Jay-Z Ready To Conquer The Sports World With Roc Nation Agency

This is what Robinson Cano said a few months ago when it was announced that he was dumping his agent — and everybody’s All-America — Scott Boras for Jay-Z:

“At this point in my career, I am ready to take a more active role in my endeavors on and off the field. I am confident that the pairing of Roc Nation Sports and CAA Sports will be essential in helping me accomplish my short- and long-term goals. I am making this important decision now so I can keep my focus on helping the Yankees succeed in 2013, while minimizing any distractions for me and my teammates.”

You better believe Roc Nation Sports is Jay-Z. You know about CAA Sports, which has become a bigger and bigger player over the past five years. And the best part of Cano’s statement is the part where he says he went with Jay-Z as a way of “minimizing” distractions for him and his teammates.

His teammates are like most athletes, and usually don’t care who is repping the guy in the locker next to them. The distraction of Jay-Z, this kind of star deciding to become a sports agent and already going for Cano and Kevin Durant and Geno Smith, will be for everybody else in sports, Boras and other agents included.

What everybody else ought to be wondering at the beginning of this story is about those lists you see from time to time about who the most powerful people in sports are, and whether in three years or four or five if Jay-Z will be right there at the top of it.

Of course this may only be early speed from Jay-Z, who is such a stone-cold genius at self-promotion that he actually had people believing he was practically George Steinbrenner over there in Brooklyn with the Nets when he had less than a 1% stake in the team before he sold it. Or this move he has made to get a seat at the table is the kind of move that is more than just a flashy headline, and changes everything.

Rocs the whole sports world, if you want to think of it that way.

And maybe in a few years, Kevin Durant is on his way out of Oklahoma City because Jay-Z has convinced him that the best place for him to take his talents is Madison Square Garden. You think that can’t happen, or won’t happen? Tell me why not.

This doesn’t mean that all of the other agents in pro sports, starting with the top guys, are going to hide under their desks, hoping they get good cell service under there. Jeff Schwartz, Jason Kidd’s rep, just did one of the best pure agenting jobs in recent memory helping Kidd get the Nets’ coaching job less than two weeks after he retired as a player with the Knicks.

Schwartz started working on Kidd even before Kidd made the retirement announcement, promoted him into a meeting with Billy King, the Nets’ general manager, and you know how it all played out — and fast — after that.

It wasn’t Kidd’s idea at the start, it was clearly Schwartz’s. That is how you do it.

Now here comes Jay-Z out of music, out of the business empire he has built for himself, taking Cano away from Boras and making Boras lose his mind. Here comes Jay-Z to even trash-talk Boras in a new song:

“Scott Boras, you over baby/Robinson Cano you comin’ with me.”

Jay-Z has now been officially approved as an agent in Major League Baseball and the NBA, and eventually the NFL will follow suit, which is why you have been hearing all over the place that Victor Cruz will be the next big name to go with Jay-Z and Roc Sports. Then you wait to see how many other big names, big young stars from the other sports, want to follow suit, to the place he describes in “Empire State of Mind,” street lights and big dreams, all looking pretty.

This doesn’t mean you have to love the man’s music and you are allowed to hate some of his other lyrics if you want to. All that. In so many ways, it’s the cost of doing business. But for now, at the start of the story, just know that Jay-Z has a different kind of empire in mind, the one where he gets to be a star and a mogul and an agent all at the same time.

That would be an empire where enough young high-profile athletes think the big dream — meaning the modern American dream — looks exactly like Beyonce’s husband.








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