Lauritzen picked up a bronze paperweight that looked like, and probably was, an Olympic medal. “So, what kind of figure are we talking about?”
And now a strange thing happened. I’d rehearsed it in my mind all weekend. In my imagination I tossed the figure on the table as effortlessly as if it were petty cash. But now that it was time to say the damn thing out loud, I choked. I don’t think I’ve been so uptight since my first regular season game as a Dallas Cowboy, when on my first pattern I forgot to look in on a look-in and the pass hit me spang on the left buttock.
“Well,” I drawled, “there are a number of rather complicated devices aimed at amortizing the principal and reducing net taxable income, and I’m omitting for the sake of simplicity some fringe items such as a car and a home, which we can take up later. Then in addition there are such considerations as subsidiary rights... “
Lauritzen cleared his throat and my voice trailed off. “Dave, you’re a plain-talking man from Texas and I’m a plain-talking man from Queens, right?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well then, suppose you drop all this bullshit and just tell me what the bottom line is.”
I felt my cheeks redden. “You’re right, commissioner, I’ve been beating around the bush. But then, I’ve never been involved in a bush anywhere near this big.”
“I promise you I won’t have a coronary.”
I took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. “Three million.”
If he flinched, I didn’t see it. He simply looked out the window, then turned and said, “For how long, thirty years?”
But to assure me that this was just a joke, he allowed something resembling a smile to trickle out of the corners of his mouth. A big contract did not look quite so imposing if it covered a long period. Julius Erving, a few years back, had signed a contract for over four million bucks, but some of that was an indemnity to a team he’d previously played for, and the rest covered an eight-year contract.
“No,” I said. “Two.” My heart was pounding furiously and my fingernails biting into the impeccable upholstery of my chair. Despite four spoonfuls of sugar in my coffee, my mouth was so dry I couldn’t manufacture enough spit to make a postage stamp stick.
“Three million dollars for a two-year contract,” Lauritzen repeated tonelessly. “How do you want that—in fives and tens?”
“A million-dollar bonus and the rest in salary, payable in convenient installments.”
“Can you think of a convenient way to pay out three million dollars?” Lauritzen asked. I think he had to keep joking to keep the enormity of the demand from crushing him.
“Look at it this way, commissioner. The box-office appeal of a million-dollar bonus baby will be irresistible. People who don’t know a hoop from a brass ring are going to swarm to the arenas out of sheer curiosity. Look at what happened when the Jets paid Joe Namath a $400,000 bonus. It was the biggest hype the American Football League ever pulled off. It led demonstrably to merger with the NFL. Now, I can’t swear Richie will do the same thing for basketball, but you know how close we are now. The television networks are leaning against the door, commissioner; all it’s gonna take is Richie Sadler to open it and they’ll come tumbling in around your feet.”
Lauritzen started to argue but I poured it on. “Another thing. With the merger of the two major basketball leagues, the salary war will come to a halt. You’ll easily make up the money paid for Richie with savings on all those other salaries and reductions of bonuses when things stabilize. You’ll be putting millions back in the pockets of the owners. Not that I think that’s such a terrific notion, mind you...”
“You’re very glib, Dave, but you’re not facing the owners and telling them they’re going to be assessed several hundred thousand dollars apiece to pay for this Wunderkind. I’ll be lucky if I escape with my scalp intact. Is there at least a little ‘give’ in your price? Something negotiable I can hold out to the owners?”
“Uh-uh,” I said. “The only ‘give’ is Richie’s ‘take’—three million skins. The negotiable area is how the money will be paid out.”
Lauritzen leaned heavily against the wall and shook his head like a bear. “There’s only one way the money can be paid out, Dave.”
“How’s that?”
“Painfully.”
Chapter IV
I had just enough time after the meeting with Commissioner Lauritzen to taxi out to La Guardia Airport and catch the noon Eastern Airlines shuttle up to Boston. I took a bus into midtown Boston, then taxied over to Beacon Street where Stanley Vreel’s corporate offices were located. I had boned up on Vreel, the owner of the Boston Bombers, but somehow my mental picture of him was still two-dimensional. Apparently others had experienced this problem too. Despite an extroverted personality and a love of publicity, he was something of a mystery. A former Bronx boy, he was a self-made millionaire who’d called all the right investment shots in the booming fifties, then shrewdly had gotten out of the stock market just before the invasion of the bears. There was some talk of his having manipulated some issues in a way that brought the SEC sniffing around his door. Rumors like that never surprise me; I hold with Balzac who said that behind every fortune there is a crime. Anyway, the SEC investigation blew over.
When he pulled out of the stock market in the sixties, Vreel cannily judged that the coming thing was leisure and began pushing his chips over to things like marinas, golf courses, and sports stadiums. You’d think he’d have made a killing, but from all accounts—and I’d checked into these with the thoroughness of a CPA—he was more like the killee. It seems that between the money crunch and rising labor costs he’d barely broken even, and then when the energy crisis came to a head, crimping the leisure industry like a dull axe, Vreel really took a bath. Now he was just another of your cash-poor, hard-working millionaires.
