mgmt one is a full service sports and entertainment agency (it prefers to be recognized as a premier lifestyle management company) with offices in New York, Cincinnati, and Los Angeles.  The company’s website, which is currently only a video (albeit an impressive video), displays pictures of a plethora of clients, including Allan Houston, Ken Griffey Jr, Rasheed Wallace, Donte Greene, Andre Smith, Brandon Banks, Chinedum Ndukwe, Frostee Rucker, Tyrese, Eva Pigford, Deborah Cox, Mike Epps, Ciara, and more.  mgmt one’s services also include digital publishing, lifestyle and wealth management, and even insurance.  The pervading slogan throughout is, “This is our DNA.”

mgmt one’s Chairman is James M. Gould, who has more than 25 years of experience in the corporate investment, real estate, sports, and entertainment industries.  He also has roughly 20 years of experience as a founder and Managing Partner of The Walnut Group, a private equity fund, and was a founding member of the now defunct United State Football League.

The company’s Vice Chairman is Brad Tilford, who also serves as the chairman of The Blackwave Group, which has properties in entertainment, sports, marketing, online media, and business-to-business consulting.  Prior to Blackwave Group, Tilford was a founding partner of Blue Equity Sports Television (BEST), which was eventually sold to
Lagardère Unlimited.

The COO/Senior Vice President is Bill Strickland, who is known for his experience in representing professional basketball players.  Strickland was President at BEST for 3.5 years, but also ran his own company, served as President of the Basketball Division at IMG, and was once Chief Operating Officer of ProServ’s Team Sports Division.

The President of the Baseball Division is Brian Goldberg, who represented Ken Griffey, Jr. for his entire 23-year career.  Kim Grillier is the President of the Basketball Division.  Grillier also used to work at BEST.  Jory Zola is the Vice President in the Hockey Division.  He is a young, bright agent who recently merged his start-up firm with mgmt one.  And there are others involved in the company, but you get the point – this looks like it has a lot of potential based on the names involved.

There is one common thread between many of the people working at mgmt one – they have worked with one another in some fashion, particularly at BEST.  As this group becomes more unified and begins to recruit more clientele, I will be sure to share its successes on Sports Agent Blog.

Agency Spotlight: mgmt one from Sports Agent Blog - Sports Business, Sports Law, Sports Negotiations, NCAA Rules

Michael Lelchitski works for Sports International Group, Inc., which is also known as SIG.  The family company, based in Gaithersburg, MD, was founded by Michael’s father Boris Lelchitski in 1996 with a primary focus of representing professional female basketball players.  Today, SIG is one of the top agencies in women’s basketball, representing over 40 players in the WNBA (which amounts to roughly 30% of the league).  Prior to starting SIG, Boris was the head coach of Euroleague powerhouse Spartak in Russia.

Michael’s title at SIG is Men’s Basketball Executive Director.  He and his father launched SIG’s Men’s Basketball division in 2008 and have largely focused on recruiting and placing players in Russia, Ukraine and all the countries of the former Soviet Union.  Michael is currently the only Russian-American agent licensed with the NBPA.

SIG hopes that Ater Majok’s selection by the Lakers will be the start of a successful group of NBA clients for the company.  However, SIG wants to remain as a boutique agency in men’s basketball and not outgrow itself.

Agent Spotlight: Michael Lelchitski from Sports Agent Blog - Sports Business, Sports Law, Sports Negotiations, NCAA Rules

The Washington Post did a fantastic job of providing an in-depth background of Miller’s sports agent, Joby Branion of Athletes First.  For a long time, I have known Branion as an intellectual, hard worker, who has the privilege of representing some of the best football players in the NFL.  Recently, Branion was a panelist at the 2011 College Sport Research Institute (CSRI) Conference.  As reported by the Washington Post, Branion’s path was not easy, but with hard work and determination, he has “made it.”

In 2007, when I first wrote a short Agent Spotlight on Branion, I had known that Branion was adopted, had to deal with the murder of his adopted murder, and that his adopted father was convicted for the killing even though he denied it.  The Washington Post article linked above goes into much greater detail.

