Riches in the Cards : Werner Bags Big Stars to Boost His Business in Autograph Sessions

Harlan Werner had been collecting baseball cards for six years, buying and selling them like a madman. The thin cardboard rectangles with pictures of Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle and other legends of the game dominated his life. Then one day he heard a knock on the door of his tiny Canoga Park apartment.

“Who’s there?” Werner asked.

“Sandy Koufax,” came the reply.

This would bring hearty laughter to just about anybody. Right, he might say, and who’s with you, Ty Cobb?

But Werner neither laughed nor disbelieved.

He opened the door.

And shook hands with Sandy Koufax.

“Let’s talk,” the former Dodger star said.

A career was launched.

Today, Werner, 24, a lanky, frazzle-haired, T-shirts-and-shorts kind of guy, represents Koufax, Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, football greats Joe Namath and Jim Brown and others in sports merchandising ventures, making deals on their behalf for autograph-signing sessions and other marketing promotions.

Werner was not yet born when Koufax smoked his last fastball past a startled batter. When Ali was perfecting the Ali Shuffle , Werner also was moving his feet back and forth rapidly. In the womb. Namath and Brown, too, were just memories for the slick-talking Werner.

But all of them, along with veteran major league manager Sparky Anderson of Thousand Oaks, came to believe in Werner’s power to get things done.

“He came to me when he was 16 and asked if I’d do this card-show thing,” Anderson says. “And I’ll tell you, I don’t even agree with this whole card-show thing. Kids don’t have access to autographs like the old days. But I agreed and we did this card thing in a motel in the Valley some place. And it’s the only time I’ve ever done one.”

How did this teen-ager win Anderson over?

“The kid was a hustler,” Anderson says. “I could tell how honest he was, even at that age. I admire any young guy that will hustle but be honest. You find a lot of hustlers, but most of them are dishonest. I see a lot of them in my business. I call them ‘green flies.’ They’ll bite ya’. But this kid was honest. I won’t get involved with anybody else. Over the years, I’ve learned to read people, and I could read him right away.”

Others felt the same way. Werner has brought Koufax, Namath, Brown, former Brooklyn Dodger Roy Campanella, Luc Robitaille of the Kings and many others to numerous autograph shows. His company, Sports Placement Service, Inc., can make as much as $50,000 from a single show, he says.

Werner lives in a posh home in West Hills that he bought 2 1/2 years ago, a home with a pool and huge rock waterfall in the back yard. He says that his income from his sports business has brought him “more than the average American salary” in the past two years.

And for this he left Cal State Northridge and Pierce College, which he attended in that order, and a job a few years ago as a sports correspondent for a local newspaper, covering high school football games.

In exchange for all of that, he now gets a hefty tub of money each year and gets to schmooze on a regular basis with the legends of sport.

“Muhammad drove my Corvette about two years ago,” Werner says. “We were at the Universal Sheraton and I was giving him a ride. He said he wanted to drive. Next thing I know he’s just burning down this big hill. Scared me to death. He looked at me, smiled, got out and switched places with me again.”

His association with Ali began, Werner says, five years ago. He wanted Ali to appear at an autograph show and kept pounding away at Ali and his entourage until he broke through. The first meeting, Werner says, was an odd one, just before the autograph show was to begin.

“I went to the Airport Hilton and when I got to his room, all these guys were in there, a half-dozen or so,” Werner says. “One of them told me Ali was in the other room and he was expecting me and to go on in. So I walk in and the room is dark and all I can see, from what little light was coming through the window, is this big face. It’s Muhammad.

“So I walk over, put my hand out and introduce myself. And then I notice that he’s sleeping. My eyes are adjusting to the darkness and I realize he’s sleeping. In bed. With the covers pulled up and everything. Right then he woke up, looked at me and sat up, staring at me. I felt a little awkward.”

Werner was 19.

He made his first leap into the marketing and public relations business in 1984 while a sophomore at Canoga Park High. He had been organizing baseball card shows for about a year and read a newspaper story about Anderson, learned that he lived nearby and figured if he could get a guy like that to appear at one of the shows he knew he’d be able to buy burgers for all his friends that weekend. Lots of burgers.

So he picked up the telephone book, found G. Anderson (Sparky’s parents named him George) and called. He got Anderson’s wife, Carol, and persuaded her to have Sparky return the call. He did, and quickly agreed to do the autograph show at the Airtel Plaza Hotel adjacent to the Van Nuys Airport.

The relationship between Werner and Anderson became tight.

“One of the first things he did, he flew to Detroit and ran a charity auction I was having for the Henry Ford Hospital,” Anderson says. “He did everything, and in five hours we raised $198,000. And Harlan didn’t take a cent for anything.

“We just became good friends. He’ll drop by the house and tell us all about his love life. I like the kid.”

Bolstered by his good fortune with Anderson, Werner found another target, Dodger third baseman Ron Cey, who lives in Woodland Hills. Cey, during his playing days, had a reputation among reporters covering the Dodgers as being, well, surly is a nice way of putting it. But Werner found Cey’s address, knocked on his door one evening and Cey, too, agreed to the autograph show.

Then, Werner set his sights on even bigger game: Koufax.

“He was tough,” Werner says. “I left dozens and dozens of messages, but he never returned my calls. But I started booking other ex-Dodgers into the shows, Don Newcombe and Don Drysdale and some others, and pretty soon Koufax had heard my name from some of them. So he finally called and I convinced him that it was a great opportunity.

“Then he came to my apartment and we worked out a deal.”

Word of Werner’s successes spread, mostly through Anderson’s lips, and within two years Werner was bringing more big guns to the shows. Tom Seaver. Nolan Ryan. Reggie Jackson. All while he was in high school.

His association with Ali and Abdul-Jabbar and Brown and Namath soon followed.

His formula for success? Simple, really. Don’t be scum.

“Sparky told me the first day we met that I was entering a business of liars and cheats,” Werner says. “That day I decided that I’d stand out because I’m not like that. I give my clients exactly what we agree upon.”

The passion showed early. As a seventh-grader, Werner discovered card collecting. By 14 he was a regular at card shows and that year he paid $50 for a 1948 Babe Ruth card by the Leaf Co. It is now worth $2,000.

“Do I still have it? Of course not,” Werner says. “I sell everything.”

Thousands of cards later, he is slowly leaving that business behind to focus all of his energy on the business of representing athletes. Later, he says, he will venture into the music business with an eye on the superstars.

For now, sports stars are his life. And he has the reminders of his dealings with them. A Nolan Ryan jersey autographed by all of the living 300-game winners--Ryan, Seaver, Gaylord Perry, Early Wynn, Don Sutton, Warren Spahn, Steve Carlton and Phil Niekro. He has an autographed Koufax jersey, Abdul-Jabbar’s autographed practice jersey and Michael Andretti’s autographed, fireproof driving suit.

“My relationships with those people are strong enough that they wanted me to have these things,” Werner says. “They’re something special.”

Something, you figure, he will always have.

“Well, I’m a businessman,” Werner says. “Let’s just say I have them now. “