And Give Up Showbiz? by Josh Young

Author:Josh Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BenBella Books
Published: 2014-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

Fred comments as homegrown Pensacola congressman Joe Scarborough shakes hands with Governor Lawton Chiles.

After Scarborough stepped down from Congress, the firm hired him. “Unfortunately, it proved that an ex-politician has absolutely zero power as a rainmaker for litigation,” Fred says. “An ex-politician may be helpful to a law firm in lobbying and government work, but not for the type of litigation we do. It wasn’t just Joe Scarborough. The same thing happened to Reubin Askew when he returned to practice after serving as governor of Florida.”

Scarborough soon switched firms to Beggs & Lane, Fred’s longtime rival. Not long afterward, he moved into television. He found huge success, and now hosts the MSNBC program Morning Joe, which consistently beats CNN in total viewers. “He’s far better on TV than he was hustling up clients,” Fred says. “I believe Morning Joe is the best morning show on television.” In 2011, Time named Scarborough one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Fred was quick to come up with ideas for businesses, and he had plenty of them. But he often didn’t follow through.

“I would have been ideal working at one of the large ad agencies because I can sell,” he says. “I can come up with an idea and sell it. BLAB was one of the first reality TV channels in the country. Imagine if I would have put together an experienced team and gone national with it. As great as I was at throwing out the idea and funding it, I always let somebody else run with the ball. Had I been better at follow-through, I could have been a billionaire.”

Several ambitious ideas never got off the ground. One was a proposal to create a mixed martial arts sanctioning body, which would have been named the World Alliance of Mixed Martial Arts, or WAMMA for short. Mixed martial arts features competitors from various martial arts and Olympic sports, including karate, jiu-jitsu, tae kwon do, kickboxing, and judo. However, it had no unifying body, so there were hundreds of different champions spread around the world. A sanctioning body would recognize one champion, and for revenue purposes that belt could be sold to a sponsor (e.g., the Budweiser WAMMA Heavyweight Champion).

Fred recruited several of his heavyweight friends to be on the WAMMA board—Jack Kemp, former Buffalo Bills coach Kay Stephenson, and Terdema Ussery. He even asked his friend LeRoy Neiman to draw some illustrations for the presentations. “We wanted to be able to standardize the sport and enable the best fighters to face off against each other, giving it legitimacy and integrity,” he says. “But in the end it was too complicated to bring all the sports together and agree.”

Fred also came up with a “skilled” poker concept that would capitalize on public interest in poker, yet take the luck out of the game and increase the emphasis on skill. The idea was based on the concept of duplicate bridge, which heightens the element of competition. Again, he enlisted Neiman to paint a colorful logo.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.