working portion of the Tim Finchem-Jack Vickers conference call and boy was it a downer...and I never even had one of those milkshakes everyone raves about.

While it was all a bit murky as to exactly why this happened, the most revealing comments came from Vickers: 

But all of the sudden here, we're into an era that the marketplace out there is not the same, and I think it's been influenced by some phenomena in that we have one outstanding, unbelievable player in the form of Tiger Woods today, and when he's playing, the ratings are great, and when he isn't playing, the ratings aren't so hot.

So when we go to talk to these contacts, and we have a ton of them, we've got plenty of contacts to get sponsors.  But, they call their advertising people in and the next thing we know, we're talking about ratings and that makes it tough.  Right now we're just in one of those dips.  That will change and I think we'll get things worked out looking down the line.

And during the Q&A:

I feel a little bit today that we didn't, as I said without being repetitious, the timing here on behalf of both of us was tough to deal with.  But on the other side, and moving forward on a basis that we didn't feel made much business sense and we're really going to get us in trouble if we didn't take a deep breath and try and regroup.  And so I feel that we have to do that.

I'd be honest to say that off the record here, we were just talking with Tim, he's got some problems to resolve, I've got some problems to resolve, and those are going to take some time to do.  But they will be handled and they will be mended back together and we'll have this thing back flying again.  But it's going to take some doing.

Hmmm...

I'm disappointed, and it hurts to see this happen all of a sudden because we really thought even down to the last minute we might get it fixed.  But it's a different world out there right now.  I've never seen it in my 21 years like it is right now.