Agent hopes his book will tutor all involved in the NBA
Mike Monroe

David Falk began writing his autobiography, “The Bald Truth,” long before the housing bubble burst and short-term pain in the stock market morphed into a full-blown recession.

But the timing of his book's release — Simon & Schuster began shipping it to book stores last week, but launches its release today — could not be more appropriate for anyone who wonders how the pro-sports establishment will deal with the difficult time that is soon to commence.

Season-ticket renewals will be going out from NBA marketing departments over the next few weeks. Nearly every team is about to feel the pinch of hard times when fans strapped for discretionary dollars decide they need to bail out their own family situations.

Falk is here to help.

He has ideas about the partnership between the players and the owners that has characterized the league since the players' union founder, Larry Fleisher, sat down with a young NBA lawyer named David Stern and hammered out the first salary cap in pro-sports history when the league faced another crisis, in the early 1980s.

Falk has been representing athletes since 1972. This gives him a perspective on how things have changed in the NBA.

He helped raise the salary structure to the point even marginal players make millions of dollars.

Over the same time frame, owners have seen the values of their teams rise, from a time when four expansion teams bought into the league for $32.5 million apiece, in 1988, to today, when it cost Bob Johnson $300 million to bring a second expansion team to Charlotte.

Today's economic reality, Falk said, is about to change everything.

The league can reopen the collective-bargaining agreement after the 2010-11 season. When that happens, owners who have suffered deep losses for a couple of recession-challenged seasons will demand concessions, just as the Big Three automakers have sought help from their unions.

“Everything will be open,” Falk said of the next collective- bargaining sessions, “from the salaries players get; to age limitations; to the softness and hardness of the cap; and to the luxury tax. All will be re-examined.

“There will be tremendous pressure to change the system so there is a chance for the owners to be profitable.”

Falk believes the union's leaders should have been knocking on Stern's door weeks ago, offering to begin a dialogue intended to benefit both sides.

“When you have a revenue- sharing relationship, the players in a partnership with the league, the goal is not to beat the owners,” he said. “The goal is to grow the pie. The players have a vested interest in making the game, and the business, strong and solid.”

Curiously, the lesson of Falk's biography is not how to squeeze the last dime out of a team owner for every player.

Rather, he wants readers to learn about building relationships and finding what is important.

“At this point in life, having done so many deals for so many players, when I look in the mirror, I don't see a hired gun,” he said. “I see a teacher. Someone who taught players, beginning in the 1970s, how to make good business decisions and plan their careers.

“That's what the book is about: owners, players, businesspeople, politicians and what I've learned about business, unexpurgated.”