With Pat or Tommy at the Mike, Talk’s Not Cheap : What Can American Business Learn From a Bunch of Ex-Jocks?

WE ARE LIVE IN LOS ANGELES, WHERE ONE JIM TUNNEY, IN STRIPES somewhat narrower than most folks are accustomed to seeing him wear, is serving up his inspirational message to a group of top corporate honchos. Tunney is best known for his Monday night appearances on national TV, during which his familiar booming voice has imparted such wisdom as, “False start, No. 68, offense--five yards, still first down.” No matter.

No one seems to believe that a former National Football League referee might be out of his element counseling high-powered business people. From the start, it is clear that Tunney owns his audience and that it will follow him on every twist and turn of his journey through the land of positive thought.

They laugh in unison as Tunney recalls the day his penalty flag was eaten by noted NFL bad boy Conrad Dobler. They nod in unison when he tells them that excellence is not the mark of any one achievement but rather “a never-ending process, a way of life, a desire to always take things to the next level.” They grow edge-of-the-seat earnest--again in unison--as he reaches into his inventory of metaphorical anecdotes and pulls out the one about the young, blind, 10-meter diving champion in the Special Olympics.

Tunney’s delivery of this powerful story is a masterpiece of imagery and pacing: “Next time you have a courageous decision to make and you’re a little fearful . . . think about that 11-year-old girl climbing up a ladder that she can only feel . . . and diving into a pool of water . . . that somebody told her was there.” By the time Tunney closes with a plea, courtesy of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “not to let ourselves die with our music still in us,” his listeners look as if they had just seen the words burned into a tablet on Mt. Sinai.

Such is the world of sports-based motivation, arguably the fastest-growing niche in America’s fastest-growing cottage industry: seminar training. By one estimate, corporate America will spend more than $250 million in 1991 in its rush to book motivational speakers. And among the sports figures engaged in industrial pep talks, top draws such as former running back O. J. Simpson and ex-Lakers coach Pat Riley, both now in the broadcast booth, command upward of $20,000 per seminar. “I think there are a great number of parallels between success in business and success in sports,” says Catherine Monson, vice president of training and communications for Sir Speedy printing centers, who gives lectures by sports figures high marks. “With top athletes, there is great concentration and dedication. They work 2% to 3% harder than everybody else. It’s a good lesson.”

“Almost every one of these speakers has had to deal with adversity,” says Clay Sigg, a director of the Sacramento Assn. of Realtors, who sets up three or four appearances a year by the likes of retired UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, former Pittsburgh Steelers running back Rocky Bleier and Olympians Rafer Johnson and Billy Mills. “Mills, if you know his background, is a classic example of someone who filtered through all the garbage to rise to the top of the heap. Well, realtors deal with rejection constantly, and you come away from a Billy Mills speech thinking, ‘If he can rise above it, so can I.’ People walk out of these things renewed.”

The appeal of sports speakers is not new. In Babe Ruth’s era, when .200 hitters did not get million-dollar contracts, an athlete knew that a good year meant an off-season “banquet circuit” might double his income. But in those days, the idea was entertainment, not enrichment. Civic and fraternal organizations prized athletes for their irreverent glimpses of the sporting life.

The perception that sports speakers could offer something more took hold around the 1960s, during the reign of Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi, known for his fire-and-brimstone approach to motivation. Corporate types, especially from the sales realm, reasoned that Lombardi’s methods might strike a responsive chord in lethargic staffers. Still, few athletes from the post-Lombardi period managed to parlay their speaking itineraries into related careers, one exception being NFL quarterback-turned-Congressman-turned-cabinet-secretary Jack Kemp.

Enter 33-year-old Marc Reede. Through careful nurturing, Reede has cultivated a classic case of childhood sportsmania into Beverly Hills-based Promotional SportStars, a thriving speakers bureau that supplies much of the momentum for the sports-motivation speakers craze. SportStars--whose main competition comes from all-purpose agencies such as the Harry Walker Bureau in New York and the National Speakers Bureau in Chicago, firms that do not specialize in sports figures--is a direct outgrowth of Reede’s chumminess with Simpson. Both lived on the same L.A. street; in fact, Reede used to baby-sit the Juice’s kids. Reede attended Loyola Law School in Los Angeles to become a player agent, but upon graduation, he says, he was given pause by the amount of competition.

