Entrepreneur (Sports / Entertainment)
– Sports & Entertainment Limited
‘… the thing is just go on, just go and do it. I think it’s amazing when you decide that you’re going to do something, somehow it happens. It just happens if you decide and you’re determined.’
James migrated to Australia from London in 1979 to set up IMG (the International Management Group) in Australasia. In 1997 he started SEL (Sports & Entertainment Limited), extending the variety of services he offered. His roll call of engagements is an international who’s who and includes a plethora of legendary identities– Muhammad Ali, Greg Norman, Tiger Woods, Sir Jackie Stewart, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Clive James, Michael Parkinson, Captain Mark Phillips, Zara Phillips, Shane Warne, Andrew Hoy, Matthew Lloyd, Michael Lynagh, Todd Woodbridge and Matt Giteau. James transformed sports marketing and talent management across the region and beyond and has many a fascinating story to tell about the behind-the-scenes deals.
Interview
BRETT KELLY: Most people in business describe managing people as their biggest challenge – attracting talent, developing it, retaining it. you’ve had an illustrious career managing people but what I think is fascinating about your story is that you’ve worked with the most talented people you can encounter.I’d love to start at the beginning. How did you become involved in talent management?
JAMES ERSKINE: It was the luckiest day. It was just pure chance. I had been a medical student at London University’s Charing Cross Hospital failing with great success. In 1976 The Open Championship was at Royal Birkdale, which is where I am from. It was really hot, and my father, who was involved with the Open, asked me to go and help him with the crowd control. That was when I met Mark McCormack. I always was a mad keen golfer, and a bit of a golf historian – I liked the scores and records and I used to follow Arnold Palmer around when I was a kid of eight. He had won the Open at Royal Birkdale in 1961. I met Arnold again in 1976.
Anyway, it was there that Mark asked me if I were working for him, which three British golfers would I sign up? I said, ‘That’s easy. Nick Faldo, Sandy Lyle and a guy called Martin Foster.’ He looked at me in a strange way – he had this funny way of getting a pen out of his jacket – and he said, ‘Would you come and have lunch with me next Tuesday?’ I didn’t know what I was doing the following Tuesday, I didn’t plan that much. I really wanted to go and play golf with my mates at Birkdale. The bottom line was, I met him and we did a funny deal.
I eventually said, ‘I’ll work for you for six months. Don’t pay me anything. I will tell you after six months if I want to stay and how much I want.’ He said, ‘That’s a daft idea, I’m not going to do that.’ So then he said to me, ‘OK, what does a young doctor make?’ So he paid me that. £2 200.
To be brutally honest, I had no idea what was involved in the sports management business. McCormack had Palmer, Nicklaus and Player, IMG was relatively small at the time – I think there were under twenty people worldwide.
My first assignment was to go to Jersey to see Tony Jacklin – he wasn’t happy.They’d done a stupid deal about his commissions so I basically said, ‘Tony, pay us our normal 25% because Jackie Stewart is paying us that, Jean-Claude Killy is paying us that and John Newcombe is paying us that. At the end of the day, if we don’t generate enough money for you, I’ll just give it back to you when I leave.’
I had not thought this was going to be a long-term career. I was staying in a flat with all these nurses and medical students and when I got home they said a Mark McCormack had been calling from America. I didn’t take any notice of it because I couldn’t afford to call America. Eventually, he got hold of me and said, ‘Where the hell have you been? What happened with Tony Jacklin?’ ‘He was fine,’ I said.‘He is going to pay us our normal 25%.’ He said, ‘He wants you to manage him worldwide.’ So I said, ‘Well, he didn’t say that to me.’ Then Mark said, ‘Well, you better come over to our golf meetings in Cleveland, Ohio.’ I didn’t know where Cleveland, Ohio was. I’d never been to America. I didn’t even own a suit at the time, I might have owned a a blazer. So he said, ‘You better get a visa.’ And off I went.
