Mark McCormack: the founding father

Mark McCormack:

the founding father November 2013

SPECIAL REPORT | EDUCATION

Mark McCormack: the founding father Mark McCormack was the first man to view sport through the prism of business. Widely acknowledged as the originator of an industry, McCormack’s IMG company has remained the preeminent agency in sport and has become known as something of a university for young executives looking to forge a career in the field. In this exclusive article, Donald Dell, McCormack’s fellow Yale graduate, the first man to follow in his footsteps, his chief adversary, and his lifelong friend, gives his personal account of the man behind the business.

By Donald Dell

2 | www.sportspromedia.com

S

ports Illustrated led their May 1990 issue with the headline ‘Mark McCormack – The Most Powerful Man In Sports’, and few would have disagreed. 23 years have passed since the edition went to print, but Mark’s impact on sports has not diminished.

Much of the sporting landscape as we know it – not confined just to the business of sports – was a creation of the pioneer Mark Hume McCormack, the founder of International Management Group (IMG).

Handsome, with messy blonde hair and a winning smile, Mark looked liked a professional golfer, and he came pretty close to being one. He was the number one player at his college, William & Mary, when he often played against the star golfer from rival school Wake Forrest, Arnold Palmer.

The pair struck up quite a rapport in their

college years, which was to pay dividends for both men down the line.

Mark had graduated from Yale Law School in 1954 and practised law in Cleveland until 1960, when he decided to approach his old friend Arnold about the prospect of managing his business affairs.

According to legend, the pair made a deal based on a handshake and Mark turned his new client’s US$4,000 a year clothing contract into a multi-million dollar business. The rest, as they say, is history.

Mark’s reputation soared on the back of his new client’s commercial success and it wasn’t long before Gary Player and Jack Nicklaus also wanted a piece of the financial pie. And so IMG was born.

At its height, IMG had 2,500 employees in 81 offices in 30 countries. Whether you are a parent trying to manage a household

or the chief executive of a multinational company worth US$750 million, delegation is a lesson everyone must learn. But Mark’s unique twist on the lesson was managing delegation. He had a way of saying, “I am delegating a lot of responsibility to you, but that doesn’t mean I am not paying attention.”

Mark was exactly ten years older than me and he had been in golf for exactly ten years before I started ProServ. Before that era, Hollywood stars had long had agents managing their legal, financial and marketing affairs, but the sports field was essentially wide open. So Mark had led the way with golfers and we inadvertently copied the blueprint for tennis players.

For Palmer, Nicklaus and Player of IMG, read Arthur Ashe, Stan Smith and Yannick Noah of ProServ.

SportsPro Magazine | 3

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Arnold Palmer and Mark McCormack met as rival golfers on the college circuit; when Palmer went pro, he soon turned to his old adversary for guidance

I remember Mark as a tireless worker, admired by his clients for the most part, and loyal to a fault. He was very creative and a true visionary.

Over the next few years we started to compete and our paths would cross.

In the late 70s ProServ diversified into basketball, with James Worthy, Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing, while IMG made a move into tennis. Their first big signing was Rod Laver followed by a youngster named Bjorn Borg, which represented a seminal move for their company into another individual sport, where appearance fees became paid to the name players on the pro tour.

Ironically, I never had any plans to follow in Mark’s footsteps. I had been a successful college and professional tennis player, and was given the honour of captaining the US Davis Cup team with my principal charges being Ashe and Smith. Looking back now I suppose Mark and I had a lot in common, both before and after our careers really got kicked off.

A Yale graduate myself, I had put my tennis career on hold to pursue the legal profession. I was working for the Washington, DC firm Hogan 4 | www.sportspromedia.com

and Hartson when Arthur kept asking me for advice regarding his career and marketing contracts. Over time it became so time-consuming that I eventually recommended he hire an agent. Ironically it was Mark McCormack who I recommended, and I took Arthur to meet with him on three occasions.

For one reason or another the meetings were not an overwhelming success, and Arthur asked me to represent him. So all of a sudden Mark had some talent management competition, as Stan Smith soon followed, and ProServ emerged.