“I was sitting around talking with O. J. and (L.A. Raider running back) Marcus (Allen),” he recalls, “and they mentioned how often they were being called upon to speak in front of large groups. I felt there had to be something there that I could build a business out of.” In 1985, with assistance from the two running backs, Reede was able to lock up the rights to a number of local sports luminaries, the prize catch being Pat Riley.

By virtue of that foothold, Reede now enjoys exclusive management of many top names, including Riley, Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, sportscaster Dick Enberg and University of Kentucky basketball coach Rick Pitino. Speakers not officially in Reede’s stable, such as Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz, nonetheless use SportStars as a source of bookings.

Reede, who claims he won’t take no for an answer, says he has assembled his arsenal to include a speaker for every corporate personality type. For a lighthearted mood, there’s rising ESPN star Roy Firestone, a comedian, singer and impressionist (he does a world-class Sammy Davis Jr.). Wooden is the poetic old sage, while Bleier “comes on like a circus barker,” in Sigg’s words. Seasonal interests also come into play. Right now, pro basketball is peaking, thus the emphasis on Riley and the somewhat less pricey Pitino. “This business is just like sports itself,” Reede says. “You’ve got to be able to take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves.”

FOR SHEER STAGE PRESENCE, NO ONE among the current crop of speakers can match Riley, whose approach to motivation is more scholarly than most, as evidenced by his inventory of catch phrases: “toxic resentment” (the envy that ordinary people have of extraordinary achievement); “core contracts” (the esprit de corps common among winning teams); the “innocent climb” (that period of unspoiled success you enjoy before realizing how good you really are), and the ensuing “disease of more” (the self-aggrandizement that continued success unfailingly leads to).

Riley, 46, dutifully mines his basketball experience, which includes nine seasons as Lakers coach. He will tell the two or three audiences he sees each week that “of the 1,000 games we played in the ‘80s, the most significant . . . was the second game of the 1985 playoff in Boston Garden,” when the Lakers had to regroup after a first-game drubbing by the Celtics. Many teams would have given up, but the Lakers rallied and went on to win the championship. To this day, Riley wears his ’85 championship ring to commemorate that event, one he labels “breaking through against adversity.”

He also attempts to adjust to the composition of his audience. “He spent an hour with me on the phone the night before, going over our needs,” recalls Dave Lopez, director of sales for Bramalea Homes, an Irvine real estate development firm. If most of Riley’s listeners are male, he edges toward male-bonding bravado. Yet, Sir Speedy’s Monson, who is “not really a basketball fan,” says she has heard him twice and “understood everything he said. He does a wonderful job of tailoring his talk.”

One morning, Riley is at the San Diego Marriott, addressing a convention of about 1,000 Sharp office-automation dealers. While he speaks at center stage, cameramen perched high atop platforms at the rear of the huge auditorium feed his magnified image to giant-screen TV monitors positioned about 30 feet to the left and right of the podium. It’s Pat Riley in Sensurround, and the effect is stunning.

No less stunning is Riley’s ability to correlate the official theme of the Sharp confab--”Invent the Future”--with his own bold predictions of a Lakers repeat after their 1987 championship. “By telling people where Sharp is going to be in 1995, you’re going out on a limb, and that’s good,” he says. In sports and in life, he believes, such public audacity establishes the mental climate within which prophecies can self-fulfill. This knack for making customized, relatively sophisticated connections between sports and business is one reason his speaking career is fast closing in on the seven-figure-per-annum plateau.

And yet, exactly what companies expect from the Rileys and Tunneys has never been clear. Of more than a dozen firms surveyed, none has attempted to track the results. “There are just too many variables,” Lopez says. People planning meetings for general audiences probably hope for little more than a certain “feel-good” climate to cap off a convention and send everyone home with the warm fuzzies. Expecting more, many sales firms are earmarking for sports-based motivation the dollars that used to be spent on other modes of training.

Still, by what leap of faith and logic do we ordain a basketball coach--albeit the winningest coach, percentage-wise, in NBA history--qualified to expound on the finer points of marketing?

“Don’t sell these guys short,” Reede chides. “You have to realize that a lot of them have had the benefit of dealing with millions of dollars in investments and start-ups of their own, so they know what they’re talking about when it comes to doing business.” And they have more to offer than meets the eye. Jim Tunney’s credentials include a doctorate in education from USC as well as three separate stints as principal at L.A.-area high schools. Riley, an avid reader of organizational theory, cites M. Scott Peck and Gen. George S. Patton among those whose words have helped shape his business dialectic.

