FOUR GENERATIONS OF COLOR

In 1980, after obtaining my doctorate and leaving St. Mary’s, I organized Golden Gate Sports Management Firm, with its headquarters in Oakland and an office in the Transamerica Pyramid building in San Francisco. My business partner, who was white, was lawyer Andy Curtin, a graduate of Fordham and Marquette Universities. He handled the football-related business, and we shared the basketball business. My area of expertise, of course, was baseball. Because of my 25 years of experience at the highest levels of baseball, in the pros and the colleges, as a player, scout and coach, I felt I had an excellent background in representing players. As an African-American man – we were beginning to be known as African Americans by then – I had to obtain the highest educational degrees to compete against the white man in the sports management arena, which I have now done for more than 20 years as an agent.

One of the first players I recruited to represent was my former St. Mary’s player, Broderick Perkins. Among the other outstanding major-league players I recruited to Golden Gate Sports and represented in their baseball and business dealings were Joe Morgan, Dion James, Ernie Riles, Mike Felder, Gary Pettis, Stacey Pettis, Danny Tartabull, Eric Davis, Kevin Bass, Willie McGee, Eric Anthony, Leon “Bip” Roberts, Charles “Chili” Davis, Johnny Rabb, Chris Brown, Lloyd McClendon, Wade Boggs, Dan Gladden, Anthony Telford, Scott Bullett, Marquis Grissom, Arthur Lee Rhodes, Alan Mills and Rickey Henderson. Among those players’ accomplishments were 47 All-Star appearances, four Most Valuable Player awards, 16 World Series championships and three current or future Hall of Fames. We represented many other players in the major leagues and the minors as well. Most were African-American players, including many who were natives of the San Francisco Bay Area; others, notably, were white players, including some superstars.

A person looking at this list of clients would believe that my firm was making millions of dollars after more than two decades in the business. Everyone on my staff was, and is, a college graduate and highly qualified to do this kind of work, African American and white; many white agents then and now have not had the educational background that my staff and I have, and they certainly have not had my background as a player, scout and coach. Yet I have learned over the years that for African Americans, representing pro athletes as an agent is a very difficult area in which to achieve. It has always been easy for me to recruit African-American clients, but it has been extremely hard to retain them. The white clients that I represent are much easier to continue working with, because of “elements in baseball” that I will elaborate on in this chapter.

My experience with Rickey Henderson, however, is a good illustration of what African-American agents such as myself have to encounter in trying to attract and retain African-American players, particularly stars-in-the-making, as long-term clients.

I have known Rickey Henderson since he was nine or ten years old. I was a friend of his mother and family. On his way to school, he used to stop by the M&M Bottle Shop, the liquor store Joe Morgan and I co-owned in Oakland. Over the years, I saw him develop into a top baseball and football prospect at Oakland Technical High School. He also played semi-pro baseball with adults at a very young age, as I had done in my younger years.

During Rickey’s senior year in high school, while I was still coaching at St. Mary’s, one of the local scouts for the San Diego Padres, whom I worked with and referred players to, came to me and suggested I saw one of the Tech players and possibly recruited him for developing at St. Mary’s. The player was Rickey Henderson. I saw him one Sunday in a semi-pro game, and he had developed so much that I told the scout that Rickey was ready to play professional baseball right then and there. On another occasion I brought Rickey and one of his classmates, Fred Aikens, to St. Mary’s. I picked them up at their school in my new green Mercedes Benz, with the top down on a beautiful East Bay day, and I took them out to St. Mary’s. I talked to Rickey about the possibility of playing baseball at college, for example at St. Mary’s for me – but also advised him that if he were to get drafted, he should take the opportunity to play professional baseball. Rickey admired the Benz so much and was so delighted to ride in it that I said to him, “Rickey, if you work hard and develop yourself in professional baseball, someday you will be able to own one of these, or maybe two of them.”