My father was a great raconteur, but he wasn’t a great businessman. My maternal grandfather was a very good businessman, he’d had a substantial family textile business, but I had never wanted to get involved in it, too many rows in family business, but I suddenly realised that maybe I had a bit of business acumen.I sat at this meeting with all these golf executives – because IMG was mainly golf in those days and a bit of tennis. They were talking a different language so I said,‘Guys, I’m just new to this, but if I were a client,’ – and I put myself in their position– ‘I’d want you guys to make me the money. I mean, I’m playing the golf and I just want you to make the money.’ The first question should be, if you’re going to change someone’s golf clubs, can they play with them because if they cannot play with their clubs, then it’s like a doctor with the wrong tools.
So it seemed to be quite simple. As luck had it, we started to represent Wimbledon and we did a tour of Muhammad Ali in 1978. I was just at the right place at the right time. There was no competition, really. I had this briefcase they called ‘Jaws’ because it looked like an old medical school bag. It had all these contracts in it. The story got exaggerated but I signed up all these Spanish golfers and legend has it, I signed up a Spanish waiter by mistake! I decided that the top Italian golfer would probably make as much money or more money in Italy as maybe the third- or fourth-ranked golfer would in England, so it was that sort of theory, get the top player in each European country.
I met Bernhard Langer. It was funny, he was literally a kid. I was twenty-three and he might have been twenty-one. There was a guy called Jan Brugelman and we were in Frankfurt at a golf club. It was windy and we were on the balcony.Langer had a two iron. It was about 220 yards out into the wind and he said,‘Watch this,’ and BANG! it finishes eight feet from the flag. And then, I’m sipping my beer and Jan says, ‘Now James, zis is the problem …’ And he proceeded to four putt. I signed up Bernhard Langer and history shows he became a superstar and sorted out his putting for the main part.
BK: Great game. you did it?
JE: Do you know, it was a fun business. I’ve always been a manager, not an agent.I mean, an agent goes and gets the money and does the deal and then buggers off. We basically manage people’s careers. I’m not interested in the short-term.
‘I was just at the right place at the right time.’
BK: How long did you spend in England and how did you come to Australia?
JE: From 1976 to 1979 I was with IMG in London, eventually running their UKand European golf business. Then, in the middle of 1978, Mark said to me at the TBC championships, ‘Would you consider going to Australia?’ Well, I’d never even thought about it. I didn’t really know, being from a little place like Birkdale with a population of about ten thousand people in the north of England. I didn’t know much about Australia at all. I thought, ‘Oh my, there would be kangaroos hopping down the high street. I’m going to miss all my mates and London and all that sort of thing. You know, I had a very close relationship with my parents and had a girlfriend there. But anyway I plucked up the courage, I went downunder in 1978.
It was the 150th anniversary of Western Australia. A guy called Laurie Kiernan who owned Channel Nine in Perth (he was an ex-truck driver). His general manager, David Aspinall, who went on to work for Alan Bond and Bell Resources picked me up at the airport. As we were driving down George Street, David shouts to a guy called Warren Boland who is driving us, ‘Warren, wind down the window.’ There was a Channel 7 News van parked in George Street, ‘Get the bazooka out.’ So Warren gets a pretend bazooka out and pretends to blow up the Channel 7 truck. I said, ‘What, don’t you talk to each other here?’ and he said,‘No, there’s a war. We live next door to each other and were always throwing bricks over the fence.’ I thought, ‘What have I got myself into here?’
I ran that golf tournament. Peter Jacobsen and Curtis Strange headed a great tournament. Then McCormack said I’d better go and see Kerry Packer. So I saw Kerry and he said, ‘A bright young bloke like you ought to come over and open an office.’ So Mark had set it all up. Kerry basically said to me, ‘We’ll give you offices. I know Mark McCormack doesn’t like paying for things.’ And I said, ‘If I have an office in your office, none of the other networks are going to talk to me.’And he said with a broad smile, ‘Precisely.’
The other thing that was really interesting was that we’d sold The Parkinson Show to the ABC from the UK. The reason we’d got Parkinson was again luck. We had asked him to help us get George Best and Geoff Boycott. Parky said, ‘If I do that, you help me.’
BK: So Michael Parkinson introduced you to the other guys?
JE: Yes. In those days, Parkinson was getting next to nothing, like a thousand quid for a show in the UK. It was big money in those days probably for television, but we managed to get him $11 000 a show on the ABC. So Kerry organised for me to have dinner with Sam Chisholm, David Evans and Bruce Gyngell at the San Francisco Grill. The first thing that came out of their mouths was, ‘We want Parkinson.’
