What I’ve Learned: Kenneth Shropshire

Erika James: You and I have had an opportunity to get to know one another over the years, and I’ve always been fascinated by the route you’ve taken to your career. What’s your origin story? You grew up in California, but how did you get from your parents’ home to Stanford?

Kenneth Shropshire: Yeah, I want the prize for the most indirect route to the Wharton School. I grew up in the Crenshaw District of LA. I grew up playing sports at what is now the corner of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Obama Boulevard and Jackie Robinson Stadium. So, Black LA. My parents were both educated at HBCUs from the South, so the Stanford-Wharton thing was not part of what was in my community. Except I was this great football player for a brief moment in time. Long enough to get a football scholarship to Stanford.

I was initially an offensive lineman. Fortunately or unfortunately, I didn’t get any bigger, so they switched me to a linebacker. And it was there that my lifelong dream of being a professional football player was killed by not having much success on the field. It’s there where I started thinking about these other possibilities for careers. The first career to come up that started to make some sense to me was the idea of being a lawyer in sports, actually being a sports agent, which was just starting to come into play in the early-mid-’70s as a real profession.

I went through that process of going to law school. Never thought about academia as a path. I was going to be a sports lawyer. The first week I was at a law firm in LA doing sports law, the managing partner says, “I need somebody to teach this class that I can’t teach at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. It’s a sports law class. There’s no materials, but somebody has to take it over.” The partner asked me to do it. I said I wanted to be immersed in sports law, so I did it.

I was 26, 27, and most of the students were 30. I was terrified to stand in front of these people, so I was overprepared. And that’s the first time I taught, and thought about teaching. But it was just a blip on the screen. I think the real turning point for me to decide to do it was $750 extra a month, which was what compelled me to do it.

James: That was a lot of money back then.

Shropshire: It turned out to be. I learned this space. There were some blue mimeographed materials that someone had at Boston College. I got those and began to really learn this broad territory that didn’t really exist at that time.

I then had the opportunity to work at the LA Olympics. I was at the firm for two years. Did that. I ran the sport of boxing. I was a lawyer doing sponsorship and licensing stuff, so back to my real law stuff. The Games ended, and I didn’t have a job in place. It’s kind of funny to think about, but I had been teaching the whole time. Even while doing the Olympics, I was teaching this class.

I was doing music law, some early LA rappers. I was representing some boxers. I was representing some track and field people. But I would be at clubs, chasing music acts at night. This was about two years. So, I came to my mother’s house to do some laundry, and my mother said, “What are you going to do?” I said, “What are you talking about?”

James: What she meant was, “You can’t keep coming to my house to do laundry. You’ve got to get it together.”

Shropshire: I didn’t understand what she was saying either. But she was talking about, “You can’t do this forever.” She said, “You seem to like that teaching thing. That’s the only thing you’ve done consistently.”

I had gone to Stanford for my third year of law school, which is a whole other story, not to be told. But I went there for my third year of law school, became good friends with this guy, Bill Gould, who’s still there. A labor and sports law expert. And I said, “Hey, I’m seven years out of law school. If I want to be a law professor, how would I do it?” He told me about this conference. He said, “You’d actually be great. Maybe nobody will hire you because you’ve been out so long. What are you thinking about doing?” I said, “Oh, sports law.” He said, “Well, nobody has a sports law class. But it’s starting to emerge, so maybe there’ll be interest.”

I put a resume in this resume book — it wasn’t electronic at the time, 1985. I put a resume in the resume book, and 20 schools called me and said, “We want to interview you.” It was a centralized conference at O’Hare Airport in Chicago. I went, did the interviews. Interestingly, Wharton was not on my list. I actually ran into a professor at a reception who had a badge that said, “Wharton Legal Studies.” I said, “Why is a business school at a law conference?” It’s the first time I heard about the Legal Studies Department. And they cleared a space for me at 7:30 in the morning. I went and interviewed, then one thing led to the other.

When I accepted the job, [I thought] I’m going to do it for a couple of years, and then I’m going back to LA. Who’s going to move from LA to Philly? That’s the long story of how I got here.

James: I want to go back to the teaching element. Because clearly, like your mother saw so early on, there was something about teaching that either resonated or matched your personality or allowed you to express your wisdom and insight in ways that were meaningful. What was it about teaching that was so compelling?

