Tracy McGrady and Jermaine O’Neal to start sports agency

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/sports/basketball/tracy-mcgrady-jermaine-oneal-sports-agency.html



McGrady and O’Neal said in a phone interview that they plan to open a player representation agency this fall. They will call it Seven1 Sports Group and Entertainment. The name is a mash-up of their jersey numbers.

McGrady and O’Neal, who both are 41 and live in Texas, said they were secure financially but felt a pull to forge a new path in their post-playing careers after discussing the matter regularly over the past two years. Their talks intensified over the past four months while they were mostly limited to their homes because of the coronavirus pandemic. McGrady (who lives in suburban Houston) and O’Neal (who lives in suburban Dallas) found themselves, in O’Neal’s words, with “time to process and think hard — together” about how they could help young players, particularly young Black players, the most.

“We think it’s needed, and we have a passion for it,” McGrady said. “We’re around kids every single day because we have youth programs. It just makes sense. We see the lack of information that these kids are getting, so we would be doing a disservice to our people if we don’t lend our expertise of what we know and help guide them. This is a calling that we have.”

McGrady said he would serve as a co-owner and adviser to players and most likely step away from the broadcasting role he has had the past four and a half seasons with ESPN. O’Neal intends to take the National Basketball Players Association test in January to become a registered N.B.A. agent and hold partner status alongside McGrady.

“Make no mistake,” O’Neal said, “this is very personal.”

“There’s no magic wand for this,” O’Neal said. “We’re not trying to say we’re the magic wand. But we’re going to be different. You can’t name another pair of people who have had the level of success and the ups and downs that we’ve had in our careers.”

Of course, for all of the life experiences they can pass on to prospective clients from the combined 34 seasons they played in the N.B.A., McGrady and O’Neal have no deal-making history to draw from compared with the league’s most established player representation firms. They said they hoped to recruit players entering the 2021 N.B.A. draft and players already in the league, but that will mean competing with the likes of Excel Sports (led by Jeff Schwartz, the former tennis agent turned N.B.A. power agent), BDA Sports (led by Bill Duffy, one of the league’s most experienced agents) and Klutch Sports (whose chief executive officer, Rich Paul, landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated in June 2019).

O’Neal said he and McGrady were in the process of hiring “seasoned partners,” including a few “old-school pit bulls,” to make up for what they lacked in representation know-how.

“This business isn’t waiting on me to pass a test,” O’Neal said.

Asked about trying to find their niche in such a cutthroat industry, McGrady said of his new rivals: “At the end of the day, they can’t get all the players. Obviously it’s going to take us some time to get our feet wet and really understand how this thing works. But we’re not intimidated by anybody. We know there’s going to be a lot of people trying to poke holes into this.”