Players: The Story of Sports and Money, and the Visionaries Who Fought to Create a Revolution

Introduction

After graduating from the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, where he won the Heisman Trophy, Roger Staubach served the four years in the Navy that came with a diploma from the academy. Then, in 1969, the man who had been college football’s best player joined the Dallas Cowboys. He took over as the starting quarterback in 1971, but Staubach may have made his smartest move in 1970, when he began selling commercial real estate in the off-season for the firm of Henry S. Miller. He continued to spend his off-seasons hawking office space throughout his career. In 1977, two years before he retired, he launched his own commercial real estate firm.

Staubach didn’t begin showing Dallas-area office and warehouse space in the early 1970s because he loved the business or planned eventually to become a property mogul and launch his own company. He did it because he had a young family and he needed the money. In 1971 his job as the starting quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys paid him a whopping $25,000, about the same salary as a mid-level lawyer in the US Department of State at the time. I know this because my father was an assistant legal advisor in the State Department in 1971, and he was being paid slightly more than the starting quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. Today the assistant legal counsel in the State Department makes about $80,000 a year. Tony Romo, the Dallas Cowboys’ starting quarterback, is currently playing under a six-year contract worth $108 million.

Roger Staubach bears no bitterness. In 2008 he sold his eponymous real estate company for $613 million. Still, comparing his football existence and Tony Romo’s leads to one very simple conclusion: in the span of a generation, everything about the sports business changed. And the changes touched even the people who connected with sports in the most innocent ways. This book is about the people behind the series of events—many of which began as happy accidents—that created the modern world of sports. In this world money determines everything from who plays for what teams, to how dynasties are created. It determines how the stars of tomorrow are made. It shapes the star-centric style of play that dominates many of the world’s top sports leagues. It even determines how big a commitment children and their families are expected to give to their travel soccer team. This world is about the business of creating champions in societies conditioned to worship them, and to reward the most sought after of them with annual compensation of more than $100 million a year.

The cliché about the modern sports industry is that television created it. Not surprisingly, television executives repeat this often. It’s only partly true, though. While the impact of television and the money it infused are important, it might never have been felt had sports not made for good television. For that to happen, athletes had to demand to be paid enough money to dedicate themselves fully to their pursuits, which vastly improved the quality of the competition to the point where people wanted to watch sports, both in person and from their living rooms, in unprecedented numbers.

An essential shift occurred in the sports industry in 1960, before anyone would have ever thought to have called sports an industry or believed its biggest stars might one day be on equal footing with the people who ran it. No one, that is, besides Mark McCormack.

The story of professional sports in the United States for the first eight decades of the twentieth century is largely one of exploitation. It’s a story of one-sided contracts and lopsided deals in which teams, leagues, national and international sports federations, and countless other moneyed interests who had put themselves into positions of power took advantage of athletes who were some combination of too young, too uninformed, or too uneducated to realize just how they were being used, and too unrepresented and unorganized to do anything about it. If there is a single turning point in the transformation of sports, then Mark McCormack’s arrival on the scene is undoubtedly it. Before McCormack—who began a revolution when, in 1960, he convinced Arnold Palmer to hire him as his exclusive agent—the grand old men who ran pro sports believed the sports industry was about them. These were the blue blazers at the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews (known as the R&A), the green jackets at Augusta National, the bureaucrats at the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and the plutocrats who owned teams in the NFL or Major League Baseball. As far as they were concerned, the inefficiencies of sports were whatever prevented the maximum amount of money and power from flowing their way.