BK: Right.
JE: So Gyngell said he’d pay us $200 000. I was thinking in my head, thirteen shows times eleven and I said, ‘We’re almost getting that now at the ABC. It’s not worth changing.’ So he said, ‘Then we’ll do twenty-six shows and that’s five million a year.’ Well, I was trying not to smile. I was thinking, ‘It just shows you, if you’re not in the country, you’ve got no idea.’ And what I realised then was that at 8.30 pm on a Saturday, everybody was watching Parkinson. I mean, he was getting well over a million viewers. But being in London, we didn’t realise how popular Parky was. That was a big lesson.
So eventually there was an auction. Channel Ten, then owned by Murdoch, got Parky, now Parkinson was only paying us 10%. He’d done us a favour. So I picked up the phone to Michael after this and downplayed it. I said, ‘Michael, if I could make you at least a million pounds a year to come out to Australia for four or five months, will you pay us our normal commission?’ And he said, ‘James, if you can make a million quid a year, you can have what you bloody well want!’And we are still managing him today. He has been very much a father figure to me. If I got slightly cocky, he’d get slightly cranky if you’re not looking after him in the way he wants, he repeatedly brings me down to earth. We’ve had a handshake agreement since 1976. Even when he went from making a thousand pounds a show to £250 000 a show he never once said, ‘Look James, let’s change the commission.’
BK: So let me ask you, when did you come here?
JE: I came in November 1979. John Newcombe was my referee. Suddenly I got my passport back and it said ‘permanent resident’ – in those days they gave them away. So I came and have lived here permanently since 16 January 1980.
BK: And then you set up the Australian IMG office. How long did you run that for?
JE: A long time. I set up Sydney, we had an office in Christchurch, but moved it to Auckland. Then we went to Asia and had offices in Hong Kong, Singapore and China. I left IMG on 26 June 1997. It was about twenty-one years for most part a very enjoyable twenty-one years. My only job.
BK: Now, let me ask you. Obviously, Mark McCormack is revered as a huge figure in the industry of talent management. What was he like and what’s it like working with a person like that?
JE: Well, first of all, he was definitely pioneering. He basically understood the value of sports and sportsmen in the international market. He understood that people got a huge amount of pleasure out of sport and that they lived a lot of their social life through sport even if they weren’t necessarily sporty themselves. I think he understood what the fans wanted. He understood what television people wanted, too. So he certainly was a pioneer in those things.
He was quite entrepreneurial, but then at other times, he could be not very entrepreneurial at all. I suggested that we should buy television stations (at a couple of times in history we could have bought both Channel Ten and Channel 7 for very little). He turned around and he said, ‘Look James, basically we sell programs to television stations.’ And I said, ‘Yes, but if we owned the television stations, think what we could do.’
BK: So for a time there, he had the content. Today, obviously, with the internet and the way the media has changed, content is king.
JE: Content is always king but we should have definitely broken into the television market in certain areas of Australia. It would have been pretty easy. There were three commercial networks and it would have been easy to take advantage of that. It was disappointing. I mean, it was just a way that he didn’t want to go. But look, he was good. I mean, he wanted to run everything. He was a bit of a control freak in that sense. When I said, ‘Look, your three children probably aren’t all capable of taking over this business.’ Nepotism is great if they’re geniuses, but how often does that happen? You know, Jack Nicklaus’ sons aren’t necessarily going to be the greatest golfers (and they weren’t). Same with Gary Player.
So one of the things I said was, ‘You’ve got to spread the spoils. You’ve got to give people some equity in this business.’ I mean, we all got paid quite well, but he didn’t see that so I said, ‘Look, Mark, my view is if you don’t do it, people will leave.’ And, of course, they did.
BK: It’s hard to retain the best talent. So how did Mark bring you into the business and keep you there? How have you brought great people in your business?
