Maybe the hiring of a licensed NBA agent is the first step.
[Happy] Walters is the founder of Immortal Entertainment of Santa Monica, Calif., which has subsidiaries such as Immortal Records, Immortal Soundtracks and Immortal Film and Television in addition to Immortal Sports.
He is probably best known for launching the music careers of such acts as Korn, Incubus, Rage Against the Machine, Cypress Hill, Kanye West and House of Pain.
Walters only has a few NBA clients, most notably Mickael Pietrus of the Orlando Magic and Shawne Williams of the Dallas Mavericks. Walters also represents players who play overseas and got to know Blair through another Pitt player, Tyrell Biggs, who signed with Walters first and is attempting to earn a professional contract.
Okay, so it isn’t David Faulk.
When Blair announced, one of the soundbytes was that he was “not Chris Taft.”
No, but he sure didn’t inspire the confidence of his decisionmaking or where his head was in this. It seemed more about celebrity. Talking about local marketing deals. Showing up as the coach of the Steelers basketball team.
The end of the article is more encouraging.
Blair will leave next week for the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., to work out with its executive director, David Thorpe. He will be there for most of the month of May as he attempts to get himself into the best shape possible for workouts with teams.
Blair could not be reached for comment, but Sharene Dixon, Blair’s aunt who will be living with him in his new NBA city, said the family chose Walters to represent Blair because they felt Walters was the best fit for Blair.
Dixon, who graduated from Robert Morris University and has a master’s degree in curriculum development and structural design, said she and her husband will be helping Blair adjust to life as a professional basketball player. She will be leaving her teaching job in Virginia to work for her nephew.
I would have been happier if he took off to start training right away (since he was no longer taking classes). It will be curious to read in the coming weeks what he looks like in the workouts. That seems to be the big issue.
Because of his lack of height, Blair has to come in willing to work on getting his body in peak condition and out-working everyone on the boards. If Paul Millsap can thrive, so can Blair.
I do like that his aunt is the one that will be staying with him and helping. Even as an employee of Blair. She is educated, stable and hopefully will make him think beyond just getting paid.
And, Chuck Morris, I did not read that Blair’s uncle is moving in or that he will become an employee. Further, if he signs a 1st round contract, then the price of a teacher’s salary plus room/board is miniscule compared to what he’ll be making plus the support he will get from his aunt. By NO way, shape or means do I read this as any type of freeloadiong situation.
Let me try to understand. Blair is leaving college, but he must have a surrogate mother and her husband living full-time with him? To do what? Cash his paychecks and give him an allowance? Make sure he eats properly and goes to bed at a decent hour? Is he that immature? Most people who have financial advisors or financial planners (and I don’t know if she has financial credentials) don’t have them living with them . They see their financial advisors/planners on a periodic basis via an appointment.
I don’t know his arrangement with his aunt, but from the outside it certainly gives the appearance of a player’s family trying to cash in. If this is the story (and hopefully it is not), it is a scenario that has repeated itself many times among pro players.
If Blair needs a full-time surrogate mother, in my opinion, he is too immature to turn pro.
The money will go fast enough: cars, houses, trips, clothes, obligatory jewelry. And now a babysitter. This ain’t good. Still, best wishes to him.
People forget that Larry hired people to help to keep out of antics when he turned pro. His first two years he had somebody come over and teach him Spanish as well as a chef come over and teach him to cook. Despite having individuals come over and help to keep him out of trouble (time spent learning Spanish and cooking is time not spent at The Club with Pac Man Jones), he still managed to knock up a cougar.
The arrangement is by no means minuscule, and hopefully the aunt is taking a sabbatical for a year or two until DeJuan can handle living alone as an adult, but for the meantime, it’s a decent arrangement. Hopefully, as you note, it’s also understood that it’s a short-term arrangement.
Hopefully DeJuan won’t misbehave and have to taste Uncle Cam’s backhand.
“Hey Auntie, everyone on the team has heavy gold necklaces, an expensive watch and an expensive car, and you are telling me that I am not permitted to buy the same with my own money?”
My guess is that a few of his teammates will have a few comments. (“Let me get this straight DeJuan. I keeping house with this gorgeous babe, and you are living with whom?”) Yep. The situation will work out just fine.
