So this is the world, and there are almost six billion people on it. When I was a kid, there were three. It’s hard to keep up.
I am out here for you. You don’t know what it’s like to be ME out here for YOU. It is an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege that I will never fully tell you about, ok?
I will not rest until I have you holding a Coke, wearing your own shoe, playing a Sega game *featuring you*, while singing your own song in a new commercial, *starring you*, broadcast during the Superbowl, in a game that you are winning, and I will not *sleep* until that happens. I’ll give you fifteen minutes to call me back.
But if anybody else wants to come with me, this moment will be the ground floor of something real and fun and inspiring and true in this godforsaken business and we will do it together! Who’s coming with me besides… “Flipper” here?
I’m finished, I’m fucked. Twenty-four hours ago, man, I was hot! Now… I’m a cautionary tale. You see this jacket I’m wearing, you like it? Because I don’t really need it. Because I’m cloaked in failure! I lost the number one draft picked the night before the draft! Why? Let’s recap: because a hockey player’s kid made me feel like a superficial jerk. I ate two slices of bad pizza, went to bed and grew a conscience!
All right. I’ll tell you why you don’t have your ten million dollars yet. Right now, you are a paycheck player. You play with your head, not your heart. In your personal life, heart. But when you get on the field, it’s all about what you didn’t get, who’s to blame, who under threw the pass, who’s got the contract you don’t, who’s not giving you your love. You know what? That is not what inspires people. That is not what inspires people. Just shut up and play the game. Play it from your heart, and you know what? I will show you the quan. And that’s the truth, man! That’s the truth. Can you handle it? It’s just a question between friends, you know? Oh, and when they call you “shrimp”, I’m the one who defends you!
I’m the guy you don’t usually see. I’m the one behind the scenes. I’m the sports agent, you those photos where the new player holds the team jersey and poses with the owner? Inside that building, that’s where I work: S.M.I.,Sports Management International, thirty three out of shape agents, guiding the careers of one thousand five hundred eighty five of the most finely tuned athletes alive. I handle the lives and dreams of seventy two clients and I get an average of two hundred sixty four phone calls a day, that’s what I do, this is what I do best, but I’ll be honest with you. I started noticing a few years ago and I didn’t say a word but the quest for the big dollars and a lot of the little things were going wrong, but lately, it’s gotten worse who did I become? Just another shark in a suit?
America still sets the tone for the world of sports. In Indiana I signed Clark Hodd. He’s only thirteen years old and is considered the best point guard in the country and last week he scored a hundred points in a single game. I also signed Erica Sorgi, you’ll see her in the next Olympics. In Seattle I signed Dallas Malloy, she’s sixteen years old and her lawsuit helped paved the way for women boxers everywhere. Whenever she fights she thinks about her ex-boyfriend. In Indio, California I signed Art Stallings, he plays the sport with what pure joy. In Odessa, Texas I signed the great Frank Cushman. This April, twenty-six teams will be falling all over themselves in order to sign him in the next NFL draft. He’s my client, my most important client. Believe me, there’s genius everywhere, but until they turn pro it’s like popcorn in the pan: some pop, some don’t.
Two days later at our corporate conference in Miami: a breakthrough, a breakdown? No, a breakthrough. I had so much to say and no one to listen and then it happened, an unexpected thing: I began writing what they call a “mission statement.” Not a memo, a “mission statement”, a suggestion for the future of our company. A night like this doesn’t come around very often. I seized it. What started out as one page slowly became twenty-five. Suddenly, I was my father’s son again. I was remembering the simple pleasures of this job: how I ended up here out of law school, the way a stadium sounds when one of my players performs well on the field, the way we are meant to protect them in health and in injury. With so many clients we’ve forgotten what’s important. I wrote and wrote and wrote and I’m not even a writer. I was even remembering the original words of my mentor, the late, great Dicky Fox. Suddenly it was all clear: the answer was fewer clients and less money, giving more attention to them, caring for them, caring for ourselves. I’ll be the first to admit it, what I was writing was somewhat “touchy feely”. I didn’t care, I had lost the ability to bullshit. It was the me I always wanted to be. I put the mission statement into a bag and took it to a Copy Mat in the middle of the night, printed a hundred and ten copies. Even the cover looked like The Catcher in the Rye. I entitled it, “The Things We Think And Do Not Say: The Future of our Business.”
