A Q&A With the Lawyer Behind the All-Star High School Football Game

[WSJ_law_blog]

We don’t know about you, Loyal LB’ers, but we’re pretty pumped about the WSJ’s new, hopped-up sports coverage — especially when lawyers make it into the stories.

Exhibit A: Today, the Journal’s Matt Futterman penned a front-pager about SportsLink — the outfit that produces the U.S. Army All-American Bowl, an all-star football game for high school seniors — and the two lawyers behind it.

We caught up with one of SportsLink’s founding lawyers, 41 year-old Rich McGuinness, a former college wide receiver, to talk about law, football and his 8 year-old business venture.

Hi Rich. Thanks for chatting with us. So before we get to high school football, tell us a bit about your legal career. Seems like you did quite a bit of law before starting SportsLink.

I graduated from Santa Clara in 1989, and went to work for Jim Florio’s re-election campaign. Doug [Berman] [a SportsLink co-founder] was running the campaign. He was already a corporate lawyer who kept jumping in and out of politics and law. I thought, if you want to succeed in politics, you got to go to law school.

I went to Rutgers law school and quickly realized law wasn’t for me unless I was on my feet doing trial advocacy. That was the only class I loved. So I went to the Morris County prosecutor’s office and started working up through the trial divisions. I’d try the bad cases; I’d take anything. I loved the competitive aspect of getting in front of a jury. As a former college football player, nothing else had that win-loss, start-finish mentality. Ultimately, there was either a victory day or you went home empty, with a not guilty verdict. So I went from the trial division to major crimes, and then specialized in arson.

Arson?

I liked it because you had to deal what little evidence there was in most arson cases. Typically, the evidence burned down, so you had to work backwards to figure out what the igniter was. A lot of the detectives believed that no one prosecutor had the energy to put together a case, and they were disappointed. So it was a challenge that I took on. I worked those cases, which were like cold cases, for two years. But after making something like $30,000 every year, I said I really wanted to get back into the sports world.

I could’ve gone to work for the IMG’s of the world as a lawyer. But I always watched the McDonald’s All-American basketball game, and asked myself, why didn’t they do a similar all-star game for high school football?

Why didn’t they?

In the world of high school athletics, every state association has its own bylaws regarding all-star participation. Since the McDonald’s game only has 12 kids per side, you’re only dealing with 24 kids from, at most, 24 different states. But for 80 kids, you’ve got to call probably every state to maneuver through their guidelines.

You called all 50?

Yes, by then I was in private practice. So for eight months, I’d run my law firm during the day, and then at night would run through state association guidelines to find out what their athletes can and can’t do. For the most part, they’d say, you can have the kid play, but can’t let them accept gifts, or something like that. After all was said and done, I got the OK from 46 state associations saying their athletes could play. When the faxes were coming in from the states, it was like watching election results.

Have you ever read “Friday Night Lights” by H.G. Bissinger, or seen the movie or the TV show?

Yeah, it’s a good portrayal of high school football. Just to go back for a second, when I read that book, I decided that the all-star game needed to be played in Texas and that’s why we put the game in Dallas. I actually called Buzz Bissinger [the author].

The second [high school football] movie that came out was “Remember the Titans.” That came out the same year [2000] as our first game. We were leaving the movie, and my wife said, you’ve got to call Herman Boone [the coach, played by Denzel Washington]. So I asked him to come down to the game and meet these kids. I said I’d name a trophy after him, the Boone Trophy. He brought Coach [Bill] Yoast [the assistant coach] down, and they haven’t missed a game in 8 years.

There’s a lot of controversy over what’s an appropriate age to expose young athletes to professional sports. Do you have a view on that?

In the end, the maturity level that’s required to have a successful NFL career and balance all the demands is that of a kid who has had a few years in college. The current situation, where you’ve got to go to college, is a good one. I would also say there are a lot of kids who have NFL bodies by the time they get to our game, whether it’s Adrian Peterson, or some of the big linemen. Physically, you could mistake them for an NFL player if you took away the signs of high school, like acne or whatever, but they don’t have the NFL maturity or character. The next few years through college allows them to build that.

Recently, we’ve spoken to lawyers who’ve found success in other industries, like music and filmmaking, but they all established strong legal careers, either beforehand or along the way. Do you have advice for young lawyers and law students looking to get into sports?

Law trains you to be a better presenter. I’d say, use all your lawyerly ability to follow your passion, because eventually you’ll build the right amount of energy to get your project up and running. My guess is that my confidence level would have been a lot less if I hadn’t been a lawyer first.