Michelle McKenna
An interest in Fantasy Football led to a 10-year career in real football for Enterprise native and Auburn graduate Michelle McKenna.
In 2012, McKenna was looking at the National Football League’s website to do some research involving her Fantasy Football team when she spotted a link for job openings with the league. At the time McKenna was working as the chief information officer for Constellation Energy in Baltimore, and she noticed that the NFL was seeking to fill the same role. So, McKenna applied and three months later was hired as the NFL’s first CIO.
Working for the NFL was something of a dream job for McKenna. She grew up in a football family (her brother was an offensive lineman for the Alabama Crimson Tide), and she worked in the Auburn athletic department during the 1980s at the height of head football coach Pat Dye’s successful tenure with the Tigers.
“I love football, and being able to be a part of bringing the game to the world means a lot,” McKenna said during an interview in 2020. “I always joke that my dad knew his kid would make it to the NFL, he just bet on the wrong one. It ended up being his Auburn girl rather than his Alabama boy.”
During her time with the NFL, McKenna was responsible for the league’s technology strategy across all activities, including the increased use of technology on the field. She also worked with the 32 NFL teams on increasing their technological footprints.
McKenna left the NFL in 2022 to become a senior advisor for the investment banking firm Evercore, with a focus on technology, entertainment and sports.
Gene Hallman
In the 1990s, Gene Hallman helped turn a bunch of old guys playing golf into one of the state’s premier non-football sporting events, launching a career for Hallman in sports event management that has lasted more than 30 years.
A native of South Carolina, Hallman arrived in Birmingham in 1991 to take over as director of a new Senior PGA Tour (now Champions Tour) golf tournament. While the event involved a number of famous pro golfers, including Arnold Palmer, the players were all a decade or more removed from their prime.
So, Hallman transformed the tournament into an unabashed social gathering. In particular, the normally staid pro-am events that preceded tournament play developed a festive atmosphere with the addition of a variety of celebrities, athletes and coaches joining the pros on the course.
“Just like in any business discipline, being innovative is so important,” Hallman said in a 2015 interview. “So often, sporting events are exercises in just getting through it. We don’t believe in that. We knowingly create extra work for ourselves because we want to take it to another level. We could have a sleepy pro-am. But by doing what we do, we attract non golf fans to the tournament.”
As the tournament grew, Hallman and Bruno’s Supermarkets CEO Ronald Bruno co-founded the Bruno Event Team in 1996. The company expanded over the years to provide management services to a variety of sports beyond golf, including Olympic soccer, football, baseball, auto racing, gymnastics, tennis and boxing.
In 2023, the company was renamed Eventive Sports, which was then acquired by the golf-related hospitality service company Troon this past January. Hallman continues serving as president of Eventive.
Dr. James Andrews
If they ever start a Hall of Fame specifically for sports surgeons, Dr. James Andrews is sure to make the cut.
A native of Homer, Louisiana, and a graduate of LSU (where he won an SEC championship in pole vaulting), Andrews worked at the Hughston Clinic in Columbus, Georgia, in the mid-1980s. While there, he made pioneering advancements in arthroscopy, a minimally invasive surgical procedure for the type of joint injuries that often occur among athletes.
Andrews moved to Birmingham in 1986 to start his own practice. He gained national attention after performing successful shoulder surgery on Boston Red Sox pitcher Roger Clemons, and quickly garnered a reputation as being the surgeon of choice for athletes facing potentially career-ending injuries.
Andrews has estimated that approximately 40% of his surgery clients have been professional athletes. His list of patients includes Troy Aikman, Drew Brees, Bo Jackson, Michael Jordan, Peyton and Eli Manning, Jack Nicklaus, Emmett Smith, John Smoltz, Tiger Woods and even wrestler Hulk Hogan.
Much of this work was done out of the Andrews Sports Medicine and Orthopaedic Center in Birmingham. He also founded the American Sports Medicine Institute, a non-profit dedicated to injury prevention, education and research.
Andrews officially retired earlier this year at age 81, bringing to a close a surgical career that positively affected numerous athletes. Former major league pitcher Al Leiter, for example, was about to quit baseball in 1991 after several injuries. But following an arthroscopic procedure performed by Andrews, Leiter pitched for another 13 seasons, winning two World Series titles and making $68 million.
“No question about it,” Leiter told mlb.com, “that doesn’t happen if not for Dr. Andrews.”
Hutch Hammond
Even as football grew into a multi-billion dollar business, one element of the game remained stuck in a cheap-looking past. Less than 10 years ago, sideline down markers still were primarily a manually operated contraption with numbers painted on plastic or metal plates that had to be flipped by hand, as if they were the world’s tallest rolodex.
