The Emperor McCormack
My Experience in Sports Marketing During Its Golden Age
Since the world is a tinderbox, why not focus on something really important— Like sports marketing.
I’m dividing this into three sections because, as usual, this began as one thing and morphed into another and that another grew into two sections. I was going to write a few observations about the basketball phenom Caitlin Clark from the perspective of someone who actually worked in the belly of the beast of sports marketing during a formative period of its development, and doing so opened up a trove of memories, some treasured, some not, and I made a discovery that blew my mind—and, not to be dramatic (OK, it’s kind of dramatic) might have changed my life by changing my perspective on my stint there.
And I will write about Caitlin. I find her a fascinating phenomenon. But bear with me. It always takes me time to get where I’m going.
“He sounds like an awful guy,” said my boyfriend when, brimming with triumph, I told him I had been hired to work for International Management Group (IMG), founded by Mark McCormack.
I dumped the guy and took the job.
I am going to assume you’ve never heard of that “awful guy”. Well friends, Mr. McCormack:
invented the sports business. It was he who first realized that, within the golden triangle of sport, sponsorship and television, lay vast wealth, just waiting to be tapped.
Before Mr. McCormack, athletes who made appearances and television commercials were customarily rewarded with watches or supplies of products or small amounts of money.
Chomp on that. Love it or hate it, it is Mark McCormack who gave us that endless cavalcade of everything that is too tedious to list which involves athletes and money.
That “golden triangle” may seem obvious now, but before Mark McCormack, athletes weren’t that big of a deal, marketing-wise. Of course there were always a select few sporting gods but they were held in a sort of reverence and even they, although they tried to squeeze as much money as possible out of what is now called NIL, even they had to scrounge. True, Babe Ruth was an icon, but he hit town during the Roaring Twenties which was really the decade of the creation of modern fame.
By the 1960s, the top guys got paid a hundred bucks to do an appearance, hawk a product, and went back to off-season jobs selling insurance or working in a liquor store. And most of the time they were just about physically disabled as a result of a lifetime of pounding and primitive medical care. “Just put some liniment on it.” Golf and tennis? Country club stuff. Back-door payments, peanuts. Women’s tennis? You gotta be kidding me. Gussy Moran and her panties got the attention, not the athletes.
Athletes were poorly paid cattle before Mark McCormack.
I don’t have any unseemly gossip, but I do have some background that you won’t read in the standard histories of IMG, most of which are faux-exposés or outright flattery.
They always start with McCormack signing Arnold Palmer on a handshake (true). Then soon after came Gary Player and Jack Nicklaus, also true.
Here’s where it gets bullshitty. Some will mention in passing that Nicklaus left to chart his own course — a Golden Bear doesn’t want to be constricted by anyone else’s bear hug. Or that Nicklaus resented the special relationship between McCormack and Palmer. Strangely, some articles omit mention of this rupture.
This is a total distortion of the IMG story and of professional golf, as Jack Nicklaus is arguably the greatest golfer who ever lived1 and IMG is the entity that literally created the modern golf tour.
Nicklaus defected. He left IMG and became his own agent. He had people working for him who performed the services of an agent, but Nicklaus was always his own boss. If you don’t know how powerful Mark McCormack was in the golf world you don’t realize what balls this took.
Nor will the articles tell you that Nicklaus’s defection was, within the confines of IMG, considered flagrant disloyalty and that inside IMG Nicklaus’s name was taboo. I don’t mean in the sense of a general, nonverbalized kinda sorta thing, I mean that I was actually ordered by my boss, among other instructions in office etiquette, not to mention Nicklaus by name.
Other points of etiquette: Because of my low status, I was always to refer to the boss as “Mr. McCormack,” never as “Mark,” a privilege reserved only for upper management. My boss, a peppery, compact, upper-middle-class Southerner, pronounced the name “McCormack” to rhyme with the word “back,” not as I did, eliding the final vowel to sound like “McCorm’ck,” and this alternate, almost foreign pronunciation, which has wedged into my memory forever, always caused me to pause briefly before pronouncing because I’d have to choose between the pronunciation that came more naturally to me, or my boss’s.