One of his brainstorms, before he got creamed by those same wonderful economic forces that brought you the recession, had been to start a second basketball franchise in Boston, fielding an ABA team that would compete for gate revenue with the NBA’s complacent Celtics. Considering that his first team was comprised of misfits, callow rookies, geriatric cases, and NBA retreads, Vreel had managed to attract crowds with pure gaudy ballsy showmanship and lost only $100,000 on the Bombers in their first year.
Vreel was a little Napoleon type, short and bristling with nervous energy. An excellent and fastidious dresser, he reminded me of Hank Stram, coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, even down to the rolled-up magazine he banged against his thigh as he paced up and down his office listening to my terms for Richie Sadler. But whereas Commissioner Lauritzen had received them with the sad-eyed resignation of a virgin about to be gang-banged, Vreel waxed absolutely apoplectic.
“You know something, Bolt,” he said in an ominously quiet tone, like a mountainful of bubbling magma looking for a fissure, “it’s fucks like you that are ruining professional sports.”
I’d been called worse names and wasn’t particularly upset. My daddy told me to put myself in the other guy’s britches and imagine how he feels—in this case, how he feels about being asked to fork up a bushel of money to cover an investment of four or five million dollars that wasn’t even making money. I just held my tongue and rode out the storm of Vreel’s indignation.
It was one of your better storms of indignation. He marched out every classical argument about how basketball used to be wholesome and unsullied until the parasites swarmed over it, and how outrageous salary demands were forcing owners into inflationary spirals that ended with higher ticket prices for the poor man in the street, and how the flower of American youth was being corrupted by easy money. The least excoriating epithet he used on me was “buccaneer,” but I also was a target for four “cocksuckers,” two “fuckfaces,” two “shitasses,” and even a “cunt.”
When he’d wound down a bit, he said, “Look, Bolt, this may sound hard to believe, but I
don’t have that kind of money.”
“I have some pals on Wall Street who told me you do.”
“It’s all on paper, for Christ’s sake.”
“Convert it,” I said pleasantly.
“I can, at a terrible loss. Or don’t you follow the financial page?”
“But I told you, the league is going to subsidize you. The commissioner’s out right now rounding up pledges.”
“How much do you think he can round up, for crying out loud?” Vreel exploded. “Don’t you think the other owners have troubles of their own?”
I went into the same number with him that I’d gone into with the commissioner, but somehow all my airy promises that a golden age of basketball was near at hand couldn’t offset the concrete reality of the price I was asking for Richie Sadler. With a wild wave of the hand he said, “All right, all right, all right, you’ve made your point. Now get outta here, I got to count my money. I’ll call you in a couple of days.”
I didn’t bother offering my hand, since I was certain he wouldn’t shake it, but just as I was reaching for the doorknob he called out to me.
“Bolt? Come here.”
I walked back slowly and he put his index finger on my lapel. “Bolt what do you really want?” His eyes were black and piercing and hypnotic and made me uncomfortable, as if they could penetrate to that pocket of larceny that, as the saying goes, there’s a little bit of in every man.
“What do I really want?” I repeated, not quite getting his drift. “I told you what I want. Three mil—”
“No, no. I mean for yourself.”
“For myself? Why, 10 percent of... ah. Ah!”
Lights went off in my head. He was sounding me out, in essence, about a kickback for me if I would lower my demands. The proposition was simple enough and far more common than some of my colleagues would like to admit. It works this way: I drop the price for Richie from three million dollars to, say, one, for which Vreel pays me under the table, oh, say $400,000. So he gets Richie for a total of $1.4 million instead of three, and I end up not with $300,000—10 percent of Richie’s three million dollar contract but $500,000: Vreel’s $400,000 kickback plus 10 percent of Richie’s million-dollar contract.
There is a little bit of larcenist in me, but for practical as well as moral reasons I draw the line at selling a client down the river. As he ushered me to the door I’d already made my decision, but I thought it best to let him think there was a chance I’d go for the scheme. “Tell you what, Mr. Vreel. I’ll think it over. But I want you to think over what you’re going to do if I decide I don’t want anything ‘for myself.’”
“Fair enough, but I believe that if you think about it, you’ll see how advantageous my counter-proposal could be.” This time he shook my hand. “Whenever you’re ready, I’ll be glad to fly down to New York, okay?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll have my chauffeur drive you to the airport.” Although we were not yet prepared to consider the NBA seriously, it was only sound business practice to cover my bets in the event my negotiations with the ABA broke down. So in the next couple of days I conferred with Sam Fine, commissioner of the NBA, and with Hy Tishoff, owner of the NBA’s Newark Nationals, the other expansion team that had drafted Richie. These sessions were slightly less turbulent than the North Atlantic during the hurricane season and I concluded at the end of them that if you really want to be liked, you shouldn’t be an agent.
