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–style TV show aimed at finding young Indian men who had the physical tools to become MLB pitchers. Instead of a microphone, there would be a radar gun, and instead of a record deal, a major-league contract.
I wasted no time in setting up a pitch meeting to a pair of venture capitalists with an avid interest in sports. As soon as the hour turned civilized, I called Will Chang’s office. Having met the famed Chinese American businessman through Barry Bonds following his investment firm’s purchase of an equity stake in the San Francisco Giants, I wanted to bring him this idea that was so far out of left field it had left the park entirely. It wasn’t because he was a Harvard grad or one of the most successful Asian investors in American sports. It wasn’t even because he was a big promoter of US-Asian relations through a number of business organizations that he either founded or headed up. It was because he is a risk taker.
Will’s corner office in the San Mateo, California, office building he owned was filled with sports memorabilia. An imposing guy hovering around six foot three, he shook my hand vigorously before padding back in his terrycloth slippers to the big leather chair behind his gigantic chairman-style desk. I sat down on the other side of the desk next to Ash Vasudevan, the Indian-born managing partner of a venture capital fund focusing on new ventures in tech, sports, and entertainment. He was Will’s right-hand man in a lot of businesses.
As I unfolded my outlandish plan, the koi fish in Will’s large tank darted in and out of the driftwood. I hadn’t even started in on the American Idol–style TV show part when Will jumped in with high energy typical of the rich and powerful.
“See, Ash, this is exactly what I am talking about,” he said. “We can find a freak of nature. We have all the Yao Ming capabilities in this thing.”
The look on my face must have shown my confusion, because Will went on to explain his philosophy about the super-abilities of top athletes. It seemed that Will had run in a marathon once, and despite training hard, he couldn’t do better than six hours. Meanwhile, the best runner completed the race in two. His frustration as an athlete led him to believe that certain people are endowed with special gifts of physicality.
“It’s a lot harder to find a Yao Ming, someone from out in the sticks who can walk onto the court and play like a professional, than it is to find someone who has just the raw talent,” observed Ash. He had played cricket in India from the time he could walk all the way up through the equivalent of the sport’s minor leagues.
“If you can’t find a Yao Ming, can you create one?” Will asked me.
I used probability as my proof. Out of twenty million to thirty million men of recruitable age in the United States, we have thousands of pro athletes, as well as about ten thousand with the ability but who crapped out because of injuries or circumstances.
“Do the math,” I said. “How many do you think there are among one hundred fifty million where no one is being recruited? Baseball has no value over there. Even if someone could throw fast, no one would know.”
“That’s it!” Will cried. “India isn’t undertalented but underrecruited. Their superhuman athletes are right now working the fields or for UPS. This will be easy if we have the right execution.”
We decided to hold the contest in India. That was going to be our play. When I left Will’s office that day, the level of optimism was off the charts. The three of us felt like we couldn’t fail.
Unfortunately, it seemed that Will and Ash were the only ones who thought the idea was a good one. I was ridiculed by other people in the business as soon I started to discuss a reality-show-style baseball talent search in India.
I heard the same thing from everybody I talked to: no way was this going to work! No matter what I may have accomplished in th
e past, this idea was going to kill my career.
A good friend of mine who worked for a sports video-game company took me aside. “J.B.,” he said, “I know you have made a lot of crazy ideas work in the past, but this is the absolute worst idea I have ever heard in my life.”
A baseball team owner cautioned that the idea was so bad that if I were smart, I would find a way to back out before I ruined my relationship with Will. A top exec at MLB International, the arm of the MLB Association that runs baseball everywhere outside the United States, said I was just wasting my time and money; that India would never yield talent.
As I set about making my mission a reality, I heard every stereotype in the book. Most of the people I talked to had never set foot in India, and yet they were convinced that all the guys there were five foot two and unathletic. They conjured up images of small guys doing tech support in outsourcing centers. “What about the Great Khali, the Indian wrestler in the WWE?” I argued. “He’s seven foot one and three hundred fifty pounds.” They just looked at me like I was crazy.
No matter what anybody said, I never wavered. Even if the percentage of people above six feet was much lower in India than in the United States, simple math dictated that India would still have more people above six feet because it had a much larger general population. Math would never let me down.
Now, as Will said, I just needed the right execution.
CHAPTER 2
Six months after my initial meeting with Will and Ash, I was on a flight bound for India to try launching the contest.
Million Dollar Arm Page 2