Now Branion is Executive Director at Athletes First.  The company just had 10 clients selected in the first 4 rounds of the NFL Draft (including the aforementioned Von Miller).  Congratulations to Branion; I hope for continued success in the future for him and his company.

Agent Spotlight: Joby Branion [Update] from Sports Agent Blog - Sports Business, Sports Law, Sports Negotiations, NCAA Rules

A couple of months ago, nude photos of high profile St. Kilda players were released on the internet. The photos were proposed to be stolen from one of the player’s computers by a 17 year old girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons.

In the midst of this scandal developing, AFL Player Agent Ricky Nixon, who represented some of the players, was negotiating with the girl a resolution that would see an end to this saga.

Flash forward to now and it has been revealed that Ricky spent considerable time with the girl, and there are claims by her that he had a sexual affair with her, which he vehemently denies. Adding to this, it is alleged that he brought illegal drugs to her in her hotel room.

He admits that his relationship with her was ‘inappropriate’, but not sexual.

Video footage has now hit the web showing the girl rummaging through what appears to be his trousers, showing his IDs. Another video shows a man who looks like Ricky in his underwear on a bed.

The girl involved has been questioned by police in regards to breaches in surveillance.

After all of this, the AFL Players Association (AFLPA) had to respond. With Ricky going overseas for business meetings, the AFLPA has decided to hand this matter to an independent investigator to get to the bottom of it.

So the question that arises is should Ricky Nixon, the most prolific agent in AFL be allowed to conitnue operating as an Agent?

In the AFLPA’s statement regarding the matter, they look at certain regulations which an Agent must uphold:

• Not engage in conduct which has an adverse impact on his or her competence to serve in a fiduciary capacity on behalf of his or her clients;
• At all times represents his or her client with a conscientious regard for their personal and professional welfare;
• Not doing anything that is materially detrimental to his or her client; and
• Not acting dishonestly or fraudulently while representing his or her client.

It is easy to see that the first point may have been breached. Having an inappropriate relationship with this girl may cloud his judgment in his clients dealings, considering she was involved in a scandal involving players that he has the duty of representing. While he initially sought her out to settle the matter, his relationship may have provided a conflict of interest.

The rest of the points are hard to gauge without all evidence coming to light. I believe that Ricky was initially acting solely in the best interests of his clients and he has committed an error of judgment on his part, which was inappropriate considering the events that had previously transpired.

Most of his clients have declined to comment on whether they will stay with him until the matter is settled.

I have written on Ricky Nixon previously with posts regarding him located here.

AFL Agent Ricky Nixon in Hot Water from Sports Agent Blog - Sports Business, Sports Law, Sports Negotiations, NCAA Rules

Type in Happy Walters into a Google Search.  One of the top listings is his IMDB page.  Did you know that Happy Walters was the inspiration for Adam Sandler to create his hit movie, Happy Gilmore?  If only poor Chubs would get his hand back.  Sandler was even Happy’s Best Man at Happy’s wedding.  While Happy Walters has really established himself in the world of sports, he is also a giant on the Entertainment side.  With sports and entertainment becoming more one-and-the-same by the day, this has to work in Happy’s favor.  He is very big in the Music scene (as a supervisor) and has also produced quite a few movies and TV shows.

Music Supervisor, Producer, Sports Agent (which I have not even got to yet), and photographer?  Another top Google Search result leads to Happy’s personal website at www.HappyWalters.com.  This is the official Happy Walters Photography website, where Life Portraits, Color Photography, and Music Photography are highlighted.

People think that I am a busy man?  I bet Happy Walters has a little bit more on his plate.  When he is not bringing bands like KoRn and Cypress Hill to the forefront of music, he is also managing athletes.  His biggest client is Amare Stoudemire, but he also represents DeJuan Blair, Shawne Williams, Curtis Jerrells, and former Florida Gator, Corey Brewer.  There are other basketball players on his clientèle roster, and Happy may even make a splash in this year’s draft.  Rumors have been surfacing lately that Happy may have a solid chance of representing University of Kentucky’s, John Wall.  He has already signed UTEP’s Derrick Caracter.

