(grabs tissues)
You know I’m thirty-one now? Thirty-one goddamn years old. Been playing in this shithole for thirteen years. I’ve spent nearly half my life here, playing meaningless game after meaningless game. Shit, people don’t even come out to watch the games here. They only come out for the theme nights. We had three thousand people turn out for Dress Like Larry King Night. They all left by the fourth inning. Sometimes they let toddlers run around in the outfield in the middle of the game. Christ. Shoot me in the balls.
I heard you guys travel in private planes. Is it true? Oh, God, how I’d love that. We travel in a Bonanza bus that was decommissioned in 1968. It smells like mothballs. We don’t go anywhere interesting. Our most exciting road trip last year was to Billings, because they have a theater that plays first-run movies. Imagine that. Imagine spending over a decade riding a bus to nowhere. Imagine living for just one goal and never reaching it. Imagine the emptiness you feel when you realize that it’s all been for naught.
I think I’m gonna be sick.
I could have had a family by now. I could have had a career in financial lending or something. Instead, I’m road-tripping it to Pullman for a day-night doubleheader that will be forgotten the moment we finish playing. We’re staying at a Motel 6 that’s been the scene of six different murders.
(sticks head between knees)
I heard you guys carry wads of $100 bills in platinum money clips. Can I see yours? Please? I just . . . I just want to smell it.
(You pull out a wad of $100 bills in a platinum money clip.)
Oh, wow.
(smells it)
God, that smells so good. Do you ever just smell your money? I’d do that all day if I were you. I’d just sit naked in my room and rub cash all over my face. Then I’d spell out FUCK BOISE on the floor with the bills and take a digital picture of it to be the wallpaper on my laptop.
What am I gonna do with my life? You’d think I’d be old enough by now to let go of my childhood dreams and get started on living a regular old life, but you’d be wrong. The longer I stay at this, the harder it is to give up. The closer I get to the end, the more determined I am to hold on, because I know there’s nothing else after this. I envy the guys that get injured. At least their dreams are shattered right away. At least they’re forced to quit cold turkey. Me? Deep down, I know I’m never making it. But as long as I’m here, it technically means there’s a chance, right?
Right?
Oh, God, I’m doing it again.
I heard you’re hitting Chicago next week, is that right? Take me with you. Please. Store me in your luggage. Tie me behind the plane and drag me there if you want. I’ll do anything. Please. Half my teammates are eighteen years old. They punch each other in the nuts for fun. Please, I’m begging you. I can’t take this.
You can’t take me? Okay. That’s okay. I understand, man. You got things going on. Maybe one day I’ll quit and take up coaching. Plenty of managers have come up through the minors. There’s no reason I can’t do the same. Who knows? Maybe one day, I’ll be managing you! Then we can sit on my veranda, eat some caviar, smoke some cigars, drink a little Patrón, and swap war stories. I’d like that. That would be fun. It can happen one day, right?
Can’t it?
Oh, God.
You see, most free agent crops are lousy because all the big stars have already signed lucrative contract extensions with their original teams. But shitty teams can’t simply stand pat. That’s boring and it can really piss off fans. In order to look like they are doing something, teams must sign new players, any players, regardless of skill level. Bringing in new players lets fans know that management is making moves, even if those moves prove detrimental to the team in the long run. That way, fans can be assured that they won’t be seeing last year’s shitty team, but an entirely new shitty team.
As a free agent, you represent the hope of better times ahead. The fact that you sucked in the past is immaterial, because there’s always the faint possibility that you will find a way to stop sucking in the future. It’s a long shot, but it’s better than no shot at all. That’s why the Knicks will happily dangle $50 million in front of you. You may not be good, but you are different, and miracles do happen, and that’s all that matters. Just ask athletes like Daniel Graham ($30 million contract), Chan Ho Park ($65 million contract), or Rashard Lewis ($121 million contract). None of these players are very good. I’m not even sure Chan Ho Park can reach the plate with his fastball. But that didn’t stop them from cashing in, and it shouldn’t stop you.
