Years ago, I was representing Boris Becker in connection with one of his endorsement agreements.

Ion Tiriac, Boris Becker’s longtime manager, asked me to fly from Monaco to Italy to negotiate a new endorsement agreement with Lotto Sport Italia.

The evening before I left, Ion gave me one instruction.

“Don’t come back without a deal.”

Simple enough.

At the time, I was living in a condominium overlooking the Mediterranean in Monaco owned by Guillermo Vilas, the Argentine tennis great and one of the finest clay-court players of his era.

My flight left early the next morning, so I was already dressed in a suit. I carried my suitcase and briefcase down to the lobby, where the doorman was on duty as always. My taxi was waiting outside for the roughly 45-minute drive to Nice Airport. It was too early for the helicopter service that morning.

I handed the driver my suitcase.

Then I realized I had left my briefcase just inside the lobby.

Thinking about the negotiation instead of where I was walking, I turned back toward the entrance.

The lobby had a soaring, two-story ceiling, and the entrance was framed by a massive sheet of floor-to-ceiling glass that was probably close to twenty feet high.

It was so clean I never even saw it.

I thought I was walking through the doorway.

I wasn’t.

I walked straight into one of the glass panels.

The entire section shattered.

Glass came crashing down around me.

For a few seconds, I just stood there trying to figure out what had happened.

The taxi driver came running inside.

The doorman rushed over.

Both of them kept asking, in a mixture of French and English,

“Sir, are you hurt? Are you hurt?”

I honestly wasn’t sure.

Then I looked down.

Blood on my shirt.

A cut across the bridge of my nose.

Another on my wrist.

A small cut near the side of my head.

Fortunately, nothing was serious.

My suit jacket had probably saved me from much worse.

The doorman insisted I go to a doctor.

I thanked him, but there wasn’t time.

Besides, I wasn’t particularly interested in explaining to Ion Tiriac that I had missed my flight because I walked into a window.

“I have to catch my flight.”

The taxi driver handed me a handkerchief, loaded my luggage, and we headed toward Nice Airport.

During the drive, he kept looking at me in the rearview mirror.

Not once.

Not twice.

The entire trip.

At first, I thought he was making sure I was okay.

After about the tenth look, I started wondering if he was trying to decide whether I was injured…

…or whether I was just an idiot.

Every few minutes our eyes met in the mirror.

Neither of us said much.

I just kept holding the handkerchief against my nose, hoping the bleeding would stop before I reached the airport.

To be fair…

The available evidence wasn’t exactly helping my case.

By the time I arrived, the bleeding had slowed.

Unfortunately, the blood had already soaked into my shirt.

The check-in agent looked at my face.

Then my shirt.

Then my face again.

“Sir…are you all right?”

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

“I walked into a window.”

She paused.

I couldn’t tell whether she thought I was joking…

or covering up a fight.

Either way, she handed me my boarding pass.

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As I boarded the airplane, one of the male flight attendants stopped me.

“Sir…are you okay?”

“Yes.”

“Sir…you’re bleeding.”

“I know.”

The moment he said it, every passenger within earshot turned to look at me.

Apparently, announcing that someone is bleeding is an excellent way to get everyone’s attention.

I quietly found my seat.

Unfortunately, being the only passenger with blood on his shirt makes it almost impossible to go unnoticed.

When I landed in Italy, a representative from Lotto met me at the airport.

His first question wasn’t about Boris Becker.

It was,

“What happened to you?”

“I walked into a window.”

By then, I had the answer memorized.

He drove me to Lotto’s headquarters.

Before we started negotiating, he suggested I clean myself up.

Good idea.

I washed off as much blood as I could, but there wasn’t much I could do about my shirt.

Someone found me a Band-Aid for my nose.

Then he suggested we have a cup of coffee in the employee cafeteria before the meeting.

That seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea.

Until we walked in.

I was now the American with a Band-Aid across his nose, blood on his shirt, and a suit that had clearly seen a better morning.

Conversation around the room noticeably slowed.

I don’t speak Italian.

But I didn’t need to.

It wasn’t difficult to figure out the topic of conversation.

Who is this guy?

What happened to him?

And why is he here?

I smiled, picked up my coffee, and tried to look like this was a perfectly normal way to begin an international business negotiation.

From the archive: The Trip I Never Saw Coming.

We started negotiating that morning.

The discussions continued through lunch…

then through the afternoon…

and by the time we reached about six o’clock that Friday evening, we still didn’t have a deal.

If we walked away without an agreement, there was no guarantee we’d ever get one.

Going back to Monaco without a signed deal simply wasn’t an option.

The executive I was negotiating with couldn’t have been more professional.

Every so often he excused himself and disappeared for a few minutes.

I assumed he was discussing the contract with other executives.

Although, looking back, it’s entirely possible he just needed a break from negotiating with the guy who had walked through a plate-glass window that morning.

Eventually, we were both back at the table.

He reminded me that his wife and children were waiting for him.

He suggested we continue on Monday.

“No,” I replied.

“You don’t understand.”

“I was told not to come back without a deal.”

Neither of us moved.

Then…

A single drop of blood fell from my nose.

It landed right in the middle of the contract.

We both looked down.

Then we looked at each other.

There was a long pause.

Finally, he said,

“All right.”

“We have a deal.”

I’ve often wondered whether we had finally reached common ground…

…or whether he simply decided he wanted the bleeding American out of his office before I bled on anything else.

