MSM Feature – Bus Cook, he’s more than a “One Man Show”

It was, without question, the greatest round of golf in James “Bus” Cook’s life. And he has no idea what he shot. That’s because his golf score that day doesn’t matter. All that matters is he scored one of greatest NFL players of all time, and in the process changed the direction of his life.
The year was 1989, and Cook was into the second decade of running a successful law practice located in Hattiesburg. He received a call one morning from a friend asking whether he would be willing to take a couple of local college students out for an afternoon of golf.
One of those students was a young quarterback at Southern Mississippi named Brett Favre.
While they were playing, Favre said to Cook, “I’ve heard a lot of good things about you, and I wanted to know if you might be interested in helping me.”
To which Cook replied, “What kind of trouble are you in?”
Favre chuckled. “No, I’m not in any trouble. I might get a chance to play pro football, and I’ll need somebody to represent me.”
Cook shook his head. “Son, I don’t know anything about that business.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about playing pro football,” Favre responded. “But I’d love for you to talk to my parents and help me.”
Twenty years later, while recounting this story, Cook said, “I guess if you’re going to start in this business (as a sports agent), then Brett Favre was a pretty good one to start with.”
Was he ever. Cook’s career change from a fulltime lawyer to a fulltime sports agent basically happened by accident. And it took off largely because his initial client became a three-time league MVP and Super Bowl-winning quarterback for the Green Bay Packers.
To this day, even though Cook has represented numerous NFL players over the years – including Steve McNair, Randy Moss and Jay Cutler – he is still primarily associated with Favre.
“For awhile, I didn’t know if I even had a name anymore. I was just Brett Favre’s agent,” Cook said. “And that’s fine. But I’m also all these other guys’ agent, too. I try to treat them all equally. But I realize that Brett gets a lot of attention.”
All that attention has complicated Cook’s life in recent years, as the drama surrounding Favre’s fluctuating retirement plans has captivated members of the media from Green Bay to New York to Minnesota to Bristol, Conn. (home of ESPN). On days when the rumor mill is churning at full speed, Cook said his cell phone rarely stops ringing.
“It’s nuts. If I talked with everybody who called, I’d be on the telephone all day long,” Cook said. “These reporters are like kids with their daddy at the park wanting to ride the slide. ‘Me first, daddy. Me first.’ They all want to get the story first.
“And one day before I die, I want to meet this guy named The Source. He’s like Santa Clause. He is everywhere. This guy named The Source, he knows more about everything than anybody I’ve met.”
Cook laughs as he says this. That’s because no matter how frustrating his job can become at times, he knows it is a much better life than what awaited him had he never left the coal mines of his home state of West Virginia.
Cook’s father spent 50 years working in those mines in order to support the raising of his six children. Cook seemed destined to follow in those dark, dusty footsteps, and had already begun making trips into the mines while still in high school.
But Cook also was a solid high-school basketball player, and his ticket out of the mines came in the form of a scholarship to American University in Washington D.C. The head coach at that time, Al Kyber, made the trip to tiny Man, W.V., to meet with Cook’s father and offer Cook the scholarship. When Kyber arrived, Cook had to be summoned from the mines, where he had already started working for the day.
“I never went back in them after that,” Cook said.
Instead, after graduating from American in 1970, Cook enrolled in law school at the University of Mississippi. He received his law degree in 1974 and began working as an attorney for Fairchild Construction Company in Hattiesburg, a job he held until he saved up enough money to open his own private practice in 1976.
“I had never been to Hattiesburg, and I instantly liked it,” Cook said. “I loved West Virginia. It’s a great place. I still love to go back to visit. But the weather is kind of tough. It’s cold. And I just really liked Mississippi. One thing led to another, and I just ended up staying here, working and building a practice.”
For more than 10 years, Cook was content simply to maintain a traditional law practice. He briefly looked into the possibility of representing NBA players, but that didn’t work out and Cook had no further plans of venturing into the world of sports agency.
Until he was introduced to Favre, that is. Then shortly afterward, he began following the exploits of a thrilling young quarterback at Alcorn State named Steve McNair.
“I had done a little work for his mom with a mortgage situation on her home, so I knew he was a pretty good player,” Cook said. “And then all of a sudden you started hearing about this guy every week.”
“So I went to his games. It was exciting football to watch. It was some of the best times I’ve ever had. We’d meet with the family and let them know that, at the right time, we’d be interested in talking to them about representing Steve. And fortunately we were able to do that.”
