One of my all-time-favorite Jay-Z songs is a deep cut called “Lucky Me.” Jay is talking about how success brings envy, jealousy, and danger, how people think his life is perfect, but he’s dealing with more than they could ever know. It’s a powerful, mournful, and somewhat sarcastic song, with a hook that goes: “You only know what you see / You don’t understand what it takes to be me.”
That’s exactly how I feel about my life. Some people say I’m lucky, and in one sense they’re right. At 22, I had a random encounter with a teenager named LeBron James that led me to become one of the most powerful agents in American sports. Bad luck can seem good for a while, like money that comes too fast; good luck might be hard to understand. My luck often arrived in disguise, in the form, for example, of an absent mother who in the end needed my forgiveness and understanding.
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People who call me lucky don’t realize what kind of assembly line I was built on. I spent the early years of my life in Glenville, Ohio, sleeping on floors and couches as my mother suffered in the grip of a drug addiction. When I was a boy in the ’80s, my father brought my mom, siblings, and me to live in an apartment above his store, R&J Confectionary. Some days I opened the store with him and worked until about 8 a.m., when he saw me off to school. After school, I came right back to work at the store, stocking shelves and running the cash register and the lottery machine, not to mention playing video games, eating Doritos, and drinking Hawaiian Punch. From my post behind the counter, I observed that selling food, beer, and cigarettes was just the surface level of my father’s success.
This article is adapted from Rich Paul’s new book,
Lucky Me: A Memoir of Changing the Odds.
The same way I overheard conversations about my mother’s drug problems and understood them at a young age, I listened to my dad interacting with people and came to understand how he became successful and admired. The bedrock of the business was the way he respected all of the people he interacted with, no matter their station in life. The education I got from everyone and everything around me was a gift. And when the door cracked open for me, it was those experiences, not a professor or an office job, that prepared me for my next life, the one that’s not supposed to happen to a guy who’s barely 5 foot 8 and who grew up with a pair of dice in one hand and a pistol in the other.
My first stroke of luck was being born into a world that forced me to be focused and prepared. Luck was learning how to recognize friendship, loyalty, love, and justice, and how to cultivate those values in life and business. It was learning how to confront systems of power and not flinch, how to walk on a razor’s edge and never fall.
People who see my success now and don’t know how I got here often reduce the narrative to one famous story: LeBron James, then still in high school, spotted me wearing a vintage Warren Moon jersey, struck up a conversation, and handed me my future. Yes, he was one of the biggest athletes to join my newly formed agency in 2014. But very few people know or respect what I had to go through to reach that point, or what I’ve done since then to reach where I am now. This disrespect comes from preconceived notions about Black men who come from the bottom.
LeBron and I hit it off from the moment we met in 2001. Our vibe was organic—our mothers went through the same struggles with addiction, and his part of Akron, Ohio, was another version of Glenville. I knew his friend Maverick from playing Catholic-school basketball. I also think LeBron was intrigued by how I carried myself. When a group of us went to a club, we walked right in. VIP section? No problem. I knew about restaurants that most guys had never heard of. LeBron saw that I was independent and had my own thing going. I wasn’t asking for anything, and I didn’t have an angle; we just enjoyed being around each other. Everything was authentic and real. I understood the depth of who he was, the good and the bad.
That’s the core of our relationship, and the core of my work today with Black athletes. Our minds tend to move in the same ways, on an individual and a collective basis. I’ve been through so many of the experiences that define the hard side of Black life in America that I can always find common ground with someone, no matter who they are.
And, of course, I’ve worked with athletes who are white; athletes from Europe, Asia, all over the world. The Black American experience resonates with so many lives. In an elevated way, the story of our struggles is the essence of the human struggle. Every person on this planet needs love, dignity, and purpose.
My next life truly began one summer day in 2014 at the Arrogant Butcher, a restaurant in downtown Phoenix. Eric Bledsoe and I were having lunch when the phone on the table lit up. I looked over at Bled and answered the call. The Phoenix Suns had offered him $7 million a year over four years—$28 million total—to play the game of basketball.
This was life-changing money for us. Where I grew up, on the East Side of Cleveland, or where Bled grew up, in Birmingham, Alabama, the only way to make even a small fraction of that kind of money was to risk your life. But we were in a different world now. Bled was about to hit his first free-agent jackpot, and I was negotiating my first contract as an official agent for my company, Klutch Sports Group.