In fact, I have come up with an ingenious plan to maximize your career revenue, and it has nothing to do with your ability or desire to win. Are you ready for it? Here it is: be an asshole. No, I’m serious. Be a total fucking asshole. Curse out coaches. Berate teammates. Bitch at fans. Hold out. It could earn you millions, and here’s why.
Let’s say you start out with a team that gave you a very large contract that covers four to five years. Well, that’s four to five years of market prices increasing across the board, increases you aren’t able to take advantage of if you stay tethered to your current contract. But if you flip out and start acting like a real prick, there’s a good possibility that your team will buy out a portion of your contract, or release you outright, simply so they can be done with you.
There’s always another team out there stupid enough to believe that you’ll clean up your act. Usually, that team is the Oakland Raiders. Plus, your notoriety could prove useful at the box office. Suddenly, you’re being signed to another lucrative contract only one year after you signed your original lucrative contract! There are endless examples of this. Steve Francis was bought out by the Portland Trail Blazers for $30 million. Terrell Owens got $5 million guaranteed from the Cowboys less than a year after being suspended by the Eagles. Hell, it even goes beyond sports. Michael Ovitz was bought out by Disney for $140 million. In all these instances, blatant assholishness paid massive dividends!
So whoever said nice guys finish last had it wrong. Not only do they finish last, they finish ass poor. It pays to burn bridges, my friend. So grab the tiki torches and get your arson on.
Clippable Motivational Slogan!
It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.
— Michael Corleone, a man who went on to live a wonderful, happy, carefree life
Chapter 11
It’s Not Whoring If You’re Famous
Endorsements and Extending Yourself Outside of Sports
The great whitewashing: branding yourself.
Your team salary as an athlete is but a fraction of your potential income. Smart athletes use their playing careers to create a brand for themselves. What is a brand? In marketing terms, a brand is the distinctive identity or personality behind a product or company. In this case, the product is you. And your brand identity is designed to trigger a specific emotional response from consumers in the marketplace. This brand personality doesn’t have to have anything to do with your actual personality. Far from it. In fact, if you’re like most athletes, it should be miles away from your true self. Because there’s a good chance that your true self is a real douche.
Case in point: Michael Jordan. When you think of Michael Jordan, you think of winning. But you also think of words like determined, friendly, playful, elegant, and sophisticated. Of course, the real Michael Jordan is nothing like that. The real Michael Jordan can be an insufferably competitive asshole who curses a blue streak. That’s not a very marketable personality, which is why Jordan carefully crafted a brand identity that was closer to that of Gandhi. And it worked. Successful brands like Jordan are ones that connect with people and establish a loyal following, like Apple, or Coca-Cola, or asspounders.com.
If you create a good brand for yourself, that brand can translate into millions of dollars. Best of all, it can continue to make you money long after you’ve retired. A good brand name can stand on its own and become something that exists beyond you. Since it is only an abstract concept and noth
ing more, it can be everlasting. Look at Arnold Palmer. What has that old fogy done lately besides split pills and gum his way through a box of Weetabix? Doesn’t matter. Because every time you order a lemonade / iced tea drink (known as the Arnold Palmer), that sly coot gets a nickel. Amazing, isn’t it? That’s the power of a brand name. I, too, have invented my own drink. The Drewtini features six parts vodka, one part applesauce, and just a splash of warm saliva.
You might think the key to having a successful brand name is being nice and friendly. Wrong. What really matters is that your brand personality is unique. For example, Allen Iverson is a successful product endorser. And no one thinks of AI as being a very nice person. The irony is that he is, by most accounts, exactly that. But because white American suburban housewives take one look at Iverson and flee in terror, he made the wise decision to create a brand personality that was rebellious, dangerous, and directly from the streets. And little white kids ate that shit right up. By leveraging America’s unspoken, lingering racism, Iverson is now a multimillionaire, adored by youths across the nation. See? I told you racism was your friend.
You don’t even have to be good to become a successful endorser. I want to show you something. These were the ten highest paid athletes in America in terms of endorsements in 2006, as researched by sports illustrated.com. Now, this list will be out of date by the time this book is published, but it serves as a valuable lesson for you.
