Million Dollar Arm
CHAPTER 1
"J.B., man, you got to figure out a way to get me outta here."
The television commercial that was supposed to only take six hours was already veering north of eight, and my client, a sports superstar, was starting to lose it. I knew how this was going to go in the first hour of the LA shoot, when the director dragged out the schedule as if he were Martin Scorsese, so that by lunchtime, the line producer was already hinting that they might need my client for another half hour or so. The half hour came and went, and now my client was mad at me: he wanted me to call it a day. But what was I going to do? Pull the plug on a half-finished commercial? Even if that were doable, I couldn't afford to ruin my relationship with the massive sports marketing conglomerate over an extra hour of my client's time. and I couldn't make my client look like a bad guy who was sick of participating in this big payday.
So I started doing what I do best: spinning. I had to take the player's mind off the clock. First stop, the makeup truck. Makeup girls are always super-nice and have great stories about other celebrities. We killed a half hour listening
to them dish on a big athlete who wouldn't let them put powder on his face. While the girls were talking, I had Mexican food from a great restaurant I knew in LA delivered to the set. He loved Mexican and couldn't get this kind of quality back home, so that provided another short diversion. Then I used my fail-proof method of discussing future business deals that would involve this athlete. I was like the storyteller in One Thousand and One Nights, improvising contractual issues and talking strategy until the director finally said it was a wrap, sparing my professional life.
I was still spinning in the car on my way back to the airport — but not to my client, who was already on his way to another part of the country. I pounded the cell phone, chasing deals. I heard that Gillette was looking for a name athlete to star in an ad campaign for a new razor and was pushing my way in to pitch. I called a stadium merchandiser to check up on the availability of one of my client's shirts.
The door of the airplane back to San Francisco closed, and the announcement was made to shut off all electronic devices, when my cell rang. I answered it; I always answer the phone. It was an exec I had been trying to reach for a month finally getting back to me. It was too late to get off the plane, so I started talking. Fast.
"Sir, please turn off your cell," the flight attendant said.
I held up my finger and got right to the point with the exec.
"Sir."
I didn't give the exec time to respond, since I wouldn't have time to respond to his response, but instead quickly segued into setting up a meeting with his secretary to talk more.
"Sir!"
He said yes — all I needed; all I ever needed — and I hung up right before air marshals came to escort me off the plane.
After touching down in San Francisco, I headed straight home to my 2,500-square-foot loft with thirty-foot floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the ballpark, only three blocks away. That's where I was headed that evening. I had to dress quickly in order to get to the stadium three hours before the Giants game for the necessary schmooze time. I changed into a long-sleeved V-neck Armani shirt, Ralph Lauren Black Label jeans, and a Gucci belt before opening up the box where I kept my watch collection. Each of the thirty timepieces, lined up as neatly as soldiers, represented a big milestone in my career. I had bought the Patek Philippe, Rolex, Audemars Piguet, and Breitling with parts of commissions I had earned — the reward I gave myself for doing well. I strapped on my Vacheron Constantin skeleton watch, its delicate wheels
and gears exposed in a face devoid of any plate or bridges. That was the reward for the trading card deal I did with Barry Bonds, the largest ever for a player at the time. It was made possible because I was the only agent in the history of Major League Baseball to take a client out of the MLB Players Association group licensing agreement. I dropped a lot on that watch.
I left the car in my garage and opted to walk to the stadium in the cool late-afternoon air. Back when I lived in San Diego and LA in the midnineties, I had been a car fanatic who thought nothing of shelling out $700 a month in gas to run a sweet '63 Corvette convertible. Since then, I had lost the bug and was now satisfied with a souped-up Mustang convertible.
With a badge that gave me access to almost anywhere in ATandT Park, I started by paying a visit to the Giants players and coaches during warm-ups. After some chitchat, I went over to the opposing team while it took batting practice in the cage. Then it was over to the zone where the media congregate. I kidded around with other agents and their players. Once the field cleared before the game started, I went to the underbelly of the stadium to schmooze with the people who ran the stadium merchandise, food, and beverage sales. Then it was up to work the rooms of the luxury suites that housed sponsors. As an agent, I always had to be in the mix.