I hung up the phone and relayed the offer to Bled. He was 24 and had just enjoyed a great season for Phoenix, establishing himself as a cornerstone of the franchise. The smile on his face broadcast happiness and relief. He was ready to sign on the dotted line.
But I wasn’t smiling.
“We’re not taking this deal,” I said.
Bled is a quiet guy, but I could sense the disappointment beneath his blank expression.
“Here’s why,” I said. “I don’t want you stepping on that court night in and night out, playing against guys who you’re better than, guys you’re outperforming, but you make less than they do. You deserve way more than $28 million. I don’t know exactly how much more, but I’m going to get you what you’re worth.”
He agreed to turn down the contract offer.
Phoenix had actually made their first offer at the start of the previous season, but we’d said no thanks. As Bled played with the unresolved contract hanging over his head, all of the other top free-agent guards got deals worth roughly $48 million over four years—$12 million a year. The Suns came up to that number, but I held out for a fifth year on the contract. Bled felt antsy. I was calm, though.
My life had never had any room for panic. I was able to transmit some of that calm to Bled, and he trusted me, based on all of the love I had poured into him since he first came into the NBA, the months he’d spent living at my house during summer workouts, the care embodied in a simple act such as me carrying his sneakers to the gym—all of the ways my friends and I had once leaned on one another to survive.
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The season ended, and the months passed. September arrived, training camp was approaching, and Bled was the only high-level free agent still on the market. His situation was in the news every day. I told him to leave his house in Phoenix and lie low back in Birmingham. Don’t pick up the phone when the team calls you. Other players told him to take the latest offer. No, Bled, trust me. We’re not budging. As comparable players came off the board and signed to other teams, our leverage grew.
By the time September ended, I knew that Bled was worth a maximum contract. Finally, the Suns offered five years and $70 million—$14 million a year. The next day, Bled signed the biggest contract of any restricted free agent that off-season. That was the first real money Klutch Sports Group ever made. It sent a message to the entire NBA and laid the foundation for where I stand today. If I had botched that deal, there would be no Klutch, which now represents more than 150 athletes, coaches, and executives, with $3 billion in total contracts. But we made our luck—we rolled the dice and won.
There was a point in my NBA-agenting career when people realized just how much my company and I intended to disrupt the system, when they tried to get rid of me. In 2019, the NCAA passed a rule saying that you needed a college degree in order to represent players entering the draft. While it lasted, which wasn’t long, people called it the Rich Paul Rule. Basically, a lot of people were upset that someone like me had the audacity to unapologetically represent some of the biggest stars in the sport. They were upset that I had rejected their criteria for admission and was working to remake a system that historically has only benefitted them. And they were threatened by the fact that they could never have what I have: my experiences. So they tried to outlaw me.
What they thought were disqualifications became my selling points. College or not, I know I’m as well prepared as anybody for the business I’m in. After everything I’ve endured, there’s very little that their system can teach me. Nobody else in my business knows what it’s like to put two and two together out of zero. I know what it’s like to serve somebody, and watch out for the police, and watch out for the rival crews, and watch out for the jackers, and watch out for the people I’m serving because they too might have a pistol. I know how to keep working even if in a split second, my life might be over. Not a day goes by that I don’t remember that life.
What none of these critics knew is that long before I entered the world of the NBA, I learned that life is full of gambles. Smart gamblers know how to manage the risks, move with intention and integrity, control what they can control—and, in the end, they have the heart to let the dice fall where they may. I’d been gambling my whole life, not for as much money, but for higher stakes. Growing up like I did, gambling was weighing the odds of getting shot if you walked down a hostile block. Gambling was being 13, taking thousands of dollars from men in a craps game, and then riding home on my bike. Gambling was giving my mom $40 and hoping she didn’t use it to get high. So when it was time to negotiate my first contract and to bet that the Phoenix Suns would give Bledsoe a better deal?
That is the gamble my life prepared me to win. Society accepts that upbringings like mine instill a hunger, drive, and savvy in great athletes. It’s long overdue for society to accept that these circumstances can produce great executives, too.
This article is adapted from Rich Paul’s new book, Lucky Me: A Memoir of Changing the Odds.