JE: Well, Mark kept me by paying me and it was a great job and fun life. I also had quite a lot of autonomy. I was down here in Australia, he wasn’t around the block. So I had a huge advantage not being in London or New York or Cleveland where he was a lot. Now, for a period of time, I wouldn’t say I was the golden-haired boy, but certainly, I was one of the guys that he would listen to a lot and get advice from and I got us into the entertainment business. Certainly, he was very pro us doing that.
We were in the model agency business already, and we got into the business of underwriting all sorts of events. I thought we should own events. No-one can take them away from us then because if you represent things we can get fired or paid less. So I thought we should basically do that. Look, Mark was fantastic at all that and the sports world owes him a lot – a genuine pioneer.
‘Nepotism is great if they’re geniuses, but how often does that happen?’
BK: And then what did you take from the experience you had, obviously working with great talent to attract that talent?
JE: IMG was good because he had good people. There was no sort of cookie-cutting machine to get great people. I mean, I was a failed medical student.A lot of them were actually lawyers. That was very good training, to be a lawyer.But some of the lawyers weren’t very good at selling. There was a whole mixture of people.
BK: What makes a great manager?
JE: I think you have to be personable and you have to love what you are doing.You can’t be frightened of the word ‘no’ because you get a lot of ‘no’s’ – you get a lot of ‘no’s’ because your clients don’t want to do a lot of the stuff and you get a lot of ‘no’s’ during downturns, like we’re in now. You can knock on twenty doors and everybody says no. So you can’t be frightened of or get depressed about things that don’t go anywhere. I think if you believe in what you’ve got, all sorts of things can happen. You know, when we saw Bjorn Borg, we knew he was going to be a great tennis player. As soon as I saw Nick Faldo play golf, I knew he was going be a great golfer. Up here (points to head), he was brilliant. He was the Steve Waugh of golf.
BK: I saw a great profile on Nick Faldo once about just how disciplined and mentally focused he is.
JE: Yes. His management and his tactics around the golf course were probably second to none. Nick Faldo will be in a rocking chair and will sit there and think,‘I won six majors. I’ve got the most out of my talent.’ There will be a lot of people who will sit in rocking chairs and say, ‘I could have done better.’
‘I think if you believe in what you’ve got, all sorts of things can happen.’
BK: So of the people that you’ve managed, what have you learned the most?
JE: Well, first of all, they’re all, in varying degrees, selfish. The people who are successful in most sports are all selfish with their time. Most of them, the people that are really great, are not obsessed with the accumulation of money. They realise that they will make a lot of money for a long time if they carry on winning, although they live in a stratosphere where a day of their time is worth two years’work to most people. They don’t get bogged down by it.
BK: It makes no difference.
JE: I always remember Nick Faldo being offered US$500 000 to go and play in Japan in the mid 1980s. It was a fortune. I mean, the average salary was £25 000.And he looked at his diary and it was his daughter Natalie’s second birthday. So he said, ‘Mate, I can’t do this.’ So I got the diary and I crossed out the birthday and put a ring around another date. ‘This year, Natalie’s birthday is here! She’s going to be two years old.’ I mean, Gill and Nick looked at me as though I was a Martian, but I said, ‘Put the money in a trust account for her.’ So I did it with humour. But that’s what good management should be like.
But to answer your question, successful people are very focused. We manage Michael Clarke and he’s unbelievably focused. I’m not saying that these guys don’t make mistakes but today, mistakes get magnified.
BK: Because they’re under huge scrutiny. Everyone’s got a camera. Everyone’s got a video.
JE: The days of JFK compared to the days of Obama are completely different.A lot of people today don’t realise the pressure that brings.
BK: I knew you’d taken on Shane Warne, but how long have you managed Michael Clarke for?
JE: I started about three weeks before he got his 329 not out.
BK: So let me ask you about that, because with him in particular, there seems to be a real change in the way that he is presenting himself or is being presented. And there are certainly very different results on the field. What influence can you have as a manager? Where does the advice start and stop –good counsel? Is it just commercial advice?
JE: No, very little influence, most is common sense.
BK: Are you doing for them what Parkinson has done for you?
JE: Well I can be quite brutal with what I have to say. One thing, when people are well known and they’re successful, in all forms of life, others just think or presume they know a lot about things that they don’t actually have a clue about. And part of the reason is, people ask them their opinion. They’re not experts at everything but because they’re well known, people expect them to give an answer.