Any reader of this publication needs no introduction to IMG, or their list of illustrious clients and achievements.

Instead I will endeavour to offer some insight into the man ‘behind the success’, from my unique vantage as chief adversary.

We always enjoyed a great personal relationship, given the circumstances, and there was tremendous mutual respect.

We were, in fact, “friendly competitors” (Mark’s description) all over the globe.

Mark was very much a creature of habit and I found this to be quite interesting.

For example, he would keep track of all the miles he travelled each year and compare the numbers against his previous year. He once explained to me that it always continued to grow, regardless of the circumstances. Similarly, he did the same thing in accounting for the number of hours he spent working for a client.

Perhaps that was something he picked up from his Cleveland law firm, recording all those billable hours. He was fanatical and meticulous about timekeeping. If he told you that he would call you next Tuesday at 9.30am, you could set your watch by it.

Those who have worked with me over the years, for better or for worse, cannot say the same!

I remember Mark as a tireless worker, admired by his clients for the most part, and loyal to a fault. He was very creative and a true visionary. He was the first person who ever realised that sporting personalities could be used to advertise corporations and their products. As strange as it sounds these days, no one had ever joined the dots in business before Mark. He was very strategic and I remember him being leaps ahead of the competition in creating presentations and effectively pitching his clients. He made selling an athlete into an art form.

IMG post-McCormack: what happened next

F

ollowing Mark McCormack’s death in May 2003, IMG was swiftly acquired by private equity firm Forstmann Little.

The new man at the helm was Ted Forstmann, a financier dubbed by the US media as a ‘playboy millionaire’.

If he enjoyed life’s trappings, he also possessed a flair for deal-making and brought a new vigour to the company, identifying college sports as a lucrative new strand to IMG’s bow and putting the wheels in motion on joint ventures with companies in China, Brazil, India and Turkey.

In early 2011, however, Forstmann was diagnosed with brain cancer. He succumbed to the illness in November of that year, but not before he had

smoothed the path for his successor.

“Before he fell sick, he had a year, year a half of great health,” recalls Mike Dolan, then chief financial officer but eventually the man unanimously elected

by IMG’s shareholders to succeed Fortsmann as chairman and chief executive. “We put a plan together, we thought about all the different things we would do together to put the company on a strong growth curve, and when he fell sick he said, ‘I want you to continue what we’ve done.’ So there wasn’t the abrupt transition that you might think.

There was continuity.”

Since taking the reins, Dolan, a former chief financial officer at marketing firm Young & Rubicon, has set about consolidating what he

Ted Forstmann acquired IMG in 2003 and led it eagerly into new markets before his 2011 death

He was also the first to recognise that the industry could be global. IMG quickly established offices all across the world and, crucially, in developing markets. He was first to the UK, first in Asia and to this day IMG is almost always the first into any new market – take Brazil and India as recent examples.

Mark represented the All England Club (where he was responsible for coming up with marketing the name and logo of the big ‘W’) and the Royal & Ancient Golf Club (he talked the R&A into playing the final round of the British Open on Sundays, breaking a century-old tradition).

Moreover, he came up with the concept

Mike Dolan became IMG chairman in late 2011

sees as the company’s five distinct areas of business: its traditional athlete representation and events arm; fashion; ‘amateur sport’, comprising the IMG Academy and the burgeoning, Forstmann-funded college sports division; media production and commercialisation; and the newest branch, Forstmann’s international joint ventures.

For much of this year, meanwhile, Forstmann Little has been preparing to sell IMG, a deal which could end up being worth around US$2 billion should it be sold as a whole. No buyer has publicly emerged to date, although private equity firms including KKR & Co, New Mountain Capital and CVC Capital Partners have been suggested as potentials, along with other sports and entertainment companies including Creative Artists Agency (CAA). With a sale possible within the next few months, the next IMG era is poised to begin. DC

of naming rights for stadiums – fans of the many sports stadiums in the United States have Mark to thank. His influence in sports marketing is ever-present.

