Comaneci’s Marketability Depends on Deft Footwork Around Image Problem

Nadia Comaneci will need her most nimble footwork since her perfect score on the balance beam to salvage her marketing potential, now that her relationship with a married father of four children has been made public.

“I think there are some problems. No one is going to touch her right now,” said Jay Ogden, senior vice president of International Management Group, which handles endorsements for U.S. gymnast Bart Conner.

“She’s an intriguing sports figure. But advertisers and companies have to be very careful,” Ogden said Wednesday. “There have to be some answers. She’s got to avoid the negatives.”

Sports agents believe that there may still be marketability for Comaneci, the first gymnast to score a perfect 10 in the Olympics. She slogged six hours through mud and ice Nov. 28 to flee her native Romania and now has refugee status in the United States.

“Time will tell. If it’s a one-day furor, it won’t make any difference,” said Leigh Steinberg, a Los Angeles agent who represents about 100 athletes, including 13 professional football quarterbacks.

“This is entirely an issue of her private life. Prior to that disclosure, she would have been very hot and marketable,” Steinberg said. “If romantic peccadilloes disqualified someone from being perceived as an attractive personality, half the people who do endorsements would not be doing them.”

Comaneci’s flight around what’s left of the Iron Curtain was arranged by Romanian emigre Constantin Panait, 34, a self-employed South Florida roofer who has a wife and four children.

Comaneci and Panait met at a party in 1987 in Bucharest, Romania, and she knew he was married.

“So what? It didn’t matter,” said the 28-year-old Comaneci, who left behind her three gold medals from the 1976 Olympics, her family and a life of privilege for a chance to “settle down together” with Panait.

The relationship may matter to corporations, who routinely insert escape clauses that can void endorsement contracts if athletes engage in compromising behavior.

“If anyone has a bad image with the public or does something distasteful, it makes it difficult to endorse a product. The name of the game is selling,” said Barbara Bennett of New York’s Grey Advertising, whose clients include Tommy Lasorda, Orel Hershiser and Dick Butkus.

“We prefer people to be squeaky clean,” said Vangie Hayes of J. Walter Thompson, a New York agency that uses basketball superstar Larry Bird for its Schick Inc. ads.

Comaneci’s refugee status is not in jeopardy, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.