Days before last year’s Super Bowl, I spoke at length with Newport Beach sports agent Leigh Steinberg, just as his biggest client, Kansas City Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes, was about to be named league MVP.
Steinberg’s mantra that day was focus: despite plenty of interest, he’d limited Mahomes’ endorsement work during the season. That focus also included Steinberg’s own made-for-the-movies life, which was again on the upswing after battling with prior personal issues.
The strategy’s paid off. Mahomes will be playing in this year’s Super Bowl and you’ll have a hard time not seeing him and his many endorsement clients on TV during Super Sunday. The QB now tops Tom Brady as No. 1 among all players, based on merchandise sales of NFL-licensed products, according to the NFL Players Association.
Among Mahomes’ first big national endorsement deals was one announced last May with Foothill Ranch’s Oakley.
As for the real-life Jerry Maguire, the QB business remains good. Steinberg, who will host the 33rd edition of his Super Bowl party Feb. 1 in Miami, just landed two highly rated Crimson Tide players as clients, including Alabama star quarterback Tua Tagovailoa.
Take a stroll through downtown L.A.’s famed Last Bookstore, and you’ll see Dean Koontz’s works of horror taking up more shelf space than just about any other, not surprising for the author that counts a core book-buying fan base of nearly 4.4 million, fifth in the U.S., according to recent surveys.
Will that last, after the Shady Canyon resident’s recent decision to eschew traditional publishers in his latest book deal, and instead sign with Amazon Publishing?
The deal “was a surprising move because it means his new books likely won’t appear in retail stores, which generally boycott Amazon-published titles,” noted a recent Wall Street Journal article.
Koontz seems unfazed. “Maybe I won’t be in some stores or make the New York Times best-seller list, but I’m willing to take that risk and I think we’ll sell more books in all formats,” he told the WSJ.
He and his wife, Gerda, will soon be on a more notable list: their $9 million gift to Hoag to transform cancer care in OC, announced last September, is among the top entries of our annual Largest Charitable Gifts list, part of a Special Report running Feb. 10.
Frieda Caplan got people to eat their veggies, and plenty of fruits they’d never tried before, too.
The founder of Frieda’s Inc. started in 1962 with a stand at the Los Angeles Produce Market and later moved operations to Los Alamitos. Over the decades, she became known as the “Queen of Kiwi” for bringing that and other as-of-then obscure foods into the mainstream.
Along with fame among the chef and foodie crowd, she and her family got plenty of accolades, including a Family-Owned Business award from us in 2009; her CEO daughter Karen also earned a Women in Business Award nod in 2000.
One award Frieda Caplan, who passed away Jan. 18 at age 96, never kept: in 1979 trade publication The Packer named her Produce Man of the Year. After returning the award for obvious reasons, it was changed to Produce Marketer of the Year.