I’ll probably never know.

The paperwork was completed.

Back at my hotel that evening, I finally looked at myself in the mirror.

Now I understood why everyone had been staring at me all day.

Then I called Ion.

“The contract is done,” I said.

“We got everything we wanted.”

“Congratulations, Mr. Del Duca,” he replied.

Then he paused.

“I also understand you broke the window at the condominium.”

Apparently, that story had traveled across Europe faster than I had.

He added,

“You know…only you and the King of Spain have ever managed to break that window.”

Before I could respond, he added one more thing.

“They’re probably going to send you the bill for replacing it.”

For a brief moment, I wasn’t thinking about Boris Becker.

I wasn’t thinking about the successful negotiation.

I wasn’t even thinking about the blood.

I was thinking there was absolutely no way I was paying for that window.

Fortunately…

I never received a bill.

— Ron Del Duca

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My son Ronaldo and me, 2019

Some of the things we remember most aren’t really about what we thought they were about at the time.

For me, one of those things was baseball.

When I was growing up in Virginia Beach in the 1970s, following the Pittsburgh Pirates took a little effort.

My father was a Naval officer, which is why we lived there instead of Pittsburgh. There was no cable television, no internet, no smartphones, and no instant highlights. If you wanted to follow your favorite team, you found a radio.

For us, that meant KDKA, the Pirates flagship AM station.

At night, if the weather cooperated, we could usually pick up at our Virginia Beach house the Pirates broadcasts from Pittsburgh. During the day, the signal never reached us. At night it drifted in and out—sometimes crystal clear, sometimes buried beneath static, and sometimes competing with another station somewhere along the East Coast.

Naturally, the signal almost always disappeared at the worst possible moment.

The Pirates would have runners on base. The announcer’s voice would get louder. You knew something big was happening…

…and all you heard was static.

My dad never seemed frustrated.

He’d just say, “It’ll come back.”

And we’d wait.

A few moments later the signal would return, and my father and I would try to figure out what we had just missed.

Those evenings became part of our lives.

Sometimes we listened for ten minutes. Sometimes for two hours. Sometimes we talked about the game. Sometimes we hardly talked at all.

We simply shared the experience.

We celebrated home runs, questioned managerial decisions, enjoyed the wins, and suffered through the losses together.

Looking back, I probably remember those evenings more vividly than many of the games themselves.

Back then, I thought I was listening to Pirates games.

Looking back, I realize I was really making memories with my father.

I just didn’t know it yet.

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The Pirates happened to be very good back then. They won the World Series in 1971 and again in 1979.

But the championships are not what stayed with me.

The time with my father did.

Fast-forward fifty years.

Technology has changed everything.

Today I can watch every game on my phone, follow every pitch in real time, and know what happened before the inning is even over.

Ironically, for much of the last thirty years, the Pirates haven’t given us many reasons to celebrate.

For a while this season, they were giving us a few more.

My son played college baseball, so we don’t just talk about whether the Pirates won or lost. We talk about strategy, the decisions that get made, and what we might have done differently.

Whether we’re sitting together or hundreds of miles apart, we still find ourselves talking almost every Pirates game.

Every time my son and I talk about the Pirates, I find myself thinking about my father.

Especially during the last years of his life.

Dementia slowly took away so many of the memories that had shaped the man I had always known.

I’d visit him at the memory care center, and we’d sit together watching Pirates games.

Some days we’d talk about the game.

Other days he would quietly watch the television without really knowing what he was watching.

We didn’t always have long conversations anymore.

We didn’t need to.

We were together.

As I sat beside him, I couldn’t help but think back to those summer nights in Virginia Beach when we’d struggle to hear the Pirates on KDKA. The signal would fade into the static, and my dad would smile and quietly say,

“It’ll come back.”

Most of the time, it did.

Years later, sitting beside him again, I found myself hoping that, if only for a few moments…

…some of his memories would come back too.

Sometimes they did.

Sometimes they didn’t.

But then I realized something.

He may not have remembered those nights we spent listening to Pirates games together.

I remembered them for both of us.

Today, my son and I still follow the Pirates the same way.

I hope that years from now he won’t remember every score, every player, or every season any more than I do.

I hope he’ll remember what took me decades to understand.

The Pirates gave us a reason to spend time together.

The time together was the gift.

— Ron Del Duca

Thanks for reading. Here is another Story you may enjoy:

The Football I Never Saw Coming (or I Almost Became the Pregame Highlight)

Around 1990, I was in London during Wimbledon in my role as in-house counsel to Ion Tiriac. Tiriac was already one of the most influential figures in professional tennis—a former French Open doubles champion and Romanian Olympic hockey player who had gone on to become one of the sport’s most powerful managers. At the time, he was managing Boris Becker, already a three-time Wimbledon champion.

I was responsible for much of the legal work supporting Tiriac’s relationships with the players he represented.

Tiriac’s influence eventually extended far beyond tennis. He built a major international business empire and remains a prominent businessman today.

During Wimbledon, players, agents, sponsors, and executives didn’t stay in hotels as much as they do today. Families in Wimbledon Village would rent out their homes for the tournament, often earning enough in those two weeks to cover months of their mortgage. You simply moved into someone’s furnished home while they went elsewhere.

One evening around 1990, Tiriac told me we were meeting a friend for dinner at a restaurant in Wimbledon Village.