With Michael, I met him with Shane Warne a year and a half before I started managing him. He was with Lara Bingle and he said, ‘We see ourselves as the Australian Posh and Beck.’ And I said, ‘Well, you’re not and I’d get rid of that idea if I were you because it won’t work here.’ And there was a sort of silence. Then later on he came to me and said, ‘Let’s get together.’
I said to him, ‘You know, people don’t want to see you as this flash kid. It’s a huge responsibility being captain of Australia so don’t chew gum when you do interviews. And take off your cap. It’s common courtesy. And just be honest. Just be yourself.’
BK: Just be yourself.
JE: I said, ‘I don’t want to change you. Just be yourself. Don’t be worried about what you say. If you think that you played like a load of turkeys, tell them that you played like a load of turkeys.’
And then the next thing that happened, he said, ‘I don’t really want to go out there as one of the top batsmen without a bat contract.’ I said, ‘You haven’t got a bat contract? All you’re doing is kidding yourself. Put the McGrath sticker on because it’s a great cause and Glenn is a great guy.’ Then he got the 329 and we did his own range. Now, was that a strategy? No it wasn’t. It was common sense commercially and he scored the runs. He did all the hard work.
BK: But he had enough respect for your experience to listen and get on with it?
JE: I had to persuade him to go out with a plain bat, but Michael learns quickly, you have to when you have the responsibility of being captain. He had to deal with Ponting still there, which he knew was a big advantage with all his experience, Clarke played a blinder. Now for the Ashes.
BK: you can see it on the field.
JE: So he was bright enough to turn it around and take it all on board. I mean, we had a chat about it and I said, ‘Listen, I know Ricky. He has made all the mistakes.He’s got all the experience. He’s a huge asset to you.’ No different from Shane Warne, who was a huge asset to all those captains before. You know, you don’t think Tubby Taylor wandered over and asked him what the weather was going to be like – he was asking him about what we should do. So, be consultative.I mean, in any form of life. If you are in an office by yourself and bouncing a ball against the wall and you never talk to anybody, it’s tough.
BK: Michael’s marriage–
JE: I didn’t know he was getting married. I had no idea, but the fact that he did it in that way, he did it brilliantly. And then it was agreed to release just three or four pictures to everyone. It was refreshing to have just a family wedding.
BK: So, of the clients that you manage now, obviously, you manage Shane Warne–
JE: I’ve managed him since 2005.
BK: So what’s a good client when you’re looking in the market? Do you approach them or do they approach you? And what do you take on and what won’t you take on?
JE: Most people, funnily enough, have approached me.
BK: Do you still look after Anthony Warlow?
JE: No, we don’t. When I was at IMG and in SEL’s early years we did. Anthony is a huge talent and I’m glad he’s off to work in Broadway. We tend to get people when they were already stars, they are already well-established.
‘So, be consultative. I mean, in any form of life. If you are in an office by yourself and … you never talk to anybody, it’s tough.’
BK: And what type of client wouldn’t you take? Is it just if you can’t do enough for them, or is it personality?
JE: I’ve turned down a lot of people – people who are madly influenced by their parents or wives or girlfriends or have a reputation for being unbelievably difficult.Life’s too short. I’m lucky now, I don’t have to deal with people I don’t want to work with. At one stage I wanted to retire by the time I was forty-five. I don’t know where I got that idea from.
BK: So talk to me about retirement. One of the constant themes I’m hearing from people who do what they love is that they have no interest in retiring.
JE: I think that’s right. You basically change the way you work, and you have other people doing a lot of the work, you delegate more and better. You change your routine a bit. My doctor said people die much younger when they retire. Everything is slower. And you see people who retire, some really bright businessmen who retire, suddenly they’re taking twenty minutes to make a decision on whether or not to take the car in for a service. I wouldn’t want to go like that. Also, I’m lucky because my job’s been my hobby.
BK: I’ve found that a constant theme, that it is more of a hobby, it’s what people love doing.
JE: I’m always late because I never look at a clock.
BK: Because you’re enjoying it.
JE: I mean, you have shitty days, you have shitty weeks and shitty months.Financially, I’ve had shitty years. It’s not much fun when you go and lose, three or four million dollars on an entertainment event. But on the other hand, you can’t win them all.
