Fresh off his donation to Syracuse University, his alma mater, and the sports management school there, super agent David Falk criticized the sports agent industry in which he still works in for an interview with me ten days ago.
His comments generated a lot of buzz in the industry--particularly the one about how he couldn't talk to a player he was interested in perhaps representing because he was told he was three years and $500,000 too short. TrueHoop's Henry Abbott, seeking to find out if that player was Derrick Rose and if the informant was William Wesley, followed up.
Falk still wouldn't name the player, but it got more play when the whole O.J. Mayo scandal was reported by "Outside the Lines" on Sunday.
We're not going to go further with that for now because Falk has more to offer on the sports agent culture. In a recent conversation, Falk had this gem, which is worth telling:
“A guy who has been in the sports business for 40 years, and was basically cryogenically frozen, resurfaced last year,” Falk said. “And we both competed for the same player this year. The player eventually went with me, but three days after this player told this agent he selected me, this agent told him, ‘You’ve made a terrible mistake. David is a really bad person. I’m here for you if you change your mind.’"
"The joke is that this was a person I once worked for and later he worked for me," Falk continued. "Then I find out from this player that this agent told him that he did Michael Jordan’s first Nike deal. That’s ridiculous. That’s like Pluto saying he invented the Polio vaccine that everyone knows was invented by Jonas Salk. So I told this player, ‘All you have to do is call Michael and he’ll tell you David did the deal.'"
"The truth is that person wasn’t even sitting in the room when we did the deal. He was totally uninvolved. But that’s the state of the business. It’s despicable that this agent would be stupid enough to say he negotiated Michael Jordan’s Nike deal. And it's unethical and illegal to solicit a client after the kid said he had decided on another agent. He should be decertified for that."
Now unlike the previous hint that Falk dropped, we're pretty sure we know who this guy is. After all, there's not many people who Falk worked for and then worked for Falk. So we called Donald Dell, who founded ProServ, where Falk got his start. Dell is now working for Blue Equity and likely was recruiting Georgetown's Roy Hibbert, who Falk signed (though Falk wouldn't confirm that this was Hibbert.)
I was told by a Blue Equity employee that Dell was at a company summit and could not immediately respond to the allegation. If he does, we will certainly allow him to defend the charge.
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