My boss’s genteel etiquette was ironclad, and although he could have, he never referred to McCormack as “Mark,” always “Mr. McCormack” in front of the servants, of which I was one. Of course, he referred to the boss as “Mark” among his equals. He and McCormack were tight as a fist because he was indispensable. No one knew more about golf than my boss and they were both communicants in the Church of Golf. Such is the minefield of hierarchy and offices; you’re reminded of your place in the pecking order every second.
Not that I was going to talk about Nicklaus. Or that I’d ever have the opportunity to mention him to Mr. McCormack who to me was a distant figure, swooping in and out briefly for important meetings from the head office in Cleveland or jetting off to London, a favorite hangout.
But tight clubs have their inexplicable quirks and my boss, a Company Man to the core, idolized, adored, and personally loved The Golden Bear. They went back a long way together, back to the days when golf was a minor league sport, and my boss was a sports reporter. He had this picture of Nicklaus on his wall, addressed to him personally, signed.
But McCormack never saw the inside of that office. As I said, he was rarely in New York and when there was a meeting with the Great Man you were Summoned, not the other way around. He was not, at least in the NY office, a drop-in type of boss. He (or his assistant) rang, you ran.
Taboo or not, you sensed the awe in which Nicklaus was held. He was simultaneously the Evil Defector and The One Who Got Away.
It was quite a time to be in sports marketing. The business had ripened into a juggernaut but had not yet reached the heights of insanity it was to achieve in the 90s. Except for the aforementioned Mr. Nicklaus, IMG represented every major individual sport athlete and a growing number of team sports athletes.
Now, here’s another bit of inside baseball and it relates to the question “Was it the man or was he just in the right place at the right time?” McCormack took the business in directions he was personally not fond of. I come down in favor of the man because of two factors: there must have been a dozen smart young lawyers who saw the opportunity that McCormack did, but we’ve never heard of them because they didn’t grab them. Also, he took the business in directions he wasn’t personally fond of, because… money.
My boss had a strange way of blurting out facts and then scurrying back into an impenetrable shell. He told me that Mr. McCormack truly disliked representing athletes in team sports: too complicated, too dependent on the vagaries of a team and league rules, and at that time most team sports weren’t international, while golf and tennis were. 2
I also think it was simply personal. He looked down on despised team sports. His comfort zone was golf and tennis, and his MO was crafting the image and income stream of the brilliant individual. In the standard histories of women’s tennis, you’ll hear a lot about Billie Jean King, but it was Mark McCormack who made them all millionaires. (Another reason why The Defection was such a galling thing.) The handshake deal, man to man.3
Yet despite McCormack’s misgivings, IMG moved aggressively into team sports in the 1980s and by the time he died, they were into modeling and classical musicians and the Pope, and I don’t know what else—dog shows? Where there was an opportunity, Mr. McCormack followed it to its logical outcome, which created the seeds of its eventual dissolution — but I get ahead of myself.
Certain things they weren’t equipped to handle, for example, the Billie Jean King-Marilyn Barnett scandal, which I witnessed. They did not deal with that brilliantly, in my opinion. To paper over the scandal, IMG hired the late Frank Deford to crank out a biography. This was a desperation move that backfired, along with everything else she did. She embarked on a frenzied series of publicity stunts, most of which have been lost to history, but I remember them, and if you’re interested, you can look up the out of print books by a tennis journalist named Peter Bodo, who is still around.
In her latest autobio she explicitly disclaimed that book in icy tones. I recently re-read it, cringing and laughing alternately and simultaneously. It was so awful, it was wonderful. Frank was a great guy, an absolute prince of a human being, but homes in Westport come with property taxes, you know? And private schools and college were expensive even then. Why not bang out a well-paid piece of hackwork — someone’s gonna do it—why not me?
The general atmosphere was one of utter, unabashed, workaholic commerce mixed with Southern and Midwestern country club. And a little bit Jewish and a few sprinkles of the high-toned WASP saltshaker.
The office manager — in fact the woman who hired me — was a tall, glacially unapproachable young woman who ran the lower ranks with ferocious Teutonic efficiency. She was the first of her kind that I had the opportunity to observe close up: utterly professional, utterly dedicated to her boss. A vestal virgin of the Church.