Happy Walters’ company in the Music industry is called Immortal (EMD).  So when he started his agency to represent athletes, it made sense to call the new venture, Immortal Sports.  But it looks like things are changing on the sports end.  Happy is transitioning to creating a new sports entity called, Rogue Sports.  In fact, the website for the new company is already under development.  It will probably be taken down or moved sometime soon after posting this, but I find the headlines quite humorous, so I am taking a screenshot and posting it here for your enjoyment.  Make sure to read the one about Drew Rosenhaus!

To conclude, I think it will be very interesting to track Rogue Sports and all of Happy’s ventures in the future.  Reading a bit more about his past, I definitely commend Happy and look up to him as a pure entrepreneur and someone who should be respected in this industry.  Good luck to him with this year’s draft class and in all future pursuits.

Agent Spotlight: Happy Walters from Sports Agent Blog - Sports Business, Sports Law, Sports Negotiations, NCAA Rules

Wichard and Pro Tect Management represent Jason Taylor, Dwight Freeney, Terrell Suggs, Keith Bulluck, Antonio Cromartie, Elvis Dumervil, Darren Sproles…okay, I’ll stop now before I take up the entire post with their fantastic list of clients.  Wichard keeps these guys because he signs them to record deals.  It also helps him on the recruiting trail, which he is dominating so far in 2010.

Pro Tect Management is additionally benefited by the fact that it has been around for thirty years.  Wichard founded the company in 1980, after playing in the NFL himself.  It is not a huge firm with numerous employees and Wichard seems to restrict the number of players he takes in as clients.  It seems like a good strategy considering the fantastic names he has the opportunity to represent.

At this point, it is reported that Pro Tect Management has signed Arrelious Benn (Illlinois), Jimmy Clausen (Notre Dame), Everson Griffen (USC), Taylor Mays (USC), and C.J. Spiller (Clemson).  All of them have a chance of being first round picks in the 2010 NFL Draft.  Is CAA watching?

Gary Wichard Is On Freaking Fire from Sports Agent Blog - Sports Business, Sports Law, Sports Negotiations, NCAA Rules

After ending his career as a Minor League pitcher, Darek started representing players with Stephens Sports Management Inc. He then split off and created Braunecker Sports Council, a firm located in Little Rock, Arkansas.  Darek has focused on securing the best talent in the state of Arkansas, and he has succeeded in his mission.  He teamed up with Jim Lindell and Mark Rodgers to create a new agency, Frontline Sports Management, and represents guys like A.J. Burnett, Cliff Lee, and a young kid in the Angels organization named Dustin Moseley.

Braunecker recently talked with ArkansasSports360.com about his business and his two stud clients, Burnett and Lee.  This is my absolute favorite Q&A segment of the piece:

AS360.com: You started out at Stephens Sports Management and branched out on your own here. Are you happy being based out of Little Rock?

DB: Very much so. I don’t anticipate being anywhere but Little Rock, Arkansas. In this business now, if you have a laptop and easy access to an airport you can conduct business anywhere. This may not be a hotbed of talent from an amateur standpoint but this isn’t a regional practice for me either. You emphasize your own region, sure … but you don’t operate in a vacuum in a particular geographic region … Being here allows me to do things with the guys in the off-season on a more personal basis as well. If we could continue to produce guys like A.J. and Cliff, then I’d be in pretty good shape. Unfortunately you can’t rely on that within this state year in and year out. It requires you to spread your tentacles a little bit farther as well.

Agent Spotlight: Darek Braunecker from Sports Agent Blog - Sports Business, Sports Law, Sports Negotiations, NCAA Rules

Salcer, who runs Icy Luck, Inc. out of Manhattan Beach, CA, represents Marian Gaborik, the uber-talented albeit injury prone right winger for the Minnesota Wild who will be an unrestricted free agent next July. The speedy Slovak is a fan favorite–most Minnesotans are more apt to remember his historic, five goal performance against the N.Y. Rangers last December, for instance, than the maddening bouts of inconsistency that always seem to come around playoff time. Moreover, Gaborik has yet to finish a full-season without some injury of note. He now sits in the final year of a three-year, $19 million deal, that pays him $7.5m this season.

