No sports contract runs a single sheet of paper. The simplest signing is processed by an army of attorneys, who insist upon pages and pages of provisions, amendments and stipulations. Does the team want its player to maintain a certain weight? Put it in contract. Can the athlete have their own physical therapist? Put it in writing. Want to inspire someone to play better? Add an incentive.
Every once in a while the stream of type will contain a gem. It might be small, something easily missed on a first glance. But look deep, for something may appear that makes you shake your head, smile and say: what exactly were they thinking?
The NBA and the Spirits of St Louis
This is the granddaddy of all sports contract clauses, one assured to never be duplicated.
Ozzie and Daniel Silna loved being sports owners; they loved running the wildly fun, mostly successful and massively unprofitable Spirits of St Louis in the 1970s ABA, which they bought for $1m. But when the rival league to the NBA folded and the bigger, more established league took on four ABA franchises, the Spirits were not one of them. Deflated, the Silna brothers refused to take the payouts offered by the NBA.
Desperate to make the merger go through, the NBA capitulated to an imaginative demand made by the Silvas. Give us 1/7 of the national television revenue generated by the four ABA teams the NBA picked (the Nets, Nuggets, Pacers and Spurs) as long as the NBA exists.
At the time, the deal wasn’t as outrageous as it sounds now. There was no ESPN, no sports-oriented cable channels, even the NBA finals were often played on tape delay, well after the prime-time crowd went to bed. How much could one-seventh of four teams’ national television revenue really be anyway?
By 2014 it was more than $500m. Scorned by the league they desperately wanted to be a part of, the Silna brothers instead cashed massive annual checks worth far more than the Spirits ever were. Last year, the league – desperate to end its most humiliating deal – gave the brothers a reported $500m to buy out the clause.
Thus a $1m investment turned into a $1bn payoff.
Bobby Bonilla’s yearly bonanza
Once, the New York Mets thought Bonilla would be their salvation. Instead, he remains their humiliation. The Mets’ mistake wasn’t to sign Bonilla for a then-astronomical five-year, $29m contract before the 1992 season. The mistake was to acquire him again after a tumultuous, controversy first tenure ended in a trade.
The second time they got him, in 1998, he was in the middle of a $23m deal. By 2000, Bonilla was done as a player, but the Mets still owed him $5.9m.
Needing to free money to pursue a core of players who would actually help the team to the 2000 World Series, the Mets struck a deal with Bonilla’s agent. The remaining salary would be deferred until 2011 at 8% interest, then paid out in annual increments until 2035.
This meant the player who flopped in two Mets tenures, is receiving yearly checks for $1,193,248.20, to do … well nothing.
“That beautiful thing,” Bonilla told the Wall Street Journal in 2011.
The owner who won’t leave
What the NBA will give to make an unwanted owner disappear. In 2014, when racist comments finally doomed the Los Angeles Clippers’ miserly, miserable owner Donald Sterling, the league worked quickly to remove Sterling and pursue a more suitable – and wealthier – replacement.
The league found a more-than willing taker in Microsoft co-founder Steve Ballmer, who bought the share of the team from Shelly Sterling – Donald’s wife – and took over the trust, operated by Donald Sterling, that owned the rest. Ballmer’s total outlay was $2bn. But Shelly Sterling wouldn’t go easily.
Refusing to simply be pushed out of the way, Shelly Sterling took the opportunity to demand some perks for herself.
She would get the title of ‘Owner Emeritus’, receive two courtside seats for every game, 10 tickets in the lower bowl of the Staples Center for every game, VIP passes, parking passes, six rings if the team were to win a championship and most important of all, the designation of ‘Clippers’ No 1 fan’ – even though she sat shotgun to one of the worst ownership runs in professional sports.
Rick Mirer’s apocalypse
Years ago, the man who would represent Tom Brady had another quarterback client – one much of the NFL was convinced would someday be a star. So in 1993, the Seattle Seahawks used the second pick of the draft to take Rick Mirer, whose agents were Marvin Demoff and Don Yee, who would later be better-known as Brady’s agent.
Negotiations between Yee and the Seahawks were tense. In those days, salaries for top draft picks did not fit in easy slots the way they do now. Signing a first round pick before training camp was not always simple. Nerves frayed as the two parties finally hashed out a five-year, $15m deal, with a hitch insisted upon by Yee: Mirer would be paid under all conditions, “up to and including the end of the world.”
While a bold clause, it did leave open significant questions. How, for instance, would Mirer be paid if the world had ended? Who would make the payment? With what currency? And should the Seahawks fail to pay Mirer because the world had ended and there was nothing with which to pay him and nobody left to process the check, would the team be sued? Who would sue them? Where would they file the suit?
Fortunately, Mirer’s time in Seattle ended long before the planet did. Four seasons after the end-of-the-world clause was struck, Mirer was traded to Chicago, where a year later he signed a three-year deal for presumably much less draconian terms.
Rollie Fingers and the $300 moustache
Baseball’s most famous facial hair was born not from organic desire, but a monetary pursuit. When Fingers pitched for the Oakland A’s in the early 1970s, the team’s owner Charley Finley told his players there was a $300 bonus for anyone who grew a moustache. This was a day when most baseball players were clean-shaven – and it was also a day when $300 was a decent bonus, and soon many of the A’s players were taking the field with bushy mounds of hair under their nose.
Fingers decided to do something different. He grew an old-fashioned handlebar, just like the old-time players from the late 1800s.
“Everybody else was growing a moustache. I said: ‘What the heck, I’ll grow a handlebar,’” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2012. “It was probably stupid but we win the World Series in ’72 and then we win in ’73 and then we win in ’74 and it’s kind of tough to shave it off after that.”
Now in his 60s, Fingers still has the moustache as do a legion of copycat hipsters who can search the internet for tutorials on making their own Rollie Fingers mustache.
Stefan Schwarz will not blast off
When Swedish midfielder Stefan Schwarz signed a contract with Sunderland in 1999, the team was concerned by their new star’s expressed desire to visit outer space. At the time it was believed that commercial space travel would be possible by 2002, and if so, Schwarz was interested.
Sunderland management were far less interested in having their new acquisition climb into a tin can attached to a rocket and be blasted into the heavens, so they insisted upon a small stipulation. No space travel.
Fortunately for all involved, commercial space travel didn’t quite take off. Schwarz remained on Earth, played five years for Sunderland and retired. He has never gone to outer space.