He didn’t say who it was

That wasn’t unusual. Many of those dinners eventually turned into business conversations.

An older English gentleman walked in—white hair, impeccably dressed, soft-spoken, and every bit the image of an English gentleman. We exchanged introductions, ordered dinner, and chatted for a few minutes.

Tiriac then excused himself to take a telephone call. This was before cell phones, so he walked away to answer a phone at the restaurant.

That left me alone at the table with the English gentleman.

“So,” I asked, “what business are you in?”

“Spirits,” he replied.

“Spirits? You mean alcohol?”

“Yes.”

“What company?”

“United Distillers.”

I told him I was familiar with the company and asked whether he worked in management.

With complete humility, he smiled and said, “No… my family owns it.”

That certainly got my attention.

A minute later I realized I couldn’t even remember his name.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What was your name again?”

“John.”

Now my mind started working.

United Distillers…

John…

I happened to drink Dewar’s Scotch back home in the United States.

I looked at him.

“Wait a minute. You’re John Dewar? As in John Dewar & Sons? The name that’s on the bottle of Dewar’s Scotch?”

Without the slightest hint of ego, he simply replied, “Yes. My sons wanted me to put my name on it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to, but we decided to do it.”

I honestly didn’t know what to say.

How many people can say they had dinner with the man whose name was on the bottle of Scotch they drank back home?

Finally I laughed and told him, “I don’t think I’ve ever sat down to dinner with someone whose name is on the bottle of the Scotch I drink.”

He laughed too.

Then he said something I’ll never forget.

“The funny thing is, we can’t even order it here. It isn’t sold in the United Kingdom. It’s sold in North America.”

A few moments later, Țiriac returned to the table as if nothing unusual had happened.

For him, it probably wasn’t.

For me, it became one of those stories that has stayed with me for more than three decades.

The biggest names I’ve met over the years were almost never the loudest people in the room. They didn’t need to announce who they were.

John Dewar never acted like someone whose family had built one of the world’s best-known Scotch brands. There was no ego. No pretense. Just a genuinely gracious and humble man.

John Dewar passed away earlier this year, but that dinner has stayed with me for more than three decades. Every time I see a bottle of Dewar’s on a shelf or behind a bar, I don’t think about Scotch. I think about the remarkably humble gentleman whose name is on the label—and how success and humility often make a far better combination than success and self-importance.

- Ron Del Duca

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“Meet me at Schiphol Airport in three hours,” he said.

I asked where we were going.

“Just bring some warm clothes.”

That was his entire answer.

Three hours later, I met him at Schiphol wearing a coat and tie.

It was Saturday, but I assumed we were headed to a routine business meeting.

Once we boarded the plane, I finally learned our destination.

Helsinki.

We were meeting with executives from Nokia, one of the sponsors of an event my client was involved with.

The meeting lasted several hours.

We discussed the sponsorship, worked through a few business issues, shook hands, and called it a day.

Exactly what I expected.

As we left the building, the two Nokia executives offered to drive us back to the airport.

I assumed they were simply dropping us off before heading home.

When we pulled up to the terminal, they got out, opened the trunk, each picked up a small carry-on bag, and walked into the terminal with us.

I remember thinking…

That’s odd.

We walked together toward the departure board.

I looked up.

Lapland.

My first thought?

Isn’t that where Santa Claus lives?

We boarded the plane.

The flight was another two hours farther north.

Most of the flight I found myself wondering,

“Where in the hell are we going?”

I knew we were headed to Lapland.

What I had absolutely no idea was why.

By the time we landed, daylight was fading into dusk.

You could still see clearly, but it was obvious night wasn’t far behind.

Most of the passengers headed into the terminal.

We didn’t.

Instead, we walked across the tarmac.

Waiting for us were five snowmobiles.

Five.

Not rental cars.

Not taxis.

Snowmobiles.

At that point, I realized my client and I apparently had very different definitions of a business trip.

Our luggage disappeared into a van.

Someone handed me an insulated snow suit and motioned for me to pull it on over my coat and tie.

I looked at my client.

He acted as though taking business clients snowmobiling across Lapland was perfectly normal.

Then he and the two Nokia executives climbed onto their snowmobiles, started the engines, and disappeared into the distance.

I looked at mine.

I had never driven a snowmobile before.

The guide stayed behind and gave me a lesson in how to drive a snowmobile.

It lasted all of one minute.

Apparently, that was considered sufficient training.

Then we were off.

We headed across what looked like an endless blanket of snow.

At one point we crossed a frozen lake that seemed to go on forever.

It was unlike anything I had ever experienced.

Eventually, the guide accelerated to catch the others.

Naturally…

…I decided to do the same.

That decision lasted about thirty seconds.

The snowmobile went left.

I went right.

The next thing I knew, I was buried in a snowbank almost up to my neck.

My first instinct was to climb out.

That didn’t work.

Every time I tried to move…

I sank a little deeper.

It reminded me of quicksand.

After a minute or two, I realized I wasn’t getting anywhere, so I stopped trying.

I looked around.

The only sound was the wind.

I watched the taillights of the other snowmobiles get smaller…

…and smaller…

…until they disappeared completely.

Oddly enough, I wasn’t scared.

I looked around.

The sky was beautiful. The snow was beautiful. Everything was completely still.

For a few minutes, I actually started enjoying the scenery.

Then it occurred to me that if nobody came back, someday they might find me frozen in that snowbank like some prehistoric man they dug out of the ice.

