Dan Morrell: In the 1970s, women's professional basketball was just getting off the ground in the US, but in Europe, it was thriving. There were these club teams in places like Sicily, Valenciennes, France that had a dedicated following, lucrative corporate sponsorships, and paid the players relatively high wages. Around this time, Bruce Levy (MBA 1977) became the first ever agent for women's professional basketball, negotiating player contracts around the world. But as he tells associate editor Julia Hanna in this episode of Skydeck. It wasn't a job he necessarily wanted.

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Julia Hanna: You're someone who was really there from the very beginning of women's basketball in a sense.

Bruce Levy: Professional women's basketball.

Julia Hanna: Professional women's basketball.

Levy: Yeah.

Hanna: Right. Can you talk a little bit about how American women basketball players began playing professionally in Europe?

Levy: Well, it happened like this. There were leagues in Europe-- very amateur except that the players would get paid modest sums. And no one really earned a living playing basketball, but women did get something.

There was very little interest, and it happened that a team in France contacted my partner at the time. We got a call. My partners Bob and Pat Kennedy had established the first basketball camps for girls and women in the United States. OK? This goes back 40 some odd years.

So a call came in from a team in France that wanted to get an American player. This was a novel idea. Make a long story short, they gave me a player. I dealt with the team. It was a very small money deal. OK. So we sent her over.

A few weeks later, I guess she was a rousing success. Another team called us from France and asked for a player. And by the time the season's over, we had sent about four, five players to France. And when the next season started, we got some contact from teams in Spain, and we found ourselves with about a dozen players.

Now, as far as I know, Americans had never played professionally overseas. The players created quite a sensation because they were so much better than anyone really in the entire country. All of a sudden started to generate interest, and then just by an incredible stroke of luck, really, I was offered an opportunity.

Actually, I was in the partnership called Kennedy-Levy Associates, but we were about 25, 30 years ahead of our time in marketing women's basketball. So we had accomplished a lot, amazingly. We got some major companies to sponsor tournaments and awards, but still, I didn't see there was any future in women's basketball.

And one of the last things we had done was create the first professional marathon ever in the United States. After two years, we had started to look in other areas. Make a long story short, I had gotten Jordache, which was then raging hot jeans company, to sponsor the marathons. I had worked closely with the Nakash brothers, the owners.

And they just out of the clear blue made an offer to me to be a consultant, to leave the partnership, become a consultant for them in international marketing. They never had a marketing department to basically license their product overseas.

Again, make a long story short, I asked my partners if I could get out of our agreement. And they said I could do so under two conditions-- one, that I find someone to replace me, which I was able to do very easily, and the second was that I take this business of placing players overseas and continue to do it.

Now, ironically, I was very reluctant to agree to that because I decided I just wanted to be a consultant, and I was done with women's basketball. However, I didn't want to leave on bad terms. So to have an amicable split, I agreed that they would forward any inquiries to me. And then I would ask them, after talking with the team, to give me a recommend basketball player.

I didn't think much would amount to it. But as it turned out, by pure luck, my job with Jordache involved going to different countries and interviewing companies that wanted to be their licensees.

So first thing, I was there for a week. They sent me to Sweden. What I decided to do after I had spent time with several businesses-- I had the weekend-- I went to visit the Swedish Federation. It was just on a lark.

And I asked them about the possibility of taking an American player, and the reaction was surprise, but they were very positive about it. And we ended up placing several players there, and within a matter of a couple years, all of a sudden I found that I had about three dozen players in maybe 10 different countries.

And then calls started coming in. Remember, this is before emails and the-- so most of the contact was by phone or by fax, but started to get inquiries from other countries.

And then I started to visit them on my own and basically open up the country, open up Israel, open pretty much the entire of Europe, Japan. Started in South America with Venezuela. And it just blossomed. It just nothing I ever could have anticipated. Just remarkable.

Hanna: So at that time, there were no professional women basketball players in the United States. In other words, there was no professional women's basketball league at the time.

Levy: Actually, there was, and this is what had prompted Bob and Pat Kennedy to start Kennedy-Levy Associates, OK?

A league had started up, I guess, 1978. I think maybe a year before we started our company. It was well-intentioned, but it was done at a very modest level. Players were paid just a pittance, and it certainly didn't last very long. The league folded in a short time, but still, it was the first time that women played professionally. But no one took notice of it. I didn't pay much attention to it. I knew it was going to fail.

But they did have these leagues overseas, and because they were done mostly as amateur club-oriented operations-- and this thing I should point out now because this is a big misconception a lot of people have. People assume that because, the United States, we have high school, college basketball, then it leads to the pros, that the same system is in effect pretty much throughout the world.

Well, Julia, that couldn't be more wrong. In almost every country, they do not have a competitive high school basketball. They play, but there are no leagues. There's no leagues with-- at the college level in basketball.

Instead, when someone has an interest in basketball or almost any other sport, rather than learn to play and play competitively at the collegiate level, they do so at the club level.

You've probably heard of Arsenal, the big football team, the soccer team. Well, they come from the social clubs. And just as it is with soccer, in almost every small town to large city, there's one or more clubs where girls and boys go from the time they're very young, and they learn to play competitive sports. And it's through the clubs, for the most part, that the professional teams are formed and the rivalries begin.

