One Year Left to Play-Chapter 120 - 39: When in Doubt, Ask Dad
If someone else practiced like Pierce, especially at 18, they’d probably end up breaking themselves.
But Pierce is just indestructible; he managed to transform from a lumbering fat guy into a tough ironman.
That evening, Mrs. Pierce prepared a lavish dinner and invited Zhang Hao and Aprile Clark. By the next morning, she urged Pierce to head to the University of Kansas.
In Mrs. Pierce’s words, if Pierce hadn’t chosen UCLA, she would have wanted to beat him to death with a belt.
Zhang Hao, meanwhile, effortlessly completed his enrollment at USC with Aprile Clark.
After finishing the enrollment, Zhang Hao accompanied Aprile Clark to buy a used car.
Living on campus at an American university costs around 6000 US dollars per year. This year’s dorm fees are 5200 US dollars, and with various other expenses, it adds up to about 6000 US dollars a year. In contrast, renting an apartment like the Pierce family’s costs only 3000 US dollars a year, which is half the price. The money saved on accommodation for a year is enough to buy a decent used car for commuting.
The University of Southern California is less than 20 kilometers from Inglewood, so driving to school is much more economical than staying on campus.
With enrollment sorted, Aprile Clark needs to get busy with school matters. Zhang Hao, on the other hand, is in no rush. Aprile Clark is busy because he’s studying art and needs to meet teachers and other students to build connections. For Zhang Hao, as soon as he registers, he attracts onlookers and reporters taking photos.
The NBA negotiations have broken down once more, but the media generally predicts that an agreement will definitely be reached before mid-September to avoid affecting the training camp starting in October.
Moreover, the NBA procurement department and the procurement departments of various teams have already released tender announcements and started preparations for the new season.
From the information Zhang Hao has gathered about this lockout, he concludes that both sides are merely laying their grievances on the table.
Both parties share a basic goal: not to engage in any negotiations or lockouts before the expiration of the current 1998 labor agreement. They want to come up with a plan where both sides can compromise and be temporarily satisfied, and then see out the remaining three years of the labor agreement.
All current negotiations are based on the 1988 labor agreement, so there’s no way to make drastic changes. To significantly alter the labor agreement, they’ll have to wait until 1998.
This lockout is simply a venting of dissatisfaction between labor and management.
This explains why later basketball fans know so little about the 1995 lockout, because it wasn’t important.
Now, Zhang Hao plans to start attending classes. After more than a month of strength training, he wants to take things lightly for a while. It’s not complete rest, though; he’ll attend professional courses and carve out time to practice shooting every day, while waiting for the team gathering day in late September and the training camp starting on October 1.
He also needs to use this time to find a lawyer for future needs.
He contacted the Players’ Union to retract the recruitment of agents announcement and then published a recruitment notice for hiring a lawyer.
Although the Players’ Union takes a commission on salaries and can also earn by managing players’ tax money, the organization is indeed useful. They handle troublesome tasks and have built a fairly complete network of connections over the decades, making everything convenient.
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Los Angeles Falcao Talent Agency.
This was once a very illustrious agency. When there were only about 300 NBA players, this agency represented over 200 of them. Every team had at least half of their players under this agency.
During that period, agents’ commission was relatively high, once reaching as much as fifteen percent.
Among them, Falcao Talent Agency earned the vast majority.
In 1991, with NBA players earning a combined annual salary of 260 million US dollars, this agency’s annual income reached over 27 million US dollars, more than ten percent of the total NBA players’ annual salary, with 16 million US dollars from players’ salary commissions.
The remaining over 10 million income came solely from Jordan’s endorsement bonuses. That year, after Jordan won the championship, his total endorsement income exceeded 50 million US dollars, nearly a quarter of which was given to Falcao Talent Agency.
From 1991 to 1993, Jordan alone gave David Falcao over 50 million US dollars in endorsement bonuses.
There were rumors that Jordan retired earlier because he didn’t want to continue giving such a large portion of his earnings to his agent David Falcao. Because the contract between Jordan and David Falcao was valid only while he was an active player, any comeback after retirement would require a new agreement. During his retirement, the Nike bonuses still had to be paid as stipulated.
As the world’s most successful sports agency in the past decade, Falcao Talent Agency, after entering the 1990s, had its peak and began to decline. The league didn’t want to see one agency controlling more than half of its players. Reports from Detroit’s media suggested that three years ago, when the Pistons suddenly dropped from a 50-win team to missing the playoffs, and when Rodman and the other members of the Bad Boys faction were involved in internal conflicts, it was David Falcao pulling strings from behind. Although at that time, the Bad Boys faction was already unlikely to continue creating trouble for Jordan, the tension between Rodman and the other members of the Bad Boys, under Falcao’s influence, somewhat eased Jordan’s path to dominating the East District.
In 1993, when Jordan retired, the league stipulated a new maximum salary commission of four percent, directly halving agents’ earnings. The previous season, the average salary commission for all players was close to ten percent.