That began to change in 2015 when Hutch Hammond, the vice president of operations at Victory Game Clocks — a sport-timing equipment manufacturer based in Roanoke — enlisted Auburn University’s School of Industrial and Graphic Design to create a digital LED down marker. “It’s one of those ideas that is so good, you wonder why it hadn’t been done before,” AU Industrial Design Professor Randy Bartlett said to Auburn’s online news service in 2016.
A group of 16 students worked on the project under the guidance of Auburn Football Equipment Manager Dana Marquez and others. They developed a battery-operated marker with a bright 15-inch LED light display in a rectangular box at the top signifying the down. At less than 9 pounds, the design was lighter than the manual markers being used, yet still sturdy enough to continue operating if dropped or run into by a player.
“The old dial-a-downs were so cumbersome and top heavy, they were just a pain to move around,” Marquez told the Auburn Undercover website in 2016. “The feedback for these has been awesome.”
Auburn unveiled the markers — called eDown — at the start of the 2016 season. Several other teams began purchasing eDown markers that year, including the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, and now they are commonplace throughout football.
Jeff Allen
A football game played in front of 100,000 fans and a national TV audience is no place to expect privacy. Yet that is what University of Alabama head athletic trainer Jeff Allen longed for whenever he tended to an injured athlete on the sidelines during Crimson Tide games. Instead, young players – many still in their teens – received initial treatment for potential torn ligaments or broken bones while fully exposed for all to see.
So, Allen began tinkering with the idea of a sideline medical tent that could be easily raised and collapsed whenever needed. Then in the summer of 2015, Dean of Engineering Charles Karr asked Allen if he had any project ideas his students could work on. Allen mentioned his concept, and Karr assigned it as a senior design project.
Within a month, students Jared Cassity and Patrick Powell helped Allen create and test a prototype of such a tent. Through the use of a circular hub, the tent could spring open in 5 seconds – complete with an examining table connected to the frame’s interior – and then fold over to form a secure covering that zipped closed.
“We created a private environment in an area that has zero privacy,” Allen said in a 2017 interview. “This thing is a game-changer when it comes to increasing the level of care you’re able to give an athlete on the sidelines.”
Allen and the students acquired a patent for the product they dubbed SidelinER, formed a business called Kinematic Sports (now Kinematic Company) and began marketing the tent. It was such an immediate hit that within two years the tent was used at all NFL games in addition to college.
Bill Battle
Birmingham native Bill Battle saw the value in name, image and likeness long before the term “NIL” became part of the sports vocabulary. In 1981, Battle formed Collegiate Licensing Company, with the University of Alabama as his first client.
Through CLC, universities began exercising their legal right to trademark the nicknames and logos of their sports teams. Before that, manufacturers that had been producing such products as hats, T-shirts, coffee mugs and posters adorned with a team’s official nickname / logo were able to keep the profits for themselves instead of sharing the revenue with the schools.
Allowing colleges to license these products might seem obvious now, but it seemed a strange concept back in 1981 when Battle began pitching the idea to officials at the University of Alabama, where he had played football in the early 1960s.
“I must have gone to six or seven offices asking where the licensing department was,” Battle told the Sports Business Journal in 2012. “They said, ‘Licensing for what?’ Nobody knew what I was talking about.”
They sure do now. As of 2021, according to the Sports Business Journal, sales of collegiate-licensed merchandise totaled nearly $7.7 billion. Battle made a few bucks off his idea as well, selling CLC to IMG for $108 million in 2007.
That was not the only impact Battle made in sports during his career. He was a member of the 1961 Crimson Tide national championship football team, was named head coach at Tennessee in 1970 at age 29 and led the Vols to a 59-22-2 record over seven seasons, and spent four years as the University of Alabama athletic director from 2013-2017.
Pat Dye Jr.
Former Auburn head football coach Pat Dye titled his biography “In the Arena.” That was appropriate, considering he spent most of his College Football Hall of Fame coaching career squarely in the sports spotlight.
Dye’s namesake oldest son, however, has been content to stay largely on the edges of the arena. In 1987, just as the elder Dye was starting a run of winning three consecutive Southeastern Conference championships at Auburn, Pat Dye Jr. began his career as an NFL player agent. Seven years later, in 1994, Dye Jr. founded his own agency in Atlanta, SportsTrust Advisors, which he still runs today as the CEO.
With his football upbringing and interest in legal issues — he has a law degree from Samford University — Dye Jr. decided to pursue a career as a sports attorney and player agent. He did so without exactly receiving the blessing of his father, who apparently did not have a high regard for the sports agent profession.
