Why former sports stars are pure gold
A clothing line, shoes, a skincare range, property development, owning a supermarket. Jane Phare looks at what elite sports stars do after their competitive careers are over and why businesses should jump at the chance to hire them.
Former All Whites star Tim Brown remembers what he calls his snakes-and-ladders moment, at an airport on his way to London. He’d spent years writing “athlete” as his occupation on customs forms; this time — “retired” at the age of 32 — he wrote “student”.
Like a game of snakes and ladders, all of a sudden Brown had slid backwards.
“I just remember my heart sinking,” Brown tells the Herald from his headquarters in San Francisco where he works at Allbirds, the eco-friendly shoe company he co-founded.
It got worse in London. He couldn’t find a job despite being armed with two degrees, after studying at the University of Cincinatti and the London School of Economics, using his football prizemoney to complete a Masters in management.
Today, Brown could be forgiven for thinking he’s landed on a snake again in the light of the welldocumented plunge of Allbirds. The share price soared after the company went public in November 2021, pushing its value up to nearly US$4 billion ($6.6b). Not bad for a dream founded in an apartment in Wellington’s Cuba Street on the back of a Kickstarter campaign in 2014.
Now, faced with multi-milliondollar losses and a plummeting share price, Brown admits the experience has been “brutal”.
But, he says, he’s faced far greater rejection and challenge in his 37 years than that which Allbirds is going through. Those highs and lows, wins and losses in his years playing professional football taught him resilience and to just keep going.
“Sometimes you’re playing really well but you’re not winning games. It feels like that a little bit at the moment at Allbirds. We’re doing some really good work but it’s been a brutal experience as a public company.”
However, like sport, things can turn and change, Brown says.
“I think sport teaches you that. In the fullness of time you can win if you stick with it.”
Head-hunting in the sporting arena
That stickability and resilience is why those who’ve worked with high-level athletes say top sportspeople possess skills that transfer well into the business world and that corporates and business-owners would do well to have them on their teams.
Those skills include hard work and commitment, collaboration and working with a team, dealing with adversity — and punctuality. It’s a lesson Highlanders captain Billy Harmon and flanker Sean Withy learned the hard way this month when, after turning up late to a team meeting, they were demoted to the bench for the clash against the Waratahs.
Mental skills guru Gilbert Enoka, who spent 23 years with the All Blacks, says athletes develop an enduring set of skills during their sporting careers, and learn to manage setbacks.
He tells athletes to work on qualities that can’t be taken away from them — good character and mindset.
Enoka, who has knocked around sports fields for well over 40 years working with the Silver Ferns, the Black Caps, the Crusaders, the All Blacks, Chelsea Football Club and, later this year, with the New South Wales’ Blues squad during the State of Origin rugby league series, tells athletes to back themselves.
“You’ll never ever rise above the opinion you have of yourself,” he’ll say.
Ignoring the doubters
Mindset, and a determination to make a dream become a reality, has worked twice in the life of former Warriors and Kiwis star Lewis (Lewi) Brown. Teachers at Papanui High School in Christchurch told him to let go of his NRL dream; that was before he was picked up by the Sydney Roosters as a 17-year-old — and the rest is history.
His second dream was to start a men’s clothing brand and when Brown retired in 2018, the doubters came back.
“You’ll never be able to do a clothing brand, you’re a rugby league player,” he was told.
Brown: “People only know you for that 80 minutes on the field, that’s what they get to judge you by”.
He was playing for the Kiwis during the 2016 Four Nations tournament at Liverpool’s Anfield Stadium when his sister called to tell him his father had committed suicide.
Brown, then 32, was raised by a solo mum and hadn’t spoken to his father since he was 21.
“I always thought I would have this adult conversation with him, build a bridge and let bygones be bygones.”
When he returned to Christchurch for the funeral, he discovered his grandfather and great-grandfather had also taken their own lives.
“The only thing that we share in common is the middle name Earl.”
When he launched his clothing line, he named it Earls Collection and, within a short space of time, proved the doubters wrong.
Six years later, Brown is talking from a pop-up Earls store at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, his online sales are going well and he now thinks he’s better known in Australia for Earls Collection than the way he performed on the field.
In addition, he’s been asked to do collaborations with other brands, including an Asics shoe. Drawing on his Māori heritage (Ngāi Tahu and Ngāti Tama ) Brown designed the Earls Asics GT-2160 sneaker, trimmed with shades of pounamu and with inner soles printed like pāua shell.
He’s also done two collaborations with Casio G-shock watches and with New Era hats and there are more in the pipeline.
A success story, yes, but the transition from “footy” to business hasn’t been easy.
As Earls grew, Brown had to learn about accounts, cashflow, marketing, suppliers and pattern-making.