That said, Gaborik correctly feels he should command top dollar. His upside especially still places him among other elite names in the NHL. However, thus far he and Salcer have rejected multiple offers from the Wild. Contract talks that the team had hoped would be done by the end of the preseason have now officially stalled, and relations between the two sides have gone from bad to awkward. Gaborik now sits on the injured reserve thanks to a conveniently cryptic and allegedly lingering “lower-body injury”. Meanwhile, the Wild has skated to one of the best records in the league even in his absence, utilizing as always a trapping style of play arguably ill-suited to someone of Gaborik’s flash anyway. And Salcer, who bit his tongue early on while bloggers and sports writers in the Twin Cities began to bash his client for reportedly turning down some fairly generous offers, seemingly had enough when he lashed out last week in local papers. While it had been reported that the Wild offered a variety of proposals, ranging from six to 10 years for more than $8.5 million annually, Salcer dismissed such talk as exaggerated. “Unfortunately, Marian has been absorbing a character assassination on the premise of misinformation that has circulated like gospel,” Salcer said. “The offers that have been thrown at the wall of 10 years, $85 million, $90 million and $100 million are wrong, as are what I now hear — seven years, $70 million and eight years, $80 million. They’re also wrong. When and if they do get offered, something certainly may happen.”

What seems clear to many pundits is that Gaborik has no intention of staying in Minnesota, and moreover that he feels he can command more money elsewhere. Rumors of a trade to Montreal sound credible to some, though knowing that Minnesota will be loathe to lose him for nothing next summer, the bargaining power doesn’t seem to rest with Wild GM Doug Risebrough. That said, is Gaborik worth top five money? If Salcer has indeed priced his stud out of the market like some analysts think he has, then it may be harder to get the free market to bite, especially as Gaborik sloughs away on the IR. Others opine that it is inevitable that someone will decide to overpay eventually, especially as the year unwinds.

Either way, Salcer isn’t backing down–from bloggers, the media, or even the Wild itself–and if he lands his man a new deal making him one of the highest paid players in the NHL, his mission will be complete. In the meantime, you can bet that he will continue scouring the print media and listening intently to the public airways for further “misinformation,” because well, that’s just the type of guy he is. Salcer got started in the business, for example, in the early 1980s after meeting and befriending several L.A. King players in his apartment complex. He was mortified to learn how paltry players’ salaries, pensions and medical benefits were, and his anger eventually lead to the uncovering of a league-wide scandal that implicated former NHLPA boss Alan Eagleson, who stepped down in disgrace in 1992 and later served prison time for fraud. “I was hearing horror story after horror story. I watched players’ salaries go up maybe 5% every year and we never knew who was making what. They’d say eight guys were making X amount and 72 were making the median, but nobody knew who was making what. [Eagleson] said to players, ‘You’re making more money than your parents. Don’t rock the boat.’ I felt if I was going to continue as an agent, there would have to be dramatic changes.” An investigation turned up that Eagleson was making under the table deals with close personal friends John Ziegler, then NHL president, and Chicago Blackhawk owner Bill Wirtz, then chairman of the league’s board of governors, suppressing salaries by giving up free agency in labor agreements and by advocating a merger of the World Hockey Association and the NHL, thus curtailing the bidding that had driven salaries up.

Flash forward and Salcer is now credited with many things modern players take for granted: agents can no longer represent players and coaches or club executives, players’ salaries have skyrocketed, the pension fund is well endowed by events such as the World Cup, and players are kept up to date about NHLPA finances. So when Salcer gets miffed, like he was this past week on behalf of his client, Gaborik, people pay attention. Sounds like the Duke.