Moreover, the mechanism of human motivation is not well understood. Some theorize that the mere presence of a Riley or an O. J.--without a word being spoken--can provide at least a temporary goose in productivity. “It almost doesn’t matter what Riley speaks about,” Lopez says, only half-joking. “He just has to show up.”

“The motivation is in the adrenaline rush we get from being around someone we idolize,” says Robert Swaim, president of the R. W. Swaim Consulting Group in Irvine and an expert on management and organization development. For men especially, he adds, seeing a Pat Riley “up close and personal” can be “a metaphorical fulfillment of their youthful dreams of athletic stardom.”

Tom Hopkins of Tom Hopkins International, a sales training and motivational company based in Scottsdale, Ariz., says this linkage between man and message is just common sense. “Let’s face it, are you going to take advice on success from a panhandler?” And Swaim likens the dynamic to the instant clout that film stars gain as a byproduct of their celebrity: “(Robert) Redford’s point of view is inherently no more significant than Joe Blow’s. But it’s Redford, so when he comes out for some cause, it gets press coverage, and we listen.”

Hopkins, who deals with non-sports-related training of salespeople, welcomes the competition and says: “These people are great for pumping you up. They’re about winning, and aggressiveness, and not getting down on yourself. Especially in today’s business world, you’ve got to go into a sales setting thinking you’re gonna win.”

Which is precisely the kind of approach that worries Larry Wilson of Pecos River Learning Center, outside of Santa Fe, N.M. Wilson, a leader in modern sales training, says: “In sports, you have a distinct winner and a distinct loser. If you win, you’re great, and if you lose, you’re nobody. In business, you want to aim for a situation in which everybody wins.” He believes that sports-based motivation hearkens back to a darker era in American business, one of the hard, no-conscience sell.

More doubt comes from Jay Kurtz, president of the Kappa Group, a Laguna Hills firm that seeks causes of corporate inefficiency: “If you have a sports figure come in and do a fine job of motivating people whose basic skills are defective, you end up with a group of very dangerous individuals.” Company performance could suffer because such individuals will be using flawed methods more enthusiastically than before--”running faster in the wrong direction.”

AMID THE MAUVE SPLENDOR OF THE Warner Center Hilton and Towers Trillium Grand Ballroom, eight clamshell-shaped napkins rise from each of nine elegantly set tables. In three hours, Tommy Lasorda, supreme Dodger and the archetypal, give-’em-hell “sports motivator”--no fancy footwork here--will speak before a national sales meeting of Staedtler Inc., manufacturer of precision drafting and writing materials.

According to Guenter Memmert, president and CEO U.S.A., Staedtler was founded in Nuremberg, Germany, more than a century before angry Bostonians littered the harbor with King George’s tea. The firm’s national headquarters is in Chatsworth.

Lasorda is not merely the keynote speaker but one whose identity has not yet been revealed. Marketing vice president Ted Wheelock, one of the few in on the secret, is sure Lasorda will go over well with the firm’s mixed audience.

“From the earliest days as youngsters, you have the Little League; then you have scholastic sports. It’s always a matter of winning,” Wheelock says. “In business, it helps to be around winners--particularly in sales, where you’re very much alone, just as a pinch-hitter is alone when he comes up in a tough situation. . . .” So does Wheeler expect more from the presentation than mere entertainment? He laughs. “We can’t afford entertainment. This is strictly business. In fact, we feel that this is something we couldn’t afford not to do, given the state of the economy.”

Had Wheelock not felt that way, Reede had a contingency plan; a videotaped distillation of the Lasorda magic, called “Winning Ways.” Aimed at a market that can’t handle Lasorda’s $15,000 personal-appearance fee, the tape sells for $525 (or rents for $150), and it has engendered considerable interest. It opens with Kirk Gibson’s last-minute, game-winning home run in the first game of the 1988 World Series and closes with shots of a pre-diet Lasorda and his beloved Dodgers cavorting jubilantly about the clubhouse after the team’s World Series victory.

In between comes Lasorda’s five-point success program: 1. Be the one who makes it happen. 2. Believe in yourself. 3. Be a team player. (No attempt is made to reconcile the ostensible contradiction between points 1 and 3.) 4. Always think positively. 5. Everyone needs motivation.

The secret guest shows up on schedule at 7 p.m. A light gray jacket in a world of dark blue suits, he is tan and still Ultra Slim-Fast slim, although the trademark circles beneath his eyes suggest a certain weariness. (This may be so, because he returns to Los Angeles by way of stops in Nashville, St. Louis and Las Vegas--a $60,000 road trip.) His arrival ignites a giddy uproar.