In a sport coat.

And a tie.

That made the scenery slightly less enjoyable.

About thirty minutes later, the guide came back.

He looked at me.

Then he looked at the snowmobile.

Then back at me.

“What happened?”

I said, “I thought I’d stop and enjoy the scenery.”

He stared at me for a moment.

I’m not sure he appreciated the joke.

A few minutes later, we pulled the snowmobile out of the drift and continued on our way.

Eventually, we reached a clearing in the forest.

Sitting there was a small insulated hut with a thatched roof.

It looked like something that had been there for generations.

Inside, there was a fire burning.

The others were already seated around it, eating reindeer and drinking Finnish liquor as though this were the most normal way in the world to end a business meeting.

Apparently…

…this was the evening program.

On the flight to Helsinki, I thought I was going to a business meeting.

A few hours later, I was eating reindeer in a hut in the middle of Lapland after burying a snowmobile in a snowbank.

I never would have predicted any part of that day.

Looking back, I’ve realized that some of the best experiences of my career began with almost no information.

No detailed itinerary.

No carefully planned schedule.

Just a phone call…

…and four simple words.

“Just bring some warm clothes.”

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A couple of summers ago, Nicole and I took a small luxury cruise through Italy, Greece, and Turkey.

Everything was first class. The ship was beautiful, the service was outstanding, and after recovering from open-heart surgery earlier that year, I was finally getting back to traveling again.

Then one afternoon, while we were docked in Bodrum, Turkey, I wasn’t feeling quite right.

Nothing dramatic. Just enough that I decided to stop by the ship’s medical office.

The doctor examined me, ran some blood work, and said everything looked good. Still, out of an abundance of caution, they wanted me to go to the local hospital for a few additional tests.

“No problem,” I said. “As long as I’m back before the ship leaves tonight.”

They assured me I would be.

Nicole rode with me to the hospital, and after they checked me in, I told her to head back to the ship.

“Worst case,” I said, “I’ll grab a cab and meet you there.”

Those words would not age well.

The hospital staff was excellent.

The waiting…not quite as excellent.

Every so often I’d ask, “Is the doctor coming?”

“Yes.”

Twenty minutes later…

“Is the doctor coming?”

“Yes.”

Eventually I decided I’d waited long enough.

“I’d like to leave.”

“You cannot leave.”

“I appreciate that, but I’m leaving.”

They handed me a form stating they recommended I not board the ship.

The lawyer in me understood exactly why. If there was even the slightest concern about my condition, neither the hospital nor the cruise line wanted the liability.

The lawyer understood.

The traveler wasn’t nearly as impressed.

I thanked everyone for taking care of me, removed my own IV—which earned me several looks suggesting I had completely lost my mind—and climbed into a taxi.

The taxi driver apparently believed he was qualifying for the Turkish Grand Prix.

We flew through the streets toward the port.

I actually thought I was going to make it.

We screeched to a stop, I jumped out with my paperwork, and headed toward the ship.

People were still boarding.

Some of them had arrived after I did.

I pointed toward the passengers.

“They’re getting on.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not?”

“No.”

That seemed inconsistent.

Meanwhile, Nicole was on the ship making her own case.

She had exactly as much success as I did.

Apparently, the captain had already made his decision.

I had spent more than forty years negotiating difficult situations.

Unfortunately, that experience didn’t seem to impress the captain.

Between the two of us, we managed to lose the same negotiation from opposite sides of the gangway.

About thirty minutes later, I watched the ship quietly sail away.

It was about 10:30 that night.

The dock had emptied out.

A few lights illuminated what was otherwise a quiet industrial harbor.

No restaurants.

No gift shops.

No tourists wandering around.

Just a picnic table…

an ATM…

two very helpful gentlemen from the local cruise company…

…and me.

I looked down at my phone.

Thirteen percent battery.

Perfect.

I texted Nicole that I wasn’t getting on the ship.

Then I sat down at the picnic table with the two gentlemen.

I looked at them and said,

“OK, boys…here we are. What’s the plan?”

I wasn’t panicking.

I wasn’t even particularly stressed.

Frustrated?

Absolutely.

A little annoyed?

Definitely.

But getting upset wasn’t going to get me out of Turkey.

One of the gentlemen opened his laptop.

After kicking around a few ideas, we all realized meeting the ship at its next stop wouldn’t work because I still didn’t have medical clearance.

Instead, they came up with another plan.

They booked me into a small local hotel for the night.

The next morning they arranged for someone to pick me up, take me to Bodrum Airport, and start the long trip to Athens.

Problem solved.

Around one o’clock in the morning they dropped me off at the hotel.

The owner couldn’t have been nicer.

The first thing I asked wasn’t about the room.

“Do you happen to have an iPhone charger?”

He reached into a drawer, pulled one out, and for about thirty seconds became my favorite person in Turkey.

The room…

Well…

Let’s just say it wasn’t competing for any luxury travel awards.

It had cinderblock walls, a tiny window, no air conditioning, and it was still about ninety-five degrees outside.

I took a shower…

…and then put the same clothes back on.

Then I faced one of the great travel dilemmas.

Leave the door open and hope nobody wandered in…

…or close it and slowly marinate.

I chose to marinate.

Around five that morning, the call to prayer echoed across the city.

At that point I figured fresh air was worth the risk.