“When I first approached him about it, he said, ‘You’re out of your mind. I don’t want you doing that. It’s got a horrible reputation,’” Dye Jr. told the Mobile-Press Register in 2010. “I think he knew a lot better than I did what I was getting into and how difficult it was going to be.”
But Dye Jr. ended up forging a successful, long-term career. His firm has represented more than 30 NFL Pro Bowl players over the years, including four-time Pro Bowler Andrew Whitworth. SportsTrust currently represents more than 40 NFL players.
Paul Finebaum
After Paul Finebaum arrived in Alabama from his native Tennessee in 1980 to work as a sportswriter for the Birmingham Post-Herald, he stirred up animosity with some unexpected commentary. Namely, he occasionally criticized legendary Alabama head football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, something that few of his peers at the time were willing to do.
This might not have led to many friendships for Finebaum in his new home, but it did lead him into what has become a long and lucrative career. From his columns with the Post-Herald to his syndicated sports talk radio show to his current television roles with ESPN and the SEC Network, Finebaum has displayed a willingness to offer scathing critiques of any figure within the world of sports (and sometimes politics).
While there are those who took offense to his caustic comments, many others simply took notice. Sports Illustrated selected the highly rated Paul Finebaum Radio Network one of the top 12 sports radio shows in the country in 2004, then named Finebaum as one of the 20 most powerful people in all of sports media in 2013. He has garnered similar accolades over the years from numerous newspapers and other outlets such as Bleacher Report. And in 2020, Finebaum received the Mel Allen Media Award for his career contributions to sports media.
In a 2014 interview with Birmingham Magazine, Finebaum insisted that he did not pay much attention to any of the praise he received. “I’ve always been rather cynical,” Finebaum said. “I’ve never believed my own press clippings, so to speak. But I still get on the air.”
Ivan Maisel
For anybody interested in a career in sports media, the primary benchmarks over the years have been Sports Illustrated and ESPN. Mobile native Ivan Maisel has worked for both.
After graduating from Stanford University in 1981, Maisel’s sports-writing career got off to a fortuitous start when he was hired by The Atlanta Constitution and assigned to cover the Clemson football team. It seemed like a good fit for a 22-year-old rookie reporter, since the Tigers had gone 6-5 the previous season and were not expected to be a major story. But Clemson surprised the college football world by turning in a 12-0 campaign and winning the national championship, providing exposure for Maisel’s work that helped propel his career.
Things progressed rapidly from there, with stops at the Orlando Sentinel, Dallas Morning News and Newsday. That was followed by a five-year run at Sports Illustrated, before he was hired in 2002 to be the first full-time college football writer for the ESPN.com website. In that role, Maisel regularly made appearances on ESPN television and radio shows.
Maisel spent nearly 20 years at ESPN before joining Nashville-based On3Media in 2021 as vice president and senior writer. “Our goal at On3 is to be the college sports destination for the fans who love not just the games, but the spectacle,” Maisel wrote in announcing the decision.
Maisel has been honored eight times for Best Story by the Football Writers Association of America, and in 2016 received the FWAA’s Bert McGrane Award for career achievement. He also was named one of the 10 best sports columnists in the nation by the Associated Press Sports Editors in 2019.
Danny Sheridan
For anyone who has had an interest in sports gambling over the past 40-plus years, odds are they are well familiar with Danny Sheridan. The Mobile native arguably is the most famous oddsmaker in the country, having been propelled into national prominence through his 30-year role as a sports analyst for USA Today beginning in 1982.
A former Mobile-area real estate agent, Sheridan began receiving national attention in the late 1970s for his sports prognostications. He made appearances on such television shows as Good Morning America and was profiled by such publications as the New York Times, Sports Illustrated and Esquire. In the 1977 Sports Illustrated article, Sheridan accurately predicted his own future. “I’d love to quit real estate,” he was quoted as saying. “I have this talent. Maybe start a tip sheet or something.”
Sheridan’s fame and influence increased over the ensuing decades. In 1993, The Sporting News ranked him number 52 on its list of the “100 Most Powerful People in Sports.” He even has been parodied on Saturday Night Live, a sure sign that a person has crossed over from just sports to overall cultural significance.
Now in his 70s, Sheridan remains a highly sought-after voice when it comes to sports odds and predictions. His website states that during football season he does “15-20 national radio, newspaper and TV interviews weekly.”
The irony in all this is that while Sheridan has become rich and famous setting odds and predicting games, he insists that he personally does not wager on sports. “But I’m glad people do,” Sheridan said in 2018, “because I make a living off of it.”
Cary Estes is a Birmingham-based freelance contributor to Business Alabama.
This article appears in the August 2024 issue of Business Alabama.
