March Madness Heroics Help Former NCAA Stars Get Business After Basketball
Ed O’Bannon Now
Marlene Karas/Bloomberg Businessweek
Ed O'Bannon is a car sales rep at Findlay Toyota in Henderson, Nev. His UCLA jersey hangs on his office wall.
Ed O'Bannon is a car sales rep at Findlay Toyota in Henderson, Nev. His UCLA jersey hangs on his office wall. Photographer: Marlene Karas/Bloomberg Businessweek
Greg Koubek Now
Bloomberg Businessweek
Greg Koubek and his brother run the Greg Koubek Basketball Camps in their hometown of Clifton Park, N.Y.
Greg Koubek and his brother run the Greg Koubek Basketball Camps in their hometown of Clifton Park, N.Y. Source: Bloomberg Businessweek
Jeff Sheppard Now
Bloomberg Businessweek
Jeff Sheppard is founder of the Kentucky-based 15inc, an apparel company named after his Wildcats jersey number.
Jeff Sheppard is founder of the Kentucky-based 15inc, an apparel company named after his Wildcats jersey number. Source: Bloomberg Businessweek
When Ed O’Bannon meets with customers at the Findlay Toyota dealership in Henderson, Nevada, he doesn’t flaunt his former basketball career.
“If they recognize me, that’s cool, but I don’t go out of my way to tell people who I am,” said O’Bannon, 38.
Even so, when potential buyers do join the 6-foot-8 sales representative in his office, there’s no escaping the hoops memorabilia, including O’Bannon’s UCLA jersey, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its March 14 issue.
He won’t reveal whether his basketball celebrity has ever translated into a sale. O’Bannon also acknowledges some customers want to talk more about his glory days than cars. And his co-workers aren’t shy about saying to shoppers, “Do you like basketball? You should meet Ed.”
O’Bannon won the John R. Wooden Award as national college player of the year in 1994-95, leading the UCLA Bruins to 32 victories in 33 games during the regular season.
He then helped the team win the 1995 National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament title, its first in 20 years. In the championship game against the University of Arkansas, O’Bannon’s last game for UCLA, he scored 30 points and grabbed 17 rebounds.
O’Bannon went on to a less than spectacular National Basketball Association career with the New Jersey Nets, followed by years playing in Italy, Spain, Greece and Poland. He retired in 2002.
“I’m just a guy who used to play basketball,” he says, “and wants to help people buy cars.”
NBA Ambitions
There are 336 Division I basketball schools, with an average of 15 players per team, and only 30 NBA teams waiting on the other side.
This means collegiate players have less than a 1 percent chance of becoming one of the 60 athletes picked up by the NBA each year. So when professional hoop dreams evaporate, former big shots such as O’Bannon face the question of whether to use their fleeting NCAA fame to their business advantage -- and how to actually turn that one great March Madness bracket-busting shot into a steady paycheck.
For the entrepreneurial minded, using basketball stardom as a selling tool can be an effective business strategy.
“Fans are loyal to teams, and true zealots have long memories,” says Alan Jay Zaremba, the author of “Madness of March: Bonding and Betting with the Boys in Las Vegas.” He knows many NCAA enthusiasts who can still rattle off the statistics of their favorite players, even those never drafted into the NBA.
‘Using Their Fame’
“It doesn’t surprise me that athletes are successful using their fame,” he says, “however short-lived the fame might have been.”
There can also be a psychological reason for not wanting to go lights out. “Fan enthusiasm and support can be intoxicating,” said Zaremba. “Athletes successful in that absolutely crazy period in March can get filled up with that recognition. The recognition is gone, you can get hungry for it.”
Jeff Sheppard helped the University of Kentucky win two national championships, in 1996 and 1998. His efforts earned him the Associated Press NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player accolade in 1998.
Sheppard played one NBA season, with the Atlanta Hawks, averaging 2.2 points and 1.2 rebounds in 18 games. He’s had better luck with his sports apparel company, 15inc -- named after his Wildcats jersey number -- that he started in 2007.
Annual Revenue Up
15inc is growing steadily: Annual revenue in 2007 was just more than $1 million, and Sheppard predicts the business is on track to hit $1.4 million in 2011. He is the first to concede the company’s success has been boosted by his basketball career.
“Everybody in Kentucky remembers and appreciates the ‘96 and ‘98 championships,” Sheppard says. “They remember where they were when it happened, and a lot of them were at the games.”
15inc is based in London, Kentucky, an hour south of the university in Lexington, and the vast majority of its business comes from schools and other organizations across the state, including the University of Kentucky, coal mines and the U.S. Marine Corps. His chances of sealing a sale improve exponentially, Sheppard says, if he gets to make his pitch to the customer in person.
‘Make the Connection’
“They definitely make the connection to the 15inc name if they meet me,” he says. Being a local hero is good for business, and he suspects he’ll continue to sign autographs, sometimes on his own merchandise, for the foreseeable future. Or, he says, “until the Wildcats win another championship.”
Greg Koubek found success without giving up ballhandling entirely. Although his college career was fairly low profile, Koubek played for Duke University when the Blue Devils won an NCAA championship in 1991 and became the first to play in four NCAA Final Fours. While toiling on the international circuit in South Africa, Turkey, Hungary and Japan, he opened a basketball summer camp with his brother, Tim, in their hometown of Clifton Park, New York.
Summer Camp
They named it the Greg Koubek Basketball Camps, but Koubek insists he used his name only to get a toehold in the business. “In the beginning, it certainly helped,” he says, describing how the camp has grown from 60 kids in its first year more than two decades ago to an average of 700 over the last six summers. “Now, people come to the camp because it’s a good camp, a quality camp. They don’t come because of the name.”
Koubek is aware, though, that a healthy percentage of his paying customers are parents who came of age during his NCAA heyday. He’s signed countless autographs for them --and many want to talk about his (and their) March Madness memories.
“They’ll tell me about how I beat the spread in their office pool,” says Koubek, who lives in Los Angeles but hasn’t missed an orientation day at his camp since its founding. “Or sometimes it’s the exact opposite. They’ll tell me how much money they lost because of me or Duke. You get both sides of it.”
Last Year’s Hero
With every March comes a crop of NCAA stars-to-be who will eventually learn the reality their predecessors now know. Ali Farokhmanesh, last year’s senior guard for the University of Northern Iowa and a Sports Illustrated cover boy, is just starting to realize how far March Madness fame reaches. After his 3-point shot last year that defeated the top-seeded Kansas Jayhawks, he was passed over by the NBA, eventually playing for Team Massagano in Switzerland.
“All of my Swiss teammates,” he says, “they’ll come up to me and say, ‘What were you thinking, shooting that shot against Kansas? You ruined my bracket!’ They want me to make their March Madness picks this year.” He can’t predict how long he’ll last in professional basketball, but he knows his NCAA fame will probably be his calling card, whatever his profession.
It’s a bittersweet reality for somebody like O’Bannon. “I have people telling me all the time that I should use my fame to make money,” he says. But he’s not sure that he wants to. “I have no problem when people do it,” he says. “I guess subconsciously, I wish I could do it, too. But I’m learning how to be happy with who I am now.”
Conversation Pieces
Which is why he insists the mementos hanging in his Toyota dealership office are just conversation pieces that say, “This is where I’m coming from. This is what I’ve done.” Try as he might, though, he finds it hard not to smile whenever a customer looks up at his keepsakes and asks, “Have you ever played basketball?”
To contact the reporter on this story: Eric Spitznagel at espitznagel@gmail.com
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jessica Flint at jflint2@bloomberg.net
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