Baseball is a long season, and even the most diehard fans don't stay to the bitter end of every game. Antsy by the seventh inning, I went down to the tunnel that connects the dugouts to the locker rooms, where girls hang out hoping to meet athletes. By now the night had turned from professional to personal. ATandT Park gets pretty cold no matter the time of year, so any girl dolled up in a miniskirt or other outfit that showed a lot of skin was clearly not there for the game. I approached a petite brunette in a tank top, short shorts, and heels: "My name is J.B. What's yours?"
I could tell in three seconds if a girl was interested. If she didn't make eye contact but instead continued to look around the room while I talked, then it was a no. Unlike guys who have to steel themselves to go up to a girl and then feel suicidal if rejected, "No" didn't affect me too much. It was just, who's next?
The brunette kept her eyes on mine while telling me her name. After a minute of small talk, she lightly brushed her hand against my shoulder as she laughed, signaling that the door was wide open. We were back at my place within a half hour. I hadn't even bought her a drink.
By two in the morning, unable to lie in bed anymore, I went to the living room and flipped on ESPN's Sports¬Center. The brunette found me with my head in my laptop, firing off work emails.
"Do you want me out of here?" she asked.
"No. Why?"
"You seem restless."
"I'm just not tired."
I called her a cab, and she took off. I didn't care who was sleeping in my bed; business came first. If I was a jerk, then being a jerk was my dream.
There are two kinds of sports agents: those who handle the playing contracts with an athlete's team, and the marketing agents who handle everything else. There was never any question about which kind of agent I wanted to be. I saw playing contracts as a game of diminishing returns. The playing contract is earned by the player, who with time naturally becomes less and less valuable. But with marketing, there was no limit to how much off-field revenue I could generate for a guy through endorsements, TV commercials, personal appearances, memorabilia sales, and licensing everything from mugs to video games. It was on me alone to make the deals, and I took pride in creating those opportunities.
I worked at the Upper Deck Company, one of the biggest trading card and sports memorabilia companies, for about four years. I started as a manager of business development and then was the director of marketing and product development for Upper Deck Authenticated, their memorabilia subsidiary. So in 1994, after I left Upper
Deck and was working as an independent sports consultant to Major League Soccer in creating its licensing program for the teams and players, I got a call from Barry Sanders of the Detroit Lions. In my opinion, he is the best running back ever to play pro football (despite his being only third on the career yardage list), and he asked me if I would help him with his marketing. That call inspired me to take the plunge and start my own sports marketing company. Twelve years later, in a business I built from the ground up, I represented all Hall of Famers. In addition to Barry Sanders, there was Dallas Cowboys halfback Emmitt Smith, the number one running back on the career yardage list, and Curtis Martin of the New England Patriots and then the New York Jets, who is number four. (The second best in NFL history, the Chicago Bears' Walter Payton, was nearly retired when I started my career.) I also represented the Giants' Barry Bonds, who I believe is the greatest baseball player of all time.
My roster set me apart from other boutique agents, who typically work either with a bunch of small clients or one big client. It was rare to find a boutique business like mine, where all four clients are among the greatest that ever played. and I knew exactly to what I could credit my success: it wasn't that I was smarter or more connected than the other guys; it was that I took business seriously.
When I was a kid, my family used to say that my
younger sister Stacey was going to try to save the world, and "J.B. is going to try to buy it." They weren't far off. Here I was, almost forty years old, and nearly every person in my circle was through business. Why not? That was my source of pride and joy. I went out only if it was a networking opportunity; otherwise it was a waste of time. I didn't yearn to share my day's experience with someone who understood me for me. The only other piece that completed me was money.
I devoted 100 percent of my time to being an agent, which, because I require so little sleep, meant about twenty-two hours a day. My need for only one or two hours a night was the single biggest advantage in anything I had ever done, from high school to my first job as an assistant account executive on Procter and Gamble accounts at Grey Advertising. It was a purely natural gift; even as a little baby, I didn't require sleep. My dad, Larry, a toy industry executive, would drive me around our neighborhood of Huntington, Long Island, at all hours of the night in a futile attempt to knock me out. He and my mother, Carol, gave up trying to get me to go to bed after my maternal grandmother bought me a little black-and-white TV set with three channels and a headphone plug that had only one earpiece.
