Woolf at the Door

Seven years ago Robert Woolf was an energetic young criminal lawyer working out of a cubbyhole office in Boston. Eager for business, he agreed to help Red Sox Pitcher Earl Wilson negotiate his baseball contract. A few fast deals later and Woolf suddenly realized: "Oh wow, this is an area that's been virtually untapped." Tapping away like a trip hammer ever since, he has become the most successful of the new and growing breed of sport lawyer-managers. He now has a stable of 200 pro basketball, baseball, football and hockey athletes. "I have to pinch myself," he says, "to believe a local attorney like me has a national business like this. It's unbelievable."

The golly-gee pitch is deceiving. To the team owners who must negotiate with him, he is the original Woolf at the door. Boston Celtics General Manager Red Auerbach, for one, swore that he would never meet with a sport lawyer --until Woolf appeared with nine of the twelve Celtic players as his clients. Now, after Woolf wangled deals like a $500,000, three-year contract for Forward John Havlicek, Auerbach admits "Woolf has helped a lot of players."

Off-Field Activities. And scared a lot of owners. Two years ago, when the Red Sox traded Ken ("the Hawk") Harrelson, the American League's Player of the Year, to the Cleveland Indians, Woolf craftily advised the flamboyant outfielder to "retire," on the grounds that the move would jeopardize the Hawk's business interests in Boston. In a subsequent meeting with Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, Woolf worked out a "substantial compensation" for his client's supposed business losses. Harrelson promptly unretired. "When we went to New York," Woolf proudly explains, "the sport world didn't understand the importance of a star's activities off the field. When we left, they knew contracts no longer stopped at the stadium gate."

For the eight lawyers on Woolf's staff, the wheeling and dealing never stops. Offering "complete representation," Woolf and his associates not only thrash out injury and waiver clauses but handle trades, drafts, taxes, bills, wills, movies, TV, endorsements, investments, public appearances and even manners. When the Boston Bruins' Derek Sanderson won the National Hockey League's Rookie of the Year honors in 1968, Woolf schooled the then 21year-old high-school dropout in the social graces, got him a TV talk show, won him a salary increase from $14,000 to $50,000 and had him dash off an as-told-to autobiography, I've Got To Be Me. "An athlete finds glory only for a few years," says Woolf. "His body is his skill, and it can depreciate very fast. My job is to see that he gets what he's worth and learns how to manage what he gets."

Fat Girl Friends. Woolf acknowledges that "the athlete and the team are like a family--the team is not the enemy." But he can be smotheringly overprotective of his athletes. When the New England Patriots signed Quarterback Jim Plunkett, it was no accident that the Heisman Trophy winner ended up living in the basement of Woolf's suburban Boston home. Brandishing one of the dozen of requests for Plunkett's support, Woolf says, "Jim doesn't need to worry about this junk." Since Woolf screens his telephone calls, Plunkett also does not have to fret about girl friends calling to find out why he has not asked them for another date. Quips Woolf: "I just tell them Jim thinks they're too fat."

Friend, fan and father figure to his athletes, Woolf, 43, works out an "amiable" yearly fee with his proteges, depending on services rendered. These days, the services range from investment and tax advice to the hard-sell hustle of Derek Sanderson jigsaw puzzles and Jim Plunkett T shirts. Owner of a winter home in Florida, a limousine with telephones front and rear, Woolf earns more than the total income of the eleven New England Patriots he represents. "The athlete of today," he says, "has become what the movie star of yesterday was." If so, Bob Woolf is the Cecil B. DeMille of the locker room.

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