Sheryl Swoopes

by Erin Davies

...Page 2

The $1.2 million that Sheryl Swoopes earned last year in endorsements is clear evidence that she has good representation. But just as a great athlete can go nowhere without a great agent, a great agent can do little with a mediocre athlete who lacks good looks, charm, and an inspiring background. Fortunately Swoopes had not only talent to sell but also the story of someone who, through determination and hard work, overcame personal hardship. "Sheryl's is very much an American tale," says Sue Levin, who was Nike's marketing director of women's U.S. products when Air Swoopes was launched. "I think that's something people are aware of, and that's positive."

To be sure, Swoopes didn't have it easy. She was born on March 25, 1971, in Brownfield (population: 10,000). Not long after that, her father left home, so she and her three brothers were raised single-handedly by their mother, Louise, who occasionally relied on welfare to support the family. "We grew up in a three-room house," Swoopes says. "Not three bedrooms. Three rooms." Needless to say, there were no cars or vacations, but there was basketball. Swoopes started playing when she was around seven, she says, "because my brothers played, and the only way my mom would let me even think about leaving the house was if I was going with them somewhere." That didn't mean, however, that her mother supported her interest in basketball. "When I was younger, she wanted me to go in the house and play with my dishes or my dolls," Swoopes says. "I guess it was just unheard of for a girl to play basketball, or she didn't want her little girl to get hurt." That changed when Swoopes entered high school. "Once I set my mind to it and said, 'I don't care what you say, I'm going to play, I want to play basketball,' then people started to support me." Her mother came to every home game.

Swoopes got really serious about basketball in her junior year at Brownfield High, in part because she knew she wanted to go to college and an athletic scholarship was the only way she could afford it. By the middle of her senior year, recruitment letters were pouring in from Harvard University, the University of Hawaii, and everywhere in between. But Swoopes wanted to stay in Texas, and she chose the University of Texas at Austin, which at the time had one of the best women's basketball programs in the country. Unfortunately for UT, Swoopes got homesick and left after less than a week, transferring to Texas Tech University, in Lubbock, which is only forty miles from Brownfield. "There were a lot of people who told me I was doing the wrong thing, that if I left UT, I would never win a national championship," she says. She proved them wrong. As a senior at Texas Tech, Swoopes scored 47 points in the NCAA championship game and led her team to its first title ever. "It was absolutely one of the great all-time performances in basketball," recalls Levin. Nike executives were so impressed with Swoopes's ability and off-court demeanor, in fact, that they signed her up soon after she graduated.

That first deal simply had Swoopes wearing Nike apparel and making a few appearances, but it quickly expanded, thanks to serendipitous timing. Just as Nike was looking for a way to boost her public profile—with no professional women's basketball league in the U.S. back then, she would not be regularly in front of an audience—others at the company decided the best way to increase its number of female customers was to introduce a women's basketball shoe along the lines of the wildly successful Air Jordan. Swoopes had everything going for her, including, in Levin's words, "the best basketball name ever." Within six months, in the spring of 1994, designers were making the initial drawings for an Air Swoopes shoe—the first Nike basketball shoe named for a woman.

Though Swoopes was understandably thrilled about the sneaker deal, she still didn't have a league to call home. She had tried playing professionally for an Italian team right after leaving Texas Tech, but a contract dispute had her back in Texas after only ten games. As a result, less than a year after playing one of the best basketball games ever, Swoopes was working at a Lubbock bank during the day and playing pickup games at night to keep in shape for the Olympic basketball tryouts the following year. Given that scenario, it's easy to understand why no other endorsement deals were in the offing. Swoopes was a smart choice for Nike since it was selling basketball shoes to girls who were already interested in the sport. But for most companies, especially those not in the business of selling sports equipment, using a female basketball star the general public hadn't heard of and wasn't going to see play didn't make any sense. Luckily Swoopes's audience problem was short-lived. In May 1995 she made the women's Olympic team, meaning a national audience would watch her play during the summer of 1996. Better still, the NBA helped put together a nine-month tour of the team, which went undefeated in exhibition games around the world and eventually won a gold medal in women's basketball. Interest by fans and corporate sponsors was so great that NBA decision makers concluded that the time was right to launch a women's pro basketball league, the Women's National Basketball Association. Although the same idea had failed many times before—no women's pro basketball league had ever lasted more than two seasons—the WNBA's ties to the NBA were reason enough for optimism. It proved well founded: Attendance in 1997, the WNBA's first year, averaged 9,669 per game, more than double the league's own predictions, and last year it grew to 10,869. TV audiences have been respectable too. WNBA telecasts on NBC logged Nielsen ratings of 2.0 in 1997 and 1.6 in 1998—far below those of the NFL, the NBA, and major league baseball, but not much less than tennis.