Grandma Ivy was a kindred spirit who stayed up late under the guise of cleaning and cooking (her two methods
of currency were guilt and food), while my grandfather Abe was asleep every night at eight o'clock. When I stayed at her house in Flushing, Queens, which was often, I would come out at three in the morning to find her scrubbing the floors and eating a whole Entenmann's coffee cake. "It's not cut, even," she said before taking another chunk off the cake.
As a kid, I watched the TV set my grandma had gotten me — using the earpiece, so as not to disturb anyone — until Johnny Carson was over and the station literally went off the air. (I became deaf in my right ear from all the years of listening with the earpiece; if someone is talking on my right side, I can't hear what the hell they are saying.) Then I read the encyclopedia.
It wasn't insomnia; I just wasn't tired. Even as an adult, I always needed something else to fill my time while wide awake in the middle of the night. Instead of indulging in diversions to kill time, like eating Domino's pizza and playing Call of Duty, I decided to fill my head with the components of business ideas that could help my career. I read business journals from all around the world and analyzed trends in my field. I taped every show on prime-time TV — even ones that I had absolutely no interest in watching, like Desperate Housewives — so that I could see the commercials and extrapolate everything I needed to know about which brands were advertising and who they
were marketing to. (I still do.) That way, if one of my athletes was asked to make a cameo on it, I could decide if it made sense.
With my single-minded devotion to work, no detail was too small if it might affect one of my clients. I saw my job as setting up the right deal and making sure that everything went the way it was set up. If Barry Sanders was starring in a Pepsi commercial, I not only negotiated the deal but also read the script, made his flight and hotel reservations, double-checked that his car arrived at the airport, and stocked the minifridge in his hotel room with his favorite drinks and fresh fruit. When Emmitt Smith was in a long-distance phone service commercial alongside ALF, the alien puppet star of the popular 1980s TV sitcom about a crash-landed extraterrestrial living with a suburban family, I went out in advance to talk to the puppeteer who operated the character. It had been a tough deal selling Emmitt on a national ad campaign that required him to appear with a puppet. The last thing I needed was for ALF to make him uncomfortable. "It's weird enough that Emmitt is this football god talking to a doll," I said to the puppeteer. "I don't want any bizarre stuff."
Because my love life didn't get any more serious than the brunette I picked up at the stadium, I didn't have any personal distractions to take my focus away from my clients. I didn't have to go home for Valentine's Day or duck
out for a Little League game. In fact, I thought nothing of picking up my life and moving to wherever it best suited my business. In 2002, when Emmitt was approaching the all-time career rushing record set by Walter Payton, I moved from Miami to Dallas for two and a half years. I set up my office adjacent to the Cowboys' training facility so that I could deal with the fifty or so product deals we had going at one time. I spent Thanksgiving at his house and carried his sleeping kids up to their hotel room during the Super Bowl. I relocated to San Francisco in 2004. Three years later, when Barry Bonds started breaking all his MLB records, including the most career home runs, I made myself available to him 24/7, from driving to and from Giants games, to personally delivering rough cuts of ESPN's Bonds on Bonds reality TV show for his review at six o'clock every Tuesday morning. At Lions games, I was down on the sideline during halftime festivities making sure that Barry Sanders's three boys didn't get trampled by players exiting the field.
I fell somewhere between a concierge (recommending good golf courses to play during family vacations) and a member of the family (buying a table at the charity dinner run by one of my clients' mothers). I loved my job more than anything else in my life, but I never mistook it for fun. Just because I was in the room when something cool was happening didn't mean that it was a party for me.
Nothing could have been cooler than when I accompanied Barry Bonds to Jay-Z's 40/40 Club in New York City. Barry will tell you that we had the best night hanging out with Jay-Z and Beyoncé. The hip-hop mogul and Barry did have an awesome time, talking and laughing for hours in a V-VIP room — while I stood next to the door all night to make sure that no one bothered them.
