I was like the Egyptians: How Walt Frazier and the Kangaroo Kid laid the groundwork for the NB

Today, Walt Frazier is known as a man of many legends. He is one of the NBA’s greatest players. He is arguably the most celebrated Knicks player ever. Currently, he is a beloved broadcaster — a bouncing, rhyming, good-timing voice who has made Knicks games worth watching for the last two decades on MSG Network.

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But he has always been an entrepreneur. In the 1970s, during his prime, Frazier was also one of the owners of one of the league’s first and most high-profile player representation agencies. It is a business that was both pioneering and generations ahead of its time, and one of the little-known stories of Frazier’s famous life. A half-century ago, when the player empowerment era was nowhere near its genesis and a firm like Klutch is closely associated with its top client, LeBron James, one of the NBA’s most acclaimed agencies was owned by two of its best players.

Walt Frazier Enterprises was a landmark. It had an office on Park Avenue. Frazier was its namesake and its face. He owned a third of it. Billy Cunningham, then a 76ers star, owned a third as well. Irwin Weiner, the actual agent in the midst, owned the other portion. Together, they represented some of the league’s top players, from Julius Erving to George McGinnis and George Gervin, at a time when there were few agents even around.

“They set the tone for how things are operating now,” Mychal Thompson, one of its clients, said.

The company first formed in the late 1960s when Frazier, then early in his career, began working with Weiner to book personal appearances around the country. Frazier was a neophyte to the business world and to New York. Weiner helped him land key bookings. One day, Frazier asked him to be his agent as well. He was in the middle of a contract negotiation with the Knicks and still smarting from the previous year when he was denied a raise. Weiner jumped into the fray and came back with a large raise.

Frazier and Weiner started Walt Frazier Enterprises and invited Cunningham to join in 1969. A company had come to them with a sponsorship opportunity but also asked for a white player to be included. Frazier suggested Cunningham because he liked how the Kangaroo Kid played.

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“I could see that, as Walt did, that this was the future,” Cunningham said. “That players would get their own representation and go to war.”

They formed their agency at the right time. The ABA had just launched two years earlier and a salary boom was forming as it competed with the NBA for players.

But those players had few choices for help at the time. Frazier says no agent talked to him when he entered the draft and he worked with a lawyer from Illinois, where he went to school. Larry Fleisher had just started to represent NBA players, including Bill Bradley and John Havlicek, but there were no other large rivals to speak of.

Salaries were small compared to now. Bradley’s deal with the Knicks in 1967 was seen as an industry-changing contract and it paid him a reported $750,000 over four years. It at least started to shift the economics in the players’ favor.

“We were the pioneers,” Frazier said. “But the pioneers don’t make the money.”

Cunningham played a pivotal role in the company as its executive vice president, but the Knicks star guard was the big attraction. He was not only the president, he was a walking example of the wealth that could be made in the NBA. Playing in New York gave him a large platform.

Frazier had style and drove a Rolls Royce — he says he was the first player in the league with one — and he flaunted it. After a photo spread in Black Enterprise magazine in 1974, he says players started flocking to the company. Their Park Avenue office — prime real estate in New York City — was also an attraction. They sent limos to pick up players.

By 1975, they had 40 clients, according to the New York Times, and none bigger than Erving. They also represented Mets and Jets from that era, who Frazier had gotten to know during various booking appearances in the metropolitan area.

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The agency had a certain cache that was hard to replicate, between its style and the two All-Stars at the helm.

“If young guys coming into the league wanted to find out who best to represent them then when you have respected legends like Walt Frazier and Dr. J placing calls on behalf of an agent it goes a long way,” Thompson said. “That’s very impressionable on a young man looking for the right representation. That’s the way it works today. If you have guys like LeBron or Kevin Durant or Steph Curry calling you to say ‘Hey, man, this guy is a good person to have represent you,’ believe me — that validates a lot of people.”

They were recruiting peers. Frazier was the walking billboard for Walt Frazier Enterprises. Cunningham recruited players and explained to them, as a fellow player, why it was a good opportunity. Sometimes they asked a client to help out.

In 1978, when Thompson was trying to decide on his representation before he became the No. 1 pick in the draft, he received a call from Erving. That’s all he needed to make a decision. Erving, Cunningham said, was the agency’s biggest client and the most validating one.

“Dr. J and Kareem were my two basketball idols,” he said. “Dr. J took the time to call a little basketball peasant like me — Are you kidding? All I had to do was hear his voice, and if anybody was repping Dr. J I knew they had to be legitimate.”

While Frazier and Cunningham were on the marquee, Weiner was its engine. He was the one out negotiating deals. Frazier considered him a friend and Cunningham described him as an agent who cared deeply about his clients.

Weiner was, by their accounts, a flamboyant man who fit the mold of a big-time agent. Thompson said he was a look-alike for Oscar-winning actor Red Buttons with his red hair. The New York Times wrote that he “has the boyish face of a Jewish leprechaun, runs the operation, and so well that Frazier refers to him as “Wonder Weiner.””

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Frazier called him ‘the Phone Ranger’ because of the brick phone he used in his car.

“He was the quintessential agent at the time,” Frazier said. “A cigar in his mouth. A fast talker. He was a character, man. But he knew the game. He knew how to get the money. … He loved negotiating. The tougher the better.”

Frazier also used the company as a learning opportunity for himself. In the summers he would go to the Park Avenue office and learn the business. He let Weiner negotiate the NBA contracts, he said, but he sometimes sat in on endorsement deals.

At the time, team travel was haphazard and accommodations were shoddy around most of the league, he says, except for the Knicks. Players used to joke that they would take their checks right to the bank so they wouldn’t bounce. Those negotiations were an education into how basketball actually worked.

Walt Frazier Enterprises was strict with its money, something Weiner preached to Frazier and which Frazier soon embodied. He had his pricey Rolls, yet he kept it for over a decade. Fashion was his only vice and he was otherwise frugal. Weiner told the Times that Frazier didn’t spend any endorsement contracts unless they were at least $10,000.

“I was in awe of the money that was out there,” Frazier said. “I had no idea what a player’s value was. Even my value with the Knicks.”

When Frazier retired in 1979, he became an agent too. By then Cunningham had exited the company, leaving when he took over as 76ers coach in 1977. Frazier and Weiner split up in the 1980s over a disagreement about the business. Weiner took the company and Frazier continued on his own, but found he didn’t want the headache of being a player rep in the changing landscape anymore.

Now, he looks at agencies with some level of astonishment as players’ salaries have risen within a multi-billion dollar industry. Cunningham looks at the agencies today and considers his own to be a precursor of what was to come.

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“I always say I was like the Egyptians,” Frazier said. “They had no one to copy.”

(Photo of Walt Frazier / Getty Images)

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