BTW, the teams play about 50-60 games on the road, depending upon play-off games. Who will be watching to insure he behaves when he is on the road, or is his aunt going to follow him? As far as controlling spending, it ain’t that difficult. One can have his agent set up a system where a player is given a weekly allowance and is issued a debit card in a conrolled account. Also, I don’t think that the proposed arrangement is going to impede his pursuit of babes should he be so inclined.
There are just too many stories of young millionaires who blew away the bucks very quickly or were swindled by investors …. does the name of Tony Dorsett ring a bell to any of you??
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By Tom Farrey
ESPN.com
Mark Cuban doesn’t know Lenny Cooke. But in the tangled world of NBA finance, where competition for clients is fierce and conflicts of interest can go unchecked, even Cuban emerges as a bit player in the cautionary tale of the former New York City basketball star.
Mark Cuban’s financial reach may have extended into a conflict of interest.
The Dallas Mavericks owner was a minority investor in the parent company, Immortal Entertainment, of the agent firm that signed Cooke while he was still in high school last year. Cooke, who was not ready for the NBA in the estimation of scouts, would go undrafted and accrue debt related to a basketball-related loan.
Cuban told ESPN.com that he had no involvement in the decisions of Immortal Sports, an upstart firm from Santa Monica, Calif., that represents several NBA and NFL players.
“I invested in Immortal Entertainment as an entertainment company,” Cuban wrote in an e-mail response to questions by ESPN.com. “It was a very small minority investment, and it was one of several I made in Hollywood. They got into sports after my investment. I have since exited as an investor.”
Immortal Entertainment has specialized in music and film projects for a decade. In 2001, around the time Cuban joined as an investor, the company branched out into the sports business through agent Mike Harrison and his runner, former University of Michigan assistant coach Terence Green. That year, their first big client, Zach Randolph, was selected with the 19th pick in the NBA draft by the Portland Trail Blazers.
The following spring they signed Cooke and another high schooler who went undrafted, DeAngelo Collins of Los Angeles. Immortal also helped Cooke acquire a pre-draft line of credit — based on his presumed NBA earning potential — by referring him to CSI Capital Management, a financial services firm that works with agents to recruit players.
At the time, Cooke was still enrolled in high school and living at the home of a former high school teammate, whose mother, Debbie Bortner, had spent two years trying to help him get his academics in order to gain his college eligibility. She contends the early access to money affected the judgment of Cooke, who grew up poor in Brooklyn.
“Immortal Sports should be renamed Immoral Sports,” she said.
Harrison and Greene declined comment. A lawyer for Immortal, Martin Singer, conceded that the agent and his runner hid their dealings with Cooke from Bortner — to the point where Greene, not Cooke, originally took delivery of the bank card associated with the line of credit so it would not have to be sent to Bortner’s home in New Jersey.
But Singer said Cooke needed no enticement to turn pro. Harrison and Green were only trying to help him realize his dream, he said.
“Mr. Cooke has nobody to blame but himself for not being drafted,” Singer wrote in a letter to ESPN, contending that Cooke hurt his chances by failing to show up for several scheduled workouts with NBA teams. Cooke insists that he wanted to attend the workouts, but that Immortal’s representatives told him to abstain due to a toe injury he was recovering from at the time.
Upon reflection, Cooke now says he should have signed with a more experienced agent, rather than the first firm that approached him.
“I don’t have (any) regrets about signing with an agent, but if I could have signed with another agent, that’s what I would have done,” he said.
CSI chairman Leland Faust declined to discuss Cooke’s line of credit other than to acknowledge that he was briefly a client. Cooke said he has not been asked to pay back any of the money he used. However, Cooke does owe money to Immortal, which loaned him $13,760 shortly after the draft, according to a promissory note signed by Cooke and reviewed by ESPN.com. That debt, due last November, remains unpaid because Cooke has no steady income, said Kenneth Glassman, Cooke’s new agent.
Cuban said he was unaware that Cooke was an Immortal client and that he played no role in the development of the company’s sports division. But Immortal executives were proud of the association, said Jeff Farley, the Brooklyn entertainment industry consultant who introduced Cooke to Greene.