Perspective really clarifies things, and I can now see how fantastic she was. I now see that she was the only reason I lasted there as long as I did (about 18 months). Young and dumb as I was, I dimly sensed that she was 100% objective, fair, and as long as you behaved yourself you were fine. I recall an incident when she openly tongue-lashed some idiots who had behaved unprofessionally and feeling simultaneously shocked at her loss of reserve — combined with a smirking triumph and relief that I wasn’t one of them. And if memory serves, my stock rose a bit as a result of their loss.
About 16 months after I was hired, Ms. Efficiency was transferred to the Cleveland office to marry one of the agents (vestal virgin no more!) She was replaced by someone who hated my guts. She fired me one day on a whim. Didn’t even bother to fabricate a reason. It was literally, “Get out of here.”
And that was the end of my big-league experience in Mr. McCormack’s empire, an ignominious, undignified firing by an idiot.
I’ll explain the details of her hatred for me some other time, for now, it would ruin the narrative. But I later learned via secret back-door channels that this office manager was an alcoholic whose behavior became increasingly erratic. One day she either came to work drunk or got drunk on duty and had to be escorted off the premises by law enforcement. I was vindicated but too late, alas.
Learning this didn’t take away the sting of the whole experience.
I had flown too close to the sun and my wings were burned.
I wanted nothing to do with sports after IMG.
The whole experience literally soured me on all sports.
I could not watch a baseball game or a tennis match without knowing the cutthroats and bastards (and lowlifes) who were responsible for putting the show on. All I could see were contracts and dollar signs. And yes, I associated all of that with personal shame and embarrassment — I mean, being fired after doing a competent job by an alcoholic?
If pro sports were big business in the 1980s, it became a juggernaut in the 1990s and since then, an out of control behemoth, invading every pore of our societal body. Of course, I heard of Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Serena Williams and all the rest, but I just didn’t care. I paid no attention to any of it.
Like Alexander’s empire, IMG fell apart when McCormack died. How it fell apart I leave to those who write theses about such things, but for what it’s worth (nothing) as to the why —it fell apart because of its founder’s megalomania.
I’m not privy to personal details, but it’s obvious that McCormack just didn’t want to face the fact of his own mortality and sorry, when you’ve built something big, you have the responsibility to do that. He died of a heart attack at age 72 and spent a miserable several months in a coma before dying. I would not wish that end on my worst enemy. OK, I would only wish that end on my worst enemy.
Seventy-two isn’t a kid, but in his demographic, that’s a bit before your time. A guy is not far off his prime at 72 in his world. Palmer died in 2016 at 87. Nicklaus is 84 and still with us. Gary Player is chugging along at 88. No one knows what could have been, but perhaps if McCormack had taken a day off here or there and not divided every moment of his life into half-hour segments, he might have lived to 82, having gradually relinquished the reins to his trusted associates. That didn’t happen because of arrogance and megalomania.
When McCormack died, his widow sold the company to William Morris, which itself went through various corporate evolutions and gyrations and now the IMG shell is unrecognizable.
I don’t think there’s a star athlete today who is repped by IMG. I looked up a few names and they’re all with other agencies.
Mr. McCormack’s empire is dead. So is my boss and most of the other top management I used to quail in fear in front of. I feel sad about this. Barry Frank liked me and if I’d played my cards a little more intelligently…
Oh well. Maybe not — bear with me. This story is about to take a strange turn.
I’m not getting into a discussion of who was greater, Tiger or Jack, which I why I add the word “arguably.” Let’s just say both have a claim. My dough is on Nicklaus, but this is another argument for another time.
The anti-Mark McCormack, Scott Boras, is the acknowledged master of baseball agentry, and his story is eerily similar to and different from McCormack. Perhaps if McCormack had heeded his gut instinct about not getting involved in team sports IMG would still exist… but again, another story for another time. And sheer conjecture.
For fun, read this. Poor Mr. McCormack has dropped in the rankings. It’s not loyalty that makes me say that he should be #1. It’s a fact.
It should also be noted that Donald Dell’s ProServ, which later represented none other than Michael Jordan, started out as a worthy competitor to IMG - but in my day, they were always the junior varsity, representing players that IMG didn’t care to take on. ProServ too is gone with the wind.
interesting- take a look at the company pension fund sale as I had to.