Once Swoopes had a public platform, her image carried the day. Indeed, her personality seems tailor-made for marketers; she's routinely described as upbeat, well spoken, and extremely personable. "I think one reason that she's been so successful is that she comes across as a happy person," says Gregory Leonard, a director of the Massachusetts consulting firm Cambridge Economics, which has done work for the NBA. Moreover, she's a happy person who overcame obstacles. That she is physically appealing as well only helped her prospects. Of course, prospects are one thing; an actual contract is another. That's where Swoopes's agent came in. Judging solely by her success to date, you'd have to say she's done well with Advantage International, which is based in McLean, Virginia. In the five years that she's been a client, the agency has upped her annual endorsement income by more than $1 million. "I think it's probably one of the best decisions I've made," Swoopes says. "I just love them to death." And it is them. Like a lot of other large sports marketing firms, Advantage has multiple people working on behalf of a single athlete. In Swoopes's case there is an eight-person "Swoopes team." Along with her agent, she has a business coordinator, three sports marketers, two public relations specialists, and an administrative assistant.

In the simplest of terms, here's how it works. The agent is in charge of negotiating all shoe deals and sports contracts, whether with a league (as in the case of the WNBA) or a specific team (as in the case of the NBA, the NFL, and major league baseball). The business coordinator handles all the day-to-day issues, including the athlete's schedule and travel arrangements. The sports marketer is the person with the most control over the athlete's marketplace destiny. Sports marketers are the ones responsible for devising an endorsement strategy for the athlete, seeking out new marketing opportunities, pitching the athlete to prospective sponsors, and finally, counseling the athlete on which deals to accept and which to decline. Just as Hollywood agents consider how various movie parts will affect an actor's future, sports marketers think about whether an endorsement deal will enhance or cheapen an athlete's image, which could lead to more or fewer opportunities down the road.

And how do they do all this? There are a few rules in the endorsement game, but mostly it depends on the individual athlete and how the specific marketer operates. "I could write you a tome and tell you everything you should do, and it wouldn't help you a bit because it's all about modulation," says Tom George, Advantage's senior vice president for athlete marketing. "It's all about judging what's in front of you and moving when the time is right. Do you bring the price up now or do you bring it up later? It's about how hard to push and when."

Apparently George knows how and when to push. For one thing, he and his team at Advantage have made Swoopes a player in the lucrative appearance market, in which popular sports celebrities get paid for two hours of signing autographs, making inspirational speeches, or simply shaking hands and smiling. The going rate is $2,000 to $50,000 per appearance; Swoopes's rate is currently $15,000 a pop, and she earned approximately $200,000 this way last year. George and company have also increased her endorsement opportunities. Five years ago Swoopes's only deal was with Nike. Today the list of companies who have used her to peddle their wares has expanded beyond Nike (estimated fee and royalties: $350,000) to include Wilson ($50,000), Kellogg ($150,000), TurtleShells protective gear ($50,000), Discover Card ($125,000), Clean Shower ($100,000), and Hasbro ($50,000).