This was the way the world had always existed for them, no matter how they had come to their positions of power. Those paths were as different as the sports themselves. New York Giants owner Tim Mara, a well-known bookie, bought his franchise for $500 in 1925 when the NFL was first taking shape. The team has been the lone source of income for his family ever since. For William Wrigley Jr., the chewing gum and real estate industrialist, acquiring the Chicago Cubs baseball team in 1921 was like picking up a toy, as it was for so many owners who would come after him. Avery Brundage, who ran the IOC from 1952 to 1972, was an amateur athlete who competed with Jim Thorpe in the 1912 Summer Olympics, then climbed the ladder of the sports federations for the next forty years before becoming the supreme leader of the modern Olympic Games. Yet no matter how these men—almost all of them were male—rose to power, invariably they and their peers shared that fundamental misunderstanding of the sports industry and its purpose. Mark McCormack, a Cleveland lawyer who cultivated a very good golfer named Arnold Palmer as his star client and essentially created the modern sports business, taught them and a generation of athletes otherwise.

At the heart of McCormack’s ideas was a simple theory: sports were about the athletes, and especially the stars. The stars were the gasoline that made the engine of any sport go. People wanted to connect with them, however they could. They were a salable commodity that was being undervalued, and by undervaluing the athletes, the industry was preventing these athletes and the sports themselves from being as good as they could be.

McCormack didn’t stop there. His philosophy wasn’t just about demanding higher salaries and finding ways to enrich the clients he represented. It was about creating an environment where television networks could give fans the convenience of watching competitions from all over the world in the comfort of their homes; where sporting events offered those fans an opportunity to get a decent meal instead of a greasy hot dog and a flat beer or soda; where a company could delight in associating with a superstar athlete or the world’s grandest competitions. McCormack understood that sport was far more complicated than a zero-sum power struggle between labor and management. Yes, the more control and freedom the athletes had, the better off they would be, but he preached that everyone else would be better off, too. With more money and freedom, the athletes could train more, which would improve the quality of the competition, which in turn would make sports more valuable as a form of live and televised entertainment. That would provide more money for leagues and event organizers to invest in the experience for fans at stadiums, arenas, golf courses, and ballparks. Then they could charge higher prices, with some portion of the money flowing back to the players, which would make their jobs even more desirable, stoking competition and raising the quality of play all the way down to the youth level, allowing the whole process to snowball. McCormack was determined to make life better for the athletes, but in doing so he could make it better for everyone—leagues, team owners, athletic federations, and fans. That was his plan.

Few of those who were in power wanted to listen to that message at first, whether it was coming from McCormack, or, later, a union organizer like Marvin Miller, or a star pitcher like Catfish Hunter, or an Olympic gold medalist like Edwin Moses, or Wimbledon champion Stan Smith, or any of the other stalwarts of the sports revolution this book explores. The powers that be liked things just the way they were, with their athletes scrounging for crumbs at the bottom of the pyramid. The battles the men in charge waged against the athletes, the fallout from those battles, and how that revolution created the behemoth that sports have become is the arc of this story. It’s an attempt to understand how we got to a place where sport is simultaneously a highly produced, often overcommercialized extravaganza but also a thrilling Darwinian narrative filled with surprise and intrigue.

It’s particularly telling that two of the most important events in this revolution, Arnold Palmer’s termination of his exploitative relationship with Wilson Sporting Goods and Catfish Hunter’s happenstance journey to becoming baseball’s first free agent, turned on their employers’ refusal to follow through on promises to buy the athletes cheap life insurance policies. Today a superstar can earn enough in a season to ensure that his grandchildren won’t have to work a day in their lives. Forty and fifty years ago, a life insurance policy that might cost $1,000 a year played such an essential role for an athlete who wanted to guarantee the security of his family that it had enough power to transform jocks into sophisticated businessmen and businesswomen. Of course, for most women who play professional sports—other than those fortunate few stars of individual sports—there is still much progress to be made. That battle continues to unfold, and its story will eventually deserve its own book.

