When Michael Sam sat down with ESPN and the New York Times to announce that he was gay, the Missouri football star and NFL draft prospect certainly got attention.
After the TV interview aired last week and the Times published its story, President Barack Obama quickly tweeted his support for the bruising defensive end and a tsunami of media followed the storyline: that the time has come for the National Football League to accept homosexual players.
That attention took place far away, but it was choreographed in Beverly Hills by publicist Howard Bragman, head of public relations firm Fifteen Minutes, along with the local operator of a gay sports website.
Bragman, openly gay himself, had helped several celebrities and athletes come out, such as former National Basketball Association player John Amaechi, retired NFL player Esera Tuaolo and country singer Chely Wright. But this was a major coup because it means that Sam could become the first openly gay player in football history.
Bragman explained to the Business Journal last week how he spent three weeks planning to break Sam’s story. Control of the story almost slipped away and they had to rush the announcement.
“You can’t control everything,” he said. “The worst case would be somebody broke the news first, and that didn’t happen.”
In the end, the story was broken pretty much as they had expected, albeit earlier than they had planned.
David Silver, chief executive of Silver Public Relations in West Los Angeles and who was not involved in the Sam matter, said Bragman made the right moves.
“What you want to do is get out to the court of public opinion first,” said Silver. “If rumors take over, it’s going to be a major crisis. It’s such a private issue that Sam’s making public; he decided to bring a private issue into the court of public opinion and the client has to control that issue, not the media.”
PRNewser, a website that covers the industry, called Bragman’s execution “a PR masterpiece in media relations.”
Early start
Bragman founded Fifteen Minutes in 2005 out of his guest house in the Hollywood Hills with Ryan Croy working as partner and brands director. The firm now has a staff of 20 with an apartment in New York that functions as a second office.
Its clients include several brands and entertainers including Ford Motor Co. in Dearborn, Mich., clothing brand CJ by Cookie Johnson in City of Industry and celebrity Mario Lopez.
Bragman, who has spent more than 30 years in public relations, also is on the board of Reputation.com, a firm that handles how celebrities are portrayed online.
Bragman became Sam’s publicist through Santa Monica’s Empire Athletes, which helps athletes enter the NFL or Major League Baseball.
Last month, Sam told the firm he wanted to come out publicly as gay, so agents Joe Barkett and Cameron Weiss reached out to Bragman for help.
Sam is considered to be an early to midround draft pick; he’s a 6-foot, 2-inch 260-pounder who powered the defense on a University of Missouri team that wasn’t supposed to do much this year, but finished 12-2 and won the Cotton Bowl. So it was obvious his coming out would be a media event.
The agents called Bragman because they knew he’d understand. Bragman once told the Business Journal that growing up as a fat, gay Jewish kid in Flint., Mich., made him feel like a Martian.
Bragman then contacted Cyd Zeigler, founder of gay sports news site Outsports in Los Angeles, for advice. The two strategized on which media outlets would get the exclusive story and when to make the announcement.
Bragman wanted one interview for TV and another in print. He settled on ESPN and Times reporter John Branch, who had worked with Bragman before and had written several pieces on gay athletes.
Zeigler would also get an exclusive that would focus on how he worked with Bragman to plan the announcement.
“You used to have to do a hundred interviews to achieve what you can do with one interview (now),” Bragman said. He knew that once the Times and ESPN broke the news, other outlets would pick up the story and it would spread over the Internet and social media, so there was no need to do more.
“That wouldn’t have happened 20 years ago,” Bragman said.
Bragman and Zeigler first planned to make the announcement later this month, after the NFL’s scouting combine, a showcase for teams to evaluate players. But that plan quickly folded. An increasing number of media outlets, including Sports Illustrated, Fox Sports, Bleacher Report and BuzzFeed, began sniffing around.
And the news wasn’t a secret to those close to Sam. The defensive lineman had told his football teammates and coaches last year at Mizzou that he was gay.
So the publicists decided to move up the announcement to last Monday. But that plan didn’t last either as some news outlets seemed ready to go with a story.
“We got the word it wasn’t going to hold, so we pushed it to Sunday night and didn’t tell anyone in the media.”
Bragman told ESPN and the Times that the timing was moved up and he said both did their interviews Sunday and turned the story around that night.
But the plan to limit the number of interviews is holding up.
“We’ve been approached by virtually every media outlet in the country, all three late-night shows, every news magazine, every wire service for Michael’s interview,” Bragman said. “And we chose not to do it.”
Why? Bragman said it would be dangerous to give too many interviews because Sam could be seen as exploiting the media and trying to force the league to accept him because he is gay.
Now, the plan is to help Sam navigate his way through next week’s NFL scouting combine and the weeks until the draft in New York.
“People think I have this blueprint,” said Bragman. “I have a process, not a blueprint. And the process I use is to talk to the client, look at their strategic goals and then decide the right thing.”
