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Charitable players receive more than they give

Goodwill, tax benefits and marketing opportunities spring from altruism.

By BRUCE LOWITT, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published December 25, 2002

Their stories are similar.

Lightning center Brad Richards and former Bucs tackle Jerry Wunsch each lost a cousin to cancer and wanted to make a difference in the lives of pediatric cancer patients.

They are part of the growing phenomenon of sports philanthropy.

Richards invites children and their families to Lightning games and gives them food and souvenirs. He also meets with them afterward. Several years ago, Richards also started a golf tournament to benefit the IWK Children's Hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Wunsch accompanies children, along with volunteer nurses and assistants but no family members, to Wausau, Wis., his hometown, for five days of sleigh rides, downhill and cross-country skiing, tobogganing and dogsledding. For most, it is their first time in snow.

Current and former Tampa Bay players also have foundations, among them Rays outfielder Greg Vaughn's Valley Foundation to help disadvantaged children in northern California and Bucs linebacker Derrick Brooks' Brooks Bunch that hosts youth at games and has taken them to the western United States, Washington and Africa.

The Lightning Foundation, Glazer Family Foundation and Rays of Hope are the team foundations. The Rays, for example, contributed to the Children's Home Society, serving eight counties, the Pinellas and Hillsborough education foundations, the Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities program and the St. Petersburg YMCA.

Dick Crippen, the Rays' executive director for community development and the Rays of Hope, said the team touched 700 charities in 2001 by donating money, baseball equipment and the use of Tropicana Field and by letting them raise funds by operating concession stands.

Sports philanthropy, once limited to Babe Ruth and others occasionally visiting hospitals and orphanages, has become big business.

The benefits to teams, players, charities and other nonprofit organizations can be enormous. The groups receive hundreds of millions of dollars while the teams and players get goodwill -- along with tax breaks, marketing opportunities and new identities.

"It's a natural fit," said Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, a Chicago watchdog agency. "A lot of (athletes) feel an obligation to give something back to society, but it's also beneficial to them. It builds up their reputation and they're more well-liked and they can get more endorsements, and they can use their celebrity status to get donations from companies whose products they endorse. If you're a cynic, you can look at it as part of the marketing package for the athlete."

But there are some pitfalls.

"When a player suddenly becomes rich, sometimes he doesn't know whom to trust," Borochoff said. "Athletes will have family members as foundation advisers or employees who may not know what they're doing."

Michael Jordan and his mother, Delores, co-founded a foundation in his name in 1989. She ran it. Jordan's wife, Juanita, and father, James, were on the board. It closed in 1996 after receiving criticism it spent too much on administrative costs and not enough on charities Jordan hoped to help.

"He'd have been better off seeking out professionals," Borochoff said. "That seems to be the biggest mistake that happens."

Agent Leigh Steinberg, whose life inspired Jerry Maguire, negotiates some of sports' most lucrative contracts. He also insists that his clients donate some of their money to charities.

"We were told over and over at our dinner table that our job was to make a difference ... and that was how we ultimately were going to be judged," Steinberg told the Christian Science Monitor.

The wedding of charities and nonprofit organizations to leagues, teams and athletes has spawned groups such as the American Institute of Philanthropy and the Sports Philanthropy Project in Newton Centre, Mass. The latter conducts seminars for teams and leagues on laws, goals and organization regarding foundations and charities.

"A well-structured team foundation can accommodate a player's efforts with a specific charity as well as distributing what it wishes to their own targeted charities," said Greg Johnson, the project's executive director. "The teams that do it best take their asset base -- signage, tickets, staff expertise, relationships with media, vendors and corporate suite-holders -- and integrate them."

Players often choose to become involved in charities not only out of altruism but because they're taking advantage of big tax writeoffs and showing they aren't, as many athletes are portrayed, greedy and uncaring.

"The media are celebrity-driven, and a lot of nonprofit organizations complain that they can't get coverage. To get it they need to somehow connect themselves with a celebrity," Borochoff said. "That can be risky if they align themselves with the wrong one, the one who winds up in public disfavor or in jail."

Public foundations, which solicit contributions, are subject to more stringent tax laws and can get in trouble if public funds are mishandled. Athletes with private foundations don't seek donations from the general public. They can afford to put in their money and that of wealthy friends.

"Often it's a tax thing; that's intriguing to the players," Stephanie Maza, executive director of the Wunsch Family Foundation, said of the private approach. "But they also have to have the right character; they have to really want to do it. It's a lot of work.

"Players who go into it because they want a good tax writeoff, their foundations usually fizzle out within the first year or two. The ones that succeed, those players like the idea of a tax writeoff, too, but they generally are the people who want to give back."

Athletes thinking about establishing private foundations have to answer many questions, Johnson said, "starting with how much time they can devote to it. And where to do it. Their hometown? Where they live? Where they play? And what happens if they're traded? And what about when they retire or are released and no other team signs them?"

Scott Conover was a tackle with the Lions when he created a foundation to give low-income children recreational and educational opportunities. After his six-year career ended in 1996 and he became a high school teacher in New Jersey, the foundation foundered.

"Most of the donations came from me personally," Conover told USA Today.

But "some athletes go on to become successful businessmen and can continue to contribute," Borochoff said. "Magic Johnson probably has more connections now than he did as a basketball player."

Some charitable athletes get a greater payoff than image-polishing or endorsements.

At first Richards wasn't sure how people would respond to his invitation to attend Lightning games because Tampa is not a hockey mecca.

"So far the kids seem to be having a great time and their families seem pleased," Richards said. "And every time I see one of them, I think about my cousin and how much he went through and how much I miss him. Nothing compares to what these kids are going through, but if I can help give them one good day, maybe they'll carry their spirits a little higher."

-- For more information on the Sports Philanthropy Project, call (617) 928-3408 or see www.sportsphilanthropyproject.com.

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