Nostalgia is an inevitable emotion for sports fans. Each generation yearns for sports to remain just as they were when they fell in love with games and their heroes. A corollary of such nostalgia is the sense that sports were better when there was less money involved—that not very long ago they were simpler and somehow more pure. As inevitable as these emotions might be, they are worth resisting. There isn’t much purity in a system as exploitative toward its labor force as professional sports was, or in the best athletes in the world being forced to hold down jobs that deprive them from training to be the best that they can be. Despite the inevitable pitfalls and crassness money has wrought, money has also made athletes and the sports they play immeasurably better. An upside-down business needed to be turned right-side up, for better or for worse.

The worse side has tested the devotion of even the most devout sports fanatics. In 2012, in the midst of Lance Armstrong’s doping scandal psychodrama and downfall and the constant hype surrounding the LeBron James–led Miami Heat, a still-rabid sports fan who had become increasingly frustrated with the crassness, the commercialism, the lying and the cheating, and the soaring prices that come with sports these days, shook his head and said, I just want to know how we got here.

This is my attempt at an explanation.

1

The Man Who Invented Sports

During the first week of November in 1958, Mark Hume McCormack traveled to Atlanta, Georgia, and checked into the Heart of Atlanta Motel for a forgettable golf tournament known as the Carling Open. It was held that year at the Cherokee Town and Country Club. McCormack didn’t go to the tournament to play golf, although he was good enough to have qualified for the US Open earlier that year. He didn’t go there to watch much golf, either. McCormack went to act on a dream.

For nearly three years he’d been practicing law at the estimable Cleveland law firm of Arter, Hadden, Wykoff & Van Duzer. He was billing $15 an hour and collecting a modest associate’s salary, but he had an infant child at home and a wife who wanted to buy a bigger house. He’d already realized the life of an attorney wasn’t going to do it for him. He had no appetite for endless hours of managing cases and babysitting corporate matters and loan closings. He needed and wanted more, and he hoped he was going to find it at the Heart of Atlanta Motel.

With its two swimming pools, three diving boards—one of them thirty feet high—and sprawling sun patios, the two-story, 216-room motel was the essence of faux swank in 1958. Six years later it would come to symbolize something else entirely when its owner, a committed segregationist named Moreton Rolleston Jr., sued the US government over the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to assert what he mistakenly viewed as his right not to serve blacks if he didn’t want to. But, in 1958, McCormack saw the Heart of Atlanta as the ideal locale to convince the best golfers in the world that he was just the right person to book their exhibition appearances.

McCormack had run the idea past a golfing buddy of his named Richard Taylor, who headed up public relations for the Carling Brewing Company. McCormack had spent time rubbing elbows with the country’s top golfers at the US Open and at a few other tournaments, and he had picked up on something he thought was a little strange for a collection of people who were so much better at what they did than 99.9 percent of the population: they didn’t make very much money. Tournament purses were worth a couple thousand dollars. McCormack didn’t think he could do much about that. But the low pay forced the best golfers to hunt for money off the course. The really good ones had deals with equipment manufacturers, which helped cover their travel expenses. Yet even the best golfers still scrounged for extra work, endorsing a product or appearing at an exhibition at a country club for a couple hundred dollars, plus a steak dinner and drinks with the membership or the executives at whatever company might be sponsoring the outing. There also didn’t seem to be any mechanism for how they could secure these opportunities. Winged Foot or The Country Club in Brookline or Atlanta Athletic or Chase Manhattan Bank either called a pro, usually one they had some personal connection to, and offered him the chance to play in an exhibition, or they didn’t. The money—sometimes it was $100, sometimes it was $500—was the money.

McCormack told Taylor he thought together they might be able to build a little business out of this inefficiency. McCormack knew a handful of players from the various tournaments he’d played in, and he had the legal background that would help with the inevitable contract work and negotiations the venture would require. Taylor, as director of public relations for Carling, had been in charge of two professional tournaments his company sponsored. He knew how to sell an event. Together, McCormack figured, they could recruit a stable of top golfers and set about selling their services for exhibitions throughout the country.

