Players : How Sports Became a Business

"Provocative...terrific stories" ( The New Yorker ) of the people who transformed sports--in the span of a single generation--from a job that required even top athletes to work in the off-season to make ends meet into a massive global business. It started, as most business deals do, with a handshake. In 1960, a Cleveland lawyer named Mark McCormack convinced a golfer named Arnold Palmer to sign with him. McCormack simply believed that the best athletes had more commercial value than they were being paid for--and he was right. Within a few years, he raised Palmer's annual income from $5,000 to $500,000, and forever changed the landscape of the sports industry, transforming it from a form of entertainment to a profitable and fully functioning system of its own. "A remarkable saga...filled with insights not only into sports, but also into human nature" ( The Dallas Morning News ), Players features landmark moments, including the multiyear battle to free Palmer from a bad deal with the Wilson Sporting Goods Company; the 1973 Wimbledon boycott, when eighty-one of the top tennis players in the world protested the suspension of Nikola Pilic; baseball pitcher Catfish Hunter's battle to become MLB's first free agent; and how NFL executives transformed pro football from a commercial dud to the greatest show on earth. "An entertaining, illuminating read" ( New York Journal of Books ), Players is a riveting, fly-on-the-wall account of the rise and creation of the modern sports world, and the people who made it happen. "No part of the media and entertainment industry has seen a more substantial economic transformation than sports....A half-century tour spanning a variety of widely recognized and lesser-known sports figures and competitions that have played roles in the industry's development.... Players could not be more timely" ( The New York Times ).