Opening the door lowered the room temperature by approximately two degrees.

Progress.

A few hours later the owner prepared breakfast.

Bread.

Cheese.

Fresh vegetables.

It may have been one of the best breakfasts of the trip.

That may also have had something to do with the fact that I was starving.

At exactly nine o’clock, just as promised, my ride arrived.

The driver looked at me.

“Sir…your luggage?”

I held up my toothbrush.

“This is it.”

He looked at the toothbrush…

looked back at me…

looked at the toothbrush again…

and apparently decided not to ask any follow-up questions.

The drive to Bodrum Airport was beautiful.

The flight to Istanbul was completely full.

Naturally, I had the middle seat.

And, once again, there apparently wasn’t any air conditioning.

At that point I was beginning to think cool air had become optional in Turkey.

A little later I found myself with a seven-hour layover at Istanbul Airport.

If you’ve never been there, it’s enormous—one of the largest airports in the world.

Hundreds of shops.

Restaurants everywhere.

Lounges.

Enough things to keep someone busy all day.

I wasn’t interested in any of them.

I just wanted a shower.

Fortunately, one of the airport lounges had one.

I took what may have been the greatest shower of my life…

…and then put the same clothes back on.

Late that evening I arrived in Athens and checked into a Holiday Inn.

Never has a Holiday Inn looked more like the Ritz-Carlton.

I took another shower…

…and then put the same clothes back on.

The next morning Nicole arrived from the ship.

After hearing everything that had happened, she just stared at me.

Fortunately, the story gets even better.

She had arranged for a local driver to spend the day showing us Athens before our flight home.

He seemed to know everyone.

We skipped lines, saw places we never would have found on our own, and ended up having one of the best days of the entire trip.

Looking back, I realized I had worried about exactly the wrong things.

The missed ship turned into a great story.

The unexpected stop in Turkey introduced me to some remarkably kind people.

Athens ended up being one of the highlights of the trip.

My heart was fine.

Eventually I even got to put on different clothes.

For some reason, I never threw that little travel toothbrush away.

It’s still in my travel bag today.

My wife would come downstairs in the middle of the night and find me staring at a computer screen.

It might be 2:00 a.m.

Sometimes 3:00.

Occasionally 4:00.

“You’ve already been down here for two hours. When are you going to sleep?”

“The Rams fan page from Missouri disappeared again.”

She would just stand there for a second.

“You’ve spent the last sixty minutes at two o’clock in the morning trying to find a football fan website?”

“Yes.”

Then came the look every married man recognizes.

It wasn’t admiration.

It was more along the lines of: There is something seriously wrong with you.

As she walked away, I muttered to myself:

“Why do these people keep changing their web address?”

Looking back, I can’t say she was entirely wrong.

In early 2001, I was practicing law, representing NFL players as an NFLPA Contract Advisor, and writing a weekly column called Agent Talk for a small website called NFL Talk.

The pay was hardly life-changing.

I earned twenty-five dollars a week.

Another attorney writing for the site—Mike Florio from West Virginia—wasn’t being paid at all.

Neither of us cared much about the money.

We simply enjoyed writing about the NFL.

Eventually, NFL Talk shut down.

That could have been the end of it.

Instead, it became the beginning.

Mike and I had exchanged enough emails to know we enjoyed working together. One day we asked a simple question.

“What if we started our own website?”

There were no investors.

No employees.

No business plan worthy of a venture capitalist.

Just two practicing lawyers with young families, full-time careers, and a server that cost roughly twenty dollars a month.

Neither of us was chasing venture capital.

We were simply chasing an idea.

Looking back, it sounds almost laughably simple.

At the time, it felt like a great adventure.

On November 1, 2001, Pro Football Talk went live.

We divided the work according to our strengths.

Mike became the driving force behind the daily NFL rumors.

I still represented players, so from time to time I would hear something making its way around the league. I would quietly pass along information when appropriate, and before long Mike was developing league sources of his own.

The rumors became legitimate because they were legitimate.

People began realizing we weren’t simply making things up.

I also wrote Agent Talk, sharing stories and observations from life as an NFL agent.

Under the pseudonym Dante Allegri—a nod to my ancestor, the Italian writer Dante Alighieri—I reviewed NFL Draft websites with enough sarcasm to keep everyone honest.

Another feature called Media Mutterings that I authored under a pseudonym critiqued sports media personalities, newspaper columns, and television coverage.

It was football.

But it was also fun.

The part most people never saw was the work.

Every NFL team had its own page.

Each page linked to official team websites, local newspapers covering that team, and fan sites around the country.

Those links constantly broke.

So while other people were sleeping, I was searching for a replacement link because some devoted Rams fan in Missouri had changed websites without telling anyone.

That was apparently a crisis that required immediate attention.

At least it was in my mind.

Meanwhile, Mike was updating rumors throughout the day.

Three ... sometimes four updates every single day... and more if it was a big story that we heard about

He was also remarkably good with the technical side of running the site.

I wasn’t.

Whenever I tried to update the live site, there was always a reasonable chance I would accidentally replace the current page with one from four or five days earlier—complete with rumors everyone had already read.

Sometimes I would call Mike in a panic.

“Mike, I just screwed it up. The site is showing news from five days ago.”

Other times, usually on a Saturday night when both of us were supposedly spending time with our families, he would call me.

“Ron, were you just messing around with the site?”

“Yes.”

“You screwed it up again.”

