Players: The Story of Sports and Money–and the Visionaries Who Fought to Create a Revolution Audiobook (Free)

“Provocative…great stories” (THE BRAND NEW Yorker) of the people who changed sports-in the span of an individual generation-from employment that required sometimes top athletes to work in the off-season to create ends meet into a substantial global business.

It started, as most business deals do, using a handshake. In 1960, a Cleveland attorney named Mark McCormack convinced a golfer named Arnold Palmer to sign with him. McCormack just believed that the very best sportsmen had more industrial value than these were becoming about Players: THE STORYPLOT of Sports activities and Money–and the Visionaries Who Fought to make a Trend paid for-and he was right. Within a couple of years, he raised Palmer’s annual income from $5,000 to $500,000, and permanently changed the landscaping of the sports activities industry, transforming it from a form of entertainment to a lucrative and fully working system of its own.

“An extraordinary saga…filled with insights not only into sports, but also into human being character” (The Dallas Morning hours Information), Players features landmark moments, including the multiyear fight to free of charge Palmer from an undesirable deal with the Wilson SHOE Company; the 1973 Wimbledon boycott, when eighty-one of the top playing golf players in the globe protested the suspension of Nikola Pilic; baseball pitcher Catfish Hunter’s fight to be MLB’s first free agent; and exactly how NFL executives transformed pro soccer from a commercial dud to the greatest show on earth.

“An entertaining, illuminating read” (NY Journal of Books), Players is a riveting, fly-on-the-wall account of the rise and creation of the modern sports world, as well as the people who achieved it. “No area of the media and entertainment sector has seen a more significant economic change than sports….A half-century tour spanning a number of widely recognized and lesser-known sports figures and contests that have played roles in the industry’s advancement….Players could not be more timely” (THE BRAND NEW York Moments).