Making Room In The Market.

Blacks dominate the playing fields but don't have a strong hold on the sports-marketing industry. Not yet.

Doug Williams' story, had it been a made-for-TV movie, would have been a sports-marketing agency's dream: its plot was full of improbabilities. Here he was, a hero to many black kids who weren't used to seeing a man of their hue play quarterback in the National Football League. He was just like them: a kid from Louisiana who had played ball at Grambling State University. That he'd made it this far was a rags-to-riches-to-respectability tale nobody saw coming. Williams' ascent, at 34, was victory enough--for him and others who'd aspired to throw the football, not just catch it. But perhaps Williams knew he'd have to do more than just show up to even be mentioned in the same sentence with the NFL's golden boy, John Elway, the man everyone expected to steal the stage.

Williams' play that day in January 1988 would reveal he wasn't in the mood to share the spotlight--not with Elway, not even with Jay Shroeder, his backup, who lusted to be in his shoes. Williams put in record-setting performance, earning Most Valuable Player accolades en route to leading the Washington Redskins to a win in Super Bowl XXII and drubbing the favored Denver Broncos 42-10.

Now, with his name written in the Football history, books, Williams' face was sure to be plastered on billboards boards all over America.

There'd be shoe deals, commercials, the whole nine yards. Or so everyone thought.

"It's a shame that the most [money] he got was a half a million dollars in endorsements and John Elway got $4 million, $5 million," says Curtis Symonds, executive vice president of affiliate marketing at Washington, D.C.-based Black Entertainment Television. "What more could he do? The only black quarterback to be MVP in the Super Bowl?" Symonds is still be-wildered, 11 years after the fact. "But the stigma out there was that Doug couldn't talk real well, wasn't good in front of the camera and so on. So of course advertisers weren't gonna risk it once that stigma was laid out there."

And that's unfair. It was then, and it is today, especially when you consider that most of the jocks--black or white--who endorse sneakers and baseball gloves today don't speak any better than Williams did and aren't that much better looking, either, not that that matters. The reality is Williams' paltry deal represents another hurdle for blacks in sports to overcome: the one that says you can only go so far, the one that colorizes what the public sees.

A SLICE OF THE MARKET

Rudy Washington, a 15-year veteran of the sports business, says, "Marketing means something different to everybody. There are plenty of good PR people out there, but I don't know if black sports marketing exists, and I can say that in all honesty because I've looked." As with the William episode, Washington, commissioner of the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC), says the quarterback would have fared better if he had had familiar faces (read black faces) marketing him.

It's true. Everybody knows that our athletes rule the hardwood and the football field in terms of sheer numbers. But when it comes to controlling how we're marketed, and who's running the show behind the scenes--the IMGs, the Advantages and the Pro-Serves, white-owned and -operated sports-marketing powerhouses--are in control. Surely there's more than enough room for African American entrepreneurs to carve a niche for themselves and compete in this area. But as Washington says, it would have to be a collaborative effort. "In the SWAC alone, 60% to 70% of African Americans in this country live in five or six states in the South," he notes. "So there's sports-marketing dollars there. A few year ago, our attendance for football games alone was close to 700,000 people. There's money there in black sports, but television won't pay us."

Just how hot is sports marketing? Hot enough for even Johnnie Cochran to start Cochran Sports Management almost two years ago. Rapper M.C. Hammer and entertainment strongman Sean "Puffy" Combs have thrown their collective hats into the ring as well. But none of them seems to be having the impact that Percy Miller, a.k.a. Master P, has. The 28-year-old's Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based No Limit entertainment company showed the powers that be that he's a true player when he landed Heisman Trophy winner Ricky Williams, arguably the best player in this year's NFL draft. Miller is not an agent, but he's surrounded himself with qualified brothers, among them Leland Hardy, No Limit's managing director and chief investment officer, to marketing and player contract chores.

A former heavyweight boxer, Hardy laments that "we have lost a consciousness in sports that existed in the '60s. There was a kinship, a feeling that a common cause was the thread of our lives. Thanks to the almighty zeal for the dollar, that sense of consciousness was lost in the '80s and '90s."

But he's dealt with the heavy hitters in a number of arenas--from boxing to tennis--and offers his take on Venus and Serena Williams' experiences in terms of marketability. He says that Richard Williams, the girls' father, took great risks by holding off on inking any major commercial endorsements until he felt the girls were ready emotionally and mentally.

"Having Venus make her professional debut without a sneaker contract was major," Hardy says. "If she had flopped, it would have been a commercial disaster. And with Serena, she was ranked 100th in the world when we did her sneaker deal, so the unusualness in their upbringing actually helped their marketing." The Williams sisters were a countercultural duo coming into an elitist white sport from the heart of Compton, California.

Hardy continues: "Their culture has enabled them to have broader endorsement opportunities. Serena, for example, at her first tournament win, gave her acceptance speech in French. Venus is accomplished in French and is studying Russian. The incongruity of their upbringing juxtaposed against their obvious academic has excellence has made them a marketer's dream."

