Don't Be Afraid to Win

How Free Agency Changed the Business of Pro Sports

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Pub Date 05 Nov 2019 | Archive Date 14 Nov 2019

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Description

Labeled by The New York Times as “instrumental in helping change the face of major professional sports,” attorney Jim Quinn has influenced modern sports business for decades. Beginning back in the 1970’s with the landmark Oscar Robertson basketball free agency case, Quinn battled owners in all four major leagues to make sure the players got their fair share. In the early 1990’s, he faced the goliath National Football League and won the right to free agency for players, Quinn has spent a lifetime dealing in the gritty sports business to make fair agreements for players. Quinn shares significant cases and legal proceedings across major American sports and tells stories of the courtroom battles he fought on behalf of players and labor leaders seeking economic justice in their workplace. He sheds light on known and unknown figures who committed to larger causes than themselves and that modern sports owes a debt to the leaders of the past who risked their careers. Through Quinn’s lengthy career he has helped to empower athletes to speak and act in the best interest of the sports community and overcome some of the toxic figures who sought to drag down league success for their own ego and greed. In Don’t Be Afraid to Win, Quinn provides a unique point of view of someone who was personally involved in making changes happen in the business. His is a masterful examination of how sports has grown dramatically over the decades, how it benefited from the rise of sports unions and free agency, and how there is still fairness to be gained across the leagues.

Labeled by The New York Times as “instrumental in helping change the face of major professional sports,” attorney Jim Quinn has influenced modern sports business for decades. Beginning back in the...


A Note From the Publisher

Author is available for interviews, blog tours, autographed tours, autographed book giveaways, contests, and book club discussions.

Author is available for interviews, blog tours, autographed tours, autographed book giveaways, contests, and book club discussions.


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Author Bio:

JAMES W. QUINN is one of the most accomplished trial, arbitration, and mediation lawyers in the U.S. Mr. Quinn spent his entire career at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, a premier international law firm based in New York City. At Weil, he served for more than two decades as both head of the firm’s 350-attorney Litigation Department and as a member of the Firm’s Management Committee. Mr. Quinn practiced in all areas of complex litigation and alternative dispute resolution, with particular emphasis on antitrust, securities, false advertising, sports, entertainment, patent, and related complex intellectual property litigation. He also developed extensive experience serving as an arbitrator under, among others, ICC and AAA International rules. Mr. Quinn received his B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and his L.L.B. from Fordham University School of Law, where he is currently teaching. This is his third book.

Author Bio:

JAMES W. QUINN is one of the most accomplished trial, arbitration, and mediation lawyers in the U.S. Mr. Quinn spent his entire career at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, a premier...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9781635766783
PRICE $25.99 (USD)
PAGES 352

Average rating from 2 members


Featured Reviews

There are plenty of things going on off of our sporting fields that affect what happens on the actual playing surface.

Jim Quinn knows all about that.

He's been around at many of the major legal battles concerning collective bargaining agreements concerning sports and their players for many years. Quinn has something of a grand slam in this area, having worked on cases in baseball, football, basketball and hockey. If you want someone who doesn't think a salary cap is something worn on your head, Quinn is your guy.

Quinn started with basketball almost 50 years ago, and has been around for plenty of game-changing moments. Through that time, he's managed to make himself relatively anonymous, since he's always worked on the outside rather than for the respective players associations directly. But make no mistake - his fingerprints have been all over some of the major American sports negotiations in history.

You'd think he'd have some stories to tell after all that, and he does. Quinn has written a book called "Don't Be Afraid to Win." The title comes from football's Gene Upshaw, who said those words to Quinn shortly before Quinn was to make the closing argument in a major legal action involving free agency in professional football. Upshaw was a Hall of Fame player with the Oakland Raiders who went on to a long "second career" with the NFL Players Association.

But Quinn actually got his start with basketball. He had joined a law firm in New York in the early 1970s, and there was a "basketball case" kicking around the office involving the NBA and its players over a possible merger. Quinn became part of the legal team for the players' side, and helped push through the agreement that allowed the 1976 merger between the NBA and the American Basketball Association to take place. That was a crash course in sports law, a very insignificant part of the legal landscape at that point that grew as the business of sports grew.