But there was no danger of my being liked, believe me. Commissioner Fine threw me out of his office, and Tishoff became completely hysterical and incoherent and warned me he had the power to ruin Richie by smearing him with a story about underworld associations. That’s when I finally lost my cool. I’d been getting nothing but grief all week and now I was being threatened by this tubby little prick whose own criminal associations were so thick you could almost see the puppeteer’s strings working his arms and legs. I hauled him off the floor and said, “Mr. Tishoff, the day Richie Sadler plays for the Newark Nationals I will kiss your ass in Madison Square Garden for a half-time ceremony.”
Owners are wonderful. Give me a roomful of them or a pit full of rattlesnakes and I’ll take my chances with the rattlers any day of the week.
After a few days things began to shake out. Big salary deals make sensational headlines, but the details of negotiation make dull reading, so I’ll gloss over them. Commissioner Lauritzen went not to the owners first but to Roone Arledge, ABC-TV’s sports programming genius, and managed to get something a little less than a commitment but more than a promise that Arledge would push for his network’s pickup of ABA basketball the following season if Richie Sadler became a Boston Bomber. Now, with something of a mandate, Commissioner Lauritzen could feel a little easier about hitting up the other ABA owners for an assessment to cover the cost of Richie Sadler. The groans were audible as far off as Rangoon, but by the beginning of the following week we were just about home.
I then informed my friend Vreel up in Boston that I wasn’t interested in his “counterproposal,” and gave him a couple of days to fall into line. This he did on Wednesday, kicking and screaming all the way. There ensued two more days of intensely boring meetings with Vreel and Commissioner Lauritzen working out innumerable details. On Friday we signed a short letter of agreement covering the broader contours of our understanding preparatory to inking, as the sports columnists love to say, the formal pact. That night we threw a party to announce the deal.
I’d asked Davis Sadler and Richie to remain in town for consultation, and they in turn had prevailed on Mrs. Sadler and Sondra to stay on and make a vacation out of it. Their holiday reached a crashing finale in this combined press conference and celebratory bash in the cavernous office of Commissioner Lauritzen. There were journalists galore, a clutch of sports stars, and grinning brass from both basketball leagues; and we posed for pictures of Richie signing the agreement, accepting a down-payment check, the usual horseshit. Arledge and some ABC flunkies showed up but preferred not to pose just yet for any pictures. Howard Cosell, on the other hand, had no such reservations. I came as close to getting snokkered as I’d been since my two-year toot ten years earlier, but I forgave myself. How often do you swing one of the biggest deals in basketball history?
There was only one sad face at the party, and it belonged to Sondra Sadler. You can’t win ‘em all, of course, but it bugged me to see that haunting mouth contorted with unhappiness. I tried to get a word with her but she kept slipping into the crowd to avoid me. At last I cornered her near the trophy case. “Goddam, you’re harder to catch than a loon on a lake.” She tried to pull away but I put a firm hand on her arm. “Come on; darlin’, won’t you suspend hostilities with me for just an hour?”
She looked out at the laughing throng bathed in a miasma of cigar smoke. “Am I supposed to love this? I think it’s disgusting!”
“Hey, listen here. Fame doesn’t destroy everybody—just those who have self-destruction inside them to begin with. I don’t think your brother is one of them, probably thanks to you. So, what do you say to a smile?”
“What’s there to smile about?”
“Well... there’s the one about the woman acrobat who was torn between two strongmen.”
It caught her off guard and she emitted a tinkling little laugh.
“Don’t you laugh now,” I teased, “don’t you dare laugh.”
She laughed harder, and I joined in.
It was the last good laugh we were to have together for some time.
Chapter V
Trish stuck her head in the door. “It’s Sondra on 40.”
“I guess she wants to say good-by. Hey, you all right?”
“A little punchy and slightly sick and tired of your unshaven face. Otherwise, fine.”
We’d spent the weekend cooped up in the office drafting the final formal agreements on the Richie Sadler deal. The work had been
just short of murderous. “Well,” I said, handing her an envelope, “maybe this’ll make up for it.”
She squinted at me and opened it with a frown. Then her eyes rounded in delight as she took out the check. “What’s this for?”
“Bonus. For taking Sondra and her mother around. You did as much in your way to swing this deal—no, no, don’t argue with me. It’s hard to find your kind of hospitality outside of the South.”
“Shit, Dave.” She looked genuinely embarrassed.
“Anyway, do me two favors. Don’t deposit the check for a few days, until Vreel’s binder clears.”
“Sure. And what’s the other?”
“Don’t call me a bubby. I hate that word!”
She leaned over and kissed me on the ear. “You really are a bubby.”
I felt a funny sort of gladness as I said hello to Sondra. As fiendishly hard as I’d worked all weekend, the image of Richie’s sister laughing had never been far from my mind’s eye and came shimmering forth radiantly whenever I took a break. I don’t know what it was. We’d talked for only a few minutes more at the party and it had been strictly informational. She told me she was an artist, that her hobby was horseback riding, that she hoped to get married one day and live on a farm and paint and have three children, preferably boys. It was just about as interesting as the 5-second précis quiz-show contestants give the home audience so why I should find it so fascinating was a mystery to me. She had expressed no reciprocal interest in my life story, which rankled within me for reasons I couldn’t explain. Well, yes I could. I guess if she hadn’t been going home that day... oh, what the hell.
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