BK: Have you ever gone public?
JE: No, I’ve never thought about going public. I would never go public, I’ve got no interest. What I think you’re referring to is that we basically set up the new V8 Supercars and sold it.
‘I’m lucky, because my job’s been my hobby.’
BK: yes.
JE: It was in 1997 and the brainchild of Tony Cochrane, who was a 25% partner of SEL (Sports & Entertainment Limited). He worked with me at IMG and came with me to SEL. We set up this deal where instead of taking commissions, we had a 25% stake in the V8 business. And it grew and grew from a small business to a company that was making in excess of thirty million dollars a year. No debt, nothing, just hard work.
Then the teams turned around and said to us, ‘Well, we would like to make some money out of this.’ A lot of mechanics and drivers had become team owners and year after year they’d ploughed all the money back into the business.They thought if we can get a good price, they could actually make a few million themselves. I didn’t want to sell. I don’t actually like selling things and it was a great business.
Actually Ross Stone, who is one of the team owners, a lovely guy from New Zealand, said to me, ‘James, we’ve all done bloody well out of this.’ He said, ‘It’s gonna change all of our lives if we sell. You’ve got all the commercial rights for V8 Supercars. We are only going to be able to sell our future cashflows going forward if you don’t come to the party. Would you just quietly consider it because I think we, meaning the teams, have been very loyal as you’ve been to us and we’d like to make some money.’
And I basically thought about it. And he was 100% right. So I said OK, but on two conditions. One, we’re not going to go and sell this thing cheaply, so I put a number on it of $320 million and, secondly, I said they would have to stay in with at least 30% because they were the act.
BK: Basically, no-one is going to want you to not have any hurt money in it, but if I’m out, I’m out.
JE: Because then you can sell to whoever you want. You can get the highest price.And that was basically the deal they agreed to. I didn’t think in my wildest dreams it would ever happen. Well, I know nothing about private equity. I don’t know anything about the stock market. I’ve never bought a share in my life. So I just sat well back, thinking they’ll probably wheel me in for a couple of presentations.
Actually, they didn’t even wheel me in because they thought I’d say, ‘You blokes aren’t capable of running this show.’ So that’s what happened, it was bought by Archer and I am still involved with the new television deal and stuff but that was it. The nice thing about it was that it was a success and we all remained friends. Tony then left us and went on to be the executive chairman of the V8 Supercars. I think it’s a different life being in a private equity situation. But he is doing what he wants to do and he does it well. There will come a time that he will want to take a back seat.
BK: yes. Any regrets? What are your biggest regrets in business? What are the biggest mistakes you made? The things you’ve learned the most from?
JE: It’s interesting. I think that I would have liked to have managed Seve Ballesteros.We did quasily, at one stage, and Tom Watson. Again we did in a quasi way. He was a client but left before my time. I’d like to have managed and got to know those two people better. And I would have liked to have managed Torvill and Dean.
BK: Can you tell me about the change from IMG to setting up SEL?
JE: Yeah, I was frightened by it, but I knew it was the right thing to do. I mean, used to have twenty-five phone calls before 10 o’clock and on the first morning, not one person rang. I went to lunch with a friend and said, ‘I think this is going to be a disaster, no-one’s called me,’ and he said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ But it was a funny thing, having all that clout with IMG and then thinking maybe I’m not going to have it now. I think that if I had my time over again, I probably would have tried to set up SEL at the age of thirty-four rather than forty-four. But I was in a comfort zone at IMG. I also liked the–
BK: Collegiality?
JE: Yes, I liked that, but also the security. I mean, some people laugh because I am a risk taker, but I wouldn’t go and put all my eggs in one basket. It’s limited risk.I’m quite conservative really.
BK: One of the biggest lessons? One of the things that have taught you the most?
JE: I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned is to listen. And when you do a deal, always let the other person go first because it’s amazing the number of times people have offered me more than I might have asked for myself.
‘I think that if I had my time over again, I probably would have tried to set up SEL at the age of thirty-four rather than at forty-four.’