I rode the coattails of greatness, working behind the scenes to make money off moments that others simply enjoyed. In 1994, when ice hockey great Wayne Gretzky broke the all-time goal record with his 802nd score, the scene was pure exuberance. Champagne was drunk straight from bottles and poured over Wayne's head as he ripped off and tossed his hockey shirt and his teammates hoisted him onto their shoulders. Then there was me, scurrying underfoot with a few security guys I'd hired to gather the used game clothes, shoes, and equipment and to iron on tamper-proof holograms to authenticate them for Upper Deck. Awesome.
I felt lucky to be in the room, but I was just completely stressed out. It was the same reason I couldn't watch sports with the same emotional investment I'd had as a kid. Whether it was baseball or badminton, I was always thinking about business.
Almost every year, I went to the Super Bowl with one of my clients — and almost every year, I flew home before
the game started. Most people would have killed (or paid untold amounts of money) to watch the game from one of the luxury boxes or the kind of seats that I had access to. But after having arrived the Tuesday before the game and accompanying my client to (and smoothing out) appearances night and day right up to game day, I was wiped out by Sunday. Grateful for the empty airport that would be transformed into a zoo the next day with untold thousands of people traveling, I headed home uneventfully.
Super Bowl Sunday usually falls on or around my birthday, February 5, and my favorite way to celebrate was alone at home on my couch with the game and a pizza — or some other form of takeout. I literally could not have told you if my stove even worked.
* * *
In general, being a salesman — the essence of an agent — is the toughest thing one can do, because virtually every answer is "no." It takes a lot of creativity, stamina, and confidence. When I heard that two-letter word, I understood it as "not yet." I just hadn't answered all the person's questions yet, but I would. No meant maybe. and being a salesman who traded in seven figures, I was selling myself as much as any product or service. With that kind of money at stake, I had to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that
I knew everything in this one arena and could help an athlete or corporation look good while making a mint.
Selling myself to new clients took up almost as much of my time as selling the ones already on my roster. When I flew out to the hometown of a big-time college running back who had finally decided to declare for the NFL draft, it was the culmination of two long years of a one-sided courtship. I couldn't talk to him about business during that whole time, because it would violate National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) rules, but I had many long conversations and email exchanges with his parents about the kind of agent I was and would be for their son. Because of my pedigree, client roster, and the vision I outlined for them, they felt I was the natural choice to represent him.
As I touched down and then picked up my rental car, I was getting more and more amped. Finalizing a deal, particularly one that was two years in the making, is always a thrill. But this one was especially exciting because although my other clients were already A-listers by the time they'd signed with me, here was a chance to build an image from the ground up. I was champing at the bit to finally sit down with him and his dad to go over the real details that we hadn't previously been able to discuss (about how we would build his brand). How many nights had I spent coming up with plans for everything from this
kid's logo to a tiered system of corporate sponsors? I had everything neatly organized in a binder: spreadsheets, designs, facts and figures. While I had no problem taking corporate clients on VIP visits to the Playboy Mansion, at heart I was still a massive nerd: the kid who stayed up all night reading the encyclopedia.
I had the athlete and his dad eating up my pitch for more than an hour when I decided to pull the trigger and suggest that we go ahead and sign the papers.
"Definitely. You are the perfect guy for me," the kid said, smiling from ear to ear. "All I need is a million-dollar signing bonus."
Wait, what? Maybe I had misheard. Maybe he had mixed up the term "signing bonus" for something else. It is not unheard of for an athlete in a tough financial situation to ask for an advance on money he'll make in endorsements and contracts, which he agrees to pay back with interest. But this kid, who came from a solid middle-class family and had a full ride to college, didn't appear to be in financial distress.
"What do you mean?" I asked. "You need a million advance against your contract or something?"
"No, a million bucks cash. In a duffel bag. No one needs to know about it. But that's what it's gonna take to get this done."
I'm usually a fast talker and can spin any situation. But
this demand left me speechless. A million bucks in a duffel bag? I wasn't hiring a hit man. Even if I wanted to give him a million dollars, how could I do that without letting the IRS know?
"Who gave you the idea that would be possible?"
He said something about another agent. That's when I stood up, closed the binder, put it and the contract I had prepared back in my briefcase, shook everyone's hand, and explained this wasn't the right fit for me.
"If there is anything else I can ever do for you, let me know," I said and left.
