Sports are going to the dogs on ESPN. But that's really not a bad thing, as dogs play a starring role in the ESPN Great Outdoor Games.

The games feature more than 230 competitors vying for medals and $300,000 in prize money in 21 events. Competitors in five events will be vying for more than doggie treats.

Jack Arute, who normally reports on auto racing and college football for ESPN, will switch to canine competition for the Outdoor Games. He'll call the action in agility (an obstacle course), big air (jumping into a lake to retrieve an object) and fly ball (a relay race in which dogs jump hurdles in a lane to fetch a tennis ball).

"They're the kind of things you watch and say, 'I'll bet my dog can do that,'" Arute said. "With the big air dogs, it's like taking a Frisbee at the end of the dock and having your dog go get it. You don't have to have on a flannel shirt to appreciate it."

Those who compete in the sporting dogs events actually hope someday to compete on a much grander stage. "With the dog agility events, organizers want to get the Olympics to consider them," Arute said. "They say it's equal to that of the equestrian events."

ESPN isn't doing this just for Fido. The fishing industry generates 20 billion dollars in annual sales, the shooting sports industry's sales are 30 billion. As a result, bass fishing, fly casting and a fly fishing tournament are on the schedule. Archery, rifle targets and a shotgun grid competition are too, as well as log rolling, tree-climbing and a chainsaw event.

These are things we grew up watching on ABC's "Wide World of Sports," which no longer airs. Today's sports landscape features a proliferation of oddball events like Toughman and Strongest man.

"I think sports suffered when Wide World of Sports went off the air," Arute said. "You don't see log-rolling, or barrel rolling anymore. What they've attempted to do here is take isolated sports and put them under one umbrella."

The Great Outdoor Games are really nothing like ESPN's X-Games, which feature extreme sports that have been invented and made popular by Generation X. The Outdoor Games are made of competitions with set rules that have long been in existence for their particular organizations.

"With the advent of 24-hour sports channels, you have to go out and create events not necessarily to compete, but to create more inventory (programming)," Arute said. "Once you do that, you find an abundance of people that don't get the publicity or exposure, but when you look at their segment of sport, there is a lot of skill and a lot of interest."

Hence, the Great Outdoor Games. Mark Malone, host of NFL 2Night and an NFL reporter for ESPN, serves as host. You will also see reporters like Bill Clement and Ron Franklin, whom you normally catch working other venues.

And despite their neatly-promoted, packaged image, the Great Outdoor Games are not a made-for-TV event.

"It isn't 'Survivor' or 'Big Brother,'" Arute said. "It's a sporting event that you are covering that have existed before we decided to put them on the air."

You can even watch it with your pet. "You can tell your dog that maybe next year, if you apply yourself in school, you can do that, too," said Arute, the owner of two dogs.

Gretchen Flemming is a reporter for the Grand Rapids Press