With Favre and McNair as his foundation, Cook’s new career was off to a stellar start. A flurry of players soon followed, including Ken Lucas, Fred Smoot, Adalius Thomas and Jeremy Bridges. Through his connections in West Virginia, he was able to sign Randy Moss out of Marshall.
“I just had a lot of good fortune starting out,” Cook said. “Once we had names like Brett Favre and Steve McNair, it just evolved from there. I’ve had a lot of really, really good players from Mississippi. I’ve been very lucky.”
Though Cook definitely has had fun being involved with the game of football, he says the business itself is not all fun and games. For every Favre and McNair who signs a multi-million dollar contract, Cooks said there are two or three players whose careers never pan out as expected and who end up costing Cook more money than he is able to make for them.
“In the NFL, the maximum percentage (for an agent) is a 3-percent fee,” Cook said. “Let’s say a guy gets drafted in the fifth round and gets a $200,000 signing bonus. So you make $6,000. Then he gets a $300,000 salary. That’s another $9,000. So you make $15,000.
“Well, you’ve probably spent $20,000 getting this kid ready with training, transportation, housing, loans, whatever. You have an office, secretaries, travel expenses, recruiting expenses. So if a player doesn’t get drafted very high, it’s not as lucrative as people think it is.”
And then there is the hassle of juggling dozens of athletes who can have fragile egos, as well as family members who are counting on the athlete receiving a big payday. When things do not go as planned, Cook often is the one who receives much of the blame, and the verbal criticism.
“A mother got very upset with my office recently and said she was disappointed at the way we had handled her son,” Cook said. “I took offense at that, because I know we had tried our best. At some point you just have to say he’s not going to make it.
“A lot of times guys will say, ‘You spend too much time on Brett Favre. You don’t have time for me.’ I talk with other players all the time. All they know is what they see in the paper and on TV. There’s a jealousy factor involved.”
Plus, Cook said there is much more to being a sports agent than simply signing players to lucrative contracts. That simply is the only part of the business that is ever talked about publicly.
“It’s not a bad business, but it’s not all glitz and glamour either There’s a lot of hard work involved,” Cook said. “You don’t just negotiate the contract and then say, ‘Send me a check.’ That’s just the beginning of the stuff that you do as an agent.
“We handle all of our players’ marketing. We help monitor financial advisors. We get monthly reports to see what they’re doing with our players’ money. We talk to them if we need to. We’ll help a player find a home. If a player asks me to come, I’ll sit down and meet with a realtor and see what kind of offer to make on a house.
“I’ll talk with a guy about a situation involving a girlfriend or buying a car or a family matter or whatever. There’s a broad spectrum of things that we do.”
That is the side of the business Cook said is rarely seen by the general public. He understands that sports agents do not have the best reputation, and he acknowledges there are a few “bad apples” in the profession. But for the most part, he said, agents truly care about their players’ well-being.
“There are a lot of good people in this business who are representing their clients to the best of their abilities,” Cook said. “They’re hired to do a job. They’re expected to represent their client’s interest, because the teams have somebody in the same position representing the team’s interest.
By and large the players don’t know or have any experience to deal with these things. An agent’s job is to help negotiate those deals.
“It’s not that agents are greedy or bad. It’s a very tough, competitive business. And there are those who stray across the lines and do whatever they have to do to sign players. But there are also a lot of very good individuals in this business. It’s like any profession. It’s just that this is such a high-profile profession.”
These days, it seems nobody is more high-profile than Favre. And though Cook is quick to praise Favre and acknowledge how much the quarterback has meant to his career, it also is obvious he would like to be known as being more than a one-player agent.
“Everybody keeps asking me, ‘What’s Brett going to do?’ Well you know, I have other players who I wish you’d ask me about,” Cook said. “That can be frustrating. Because I love them all. I really do. And you hurt for them. The thing I hate the most is when a kid doesn’t get drafted, or when he gets cut. Sometimes I take it too personally when a guy gets cut.
“Certainly this job pays well if you have the right players. But more than anything, I really want to help these guys. I enjoy watching them grow and mature. The Brett Favres and the guys who have been in the league awhile, they’re fine. It’s the new kids coming along who you want to try to get them started out on the right path and try to get them through the first few years in the league.
“Then when you do that, you can turn around and say maybe you had a small part to do with these guys being the people they are. I want to think that we’ve done a good job for our guys. All of them.” – MSM