“(Cuban’s) name came up a few times,” said Farley, who had previously done business with Immortal. “I’m a big Dallas fan from back in the days of Derek Harper so the guys at Immortal said, ‘Yeah, Cuban’s involved.’ ”
Other basketball players that have been or currently are represented by Harrison include Mateen Cleaves, Donnell Harvey, Mario Bennett and Charlie Bell, according to the NBA players association.
Spokesmen for the NBA and its players union each said their organizations were unaware of Cuban’s former stake in Immortal — a relationship that could have been perceived as a conflict of interest given his ownership of the Mavericks.
In fact, another team owner in Dallas dealt with a similar issue in 2001, just as Immortal’s sports division was ramping up. Concerns surrounded Tom Hicks, owner of the Texas Rangers and Dallas Stars, after one of his companies, Clear Channel Communications, purchased the SFX sports agency, which represents many of the best baseball (as well as football and basketball) players. To satisfy the players associations, Clear Channel gave up the right to remove SFX directors or officers.
NBA spokesman Tim Frank said the league plans to take no action on the Cuban-Immortal connection since it is now “in the past.” Any future arrangements of that type, he said, would bear scrutiny.
“In a case like this, there could be a significant conflict of interest,” he said. “It is something we would scrutinize.” Cuban declined to say when exactly he bought into Immortal and when he sold his interest in the company. Dallas newspapers reported last year that he and fellow Broadcast.com co-founder Todd Wagner became involved in the parent company around the end of 2001 or start of 2002. Immortal Entertainment had between 31 and 40 employees and sales of $750,000 to $1 million, according to a Dun & Bradstreet report.
Tom Farrey is a senior writer at ESPN.com. He can be reached at tom.farrey@espn3.com
Again, I will never buy any of the preceding arguments that a professional. educated aunt will not have Dejuan’s best interest at heart.
“Blair was heavily recruited coming out of high school. Besides Pitt, other schools pursuing him included Florida, Kansas State, Indiana, Marquette, Miami, West Virginia, Wake Forest and Tennessee.His parents admitted that if they had their way, Blair would have gone to Tennessee. They liked Volunteers coach Bruce Pearl, and thought it would be a good idea for their son to leave the city. Blair himself had problems making up his mind; while considering as many as 18 different scholarship offers, he was so confused that one day he threw his cell phone across a room, breaking it.[3]
However, neither Blair nor his parents were a match for his maternal grandmother Donna Saddler, who had played a major role in his upbringing. Pitt coach Jamie Dixon recognized Saddler’s importance early in the recruiting process. On the first day he was allowed to contact Blair, he called Saddler, asking to come to her house. She told Dixon that they were having a family reunion at the house that day, and invited him to come, which he did. When Dixon was down to his last scholarship in the 2007 recruiting cycle, he called her, telling her that Blair would need to take the scholarship at that time. In the end, Saddler made the decision for him, telling him “Pitt is it.” She liked Dixon and the proximity of her home to the school.”
From the PPG:
“Blair could not be reached for comment, but Sharene Dixon, Blair’s aunt who will be living with him in his new NBA city, said the family chose Walters to represent Blair because they felt Walters was the best fit for Blair. Dixon, who graduated from Robert Morris University and has a master’s degree in curriculum development and structural design, said she and her husband will be helping Blair adjust to life as a professional basketball player. She will be leaving her teaching job in Virginia to work for her nephew.”
Blair turned 20 years old yesterday. Is the only decision he is capable of making is to hire an attorney to officially end his college eligibility and then to fire him? I hope to stick around to see how this all plays out. Anybody care to guess what his bank account will be (assuming he is a low first round draft choice) after he pays his taxes, after he pays his agents fees, after he pays any escape fees to his attorney, after he pays his aunt and her husband salary, living expenses, health insurance (?), etc., and after he buys himself a few toys?
BTW, I like the part where his aunt and her husband will be helping Blair adjust to life as a professional basketball player. His aunt and uncle can both fall back on the experience that they gleaned during their years in the NBA.
I was never sure what to make of his Aunt and Uncle moving in with him– but now that it looks like she is quitting her job to “work for him” makes me pause again. How much money will they ask of him for these services? What kind of relationship will this be? Will she really be able to tell him what he may not want to hear? He will be her boss after all.