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Both of them
Join Date: Sep 2006
Posts: 10,225
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Using His Best Sales Pitch, Wadsworth Receives a Chance With the Jets
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/18/sp...in&oref=slogin
Quote:
As he did for years on the football field, Andre Wadsworth quickly sized up the men who were quietly taking his measure. This rectangular playing field was a long conference table in an office building in Atlanta, around which sat 20 men affiliated with the North American operations of the car manufacturer Porsche.
For the next 15 minutes, Wadsworth delivered his PowerPoint presentation exactly as he had practiced it over and over, including in a walk-through with his business partner at their hotel the previous night.
When he was done, Wadsworth, a former defensive end with the Arizona Cardinals, had the same euphoric feeling he would get when he took down the other team’s quarterback. He had nailed it.
Wadsworth walked out of the conference room earlier this spring assuming it would be a few days before he found out if his presentation had won him a coveted Porsche dealership in Destin, Fla.
He and his business partner, Bryan Myers, had not yet left the building when they heard from one of the men in the room. “Can you sit tight for 15 minutes?” the man said. At the end of the day, Wadsworth returned to New York having secured his sixth car dealership with a presentation that he worked on between his off-season training sessions with the Jets.
Eric Mangini, the Jets’ coach, said he was not surprised by Wadsworth’s salesmanship. Wadsworth, who has been out of football since 2000, is working out with the Jets because he sold Mangini and General Manager Mike Tannenbaum on his comeback.
“In interviewing him and getting to know him, he was so impressive that as much as we tried to scare him off and get him to reconsider, he was too determined,” Mangini said recently.
It is not the first time that Wadsworth has faced long odds. Coming out of Florida Christian High in Miami, where he was one of 70 students in his graduating class, Wadsworth was told he was not good enough to play N.C.A.A. Division I college football.
Stony Brook, a Division I-AA program on Long Island, was the only team to pursue him. Undeterred, Wadsworth walked on at Florida State and ended up starting in his freshman year.
He played nose guard but switched to defensive end before his senior year and went on to amass 16 sacks. The Cardinals drafted him No. 3 over all in 1998, behind two quarterbacks: the likely Hall of Famer Peyton Manning and the bust Ryan Leaf.
The Cardinals’ selection was widely hailed, but an unfortunate thing happened to Wadsworth on his way to becoming the next Bruce Smith. The bones in his knees turned to ash.
Over the next three seasons, Wadsworth was limited to 36 games, including 30 starts. By 2001, he was out of football and in the operating room. Since 1999, he has had 13 knee operations.
He may not have had a good knee to stand on, but Wadsworth had a leg up on retirement because of business contacts he had pursued at Florida State.
During his junior year, Wadsworth starting hanging out at a BMW, Mercedes and Porsche dealership in Tallahassee operated by Myers. Wadsworth’s father, Andrew, owned a family auto parts store in his native St. Croix, of the United States Virgin Islands, and Wadsworth had always been fascinated by cars.
“He asked me if I’d teach him the business,” Myers said in a recent telephone interview. He chuckled. “Pretty soon, he became a pain to me because I was trying to run a business and he was hanging around, asking all these questions.”
When doctors told Wadsworth his playing days were over, he teamed with Myers and poured all of his energy into building their partnership. Since 2001, Wadsworth has spent every week game-planning and competing and traveling. But his arena has been the boardroom, not the field.
Watching Wadsworth at work, Myers can see how all those years in football shaped him. His preparation is meticulous and he measures success in increments, as if he were trying to move the first-down chains, not mountains.
“Andre’s more of a realist,” Myers said. “I’m much more the optimist. Andre has to bring me back down to earth once in a while.”
Wadsworth, who is 32 and married with two children, says a lot of people think his football comeback is a fool’s mission. There is not much precedent for what he is trying to do. In 1995, Bobby Joe Edmonds, a running back who spent three seasons with the Seattle Seahawks and one with the Oakland Raiders, played with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after being sidelined five years with a leg injury.
Myers said he had a stock answer for those who asked him if Wadsworth was crazy: “If you have to ask, I can’t explain it to you.”
Wadsworth says he is not doing it for money or attention. He has more of both than he needs. What it boils down to, he said, is opportunity. He is doing it because for the first time in seven seasons, he is physically able to.
“You can never, ever play football after the age of 40,” Wadsworth said — unless you are a backup quarterback or kicker, he might have added. “So there’s a sense of urgency for me to enjoy it as much as I can.
“Being in minicamp again brings a youthful excitement. Just being here, it’s a whole new life.”
For the first time since high school, Wadsworth is lining up at linebacker. The pie chart that is his life is pretty carved up right now, what with trying to learn a new system, retrain his football muscles and honor his business commitments.
“I can tell you he’s a lot tireder,” Myers said. “I used to talk to him every night. Sometimes I call him now, and he’s asleep.”
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Using His Best Sales Pitch, Wadsworth Receives a Chance With the Jets
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