Taylor liked the idea and together they hatched a plan to launch it. The Carling Open would be the place, they decided. Since Taylor worked for Carling, they’d have access to any golfer they wanted during the day. Each night, after play ended, they met with any players willing to take the twenty-mile drive south from Cherokee near the Chattahoochee River in Sandy Springs to visit them at the Heart of Atlanta Motel downtown. There, McCormack and Taylor sat, offering drinks and explaining their half-baked vision of how they might put some extra dollars in a top golfer’s pockets—and along the way turn themselves into something more than white-collar working stiffs.

They talked to Bob Toski and Mike Fetchick, and Gene Littler, and Julius Boros, who ended up winning that weekend at Cherokee, and Billy Casper, and Dow Finsterwald, and Art Wall, Jay Hebert, Ernie Vossler, Jim Ferree, and Doug Ford. Each one listened to the plan for a company called National Sports Management, which they were told would put the golfers’ needs first. It was what every golfer ultimately wanted, McCormack knew, especially a rising star he pitched one night named Arnold Palmer, the reigning Masters champion whom McCormack had first met during college golf tournaments.

The exhibition engagements would happen on the players’ days off before a tournament began, in areas where they would be preparing to compete anyway, McCormack said. He promised not to inconvenience them. He knew the last thing a top athlete getting ready for a tournament wants is some kind of hassle, no matter how much it might pay. He was ready to begin soliciting country clubs and corporations in the new year. He would suggest a rate for each pro. Palmer, Toski, and the other top players could get $500 for a weekday and $750 for a weekend or holiday. Lesser names might get $400 for weekdays and $600 for weekends and holidays. McCormack promised not to rope them in against their will. These would be nonexclusive contracts that gave the athletes the opportunity to suggest their own rates or end the deals after a year. They just had to show up if McCormack found them a gig at their agreed-upon rates and they didn’t have any scheduling conflicts or injuries. For their work, McCormack and Taylor asked for 20 percent for new exhibition engagements and 15 percent for negotiating a new deal with a corporation or club where the player had played before signing on with the new venture. Just give it some thought, McCormack and Taylor told them. A proposed contract would arrive in a few weeks.

A month later, on December 13, McCormack began to fire off a series of letters and contract proposals to everyone who had raised his hand in Atlanta. That included Toski and Fetchick, and Littler and Boros, and Casper and Finsterwald and Wall, and Jay Hebert, Ernie Vossler, Jim Ferree, and Doug Ford, and, of course, Arnold Palmer.

I assume you escaped Atlanta unscathed since I have had no requests to defend any lawsuits in the Georgia courts so for that I am very pleased, McCormack began his letter of solicitation to Palmer.

Confronted with actual contracts that empowered them with flexibility and autonomy and the chance to make a few extra bucks, the golfers proved just as enthusiastic as they had said they were during the Carling Open. Some of them even seemed open to having McCormack and Taylor represent them for all of their marketing efforts. To those who did, McCormack sent a Chinese menu of services he could provide in addition to exhibition work: everything from tax preparation to real estate advice. If an athlete allowed National Sports Management to represent him for product endorsements, even on a nonexclusive basis, they would pay a 12.5 percent commission on exhibitions and 15 percent for all product endorsements.

For a group of players who either didn’t have anyone working on their behalf or were used to having equipment contracts put in front of their faces and told that the terms were nonnegotiable, McCormack’s offers were a revelation. Under McCormack’s contracts, the players had a say in what they would be paid, and they could ditch the whole thing after a year if they wanted to. The players merely had to agree to send all solicitations they received McCormack’s way. He explained that this would spare them the awkwardness of saying no when friends asked for favors or discounted deals. The players agreed that any money they earned would get paid first to NSM, and then NSM would distribute the money to them. It would make it easier for McCormack to keep track of their payments for tax purposes, McCormack explained. He also insisted they send him copies of all the current deals they had with clubs, corporations, or equipment manufacturers. This would allow him to understand how and where he could boost their incomes. There was a side benefit in this for McCormack, of course: he was about to gain an overnight education in the market for the services of the best golfers in the world. Within weeks he was going to be the only one on the sell side of the business to know the going rate for Spalding’s name on a golf bag or for Julius Boros to show up and play Merion with the executives of Philadelphia’s top utility company.