Shropshire: I also loved to write. My life game plan was to be in the NFL and then to be a journalist. So again, two things happened. First, I didn’t get to the NFL. Then people told me, “If you want to be a journalist, you probably got to go to Iowa or some obscure place to start off to be successful.” At the time, Stanford did not have a journalism major, which I did not know before I went there.

When I started teaching, my mother and my father said,  “You know, everybody else in the family was an educator anyway. This makes sense.” My grandfather on my mother’s side had been a dean at Langston University in Oklahoma. He was a chemistry professor. Both of my grandmothers were elementary school teachers. I had all these people who had done this. Neither one of my parents were teachers, but it was in the family.

I enjoyed it. To this day, I can’t really explain why. As time went on, it became student engagement and conversation and helping students to get somewhere else. A good part of it was the investment that had been made in getting that bulk of knowledge on a particular topic. And then, why stop? I was only halfway joking about what kind of student I was before law school. That I was doing what I needed to do to get through classes. My wife even jokes about the uneven quality of the high school that I went to. My wife was from the same neighborhood, got bused to Beverly Hills High School, and I stayed in the neighborhood. I did not know, for example, when we were taking our kids to think about schools here — I really didn’t have a full grasp of what an AP course gave you, because I hadn’t been exposed to AP courses.

Once I got out of the football thing, once I got rid of the athlete identity, I began to really enjoy topics that I was excited about. I often think, having been in this atmosphere all these years, that you probably would have gotten a PhD in something that you wanted to engage in more deeply. But for a lot of reasons, even though I had these educator relatives, getting a doctorate and being this expert in this space was not something that I thought to do early on.

I think it’s one of the reasons why I ended up writing 12 books. Each one for me was like a mini dissertation on a sports topic. Stadiums and arenas, sports agents, race and sports. I would get excited about trying to find all the information that was there. So, it was the combination of the two. The idea of working with students, and then the idea of this latent opportunity to write. Once I got here, I said, “Well, how do you get tenure?” Well, you’ve got to write. OK, I can do that.

James: You find yourself in the legal studies department at Wharton. Tell us about that time period in your life.

Shropshire: First, I wanted to do a lot of consulting. I said, “Oh, I can continue making some money while I’m getting this regular paycheck.” The late Tom Dunfee, who was one of the senior professors in legal studies at the time, had boxes of expert witness cases he was working on, this sort of stuff. I said, “How do I do that?” And he said, “Well, first you’ve got to be an expert.” Then he was kinder and said, “You need to do the work that gets people to contemplate who you are.” He got me financially excited about research.

The chair of the department at the time was a guy who had been here since the ’40s, ’50s, Fred Kempen. He said one of the best things you can do is just go to the library every day and read something. In the legal space, the idea of reading something or immersing yourself in some topic just because was not something you did as a lawyer. You did what the client wanted you to do. He said, “What are you interested in? Go in there and look at it.”

There was a third person, David Thomas. We both came here at the same time. He ended up going to Harvard, was a dean at Georgetown, and then president of Morehouse. There were three Black professors at the time. There was a senior guy, Howard Mitchell, then me, and David. David and I would go to post-work cocktails sometimes. One time, casually, he said, “What are you writing?” I said, “Oh, I’m not writing anything right now. I was told to read.” He said, “Look, if you don’t start writing something, you’re not going to be here long.”

People who have gotten PhDs understood what it took to be successful. I hadn’t really taken the time to figure that out. So, it was those three conversations. To put the consulting in the right place, to just go and explore and learn for a learning’s sake. And to deliver something that’s concrete, based on all that activity. There should have been a how-to book that told you, “This is what you’re supposed to do.” But again, coming in kind of sideways as a practicing lawyer, it wasn’t an atmosphere that I was accustomed to.

James: When you think about sports as you knew it and experienced it back then, especially sports in higher education and the student athlete, what are you seeing? How has that changed?

Shropshire: It’s changed a lot. The economics of college sports have changed a lot where, with this NIL and transfer portal, there’s the opportunity for athletes to get their value or closer to their true value. I always tell people that you’ve got to be careful about saying they were “granted” NIL rights. They’ve always have the rights. They were just foreclosed from accessing them. So, that’s been opened up. The idea that they can move from school to school [with] fewer restrictions than there have been, that has made it better.

James: What prompted this shift?