“When I’m in big meetings, I still have imposter syndrome. I just ask people to dumb it down for me. The silly person in the room is the one who doesn’t ask the question.”
Despite the challenges, Brown wouldn’t have it any other way.
“It’s like anything, you’ve got to put work into it. I’d rather fail at something I want to do than fail at something I don’t want to do.”
‘A tectonic shunt’
Having worked with thousands of athletes in his career, Enoka describes the transition from a highlevel sporting life to a “normal” life as “a tectonic shunt”.
“I haven’t met one person who has gone from playing to retiring that hasn’t had challenges. It’s just a matter of degree.”
Brown values advice from a mate, former All Black Conrad Smith, who encouraged him to apply the same level of energy and enthusiasm to things off the field as he did to football and to take notice of people he met along the way.
Networking on the back of his All Blacks and Blues career is something on which Sean “Fitzy” Fitzpatrick is an expert. He retired at 34 with a passport full of stamps and a battered body. But he also had friends and contacts for life and lessons that would later back him in his business life.
At the age of 40, he left for London with his wife Bronwyn and their two young daughters without really knowing if he could make it abroad.
“My whole career was like that. I never thought I was good enough to be there and it made me work harder.”
In London, his reputation and mana opened doors: lunching with Sir Doug Myers, attending Sir Edmund Hillary’s memorial service at Windsor Castle and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa’s 60th birthday party, where he and fellow former All Black Zinzan Brooke performed a haka in front of Princess Anne.
At a British Chamber of Commerce trade dinner in Moscow, Fitzpatrick met Kiwi billionaire Stephen Jennings, an All Blacks fan and chief executive of Renaissance Capital, one of Russia’s largest investment banks. He asked Fitzpatrick to speak at a Renaissance conference in Amsterdam and from there, he began hosting some of Europe’s wealthiest investors at rugby and World Cup events.
He and Bronwyn later bought their own box at Twickenham Rugby Stadium, launching a successful business hosting corporate guests, which in turn became a valuable networking tool for Fitzpatrick’s speaking circuit work.
Now, Fitzpatrick has started a business placing foreign students into top UK schools with a colleague he met while working for Jennings, an example of the value of networking.
His advice to young athletes is to start planning early, be respectful to people on their way up, ask for help or advice and surround themselves with the right people.
Former Silver Ferns captain Bernice Mene, who played competitive netball for 10 years from the age of 17, agrees that skills learned in the sporting arena translate well into business.
Mene, who is head of people and programmes at Hyundai, says those skills include understanding about good leadership, getting a team to be high-performing, pre-and-post analysis, being able to coach people and to be coached.
Mene, who worked as a secondary school language teacher while she was playing netball, also completed post-graduate study in career counselling for elite performers through Victoria University in Melbourne, later working with highperformance basketball and softball sportspeople in New Zealand.
“In many ways it helped me understand what I was going through but I was also able to help others.”
Tim Brown, whose Allbirds company employs nearly 1000 people, says there are opportunities on both sides for employers and pro athletes who work hard, learn fast, can deal with pressure and know how to integrate with a team.
“What organisation wouldn’t want to tap into that type of character and talent? Certainly our experience at Allbirds is they can make a big difference,” Brown says.
Athletes, given the opportunity, are extraordinary performers.
Helen Regan, a player development manager who has worked with the Phoenix since 2007, says of 10 skillsets that employers might be looking for, sporting professionals will tick eight of the boxes.
She encourages athletes to highlight their sporting achievements on their CVs.
“That’s a huge point of difference. If you’ve got a pile of 100 CVs and someone’s got this amazing sports history, it immediately marks them out as different to other people in a good way.”
But Tim Brown warns that there’s no easy road, despite sporting prowess. He remembers packing textbooks and sitting economics exams while on tour. And, much to the amusement of his teammates, he worked on his wool shoe idea while he was playing for the Phoenix, years before Allbirds was launched.
Memories fade fast
In the heady days of triumphant fist-pumps and winning medals, sponsors come clamouring. But memories fade fast and so do the sponsors.
It’s what comes next that counts. Fitzpatrick: “If you’re a highperforming sports star in your 30s and you’re just starting to wonder about life afterwards, it’s probably already too late.”
It was charity work after a 20-year high-performance career that eventually morphed into a business which Rob Waddell now runs, working with schools, sporting organisations and charities to link them with businesses and sponsors.
The former Olympic rower and America’s Cup grinder retired in his late 30s, spent eight years as Chef de Mission for New Zealand, leading teams in Olympic and Commonwealth Games, and then began to do volunteer work for charities. Now that’s his job.
His advice to high-level athletes is to be dedicated to sport but also think about study, qualifications or an apprenticeship along the way.
“I think it gives you an important balance so that when you’re lining up to face the blow torch, it doesn’t all come down to the gold medal. You realise you’ve got other things going on in your life.”