BK: Tell me about debt. We’re past the global financial crisis. you’ve mentioned your view on risk. Obviously, we’ve seen countries and companies and all sorts of people doing interesting things. Explain to me your concept of risk, of not putting all your eggs in the one basket.
JE: Two things. In my era as a kid, you were well-off if you had a fridge. No-one had a dishwasher. Some homes had a colour television and some had two televisions. But this generation – our children are far more into consumerism.They’ve got all the gadgets. But the first thing that people have got to turn around and do is work out what’s important.
I’ve always got this line that it’s far easier to save a dollar than make a dollar in times of recession. So, you have to go back to basics. Pick the low-hanging fruit because everyone is trying to go and do this blockbuster thing. Life is cyclical.And, I mean, the business that we’re in is sport and I’ve sold a lot of major television sports. I’ve represented the Olympic games, Wimbledon, Royal and Ancient, and all sorts of people. Sport is always going to be there because it doesn’t fluctuate from year to year.
BK: It’s very much a constant.
JE: Yes! If you create a new drama series or a new reality TV show you hope and pray everybody is going to watch it. It may work, it may not. The AFL Grand Final might be 3.2 million viewers or it might be 2.8 million, but at the end of the day–
BK: That’s a hell of a lot of people.
JE: And it’s always going to be in demand. I mean in the history of Australia since I’ve been here, there has never been a network that’s survived that hasn’t had a major sporting franchise.
BK: So tell me about innovation and technology. What impact is that having on your life and work?
JE: Well, I’m the wrong person to talk to because I hate all that stuff. I mean if I had my way, I’d have a car that still had the windows that wind down. I literally only got an iPad three months ago because everyone got fed up with giving me hard copies. I like a piece of paper to write on, write down comments you can think about later. I don’t like looking at screens. I like being outside. My first meetings are always at Bondi or Watson’s Bay, somewhere near the water. I don’t text people. I talk to people on the phone.
BK: So, human-to-human interaction.
JE: I can pick up the phone to you and know the sort of mood you’re in. I’ve got a very simple theory: people like doing business with people they like and people they trust. Most of the major deals I’ve got have all been handshake deals. I’ve done the Olympic Games on a handshake with Kerry Packer. And Dick Pound, the Chairman of the IOC’s TV committee at the time, said, ‘James, where is the contract?’ I said, ‘Don’t worry about the contract, it’ll get signed. He’s already sent me the cheque.’ It’s better than the contract. That’s how it works.
And if anyone dudded me – and I’ve been dudded – I will never do business with them again. They’ve had one chance. Why would I want to do it? I don’t mind if someone says they’ve promised to do something but they can’t. We’ve all done it. So I think it’s just common courtesy, really.
BK: So what about Kerry Packer?
JE: Look, I liked him. He was just an absolute sports fan. He could be quite bullish in a way sometimes, but when you stood up to him he could also admit when he was wrong.
‘I’ve got a very simple theory: people like doing business with people they like and people they trust. Most of the major deals I’ve got have all been handshake deals.’
BK: Let me ask you one last question. Which motto or quote or thought best summarises your approach to life.
JE: Just be yourself. Yes, be yourself. I mean, there are so many different ways and life is not an exact science. I’ve met eccentric people who are charming, I’ve met billionaires who are charming, and I’ve met people who never quite make it and they tend to be more of a pain in the arse than those who have really made it.People who really are secure within themselves and secure with their own ability, I think that people really get that.
There are a lot of emotions that are completely wasted. Jealousy is a wasted emotion, envy is a wasted emotion, probably the thing is just go on, just go and do it. I think it’s amazing when you decide that you’re going to do something, somehow it happens. It just happens if you decide and you’re determined – now, the idea should not be flawed in the first place – but once you’ve decided that it’s a good idea, then–
BK: you put effort into it.
JE: Yes. You know, I spoke to David Gallop this morning about his sudden departure from the Australian Rugby League Commission. I think in three months time he will think that it was a complete blessing in disguise – umpteen things will open up for him that he would never have even thought of, whether it’s television or radio, books, on boards, whatever it might be.
But there is always a fear factor of what’s going to happen when you make a move. It’s not necessarily an enjoyable feeling, but it’s enjoyable when you plunge in and go and do it!