Fortunately, Mike usually knew how to fix whatever I had just broken.

Instead of posting one update, I would create an emergency.

Looking back, I contributed enough technical disasters to keep him employed full-time.

For months—and then years—we weren’t doing it for money.

We simply believed we were building something worthwhile.

Eventually we added advertising.

Not exactly the kind that changes your life.

One month Mike called me.

“Ron, we made $47.12 this month!”

We celebrated.

Then we remembered we owned fifty percent each.

Suddenly our growing media empire had generated a whopping $23.56 apiece.

We were still practicing law Monday morning.

Then something unexpected happened.

An email arrived from Sprint.

At first we wondered if someone was playing a joke on us.

They weren’t.

Sprint wanted to become the exclusive sponsor of the website.

The agreement paid us six figures annually.

I was still practicing law full-time, representing players, and negotiating contracts during the day—while at the same time helping negotiate this deal for the website we had built at night.

For two lawyers who had spent years chasing broken hyperlinks in the middle of the night, it felt almost surreal.

Sometimes persistence takes longer to pay than people expect.

Sometimes it pays far more than they ever imagined.

As the website grew, another issue began to surface.

NFL teams started recognizing my connection to it.

Occasionally, an executive would ask me,

“You’re involved with Pro Football Talk, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I write that Agent Talk column for them.”

“Isn’t there something more?”

I would quickly change the subject.

There were already rumors floating around that various other people were involved with or owned the site—most of them untrue and sometimes spread by people trying to promote themselves.

I never told the teams that I owned half of it.

Every so often, someone would say something like:

“A funny thing happened inside our organization that only a handful of people and our players knew about. Two days later it showed up on Pro Football Talk.”

I would change the subject.

The reality was becoming obvious.

The better the website became, the harder it was to balance that role with representing NFL players.

Eventually I had a decision to make.

Continue helping build the media company.

Or continue practicing law and representing athletes.

I loved both.

In the end, an investor and friend of Mike’s purchased my ownership interest in a fair six-figure transaction.

There were no lawsuits.

No angry letters.

No public arguments.

Just two business partners reaching an agreement that made sense for everyone involved.

Mike and I remained friends.

We still keep in touch today.

Mike continued building Pro Football Talk into one of the most respected football news sites in the country.

Today, Pro Football Talk is part of NBC Sports. Mike hosts PFT Live during the week and appears regularly on NBC’s Football Night in America.

Watching that success has always been gratifying.

People often ask me how businesses become successful.

They expect me to talk about financing.

Marketing.

Timing.

Those things matter.

But I usually think back to something much simpler.

Two lawyers.

Young families.

Busy law practices.

Very little sleep.

A twenty-dollar server.

Twenty-three dollars and fifty-six cents each in advertising revenue.

And enough belief in an idea to keep fixing broken links at four o’clock in the morning.

One final lesson stayed with me.

Not every successful business partnership has to end badly.

Sometimes one partner realizes his path leads in a different direction.

Sometimes the other partner keeps building.

Sometimes both people leave the table satisfied.

The proceeds from selling my interest helped me launch other businesses and opportunities that shaped the rest of my career.

Mike built Pro Football Talk into something far bigger than either of us imagined.

I’d call that a pretty good outcome for two lawyers who simply enjoyed writing about football.

This November marks twenty-five years since Pro Football Talk first went live.

Millions of people have visited the site over those years, and page after page of NFL news, rumors, commentary, and analysis has been published.

Every time I see Mike on NBC, I don’t think about what I sold.

I think about two young lawyers with growing families, trying to balance clients, law practices, and a website that barely paid enough each month to buy dinner.

We didn’t know whether it would last twenty-four days.

We certainly never imagined twenty-five years.

Looking back, the biggest lesson wasn’t about football.

It was about partnership.

Find someone whose strengths complement yours.

Be willing to work harder than anyone thinks is reasonable.

And if life eventually takes you in different directions, remember that success doesn’t require someone else to lose.

Sometimes the best business stories end exactly the way they should—with both people winning.

And it all began with two lawyers, a twenty-dollar server and a broken Rams fan-page link at four o’clock in the morning.

In December 1989, I was 31 years old and working as the only tax attorney at a boutique law firm in Virginia Beach.

I had joined the firm a few years out of law school, knowing that it represented Ion Țiriac.

Țiriac had been a successful professional tennis player, including winning the French Open doubles championship with Ilie Năstase. By the time I became involved, however, he was already building the business career that would eventually make him a billionaire and one of the wealthiest former professional athletes (he still is).

He managed elite tennis players, including Guillermo Vilas and Boris Becker. Becker was already a multiple Wimbledon champion and one of the leading players in tennis.

Țiriac was also moving heavily into tournament promotion.

One of his first major projects was the Eurocard tournament in Stuttgart, Germany. The event had begun as an exhibition and was being developed into a major professional tournament. It would eventually become one of the most important indoor events in tennis and help lead to other tournaments Țiriac developed or promoted internationally.

But in 1989, it had a tax problem.

The existing arrangement involved a German entity making payments to a Dutch company. A United States company was not part of the original structure.

Because the tournament was conducted in Germany, substantial payments were potentially subject to German withholding taxes.

Everything had to be structured legally. My idea was to introduce a United States company into the arrangement and separate the licensing and consulting relationships through a series of agreements. The question was whether the applicable tax treaties among Germany, the United States and the Netherlands could be used to reduce—or possibly eliminate—the German withholding.