One of my lasting memories is of a conversation we had only a few months before he passed away. We were discussing the future areas of growth SportsPro Magazine | 5

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Mark McCormack was the first executive to recognise that sport could become a global industry

for sports marketing in television over a drink or two. Mark was insistent that the future was televised ballroom dancing, which drove me to fits of laughter. I could not believe he was being serious and told him in no uncertain terms that would never, ever happen. In 2013, Dancing With the Stars in the US and Strictly Come Dancing in the UK are two of the most popular shows on television, and Mark must be chuckling from above.

On a personal note, Mark and I used to kid that tennis parents would not be good agents for their kids. When my identical twins started playing on the Yale varsity team, I said to Mark one day at Roland Garros, “Mark, my twins are going to be great young players, but they need a big marketing guarantee,” which IMG often offered to young stars. Mark paused, thought a moment, and said, “No problem – take them to Octagon,” which brought a big laugh to both of us.

On another occasion, which shows the depth of Mark’s loyalty to his friends, a close colleague and confidant to me at ProServ decided to leave secretly, and wanted to take several leading clients, including Lindsay Davenport and Gabriela Sabatini, with him to IMG. You can imagine the controversy and angry confusion that would have caused, had this request to join IMG been accepted.

Instead, one morning when my wife Carole and I were traveling through the West Virginia mountains on a vacation, the car phone rang (there were no mobiles in those days!), and Mark said, “Don’t answer me, just listen – IMG will never accept your close ProServ employee joining IMG – absolutely no way will it 6 | www.sportspromedia.com

happen. Goodbye.” And he hung up. I will never forget this call.

Mark and I would meet secretly twice each year – at Hotel Crillon in Paris during the French Open and at his townhouse in New York during the US Open. We discussed all aspects of the sports business – about client fees, recent business deals, and not poaching each other’s key personnel. He knew I always wanted to hire Bob Kain away from IMG, because he was the best of their best – honest, smart, articulate, and a great recruiter. Bob continues to strive and thrive in the industry to this day for CAA, as their senior advisor.

Mark was also a doting father, and a loving husband to Betsy Nagelsen, whom he married on 1st March 1986. Betsy was an IMG client since 1974 and a wonderful tennis player, winner of the doubles championship at the 1978 and 1980 Australian Opens as well as five singles and 26 doubles titles on the WTA Tour, with a beautiful smile and warmth that charmed Mark beyond words. They were happily married for 17 years. Mark was 67 years old, with three older children from a prior marriage, when their daughter Maggie was born and became the joy of his later years.

Today, at 16, the way she looks, acts and speaks, with a friendly smile and piercing blue eyes, reminds me of her father.

Mark’s approach to business and life was that of the grinder – with a tireless work ethic and a stubborn persistence.

Mark believed, like Winston Churchill, that any goal is attainable, as long as you never, ever give up!

Mark was a fantastic manager in his business practices, coaxing people

when they needed it, yelling when it was necessary, but always striving to win. He believed, “To win, you have to say to yourself: ‘I want to be the best, and this is what I am willing to give, to be the best.’”

I think the real secret to IMG’s success is that Mark understood clearly that sports is a business of relationships. McCormack often said, “Sports is not something you can buy your way into, as you can in other industries,” and I have always echoed those sentiments.

Mark died on 16th May 2003, passing away quietly in a Manhattan hospital after four months in a coma. The press and good friends often used to ask Mark about his retirement plans. “People retire to do what I do every day,” Mark would answer.

“Play tennis with Monica Seles and golf with Arnold Palmer, go to Wimbledon and the Olympics and be treated like a king; write books and make speeches. As long as I can contribute, I’ll be around.”

My thoughts completely today.

Mark McCormack, as the creator and pathfinder of the sports marketing industry, was both unique and irreplaceable – no one else comes close.

I miss him a lot – his wit and charm, but also his competitive juices which still challenge me daily to do better.

Goodbye, old friend. You are still contributing.

Donald Dell

Along with Mark McCormack, Donald Dell was one of the first professional sports agents. Having founded the ProServ sports marketing firm in 1970, Dell is now one of the most distinguished and respected figures in the sports industry. He is currently group president at Lagardère Unlimited.

Editor’s note: Our thanks to IMG for access to their photo archive.