1. Tiger Woods ($100 million)
2. Phil Mickelson ($47 million)
3. LeBron James ($25 million)
4. Dale Earnhardt Jr. ($20 million)
5. Michelle Wie ($19.5 million)
6. Kobe Bryant ($16 million)
7. Shaquille O’Neal ($15 million)
8. Jeff Gordon ($15 million)
9. Peyton Manning ($13 million)
10. Dwyane Wade ($12 million)
Look at number 5! Are you shitting me? Michelle Wie can’t even beat girls, yet she makes more endorsement money than any other female American athlete, and more than any football or baseball player. Why? Two words: Asian jailbait. That’s Wie’s brand identity, and it has paid off quite well. Never mind that she couldn’t break 80 on a fucking pitch and putt. When fifty-year-old salesmen see her out on the course in a skintight Lycra skirt, they’re liable to buy anything, even the idea that the girl is any good. It’s a fact: impulse purchasing rises 379 percent when you have your dick in your hand.
You’ll also notice that the athletes listed cover a wide variety of brand personae. Tiger Woods embodies excellence. Phil Mickelson is adored by every cocky, disingenuous, lily-white, sales team douchebag at your local muni. James and Wade have the “inner-city children with unrealistic hopes and dreams” demographic covered. Earnhardt Jr. appeals to fans of his late father, but has used his looks to expand that base to people who weigh less than four hundred pounds. Jeff Gordon is loved by a surprisingly robust group of people who like both NASCAR and rainbows. Bryant signifies elegance and sophistication, with a dark, seamy underbelly. He’s Alan Ball’s favorite athlete. O’Neal appeals to the average American who is fat and cross-eyed. And Manning’s got the obsessive-compulsives in his pasty grasp.
All of these athletes have used the power of branding to become small, international, one-person corporations. You can do the same. The best part: by transforming from a person into a corporation, you’re free to do many of the things corporations do that regular old humans cannot, like skirt federal regulations, use questionable accounting practices, leverage overly generous tax shelters, taint lakes and ponds with arsenic, and so much more. It’s a whole other level of deviant behavior, and it makes for quite a naughty thrill.
Deeply Penetrating the Numbers
27.3/0.1
The typical American household pays 27.3 percent of its income to the taxman. But, because you are now ass loaded, you can get that down to 0.1 percent for all your earnings. How? Two simple steps:
1. Filter your endorsement money through your own offshore eponymous corporation based in Monaco.
2. Own three or more domesticated alpacas.
No, no, no, it’s pronounced AH-dee-dahs. Know your shoe company!
Your shoe contract can be worth double or even triple your team salary. Why do shoe companies pay athletes so much? Well, for one thing, it’s not like they have a very high cost of labor. Those Filipino kids are content to be paid strictly in caramel popcorn. Little angels. You, on the other hand, are paid quite a bit more (and in hard currency!) because your personality can help lend cachet to new lines of footwear and athletic apparel, cachet that can directly translate into hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
How? You see, when children watch you play, they become inspired. They see in you the magnificent potential of what can be achieved in life. Thus, you are the catalyst for their very first childhood dream. And the beauty of childhood dreams is that kids are too naive and stupid to realize that making it in the pros is a one in a million shot, if that. As long as children have that dream, they’ll keep plunking down $150 for your signature orange cleats with real mink Velcro straps. The better you are at selling that dream, at keeping reality at bay, the more money you will make. Nice.
So how do you choose which shoe company to go with? Well, you want a shoe company with a brand personality that hews close to your own. If, say, you’re a 280-pound wrecking ball of a linebacker who wads up quarterbacks and shits them out like hot diarrhea, you probably don’t want to sign with Keds. Here is some basic information on each company to help you in your decision.
Nike
Founded: 1972. Legend has it cofounder Bill Bowerman got the idea for starting a shoe company after making a homemade running shoe sole using his wife’s waffle iron. The idea of herding Indonesian children into a crowded sweatshop and forcing them to slave over hot waffle irons, twenty hours a day, under threat of lashing? That came to him just a year later, and the company really took off after that.