The kid's father chased me out to my rental car. "What's the matter?" he asked, genuinely confused by my quick exit. I didn't know what to say.
"Sir, I don't do business in that manner."
In my car to the airport, on the plane, back to my apartment, and all night long, I stewed: two and a half years of recruiting in the toilet. I had wasted all that time, energy, and money — as did the athlete. If he would have just signed with me, within a month I could have gotten him way more than $1 million in endorsements. I had thought this was a good kid, and he was a good kid. But the culture around sports in this country bred greed and an above-the-law attitude. I'm sure another agent did promise him $1 million cash, tax free.
I offered athletes a lot of value. I took pride in my
results and track record. There had to be people out there who could understand the skill set and work ethic I possessed and wouldn't ask me for $1 million in a freakin' duffel bag. There had to be a way I could find guys with earning potential and appreciation — even if it meant more work on my part. I didn't mind hard work. I lived for it. But I needed more control of my product. There had to be a better way.
My indignation and dissatisfaction didn't dissipate, despite my effort to distract myself out at clubs with hot girls. Night after night, I burned with anger. It fueled my brain that turned over ideas as quickly as the images flashed across the TV I kept on in the background all hours of the day and night.
During the National Basketball Association's 2006 All-Star Game, I was struck by Yao Ming's steely presence. The Houston Rockets' seven-foot-six center had grown into one of the top centers in the league, but in the last couple of years, he had missed a lot of games due to foot problems. Still, he was an international fan favorite and had the most fan votes going into the All-Star Game. I knew his agent, who had become wildly rich from the Chinese player's success. Yao Ming, who made Forbes lists, was bringing in $50 million a year easy.
As I watched Yao play, the formula for his success appeared before my eyes as clearly as if it were written on
a chalkboard. He was the first person from a country with more than a billion people to be successful on an American professional team sport. Plus, the country he came from already had the pipeline in place (broadcasters, live-event ticket sales, sponsors, licensed merchandise production, and sales outlets) to monetize a pro athlete's worth.
While the night wore on, I became more fixated on the idea of replicating this formula. Where was my Yao Ming? ESPN hummed in the background while I went over a few contracts — busywork — when something else caught my attention.
The sports network was airing a cricket match in India; filler for the three-in-the-morning time slot. According to the radar gun on the screen, guys were throwing 150 kilometers per hour, or about 93 mph. A lightbulb went off.
From my foreign business journal reading, I knew there were something like 150 million Indian men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. and there were no college or pro teams in any sport scouting for talent there like they do in the United States. There was a pro cricket league, the Ranji Trophy, but the money was poor; only a national team really gave its players the opportunity for a career. As a result, there were a grand total of twenty-five pro sports jobs of note in a country with over a billion people.
What if I could tap into the undiscovered talent in India, import it to this country, and translate it into a great baseball pitcher?
Cricket and baseball pitching were not exactly apples and apples. On one hand, the cricket pitchers had the advantage of a running start. However, they were pitching on a flat surface and throwing on a bounce, unlike baseball pitchers who throw from a mound and directly to the catcher squatting behind home plate, sixty feet and six inches away.
I had heard many pitching coaches say, "Give me anyone who throws a hundred miles an hour, and I will give you a pitcher." Somebody over there had to have a strong arm. More than just somebody. Based on statistics alone, there had to be ten or fifteen thousand guys in India with the raw talent to pitch in the major leagues.
I went back to my Yao Ming formula and tested my new theory. India had the infrastructure to monetize a sports athlete through cricket, which was followed by millions of devoted fans. Also, no native athlete had ever become successful in any American pro sport. Suddenly, something out of left field was hurtling toward a logical and potentially very profitable conclusion.
How to find this hidden talent quickly presented itself as a problem: because no one in India had heard of baseball
let alone played it, US scouts didn't go there. Why would they? There were no leagues. There weren't even games.
My mind skipped to yet another universe far from both India and Major League Baseball: American Idol. In the ultimate democratization of talent, judges go from city to city searching for diamond singers in the rough, with the tryouts promoted on all the local radio stations. The promise of being on television and possibly achieving stardom and winning a big prize gives the talent competition all the credibility and incentive it needs.
That was it! I would create an American Idol