Now, as the inside man at No Limit, Hardy expects to blaze trails in the way black athletes are marketed. And Miller, whose company sold more than 6 million records and ranks 11th on Forbes magazine's annual poll of highest-paid celebrities, seems to be clearing the way and looking ahead. A $20 million, 48,000-square-foot athletic training complex is expected to be completed in about a year in Baton Rouge.

Unlike Doug Williams, African American athletes are being told by the African Americans who represent them that there's more to life than shoe and apparel contracts. "The bottom line is brothers have to understand that they're marketable," says BET's Symonds, a former director of affiliate marketing at ESPN's Chicago office. "You saw that with the NBA lockout. Athletes are saying, look, we understand who's bringing the people to the arenas."

THE MONEY TRAIL

No Limit comes with financial clout, but that hasn't stopped the major players from snickering. Ricky Williams and others, such as Cleveland Cavaliers guard Derek Anderson (also in No Limit's camp), have set a precedent: like it or not, we, the athletes of the next millennium, believe in our own people. But there are still major hurdles to get over. "You have a lack of representation by men of color through most of the first round." Hardy's "pipeline of delivery" thesis explains: "In basketball, for example, ball, for example, there are only 29 teams in the league and two rounds in the draft. So every year, out of all the people in the world that play basketball, only 29 men become first-round picks. To identify those men, there are certain delivery systems, like the New Jersey-based Adidas-run ABCD camp, one of the premier high school camps." In many instances, Hardy says, this is the very first airplane trip for a poor kid. In most cases, Adidas has been outfitting that kid's coach with sneakers and apparel for years. Adidas brings the kid to the ABCD camp and a relationship is born. What happens then, Hardy says, is where the problems lie. Adidas then purportedly hand delivers the kid to [high-profile agent] Arn Tellem, who has a partnership with Adidas. In essence, Arn Tellem just sits back and gets all of those kids. [Tellem represents Lakers star Kobe Bryant.]

"All of these older guys [agents, sports-marketing firms] are traditionally from white America," says Tevester Scott, No Limit's COO. "Can they relate to the 21-year-old athlete? I'm not saying they can't do a good job, but can they relate? We're their peers."

Elaborating on Scott's point, Hardy says, "We enjoy a kinship with our target audience that transcends race and economics. It's something that's born out of a cultural kinship. We can communicate with them in a way that others that are not of their community cannot. Therefore, we can actually tell their stories."

Even though there was some dissension in the marketplace surrounding Ricky Williams' choice of agents, the star running back with dreads hasn't hurt his ability to market himself. "He's been much sought after," says Hardy. "A variety of organizations--trading card companies and other companies--want to manufacture caps with dreads on them. So it's really been an across-the-board sort of clamoring for Ricky."

Most expected the process to Take a while. Hardy says it hasn't: "One of the things that helped his marketability was he was the first player in the first round signed, which was the antithesis of what everyone was saying and expecting. That means any potential marketing company now knows that he's gonna be in camp, he's gonna be on the football field, that he's a team player--positive virtues like those--so it's been something that's been easily done, albeit carefully and selectively."

TRICKS OF THE TRADE

Mannie Jackson, owner and chairman of the Harlem Globetrotters, isn't at all angry about Master P's accomplishments. But he lives and dies by an adage that he says never gets old. "Too often, most of us who are most qualified don't want to pay our dues in the trenches and learn the trade first," Jackson says. "If we're really well-qualified, we want to start off with the big desk in the corner, the big salary and the big story. And the problem is that with this business, you gotta get inside early and learn the trade from the bottom up."

To do that, Jackson, who was recently approached by a hockey franchise owner regarding the dearth of good sports-marketing consulting companies, says African Americans need mentors and supporters. "I try to tell kids when they come out of M.B.A. schools to take the job that pays $400, $500 a week and struggle for four, five years, so that by the time they're 28, 30 years old, they'll have the ability to be dominant as they will be qualified and have built the right relationships."

Jackson acknowledges that the opportunity to carve out a niche is there, but with bigger corporations having such a strong hold on the industry, there will be resistance. "I don't believe there is a cultural phenomena that says black folks don't take risks and avoid confrontation," he says. "But I believe that the industry will be going through a phase during the next 10 years where it will start to rationalize itself. That's when the opportunities will be greatest."

Just like in any other field where relationships and name-dropping are key, the sports-management industry is no different. "It all boils down to relationships," adds Washington, who says one of his visions is to create a black sports-marketing institute from the SWAC and dispatch people to receive training. "Can you sit down with the big money firms and speak their language? Until we can do that, we won't go anywhere," he says.

Jackson, whose company has tripled its business and continues to grow at an annual rate of over 20%, says if budding entrepreneurs get savvy enough, there are ways, though unconventional, to break ground. "There are a lot of people out there--like the Colangelos and the Steinbrenners--who really want to and would extend the [financial] help to somebody who shows the wherewithal. Let's face it. It's a business and it's more than viable."