Logo: The Swoosh. This legendary brand symbol is meant to convey the winged feet of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory (Note: her name is actually pronounced nee-kay, in case you feel like being a smartass at a dinner party). But really, I think it looks more like a lazy man’s check mark. Or a ladle on its side.
Annual Revenue: $15 billion. And with just $50 spent per year in overhead on overseas costs, Nike is the most profitable company in the world outside of the Catholic Church.
Slogan: Just Do It! Coincidentally, this slogan also represents the entirety of Nike’s employee handbook.
Famous Endorsers: Michael Jordan, Brett Favre, Derek Jeter, LeBron James, Charles Barkley, Spike Lee (white-friendly version)
Signature Shoe: Air Jordans. Before Air Jordans, Nike was more renowned for making running shoes. Air Jordans not only made Nike a brand that transcended all sports, but also introduced the idea that sneakers could be fashionable. Nowadays, it’s not unusual for Nike to make shoes using patent leather, polyurethane, and any number of nonbreathable, impractical materials.
Adidas
Founded: 1949, in Germany by Adolf (Adi) Dassler. Dassler went by the nickname Adi, hence the name adidas. This was fortuitous, because adidas sounds like the name of a sneaker company, whereas adolfdas sounds like a company that manufactures riding boots used for kicking shooting victims to the side of the road.
Logo: The three stripes in the adidas logo are meant to represent each of Dassler’s three sons: Gerhard, Helmut, and Ta’Quan. Company officials insist that the word adidas not be capitalized. No wonder they continually lag behind Nike in the global sportswear market. Show some fucking confidence and rock the uppercase, my friends.
Annual Revenue: $14 billion
Slogan: Impossible Is Nothing. The brand slogan suggests that it is not only possible to do the impossible, but that the impossible is, in fact, easily conquered. Obviously, the company has a far lower standard of what is considered outside the bounds of human ability than you or I.
Famous Endorser
s: Kobe Bryant, David Beckham, Gilbert Arenas, DJ Run, DMC, the late Jam Master Jay (shoelace-free lines only)
Signature Shoe: The Samba. This classic adidas model is the preferred shoe of soccer players the world over. On the field, that is. Off the field, most soccer players enjoy the practical femininity of the Easy Spirit pump. Looks like a pump, feels like a sneaker!
Reebok
Founded: 1895, as Mercury Sports. As you can see, Reebok dabbled with a Roman god name before Nike came and ruined their shit with a Greek god name. Everyone knows you only use Roman god names for planets.
Logo: The name Reebok is derived from a type of South African gazelle. So I guess it sort of looks like that. Oh, who am I kidding? It looks like a highway that’s been blocked by a goddamn triangle. The Reebok logo used to include a British flag, before everyone figured out that the only sport British people excel at is darts.
Annual Revenue: $4 billion
Slogan: I Am What I Am. No doubt this slogan will have changed by the time of this book’s publication, if Popeye’s lawyers have anything to say about it.
Famous Endorsers: Shaquille O’Neal, Allen Iverson, Scarlett Johansson, Jay-Z . . . whoa, back up! Scarlett Johansson? Nice! I’m not sure she’s ever played sports, but who cares? Shit, I’d buy used syringes from Scarlett Johansson.
Signature Shoe: The Pump. An absolute sensation upon its launch, the Pump was a high-top basketball shoe with a special air pump on the tongue that increased the cushioning around your ankle. I had a pair when I was twelve. I enjoyed pumping it up until my feet were numb and then falling down the stairs.
Those are the three main brands out there. And since adidas owns Reebok, it’s more or less a two-horse race for global domination of the foot. Other brands include Converse (for basketball), And1 (also for basketball), New Balance (for runners), Airwalk (for annoying tween skaters I’d like to run over with a snowplow), K-Swiss (for no one), and Champion (for poor people who shop at Payless). All are fine companies with something to offer you, the professional. Except K-Swiss. Who the hell wears those fucking things?