Agent Spotlight: Ron Salcer from Sports Agent Blog - Sports Business, Sports Law, Sports Negotiations, NCAA Rules

Kyle Rote Jr. is the founder of Athletic Resource Management (ARM, Inc.).  Rote Jr. currently serves as CEO of the company that you may not recognize at first glance.  Do you recognize the name Jimmy Sexton?  He is the President of ARM, Inc., which is one of the industry leaders in representation of football players and coaches.  Their client list includes Philip Rivers, Jason Whitten, and DeAngelo Williams on the player end.  As far as coaches go, Sexton and Rote Jr. are at the top of the profession.  They represent Nick Saban, Bill Parcells, Phillip Fulmer, Steve Spurrier, Houston Nutt…the list goes on and on.

Rote Jr. will be inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame class in February.  All of us at SportsAgentBlog.com congratulate him and wish ARM, Inc. continued success in the world of sports business.

Agent Spotlight: Kyle Rote Jr. from Sports Agent Blog - Sports Business, Sports Law, Sports Negotiations, NCAA Rules

While a law student in 1993 at St. Louis University, Ben Dogra, now 43, interned for free with Jim Steiner of SFX Football (then SMG). Dogra would later call Steiner his mentor, but in time, some began to wonder who was teaching what to whom. By 2006, Dogra and Steiner sold SFX Football (which was generating an estimated $7 million in revenue at the time) for roughly $30 million to Creative Artists Agency (CAA), where they joined Tom Condon and his partner Ken Kremer (of then-IMG Football) while bringing 57 NFL clients as well as their eight employees (CAA Football now has a staff of 15, including those who handle player endorsements). The deal raised eyebrows throughout the industry by bringing together the largest and most star-studded football client rosters, creating what SportsBusiness Journal called “the most dominant player representation practice in the business.” By this time, Steiner was in the backseat, so to speak, as an associate of Dogra’s, and it was Dogra and Condon who were set to become the division’s principals. The results have been staggering. Dogra and Condon represent about 130 players, including 4 of the first 8 picks from last April’s draft, and 6 of the top 21. They have also represented four of the past five first-overall choices and 48 first-round picks since 2001, eclipsing any competitor. Recently, they were named #1 (Condon) and #6 (Dogra), respectively, in SBJ’s list of the Top 20 most influential agents in sports.

There was a time, however, when some wondered whether their merger would be a problem, especially with the various fiascos that took place at SFX when “mega-agents” in the same sport were paired together under the same roof. However, Dogra and Condon’s yin and yang like balance has thus far yielded solid chemistry, and much admiration from the industry as a whole. Said Denny Thum, the Kansas City Chiefs’ executive vice president: “Tom (an NFL guard for 12 seasons and a former president of the NFLPA) is the football guy and can carry on the conversation from the football standpoint. Ben is the numbers guy and…without question has a memory like a steel trap.” And Howard Nuchow, co-head of CAA Sports, reiterated the same premise: “They are definitely different and combined they can take care of anything. Tom seems to be way instinctive and his instincts are off the charts. And Ben is really cerebral and thinks about things a lot before deciding what to do.”

Born in New Delhi, but raised predominately in northern Virginia from age six on, Dogra yearned for “an NFL career.” But due to his size and lack of skill, he quickly settled on another route into the league. After graduating from George Mason, he started law school in St. Louis, due primarily to its proximity to two sports agencies. One of said agencies was Steiner’s and SMG, which rejected Dogra at first but later took him on after much pleading. Dogra worked his way from the bottom up, quickly earning a reputation as an above average recruiter who connected well with his players and especially with their families. Will he ever eclipse Condon as #1? With Condon’s name being tossed around on the shortlist of those who might replace the late Gene Upshaw as NFLPA executive director, it is not inconceivable. But Dogra has prided himself on flying under the radar, so to speak, leaving the limelight and chest pounding to flashier personalities. If he is indeed “the best football agent attracting the least attention” and wants to keep it that way, then he is indeed in quite a dilemma. A dilemma he probably dreamt about as an intern.

Agent Spotlight: Ben Dogra from Sports Agent Blog - Sports Business, Sports Law, Sports Negotiations, NCAA Rules