This was before the Internet.

Tax research meant statutes, regulations, treaty books and loose-leaf services that were updated by inserting replacement pages into enormous binders. There was no quick online search and no database producing an answer in seconds.

One of the firm’s partners asked me to examine the structure and see whether I could find another approach.

I studied the applicable treaties and concluded that, if certain requirements were satisfied and the agreements were structured correctly, the German withholding could legally be reduced substantially.

I explained my theory to the partner.

That Sunday, he called me and told me Țiriac wanted to discuss it by conference call. Now.

Working on a Sunday did not strike me as unusual, so I went into the office. We sat in a conference room in Virginia Beach while Țiriac joined the call from Europe.

I explained the idea.

There was a pause.

Then Țiriac said, in his direct and unmistakable way:

“Good. The tournament begins this week. Be here Tuesday night and explain it to my German and Dutch attorneys. They tell me it cannot be done.”

I looked across the conference table at the tax partner, Tom Betz.

Then I said out loud:

“How am I supposed to be in Germany on Tuesday? I don’t even have a passport.”

“That’s not a problem,” Țiriac said. OK. no problem.

The plan was apparently already settled.

I would fly to Washington the next morning, take a cab to the passport office, wait for an expedited passport, go to a hotel for a few hours and then begin an overnight trip to Germany. Someone from Țiriac’s organization would meet me when I arrived and take me where I needed to go.

That was it.

On Sunday, I had been a 31-year-old tax lawyer sitting in an office in Virginia Beach.

By Tuesday, I was expected to stand in front of a room filled with experienced German and Dutch tax lawyers and accountants and explain why the advice they had been giving their client was wrong.

I went home and packed.

The next morning, I flew to Washington, took a cab to the passport office, waited for my passport and then went to the hotel that had been booked for me. After a few hours there, I headed back to the airport and began the overnight trip through New York to Germany.

I spent much of the overnight flight journey reviewing the treaties, checking my analysis and trying to anticipate every objection I might hear.

After landing in Germany, I first met with an older German tax adviser at his office in Munich.

He listened to my explanation.

Then, in an extremely detailed and sophisticated manner, he told me why it would not work.

From there, I was driven to Stuttgart for the larger meeting at the Schleyer-Halle, where the tournament was being held.

I walked into a large conference room carrying my papers.

Around the table were Țiriac, several members of his organization, German lawyers, German accountants, Dutch counsel who had worked with him for years and several other advisers.

I was 31 years old, had barely slept, had never made a trip like this before and had already been told by a respected German tax professional that my idea was wrong.

Țiriac looked around the room.

Then he looked at me.

“Mr. Del Duca, I have all these smart people here,” he said. “I pay them a lot of money to tell me what I cannot do. Tell them why your idea is better.”

At that moment, there were only two possibilities.

I was either going to rise to the occasion or fall flat on my face in front of everyone.

I believed in the analysis.

More importantly, I had prepared.

I stood up and spent approximately 15 minutes explaining the existing structure, the applicable treaty provisions and why I believed the licensing and consulting arrangements could be reorganized to reduce the German withholding legally.

Most of the people around the table looked skeptical. And pissed.

There was some murmuring. A few people began quietly discussing my conclusions with one another.

Țiriac listened.

When I finished, he stood up.

“We will use Mr. Del Duca’s idea,” he said.

Then he looked directly at me.

“If it is wrong, I will fire you. And then your firm will fire you.”

Fair enough.

I was taken downstairs into the basement of the Schleyer-Halle and given an office.

“Office” may be too generous a description.

It was essentially a windowless cinder-block room.

I did not have a secretary with me. There was no Internet, email was not part of ordinary business communication, and the fax machine available to me was one of the early, rudimentary models.

I began preparing six separate agreements to implement the structure.

I wrote the documents by hand and faxed the pages to my secretary back in Virginia, six hours behind me. She typed them and faxed them back to Germany. I reviewed the drafts, marked them up by hand and faxed the revisions back to her.

Then she typed them again and returned them to me.

We repeated that process over and over.

At the same time, I was negotiating with representatives of the City of Stuttgart, which controlled the original tournament rights being licensed to Țiriac’s organization. Each discussion produced another issue, another revision or another provision that had to be reconciled with the treaties and the overall structure.

There were probably ten rounds of revisions across the six agreements.

Each one traveled from my handwritten pages in a cinder-block room in Stuttgart, through a fax machine to Virginia, onto my secretary’s word processor, and then back across the Atlantic for further changes.

By Sunday evening, the agreements were finished and ready to be signed.

A local government official had invited television crews and newspaper photographers into the room to record the signing. As they began moving toward the table and the documents, I realized they were about to photograph the financial terms and other confidential details.

My German was limited, but I knew one word that mattered.

“Nein.”

I stopped them before they could film the agreements and had them removed from the room.

Only then did the parties sign.

The structure worked, and the legal tax objectives we had set out to accomplish were achieved.

I had traveled from Virginia Beach to Germany with almost no notice, stood before a room filled with professionals who had far more international experience than I did, and persuaded the client to follow an approach nearly everyone else in that room opposed.

I did not accomplish it because I was the oldest person in the room.

I was not.

I did not accomplish it because I had the most impressive title.

I did not.

I accomplished it because I had done the work, understood the facts, believed in my analysis and was prepared to defend it.

