Q: How did you and ProLink co-founder Paul Kirk, a former spokesman for the Denver Broncos, come up with the idea to start the company?
A: I ran Jake Plummer’s foundation, and I started Jay Cutler’s for him. I knew Paul through the two quarterbacks. When he left the Broncos, I said, “I’ve got this great idea and wanted to see what you think.”
It was in April of 2008 when I first approached Paul and said I think that there’s a great need for a company to work with players in their off-field endeavors and outside of the corporate initiatives that a franchise does with the community. Teams are set up to help identify corporate endeavors for the players, but an individual player’s pursuits are pretty much left up to the player.
Q: What are some examples of athletes branching out?
A: When Jake Plummer had decided to support Alzheimer’s and Family Tree, those are charities and programs outside of what the Broncos, as a team, support. When Jay Cutler came to town and wanted to immediately jump into supporting the community, I worked with his family and a friend of his to identify a couple of programs here in Denver that would be great for him to support. At that time, that was United Way’s Lights On After School, which included the Rev. Leon Kelly’s Open Door Youth Gang Alternative.
Q: Players have agents, managers, publicists, lawyers, etc. What do they call you?
A: We’re actually advisers and consultants. We work with the agents, we work with the players, we work with the teams. We don’t work real independently. When a player will come to us or an agent will come to us with a player, it might be for the full suite of services we have, which is media training, community involvement, website development and fan communication. Or they might come in and just want to learn media training for now.
We also work with the opposite, such as when we’re contacted by a charity that wants to involve players with what they’re doing.
Q: How tough has it been to start a new company amid the economic downturn?
A: It’s actually benefited us because the teams around the country were all downsizing their front-office staffs. In doing that, some of the things were falling through the cracks, such as the support players could get. So it opened the doors for us to come in and work directly with the players.
The Broncos were one of those teams that trimmed some of their business staff a year ago in March. It’s sort of the backdrop by which all of this begins.
Q: Do you help shape a player’s brand?
A: Yes, we do work on their brand. Each player is very different, each one has a different brand. And there have been situations where agents have called us about a particular athlete who may be dealing with a particular issue to ask for some advice on how they should handle it.
Q: Would you have done anything differently in handling Michael Phelps’ and Alex Rodriguez’s recent image problems?
A: Anybody who grew up during Watergate knows the coverup is worse than the crime. If there has been a misstep, you want them to admit it, apologize and move on. They are role models. They’ve accepted that mantle by their roles in the community and by accepting endorsements and marketing dollars from companies. I think A-Rod had the benefit of seeing the ones who had done it right. Being genuine and apologetic is the first step.
Q: What message do you send to players during media training?
A: The concern is not to homogenize them and make them uninteresting. That’s the last thing you want to do. You want to help them understand their thoughts and convey those. They might get aggravated with the media, but they always have to understand that the media is the means to get to their fans.
Q: What’s your favorite sport?
A: My favorite sport is baseball. My uncle (Grant Bowler) played for the Chicago White Sox, and he taught me how to throw a great pitch through the milk door over on Capitol Hill. Those old milk doors in the back of those Denver squares were just the right strike zone, and we would put dolls in there, and he taught me a wicked fast ball. It stuck with me my whole life.
Edited for length and clarity by Andy Vuong.