Shropshire: The first book I wrote was called Agents of Opportunity: Sports Agents and Corruption in College Sports, and a big portion of the book looked at the question of amateurism because student athletes were being taken advantage of by agents. Oliver Williamson, a great economist, defines this whole idea of opportunism as self-interest seeking with guile. That was one of my early reading sessions, was kind of, “Oh, what is this thing? And how should we look at these athletes being taken advantage of? And how can we stop agents?” Because there were a lot of big legal cases with agents taking advantage of athletes. What can we do? How can we legislate this better?

The concept that emerged out of that was, “We need to get rid of this amateurism thing that’s a myth anyway.” If you go back to ancient Greece and the Olympics, there actually was no amateurism. It was, you won amphoras of oil and gold and all sorts of stuff if you won a competition. It wasn’t until later, in Britain, where this whole idea of, “We as the elite class shouldn’t have to compete with these people that labor all day, so let’s find a way to separate. If you need to get paid to participate in sport, then you’re in a different class.”

This elitism happened there. It was transported to the U.S. And we began to see rowing competitions between Harvard and Yale, and prizes would be boats or all-expense vacations to Havana, Cuba.

It took all these years to the moment you’re talking about that we began to have court cases where athletes would file these actions and say, “Wait a minute, why is it the universities, why are all these other people getting paid, and we can’t get paid? There’s all this money in the system. Why can’t we get some of it?” Finally, a couple of Supreme Court cases allowed the dollars to begin to flow in that way. That’s the moment we’re in now. We’re trying to figure out, how do you do that the right way? We’ve got a lot of problematic issues that [prevent] that from happening as an open market, where there’s still this, “We can’t let all this money just go to these student athletes. We can’t let people just move around.”

Where I come down on it is: It’s OK to let the dollars go where they should go, but let’s not lose sight of this great opportunity that exists for so many people to get a college education. No matter how we talk about it, it is valuable. Especially if you’re not one of the 2% that end up having a professional sports career.

The idea that some quarterbacks are making $4 million or $5 million a year in college sports, the idea that you can make that amount of money and you full focus on sport, what about the rest of your life? That’s a lot of what I’ve been writing and thinking about lately, is how do we address that issue? How do we get student athletes who have foreclosed the student part — how do we get them more engaged in the possibilities of life and the reality that even if you do have a pro career, what are you going to do for the next 30, 40, 50 years of your life?

James: I think we’re going to be grappling with this for some time, because the questions are complex. Anytime you talk about this much money in a system, there’s going to be infighting and political issues, so this isn’t going away anytime soon.

I wanted to stay on this topic, but in a manner that’s a bit more sensitive, and that is bringing the element of race in all of this. Part of your work, your writing, your thinking, your books have also integrated the notion that there are racial dynamics at play in some of these decisions. Can you talk a bit more about what you saw early on or what you’re trying to achieve with broadening other people’s perspectives around the role of race in sports and the student athlete?

Shropshire: Interestingly, there was work before mine that focused on the sociology of sport, issues of race and sport, and who is given the opportunity to play. That is the outside-the-business-school kind of question a lot of people were asking. When I wrote the book In Black and White: Race and Sports in America, I said, “Let’s look at ownership, coaching, let’s look at the power positions.” I used some language that hadn’t been used before — the power positions in sport — and see who has that. And as it turned out, that was not a place where you saw African Americans, largely.

Even though there’s been some improvement in coaching, it’s gotten more and more difficult to improve that in terms of ownership. When I wrote the book, I think the Los Angeles Clippers may have transferred for $13 million or so. Now, it’s not too crazy for a team to transfer for $13 billion. At the time that it was $13 million … there were very few people that could. When I wrote the book, I interviewed a number of people who said, “Yeah, I was in a group, and we didn’t get the right to buy the team because we were Black.” So, there was that.

The idea of the ownership groups in sport — and I’ve worked with a lot of owners and a lot of sports — it’s a very closed group. And in some ways, rightly so. There’s 30 or so owners in each of the major sports leagues. Economics-wise, I certainly understand if you want to sell a franchise in your league for as much as possible. So, as much as racial issues may have evolved and they’re not as severe as they were, and the word would not leak out as directly, “We didn’t sell it to you because you’re Black,” that’s not necessarily an issue that needs to be utilized anymore.

There’s an interesting lawsuit now by Brian Flores, who was the head coach of the Miami Dolphins. He got fired from there after a winning season. He has brought an action saying that there were discriminatory methods utilized that didn’t allow him to get another head coaching job. The interesting thing about that case is he continues to push the case forward, despite probable settlement offers, because he wants to have the issues that still exist in that league see the light of day through litigation and depositions, interrogatories, and the like.

