World-class athletes are scrambling to save sensitive endorsements and avoid the fate of tycoons tried and convicted in the court of public opinion. The price of scandal ramps up fast.
Months into the season of zero tolerance for sexual harassment, patterns of best and worst practices have finally started to emerge.
Public figures facing credible accusations run big risks if they refuse to roll with the prevailing wind and accept the crowd’s mercy — even if they don’t think they’ve done anything awful.
That’s what Shaun White is doing now. Ordinarily he’d be celebrating his third Olympic gold medal and courting new corporate sponsors.
Instead he’s keeping quiet and letting what would have been a moment of career-capping glory slip by without any serious effort to capitalize on it.
Even if the strategy works perfectly, it’s a perfect defense. He won’t lose the contracts he has. He just won’t parlay that medal into the next level of fame and fortune.
The alternative is disaster. This isn’t a time for tough postures or self-righteous defiance. Just look at Steve Wynn, Jeffrey Tambor, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein or any of the other onetime stars that burned out in the last few months.
Wynn rolled the dice and lost
While White is big enough to attract expert financial help, he’s not so big that he thinks he can ignore their advice. Snowboarding has been his life since childhood, earning him at least $20 million in prizes and sponsorships along the way.
He’s a god on the slopes. But from a purely mercantile perspective, he’s basically a highly compensated brand representative catering to particularly adrenalin-driven markets. Image is everything.
Steve Wynn’s personal value proposition is similarly image-driven. It’s just that his audience was Wall Street and institutional investors have finally lost confidence in his ability to add more value to his casinos than his newly public reputation as a lech drives away.
It doesn’t matter if the company still has his name on the letterhead or the ticker symbol. He breached his employment agreement and now he’s out without severance. That single line-item slice of his disgrace will probably cost him at least $300 million.
Then there's the shareholder equity he’s destroyed. The back of my envelope says he’s personally down another $350 million, which means his punishment in the court of public acclaim has already cost him 1/5 of his fortune.
He’s also finally been forced out of his second casino empire with restrictions prohibiting him from getting back in the game for another two years. The man is already 76. Any effort he makes to rebuild is going to push the statistical limit.
Wynn gambled that he wouldn’t get caught and then he doubled down on the expectation that there wouldn’t be any repercussions. He lost. He’s done.
If he hadn’t fought quite so hard, he might’ve gotten the chance to manage the narrative behind the scenes and retire gracefully.
Of course, three months ago, nobody really knew how much power social media backlash had to wreck a career. Fighting was a reasonable option early on.
With blood in the water, it really isn’t an option now. Even the people who are seen as enabling the Harvey Weinsteins of the world are losing their jobs as tainted companies get sold off for scrap.
Sudden retirement
Maybe someday these people will be able to rehabilitate themselves with time and a little PR work. Weinstein has definitely been trying, with his endless apologies between sex addict rehab sessions.
Wynn didn’t read the wind and he’s been decisively crushed. Shaun White settled the claims against him, moved on and has since apologized again.
He can still work. As long as his contrition stays ahead of the outrage, he’ll probably remain “family friendly” enough to hang onto existing sponsorships from mainstream companies as well as the niche “extreme” vendors that thrive on outlaw personal branding.
Get realistic: while selling snowboards and sports cameras are nice, they’re small potatoes compared to a cell phone commercial or two. The mainstream is where the long-term money is.
And every few years, an all-new class of Olympic stars emerges to grab a piece of that mainstream money. White’s just tainted enough this year that those plum contracts will probably pass him by.
It’s not a building year for him. At best, it’s going to be a rebuilding year — but it beats forced permanent retirement.
We live in a world where there’s no statute of limitation on past mistakes or even getting caught on the wrong side of shifting moral codes. Social media records can turn up patterns of bad behavior and open up controversies that even a few years ago could have been buried forever.
Now it’s the careers that get buried in an instant. It’s a different form of justice. Love it or hate it, it’s the way the world is right now.
Wealthy people in prominent places are best served by living as though it could all end tomorrow. They need the assets to build the next act.
Wynn has plenty of assets. He just needs to figure out what to do with his time now that his active involvement in the casino business is over.
All these people have plenty of assets. Even Shaun White, barely 30 years old, has poured money into real estate to work for him no matter what happens on the slope.
After all, he could wipe out any time, break enough bones to make it hard to ever compete at world-class levels again. It’s the classic sports career-ending risk.
We’re watching similar catastrophic risk play out in Hollywood, Washington and now Wall Street. You’d tell a football player to hope for a long and lucrative career while banking on a few good years at best. That’s the new model. Ignore it at your peril.
