Worlds To Win By

Kentucky Wildcat basketball coach Rick Pitino bounds onto a temporary stage inside the gaping expanse of the Philadelphia Convention Center, a winning grin spread across his youthful face, his bright eyes all aglow beneath the spotlight. "America's Most Energetic Motivational Speaker" immediately begins to pace an imaginary sideline, working the huge crowd toward an emotional pitch fit to inspire a flagging basketball team. "We have 1,500 superstars in this room!" Pitino crows.

"Damn right!" shoots back a heavyset office-products salesman in the 11th row.

Many of the 200 or so sports celebrities who work the flourishing business-lecture circuit launch into platitudinous rants the moment they take the stage. Fox TV football analyst Terry Bradshaw often grabs his audience with a screeching ode to "childlike enthusiasm," which the former Pittsburgh Steeler quarterback seems determined to demonstrate throughout his $10,000 exhortation about the vagaries of success. But Pitino prefers an articulate "Manager of the '90s" persona for his motivational lectures. For $20,000 and a first-class plane ticket, he will convey his secrets of managing and motivating a winning team—secrets that enough leaders of the business culture believe to be so similar to the keys to managing and motivating a winning company that they have created yet another source of windfall profits for contemporary heroes of sports.

"He's got the competition beat at the podium, too," proclaims a promotional document mailed out by one of the several lecture agencies that collect 20% of Pitino's speaking fees. "He'll energize your team."

"Most of the time I talk to senior managers," Pitino will say after the speech. "Then, it's like I'm talking to other coaches. When I talk to salespeople, I change the speech a little, because that's more like talking to recruits. I have a pure entertainment talk too."

Arrayed across the hundreds of faces angled up at Pitino in Philadelphia are the ready smiles of salespeople. Some of those gathered in Philadelphia sell variable annuities, some sell mortgages, and a few sell industrial compressors. When the successful coach tells them to do so, most carefully consider whether or not they indeed have the "attitude" possessed by the winners Pitino describes.

"Attitude" is actually Element 3 of Pitino's four-element, win-like-me prescription, represented by the acronym TEAM. TEAM is a kind of study aid by which listeners can remember lessons derived from sports that will lead them to superior business performance and even to commence a personal renaissance marked by wealth, organizational triumph and happiness. Almost all of the hot-ticket jocks working the upper tier of the corporate-inspiration circuit ($20,000-plus per speech, though most fees are negotiable) proffer canned axioms and truisms that at once delineate and dilute the common complexities of work and play, and most of the speakers insert some kind of acronym near the crescendo of a motivational address. For a $20,000-per-throw talker like former Chicago Bear coach Mike Ditka, the code word is ACE, which stands for Attitude, Character and Enthusiasm. Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz ($25,000) prefers WIN, for What's Important Now. Former Los Angeles Laker and New York Knick coach Pat Riley ($45,000), reputed to be the most requested sports speaker in the country, prefers an amalgam of "rules," as in the "Rule of the Rebirth, Rule of the Heart, Rule for the Triumph." In Pitino's watchword, T is for Togetherness, E for Esteem, A for Attitude and M for Mental Toughness.

Pitino illustrates and underscores all of these values with stories from his career, his personal life and what he can only imagine goes on in the world of business, since basketball has, as he often points out, consumed his life. Pitino illustrates the A in TEAM with stories of the collective attitude problem that was the Knicks when he coached them (1985-87), and with jocular references to his conjugal stamina with Mrs. Pitino even when it's late and he's tired. ("Three hours," he says, "but then, I'm Italian.")

The E-for-Esteem in Pitino's TEAM is considered something of an innovation, because in the realm of sports motivational bombast, E usually stands for Enthusiasm. At the moment, enthusiasm is the most popular sports value being repackaged as a clarion call to business success—a value as essential to the '90s as Intensity was to the '70s and Work Ethic was to the '80s.

And, it should be said to all doubters of the power of an honest-to-god sports celebrity talking victory up close and in person, the crowds invariably lap it up and call for more. For every executive who considers it absurd to draw corporate direction from individuals who in only rare cases have managed more than a dozen 22-year-olds at one time, there are probably 12 who believe that if you pay the price for a seat on the figurative bench of a great coach, success will follow. Meeting planners and other executives who book sports speakers contend that a well-delivered motivational talk to a sales force actually inspires immediate increases. But the kick tends to wear off, so another shot of concentrated competitive spirit is required.