There are some interesting cases out there. But the flip side, of course, is that the state attorney general in Florida sent a letter of inquiry to the NFL saying, “You have this thing called the Rooney Rule. That’s discriminatory against whites.”

James: Why don’t you describe the Rooney Rule?

Shropshire: The League issued a rule saying, “We need to improve the number of African Americans that are head coaches in the National Football League. So, we mandate that whenever you have an opening, one of you 32 owners, you must interview at least one person.” Originally, I think “one minority” was the way it was phrased then.

That rule actually had some success over the years. I think the year it went in place, there were two African American head coaches. There was a high of eight over this 22-year period of time. Last year, zero were hired out of 10 openings, so it’s viewed as more problematic. Again, the state of Florida says, “Why do you have such a rule? There aren’t any problems.”

The whole idea is, “Who’s in the room of the owner making these decisions? Who’s recommending these people? Have they looked as broadly as they can?” Which is all that the Rooney Rule does, is try to assist in the interview process. Not ultimately to make the determination of hiring.

James: Are there some leagues that are more prone to challenges with respect to race, or some leagues or leaders that you feel are able to navigate murky waters really well?

Shropshire: The NBA has a longer history of success. The first African American head coach in pro sports, Bill Russell, was early on. They continue to have a representative number of African Americans in the league office and a record number of African Americans at the head coach level. There has been African American ownership in the league, including Michael Jordan, along the way. So, some degree of success there.

The two worst? Hockey, by definition, is problematic to think about. What are the real issues we should think about with hockey? But there is some equivalency of hockey and football. Although you just don’t have as many African Americans playing hockey, or African Canadians playing hockey. But there are no Black head coaches in the National Hockey League.

Baseball, by far, has been the most problematic. And they are the most energized. April 16th, Jackie Robinson Day. They still reach back to celebrate that. It actually was the second league to have an African American to integrate. The National Football League had someone the year before, in 1946. But it wasn’t the national pastime, so not as celebrated.

But there’s been a tremendous decline in the number of African Americans playing baseball, from a high of 19% down to 8%, 7% or so. But it’s also interesting, too, the global nature of baseball. At one point, there were official baseball numbers saying that Major League Baseball was 29%, 30% Black. And then someone had the right notion to say, “Well, wait a minute, are these African Americans? Are these Dominican brothers? Where are they from?” So that’s when the decline came and focus began to happen.

James: You’ve spent decades teaching students at Wharton and at Arizona, in sports and law, so you’ve seen this over a tremendous period of time. There now seems to be a resurgence of interest in sports and entertainment in the realm of business and business education. You were one of the first to advance a curriculum around that. You worked with the NFL Players Association. You were educating professional athletes and brought those programs to Wharton. You brought programs to the University of Arizona. But it feels like we’re in a new era now with sports, and the ownership and private equity just putting so much money into sports and youth sports. What’s driving this attention?

Shropshire: The rapid increase in valuation. Also, just sport as an asset class. I think the first time we really grasped this were two LA franchises, when Guggenheim Partners purchased the Dodgers. A number of people said, “Wait a minute, what’s going on here?” And you talk to people who say, “For Guggenheim, it’s just better moving $2 billion from sitting here to sitting there. Eventually, the value of the franchise will catch up, and they’ll look like geniuses.” And then Steve Ballmer with the Clippers — in an interesting racial moment, too — acquires that franchise for a pretty big number. If you have that kind of wherewithal, if you have that kind of fund, the idea of “here’s a place to park some money” is not a bad idea.

Globally, we’ve been looking at this whole idea of these global soccer franchises. The idea of, “Well, in this private equity realm, we’re used to finding undervalued assets that if some great management is put in and some good things are done, we can get in and out pretty quickly and be very profitable.” These are scattered around the globe for a lot less than you have to pay for a franchise here. That’s been a big part of it.

James: We actually had a group of students in our WEMBA program who purchased a soccer team in Italy and revamped it. They won within the first two or three years and have already exited and are on to their next team.

Shropshire: Yeah. It’s just a different asset class. Part of what’s happening at Wharton, too, with some students and some faculty members — [neuroscience and marketing professor] Michael Platt, for example, is looking at some ancillary issues related to sport. He’s looking at, how can we make athletes better by understanding how they perform? So, there’s all these ancillary businesses that are there. As I was leaving, someone had the bright idea that analytics should be the dominant space in sport. Turns out it’s a piece of what should be dominant. But that’s going to remain an important piece, too.