Exactly how these and other companies came to do business with Swoopes varies tremendously. Some, like Kultur­White Star Video, which markets an instructional basketball tape, approached Advantage asking specifically for Swoopes. Others, like Clean Shower, had to be approached by Advantage, requiring one of George's sales reps to sell Swoopes—in print and in person—as a great endorser. Still others, like Kellogg and Wilson, linked up with her as a result of their prior relationship with Advantage. In early 1995, for instance, George learned that Kellogg was interested in signing a member of the women's Olympic basketball team to appear on cereal boxes. He proposed Swoopes, and the company bit: By May of that year she was under contract. Charmed by her, Kellogg re-signed Swoopes in July 1997 as a corporate spokesperson, a job that involves personal appearances, signing autographs at children's basketball clinics, and being featured, along with Grant Hill of the NBA's Detroit Pistons, on the back of various cereal boxes. In mid-1998 Kellogg expanded Swoopes's responsibilities to include endorsing its Nutri-Grain cereal bars.

The Discover Card deal was altogether different, but not unusual for the world of athlete endorsements. In that case Nova Lanktree, whose Chicago-based Lanktree Sports matches sports stars with companies in need of endorsers, had received a call from longtime client DDB Needham, which was looking for an athlete to appear in a national ad campaign for Discover Card. Lanktree was given a budget—she won't say how much—and then, as she usually does, she called Tom George and about ten sports marketers. After George and the others sent her short lists of athletes they thought would work well, Lanktree passed the names on to the talent manager at DDB, who turned them over to the Discover Card team, which in turn, made the decision to use Swoopes and four others. Just how good Advantage has been for Swoopes was on display when she nervously called George in early 1997 to tell him she was pregnant—and that the baby was due in June, the first month of the WNBA's first season. That meant one of the league's highest profile players wouldn't be able to play at least part of the season. "It could have been a real problem PR-wise," says George. But they found a way to turn it to their, well, advantage. In what has proven to be a smart move, George and Swoopes decided not to play it down but to play it up, which has led to new endorsement opportunities as well as more media exposure. A pregnant Swoopes was featured on the cover of the debut issue of Sports Illustrated for Women, and People reported on the birth of her baby, a boy named Jordan in honor of Michael Jordan, her friend and mentor. Today George markets Swoopes as a "supermom" and is looking into new endorsement categories, such as diapers and other mother-related products that a childless basketball star couldn't do. In the meantime companies that have worked with Swoopes for years couldn't be more pleased about her motherhood. "She's a working mom," says E. L. Chaffee, a consumer promotions manager at Kellogg. "She has all the characteristics of our consumer, yet she's doing something fabulous with her life. There's a lot of power in that imagery for us."

What's next for Swoopes? Most people agree that her status as an endorser is tied to the WNBA. "Her success in the marketplace is contingent upon her playing," Lanktree says. "She doesn't necessarily have to win championships all the time, but TV has got to cover her team and attendance has to be good, because the advertiser needs something to link up to. They need to say, 'Gee, we had very high ratings on the day that she played,' which means the fan, who is the potential consumer, saw her." Unfortunately there's no way to tell how the league will do. It's not yet making money, and its positive buzz could wane as the novelty wears off (though, of course, it may not matter if it doesn't make money for years, since the NBA can afford to keep it going if it wants to). Even if the WNBA continues to be viable, Swoopes's endorsement income is far from guaranteed. The inherent vagaries of the ad business can change things dramatically. For instance, she won't be working for Discover Card in 1999 because its parent company changed its marketing strategy and will not use celebrity spokespeople.

Not that Swoopes won't continue to have all the attributes companies love. "Five years from now," Lanktree says, "if her star keeps shining, if she keeps playing beautifully, and if she continues to stay in the public eye, there's an awful lot of extra dimension to her as a credible spokesperson." But the reality, alas, is that even in the best of all possible worlds, it's highly unlikely that Swoopes's endorsement income will ever rival that of a top men's basketball player. Even her agent knows it. "It won't happen in my lifetime," says George. "Until the platform on which women's basketball players stand becomes significantly larger, their endorsements can't get larger. Michael Jordan stood on top of the NBA platform, and that's a huge platform. The WNBA, God bless it, is a relatively small platform."