Littler, Toski, Ferree, and Vossler all signed their contracts by December 17, just four days after McCormack sent them. By early February, Wall, Ford, Hebert, Boros, Finsterwald, and Casper had signed theirs, and by early March, National Sports Management was representing seven of the top ten money winners on the 1958 PGA Tour. Palmer, who, according to the legend, never had anything but a handshake deal with McCormack, actually signed a contract, too. The greenskeeper’s son from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, who’d sneaked off with the 1958 Masters by a stroke, entered McCormack’s stable on January 15, 1959. The concept of International Management Group, the industry behemoth that would eventually influence nearly every corner of the modern sports industry, still wasn’t even a germ of an idea in McCormack’s mind. But maybe, just maybe, this frustrating and fascinating game McCormack had started playing as a grade-schooler would start to pay him back in some small way. That was the dream.

The defining event of Mark McCormack’s childhood occurred when he was just six years old. McCormack was playing in the street near his Chicago home when he was struck by a car. The accident fractured his skull. He would eventually make a full recovery, but doctors recommended that he not play contact sports. Even at six years old, McCormack already loved playing football with his friends. A prohibition on contact sports was a prison sentence.

From his earliest years, Mark McCormack had a broad athletic frame. He wasn’t a massive kid, but the earliest pictures of him, taken when he was just a toddler, show a young boy with long legs and the sort of chest and torso that look like they’ve been puffed up with a few shots of air from a bicycle pump. His hair is a light strawberry blond, his eyes narrow but deep and contemplative, windows into a mind that even then appears always in motion. His brow is often furrowed. There is a degree of dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs and an almost palpable belief that he can change them for the better.

Yet there were two things McCormack knew he couldn’t change: his inability to play contact sports and his existence as an only child. He never complained about it, but the inherent loneliness drove an almost obsessive need for structure and activity. As a young boy, sitting around the house and letting activities evolve organically wasn’t an option, so he incessantly sought out friends on the block to take part in sports and other games that he would organize and whose results he began to track. Even when just a couple of friends were playing cards, or if McCormack was alone on his porch throwing a ball in the air all afternoon, he was always keeping score, even when the games were ones he imagined in his head. A statistics nut, he played out an entire Major League Baseball season on his front porch while bouncing a ball against a wall and keeping batting averages of imaginary players. He drew chalk lines across a wall and played a tennis match against an imaginary avatar of the best player in the world at the time. Every time he swung a golf club, even if he was just swatting grass in a yard, he was teeing off against Sam Snead or Cary Middlecoff or somebody else from those days and keeping scores and records in his head. When childhood friends weren’t available or the weather wouldn’t cooperate, McCormack would take out his toy soldiers and stage elaborate battles. He tracked those outcomes, too. Sitting at a table, he would stage a football game between his left hand and his right, with each finger representing a different player. The drama would unfold as he slammed one hand into the other.

As Mark’s father, Ned McCormack, looked around his Chicago neighborhood, he saw a lot of kids who were pretty good at basketball, pretty good at baseball, pretty good at football, and played a nice game of tennis. But he decided his little boy with the damaged skull would be more fulfilled if he could do one thing and look at everyone around him and say, You may be stronger than I am and taller than I am and faster than I am and a better football player than I am but I can beat you in golf. The self-confidence would flow from there and more than make up for any lingering inhibitions from an unfortunate collision with an automobile.

From Ned’s vantage point, there weren’t many kids playing golf. If you had some coordination and started early enough, having some success at the local and regional levels wouldn’t be very hard. Beyond that, Ned, the publisher of a farm journal, believed in the value of concentrating your talents in a single pursuit and being very good at it rather than playing a lot of different sports and having moderate success with any one of them.