Quinn starts with some background about the NBA's legal battles, and moves on to something of a play-by-play of his big cases from there. After a while, he became something of a go-to figure for players in all sports, since he developed a large amount of expertise in the field. The sports business exploded economically in the past 60 years or so, which means a lot of money has been coming in. Quinn has been a loud, forceful advocate for the players to make sure the participants received something of a fair share.

It hasn't been easy at times. Two of the great truisms in sports are said to be that "a baseball team never has enough pitching," and that "no owner ever seems to make money." But no matter what you might have thought about player salaries at a given moment, the money is out there. It's not as if ticket prices will go down considerably if the average salary goes down by 50 percent.

It's quite obvious after reading this book that Quinn is smart and knowledgeable. It's easy to see why he has been hired so many times. Yes, there is a little arrogance there, and we could have done without some of the great restaurants' names that are dropped along the way. Quinn also is very loyal to his side in telling the stories about his sports-related cases (he's done plenty of other work in the business world as well). There are a few people on the players' side who don't come off particularly well (hockey's Alan Eagleson, an eventual felon who served jail time, tops the list), but not many.

Most of those on the other side of the table don't come as well, particularly the hard-line owners. NFL Commissioners Pete Rozelle and Roger Goodell aren't two of Quinn's favorites, and NBA Commissioner David Stern only earns a little grudging respect. It's a surprise how hard he comes down on the current head of the Green Bay Packers, Mark Murphy, whom he describes as a 'turncoat" (Murphy formerly worked for the NFLPA) and "obnoxious." Quinn might have made a better case if he hadn't called him "Mike Murphy" in the book. Others do a bit better. For example, NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, according to Quinn, was a worthy adversary and a class act. Every story has two sides, and this has one for the most part. That's fine; it's his book.

The author deserves plenty of credit in one important area, though. This is a relatively easy book to read; you need no legal training to get through it. Quinn makes his points quickly, and the process is relatively simplified.

I'm not going to tell you that collective bargaining is a subject that will keep even the biggest sports fan engrossed. But like it or not, such sessions are part of the sports landscape. "Don't Be Afraid to Win" offers a look behind the curtain behind some of the major moments in sports that didn't involve a game. Therefore, it should work nicely for its target audience.

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Jim Quinn has made quite a name for himself in the world of sports when it comes to legal and labor issues. He has worked on numerous cases involving either union matters or free agency issues against the NBA, NFL and NHL. He shares the stories of these cases and the importance they had in shaping free agency in each of those leagues in this book.

The book deals strictly with his work in each of these leagues and nothing else. It is not a memoir, it doesn't discuss the accomplishments of his more noteworthy clients such as Oscar Robertson and Freeman McNeil and it isn't simply stories inside the courtroom. Therefore, if a reader is expecting to find this type of information in this book, it won't be found.

However, if the reader IS interested in learning more about why these issues came about, the importance of free agency in shaping the business of professional sports as we know it today and some great inside information on the biggest cases involving free agency such as Robertson v NBA and Freeman v NFL, then get this book and read it cover to cover.

The start of the book is probably the most interesting story of the whole book and it was not a case that Quinn worked on but instead was an impromptu strike called by Quinn's mentor, Larry Fleischer. Fleischer became very well known as an agent for many NBA player as well as a sports litigator, but his first foray with NBA players and labor issues made for great reading. Known as the "21 minute strike", Fleischer convinced players who were in the 1964 NBA All-Star game to not take the court unless the owners would agree to higher contributions to their pension plan. Nervously, they agreed to do so, and it worked as the owners verbally agreed to do so and the players took the court.

From there the book discusses all of the various actions taken toward free agency in basketball, football and hockey. The latter sport is mainly discussed because it was the one time owners "won" because the cancellation of the entire 20014-05 season resulted in the players agreeing to the owners' demands.

In the other two sports, however, Quinn paints a picture of multi-millionaires using the same arguments in order to deny players free agency, namely competitive balance and the explosion of salaries. It didn't matter what year or what sport, the book portrays the owners as unwilling to change while Quinn tells of his meetings with players and other lawyers in a very entertaining manner. Of course, he also shares his secrets and strategies used in order to win cases and provide players with true free agency.

As mentioned earlier, if this topic doesn't appeal to a reader, then that person should skip this book. But for readers who enjoy this topic as I do, it is one of the best ones available on labor and legal issues in professional sports and should be on their book shelves.

I wish to thank Radius Book Group for providing a copy of the book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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