Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Players: How Sports Became a Business

Players: How Sports Became a Business

Futterman, Matthew

Paperback

FictionBusiness GeneralSports General

Publisher Price: $18.99

ISBN10: 147671696X
ISBN13: 9781476716961
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: Apr 18 2017
Pages: 336
Weight: 0.65
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.40 Depth: 8.30
Language: English
Provocative...terrific stories (The New Yorker) of the people who transformed sports--in the span of a single generation--from a job that required even top athletes to work in the off-season to make ends meet into a massive global business.

It started, as most business deals do, with a handshake. In 1960, a Cleveland lawyer named Mark McCormack convinced a golfer named Arnold Palmer to sign with him. McCormack simply believed that the best athletes had more commercial value than they were being paid for--and he was right. Within a few years, he raised Palmer's annual income from $5,000 to $500,000, and forever changed the landscape of the sports industry, transforming it from a form of entertainment to a profitable and fully functioning system of its own.

A remarkable saga...filled with insights not only into sports, but also into human nature (The Dallas Morning News), Players features landmark moments, including the multiyear battle to free Palmer from a bad deal with the Wilson Sporting Goods Company; the 1973 Wimbledon boycott, when eighty-one of the top tennis players in the world protested the suspension of Nikola Pilic; baseball pitcher Catfish Hunter's battle to become MLB's first free agent; and how NFL executives transformed pro football from a commercial dud to the greatest show on earth.

An entertaining, illuminating read (New York Journal of Books), Players is a riveting, fly-on-the-wall account of the rise and creation of the modern sports world, and the people who made it happen. No part of the media and entertainment industry has seen a more substantial economic transformation than sports....A half-century tour spanning a variety of widely recognized and lesser-known sports figures and competitions that have played roles in the industry's development....Players could not be more timely (The New York Times).

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