Staedtler’s photographer is shooting pictures of Lasorda from a distance of nine inches or so as the manager works the room, flashing that distinctive toothy smile and signing an endless stream of autographs on paper torn from every available source. The company’s links to its German hierarchy, Memmert and Manfred Schittenhelm, executive vice president of overseas operations, stand off to the side, enjoying everyone else’s delight, although an enigmatic quality to their smiles suggests that the full significance of the goings-on escapes them.

After dinner, photos are taken of Lasorda with the winners of achievement awards. Then, Lasorda begins to speak. That familiar, rough-hewn voice echoes through the room, and all the signs of fatigue become irrelevant. It’s the same hyperkinetic Lasorda you’ve seen in the Dodger dugout--minus the four-letter words.

“You know, I’ve had the good fortune to speak to many, many groups,” he begins. “And after meeting you, and talking with many of you, and breaking bread with you over the past coupla hours--and I say this with all honesty--you are the greatest bunch of candidates for Ultra Slim-Fast I’ve ever seen.”

This squib, delivered deadpan, finds its mark. Throughout Lasorda’s hourlong presentation, paroxysms of laughter and applause will greet each anecdote and one-liner.

Watching Lasorda, it becomes apparent that if he and Riley are the two stars of the movement, they also define its poles. Riley approaches his speaking career first and foremost as a business venture. He has a clear long-term goal, he has a plan for getting there, and he carefully plots each step along the way. So when he speaks, there is occasional laughter and occasional poignancy, but mostly there is a biting earnestness. Lasorda, meanwhile, is just out to have a grand old time, doing what comes naturally: exhorting the people around him to demand the best of themselves, to see the glass always as half-full and, above all, to be enthusiastic.

Lasorda is so vital and spontaneous that few realize he is recycling material, verbatim, from his videotape. Blank spots in his monologue allow him to insert the names of key people in the group he’s speaking to, and he ingratiatingly does so: At almost fixed intervals, he tosses in a “Guenter” or a “Manfred” or a “Teddy.”

Gradually, Lasorda glides into his Darwinistic motivational tract. “If I were a high school coach,” he says, “I’d teach kids about values. But when you get to the pros, you can forget about those things. You gotta win. If you don’t win, you fall by the wayside.” So it is in today’s business world, he says.

Apropos of which, he tells of the time he ran into former Cincinnati Reds manager John McNamara in church before a game. After Mass was over, Lasorda saw McNamara light a candle. So Lasorda asked McNamara to wait outside, lighted a candle of his own--and blew out McNamara’s. He concludes: “And we beat the pants off ‘em that day, 13-2.”

That colorful vignette is the perfect bridge to Lasorda’s ideas on “a winning attitude,” which he shares on a point-by-point basis:

On dedication: “Everybody says, ‘We wanna be No. 1.’ But we don’t always want to put forth the effort to be No. 1. Believe me, it isn’t always the most talented guy who wins. It’s the one who wants it more than the next.”

On self-confidence: “When I first took the job as manager of the Dodgers, (broadcaster) Vin Scully says to me, ‘You’re replacing a man who’s a legend, a sure Hall-of-Famer. Don’t you feel a lot of pressure?’ And I said, ‘Know something, Vinny? I’m worried about the guy who’s gonna have to replace me. ‘ “

Riley-like, Lasorda boldly predicts: “When you watch the Fall Classic, you’re gonna see me sittin’ in that dugout, knowing I have tasted the fruits of victory all summer.”

While the applause crescendoes, Wheelock gives Lasorda a gift, a very nice beer stein, and Tommy, who hides his emotions about as well as he hides his Dodgers affiliation, looks genuinely touched.

Cynics might argue that Lasorda’s delineation of the essential questions of all business--Why do some succeed while others fail? What does it take to be No. 1?--is more convincing than his rather simplistic answer, which reduces to “Ya gotta want it.” Cynics might argue that there is nothing in Lasorda’s pop-psych rhetoric from which even the most careful listener could fashion a specific game plan for achieving his goals.

But this is not a night for cynics. Caught up in the moment, the Staedtler gang has risen en masse to give the Dodger manager a rousing send-off. And if the enigmatic twist is not entirely gone from the brows of the two Germans, they are applauding wildly nonetheless.