Confidence without preparation is just noise.

But when you know the facts, have done the work and can support your position, you should not abandon a sound idea merely because more experienced people across the table appear unconvinced.

Sometimes the person who sees a better approach is the youngest person in the room.

And sometimes, on Sunday, that person does not even have a passport.

At the time, I represented Mississippi State defensive end Terry Day as he prepared for the 1997 NFL Draft.

A few weeks before the draft, my office phone rang.

“Ron, this is Bill Belichick with the Jets.”

Coach Belichick explained that the Jets wanted to schedule a private workout with Terry at Mississippi State before the draft.

Pretty standard stuff.

Then, almost as an afterthought, he paused.

“You know...I know your name from somewhere. I know I know you somehow.”

I laughed.

“Coach, I know who you are, but I’m not really sure how we’d know each other.”

He chuckled.

“Well, I’ll call you tomorrow to confirm when your player is available.”

That was the end of the conversation.

That evening, after leaving my office, I stopped by my parents’ home in Virginia Beach to see my mom.

I casually mentioned that Bill Belichick had called me earlier that day.

Without missing a beat, she smiled and said,

“Billy Belichick? How’s Billy doing?”

I looked at her.

“Mom...what do you mean, Billy Belichick?”

She smiled.

“Don’t you remember? Billy came to the house with his dad.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. To my mother, he wasn’t Bill Belichick. He was simply “Billy.”

The elder Belichick had spent decades as an assistant football coach and scout at the Naval Academy, and he and my father had known each other through Navy football (my father played for the Academy). During my father’s Navy career, he occasionally helped identify football talent throughout the Tidewater area as a courtesy to the Academy. Occasionally when the elder Belichick came to evaluate players, he’d bring Coach Belichick along.

“Mom...I honestly don’t remember that.”

The next morning, exactly as he promised, Coach Belichick called back.

Before we discussed Terry’s workout, he laughed.

“I figured out how I know you.”

“Our fathers knew each other.”

I couldn’t help laughing.

“Coach...my mother told me the exact same thing last night.”

We both got a kick out of it before getting down to business.

A few weeks later, the Jets selected Terry in the fourth round (102nd overall) of the 1997 NFL Draft.

A few months later, I was at the Jets’ training facility negotiating Terry’s rookie contract.

I was sitting with Mike Tannenbaum, who later became the Jets’ General Manager and is now an ESPN football analyst. We were discussing the details of Terry’s contract when Coach Belichick stopped in.

He didn’t have to.

He wasn’t there to negotiate the contract.

He simply wanted to say hello.

What surprised me most was what happened next.

We hardly talked football.

Instead, we spent nearly an hour talking hockey.

One of my longtime legal and tax clients was NHL defenseman Petr Svoboda, who enjoyed a long and successful NHL career. Coach Belichick knew Petr’s career remarkably well, and we spent most of our conversation talking hockey instead of football.

That conversation stayed with me.

Years later, the public came to know Bill Belichick as quiet...

guarded...

and almost impossible to read.

That certainly made for good television.

But it wasn’t the man I came to know.

Every interaction I ever had with him was thoughtful...

personable...

respectful...

and genuine.

Whenever I had an undrafted free agent or a veteran free agent he thought might help his team, he gave that player an opportunity.

No promises.

No guarantees.

Just an opportunity to earn a roster spot.

Sometimes, that’s all an agent can ask for.

What I Learned

Professional sports is a much smaller world than most people realize.

Relationships built by one generation often find their way back to the next.

And one more thing...

Never assume you know someone solely by what you see in public.

Sometimes the person behind the headlines is completely different from the one everyone thinks they know.

I got the chance.

Years ago, while I was representing Minnesota Vikings cornerback Robert Tate, the Vikings’ front office was kind enough to issue me a field pass before a home game at the Metrodome.

As a sports agent, there aren’t many experiences better than standing on an NFL field before kickoff.

Players were stretching.

Coaches were talking.

The stadium was beginning to fill.

Kickers were working on kickoffs and field goals.

I was walking around near the back of the goalposts, taking it all in.

Then something caught my attention.

It wasn’t a player.

It wasn’t a coach.

It was ESPN’s Suzy Kolber.

Like most people, I recognized her immediately.

I may have watched a little longer than I should have.

Actually…

A lot longer than I should have.

Suddenly…

WHOOSH!

Something flew past my head so fast I barely saw it.

A football.

The kicker had launched another practice kick, and while I was admiring Suzy Kolber instead of paying attention to my surroundings, I came within inches of becoming part of the pregame entertainment.

Had that football connected, there’s a pretty good chance the headline would have read:

“Sports agent knocked unconscious during Vikings warmups.”

Not exactly the publicity I was hoping for.

I looked around, pretending nothing had happened.

Unfortunately, everyone around me knew exactly what had happened.

The expressions on their faces said it all.

“That guy almost got drilled.”

I smiled, straightened my jacket, and did what any self-respecting sports agent would do.

I acted like I meant to do it.

To this day, I laugh every time I think about it.

But it also taught me something.

Whether you’re standing on an NFL field, negotiating a contract, or simply going through life, distractions have consequences.

Sometimes they’re expensive.

Sometimes they’re painful.

And sometimes…

they miss you by about six inches.

Ever since that day, I’ve made a conscious effort to pay attention to what’s happening around me.

Because you never know when the next football is coming.

— Ron Del Duca