So that's an important distinction because United States women's basketball was very-- was starting to get popular by the late 70s. It was starting at the collegiate level, but it was very difficult to convert that to professional interest because people-- when people were rooting, it wasn't so much for women's basketball, it really was for their college.

And that is why people are surprised that you can have teams that have budgets far in excess of a WNBA team, yet maybe they'll get 5,000 to a game, and they'll charge maybe $5 for a ticket. It's because the clubs are sponsored.

It's the passion that fans feel for the clubs and the money that local companies, sometimes national companies, give to the clubs that basically subsidize women's basketball. They're operated to bring glory to the city or to the club in whose name they operate.

Hanna: Mm-hmm.

Levy: Does that make sense?

Hanna: It does, and that translates, as you've said in the past, to higher salaries in Europe than--

Levy: Exactly.

Hanna: in the United States.

Levy: Substantially. There are top players who earn as much in one month overseas as they earn for an entire WNBA season. The WNBA salary structure is quite rigid, and this, I think, was part of the genius in establishing the league to prevent-- and this is, I think, one of the main reasons that every other league that started failed miserably, because they couldn't control salaries. And when some superstars develop, they ask for a lot of money. Things start to collapse.

Well, the WNBA has a system where for first four years, from the time you're drafted, your salary is set. And they also have a maximum salary for an individual, which is a little over $100,000, as well as a maximum that a team could spend.

Hanna: Now, you as an agent are in a position often and have been in a position often of negotiating for your players. Do you have a strategy when you go into these negotiation situations? Because I can imagine that sometimes they get a little tense or difficult.

Levy: Well, they can get really tense, and the strategy is-- first of all, when I negotiate, we're talking about contracts outside the United States. In the WNBA, there's very little latitude in negotiating contracts.

So for the contracts abroad, number one, what I want to make sure I do is to not offend the team that's offering a contract. In most cases, my players get multiple offers from multiple countries. And I want to make sure that wherever they end up they're not resented because once they leave, if a player goes to Russia or she goes to Italy or Turkey, she's kind of out of my sphere of influence.

If there's a problem, I have to fly over to another continent to deal with it. So I try to avoid situations where a player, because the team resents that I was so difficult in negotiating and got her so much money, where they take it out on her. They don't give her good housing, or they just ostracize her. I want there to be, more than anything else, a harmonious relationship between team management and the player.

And so I'll go to a certain point. If I can't get the money I want, I'll just go to another country, or I'll go to another team. But I try not to play hardball because I learned early on that's a strategy that doesn't work.

What I do play hardball with-- it's not the money but it's certain other provisions. For instance, making sure that she's housed in a secure area. Also, in every contract-- and I just started this without thinking in the very first contract I did, but I've kept it ever since. Every player who got sent overseas with one of my contracts has the club commit to providing free professional language instruction.

These are items that I find-- I consider non-negotiable, and that's where I'm really tough. But when it comes to money, I'm surprisingly easy to deal with.

Hanna: So what was it that made you realize that those foreign language classes were an essential part of any contract that you negotiate?

Levy: Horror stories, horror stories. When I first started sending players over, the biggest problem that most of them had, the toughest adjustment was getting by and not speaking the local language.

One other thing I could tell you that's very different between international teams and teams in the United States is that, for the most part, in women's basketball, surprisingly, those teams are located not in the big cities but in small towns.

So you don't have a team in Italy in the first league in Rome. I don't know that there ever has been. You don't have a team in Paris that plays in France. There's one team in Stockholm. There's no team in Budapest.

And the reason for that is pretty simple. If there was a team in, let's say, Rome, well, it would get no publicity. It would get no fans because there'd be too much competition from men's football, men's basketball, and other sports.

In some of these small towns that are actually powerhouses of women's basketball, women's basketball is the biggest sport there. And when a women's basketball team becomes internationally strong, it brings great pride to that particular town. So that makes it very, very different.

So I would find myself sending a player to a city where she couldn't find anyone-- there were a few who might speak just passable English, but-- could you imagine how alienating it is to have to live-- you're only playing a few games, and that's two hours, and you practice. But the rest of the time you're talking about 20 some hours a day, seven days a week without a break.

What do you do? How do you adjust? Your teammates might speak a little English, and that has changed over the years. But certainly, in the first 20, 25 years, it was just such an isolating experience unless you had the players and the team prepared for each other. And getting language instruction was absolutely vital.

Hanna: I just have to wonder, once you became an agent for women's basketball players, did you ever find yourself thinking, gosh, I could do this for men's basketball players and make so much more money? Why did you stick with the women? What's rewarding about it?

Levy: I just felt with women's basketball that-- I know it sounds-- I don't know. It sounds a little corny, but I had a mission. Once I started to see that this was becoming a real opportunity for women, I wanted to see it through. I wanted to see it as far as it could go, so it was wonderful when I saw the WNBA.

But even then, it wasn't-- it still hasn't reached the point where I could say, OK, everything is ideal. But, still, after about 25 or 30 years, I felt that we'd accomplished pretty much everything that we could. There were marketing deals. Things were pretty much stable.

But I never wanted to leave that because you can't start something like that and abandon it. And I don't regret. Believe me, I don't regret any lost income or anything like that because the psychic income that you get from doing something that you're truly passionate about is absolutely the most important thing.

Skydeck is produced by the External Relations department at Harvard Business School and edited by Craig McDonald. It is available at iTunes or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

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