There’s a lot that continues to go on now that there’s enough money there. These aren’t mom-and-pop organizations anymore. If you can bring sophisticated management and technology to them — and that’s what I end up doing a lot now, is helping some sports tech companies figure out, how do they engage, and how can they do better, how do they find funding, and that sort of thing.

James: What would your advice be to Wharton if we wanted to take advantage of the many interdisciplinary faculty who have some tangential interest in sports? Obviously, we have the Wharton Analytics and Sports Initiative. We have, like you said, Michael Platt, who’s looking at the neuroscience of the athlete. We have finance faculty who are looking at valuations of teams. What’s the opportunity for a school like Wharton to reimagine an offering in the sports business realm?

Shropshire: I think in some ways we had it right the first time we thought about it. It was just too early. I don’t think that it was as broad-based. When we first started the Wharton Sports Business Initiative to look at this, we put out a call for research to faculty. We got a lot of surprising stuff that was around. But just in my quick survey now, nowhere near as high level and engaged as people are now.

I think it is just, as we’ve done in so many other areas, more of an umbrella to say, “As future sports business leaders, here are all the things that you may want to look at and that Wharton is doing work on.” And elevating, as we always do, faculty. Providing the opportunity to faculty to do that great work in that space.

I think that’s where we were headed before the analytics detour took over. Analytics is important, but the idea of sports business more broadly. I think, too, that there was some trepidation, because the sports-focused business programs around the country were largely for management, not necessarily leadership, which is a whole different conversation than what we typically talk about here. We don’t talk about how to sell insurance, necessarily. We talk about these marketing elements, or we talk about what’s behind the products, that sort of thing. But now, I think people are a lot clearer that you can do the same thing with the sports focus.

James: As students are coming into their undergraduate educational experience, or even an MBA, and they want to get into the sports world, is there a career trajectory for someone now? How does one become successful in the world of sports management?

Shropshire: I still say it’s the same way. There are some great sports management programs. But that’s not what Wharton is about. Wharton can teach you to be the best marketer, the best accountant, the best finance person. You also should understand how that works in sport. You’ve got to put the subject matter before the sports part. If you walk into a job interview to be the CFO for a league [and] you lead with, “Why I love baseball,” that’s not going to get you there. And it may get you out the door faster than, “Here are the new financial issues that I think are applicable to this business.”

James: I want to circle back to something that we talked about in the beginning, and that is your relationship with students and that initial passion that you have for being in the classroom. Because it doesn’t matter where I go in the world, I am going to run into someone that knows Shrop. Not very many people that I know of have that kind of connection with others. And they’re lifelong connections. They may have been a student in your class 25 years ago, or they may have been someone that you met in some conference or some consulting engagement, but they seem to stick with you and you with them. What is it about Shrop that helps create these lifelong relationships?

Shropshire: Well, I hope that’s true. As I have been in this emeritus phase, I have been trying to figure out now, “Do I have to continue to talk to everybody that reaches to me?” Because the numbers have just gotten so big.

I think it’s just the right thing to do to be accessible in that kind of way. I think part of my slow motion in terms of becoming a better student was not being invited into the space to learn what these faculty were doing until I was. That professor at my last year at Stanford, Bill Gould, said, “Come be a research assistant. You want to learn more about sports? Come see what I do.” I said, “Oh, this is very interesting.”

The other thing, when I worked at the LA Olympics, one of the first tasks I was given was to reach to the mayor’s office on a topic. “You need to get an answer on this.” I called up Mayor Tom Bradley, who had been my city councilman. I left a message. Sometime later that evening, I pick up my phone, and he says, “Hi, this is Tom Bradley.” I had this conversation with him. I’m in shock. I asked him whatever the question was. And I said, “If I may ask you, sir, what are you doing calling me?” And he said, “I return all my phone calls.” And then he says, “Well, not really, but I make sure everything is returned. And this happens to be one that’s on my list of calls to return.”

Here’s this guy who was kind of a childhood hero. I got to vote for him when he ran for mayor the first time, 1973. I’ve always kept that in mind. And I have not always done it. Because somebody will see this interview and say, “He didn’t call me back.” But it is at the forefront. It’s what I tell people, students, all the time, is that it’s an important thing to do.

James: Well, I will tell you that Wharton is better off for your having been such a significant part of its history, and we’re grateful that you continue to stay engaged. Thank you so much, Ken.