It was Mark McCormack’s first lesson in the value of an obsessive pursuit of excellence in a single field. Choosing golf was convenient, too. The family of Grace McCormack, Mark’s mother, owned a home in the country idyll of Sawyer, Michigan, just eighty miles around the bottom of Lake Michigan from downtown Chicago. The home, built atop a 280-foot dune, with a stairway that offered a 180-step trip down to Lake Michigan, was just five miles from Chikaming Country Club, a 6,400-yard, par-71 track. McCormack’s grandfather, Richard W. Wolfe, a Chicago commissioner of public works, was a member. Chikaming became a daily haunt for young Mark, a place to swing a club every day and grow comfortable in the world of a sport that was foreign to most of society.

On summer mornings McCormack would grab his buddy Fred Adams, whose parents had a house near the McCormacks’ home on Lake Michigan, and drag him out to Chikaming. McCormack was a far better golfer than Adams. No matter: McCormack would just invent a new set of rules, giving Adams extra strokes or letting him tee off close to the green—anything to make the contests as competitive as they could possibly be. When golf was finished, McCormack would gather up the rest of the neighborhood for his McCormack Olympics, a series of competitions in swimming, tennis, table tennis, whatever he could come up with where he could develop written rules and a means to victory that, at his urging, he and his friends would assiduously follow. Then the next morning he would return to the golf course, where all those rounds eventually led to a Chicago prep school championship and a spot on the golf team at the College of William & Mary in Virginia.

While Ned McCormack focused on his son’s physical talents, Grace McCormack, a woman obsessed with planning, structure, punctuality, and money, went to work on his mind. Grace never missed an opportunity to tell her son how important money would be in his life. He shouldn’t obsess over it, but it was important—something that could open doors and provide a level of comfort.

After church on Sundays, Grace and Ned would drop their son off at his grandparents’ house for lunch. Grace would give Mark, who was eight years old then, a quarter. He was supposed to use it for a cab ride home. Twenty cents would cover the fare, and a nickel was to be given to the driver for a tip. After a few weeks Mark noticed that the fee for the cab ride increased from fifteen cents to twenty cents about five hundred yards from his home. The next week he began asking the driver to drop him off at a distance that would allow him to pocket an extra nickel. He could walk the rest of the way. The tip ended soon after that, too. By nightfall most Sundays, Mark was a dime richer than he had been when the day began.

Grace McCormack also fixated on organization and punctuality. She set the family breakfast table before she went to sleep at night. After Mark went away to college, his mother would write to tell him she would phone at three o’clock on Sunday afternoon, and that is precisely when the phone in his dormitory would ring.

The lessons paid off. Howard Katz, who helped run McCormack’s television company, TWI—the event and production company of International Management Group (IMG)—from 1974 to 1983, said his boss once scheduled a breakfast for the two of them at the Beverly Hills Hotel for 7:25 a.m. Katz arrived at 7:20. McCormack was waiting in the hotel lobby, reading the newspaper. He looked up at Katz and told him he was five minutes early. Katz told him he wanted to make sure not to be late. McCormack said he’d planned to read the newspaper for another five minutes. And that’s exactly what he did: he read the newspaper until 7:25, and then it was time for him and Katz to begin their breakfast.

Time is supposed to be the great, unconquerable enemy, says Katz, now a senior executive with the National Football League. Mark conquered time, and he did it with yellow legal pads and three-by-five cards.

On those pads and cards were lists of how he would spend every minute of every day, from the moment he woke up until the moment he went to sleep, sometimes three and six months in advance, just as his mother had planned out vacation meals in London and Paris ahead of time. Every second of his life was preplanned, said Peter Smith, a Brit who ran IMG’s Asian operations, among other postings. "Wherever you were in the world he would tell you, ‘I will call you at 4:00 p.m. your time,’ which might very well have been 4:00 a.m. wherever he was. Sure enough, a minute or two before 4:00 a.m. your phone would ring, and you would