Jack and Esther Reich raised two boys in the clamorous Pittsburgh of the mid-20th century; they weren’t necessarily rich, even if that was the correct way to say the surname, but older son Sam made it to law school at Penn and brother Tom became a lawyer, as well, after studying at Pitt and Duquesne.
On Thursday of this week, the day of his brother’s funeral in Los Angeles, Sam spoke with me on the phone from Bradenton, Fla. Now in his mid-80’s, he was unable to travel to California for the service, but you can be pretty sure no one who got there had the insight into legendary sports agent Tom Reich like his older brother, much less the treasured memories.
“My strongest memories of Tom, as I approach his funeral that I’m going to watch on Facebook, the strongest memories are when we were little boys,” he said, “because if it was a Saturday Kids Day at Forbes Field or a Sunday or holiday doubleheader, we were there. We were Kiner fans. Ralph Kiner was our first hero. And we would go all the time even though the Pirates — except for 1948 — were pretty hopeless.”
I can’t imagine.
The brothers never really broke their addiction to bad baseball, and Sam even spread it to his wife. Before they moved to Florida four years ago, the two of them would see the Pirates 100 times a year in various locales.
To choose a standout memory in their adult lives, Sam goes straight to the moment Tom changed the course of his career, which would ultimately change the course of sports in America. That’s all.
“Tom’s personality to some people was very bizarre, very loud,” Sam said. “He would erupt. He would say outrageous things for effect. That personality is part of his legend, but it doesn’t reflect his intelligent approach to problems. I’ll never forget the night he came home and told the family, ‘I’m going to be a sports agent, representing baseball players.’
“Some sports teams wouldn’t even talk to agents. They gave them such a hard time. One of his early cases, he spent hours, days, trying to get a player a $3,000 raise. I remember thinking, ‘What kind of living can you make for your wife and family and yourself if you have to fight to get really good players $10,000 or $13,000?’ But the union changed all that, and the agents were indispensable.”
Before long, Tom Reich could be spotted prowling the concrete bunker of a concourse outside the Three Rivers Stadium locker rooms, cajoling Dave Parker to consider the benefits of Tom Reich representation. In January of 1979, Reich landed Parker a five-year, $5 million deal, the first contract in professional sports to average $1 million per year. There was a gala to mark the occasion. That summer, Pittsburghers fired projectiles at the gifted right fielder, preferring I guess that the Galbreath ownership keep their money to lavish on feed for their thoroughbreds. The first baseball contract to average $2 million was a Tom Reich production, as well, landing with George Foster of the New York Mets.
But even before either of those things happened, even before Tom Reich developed intricate back-channel networks with George Steinbrenner and Jerry Reinsdorf and so many powerful baseball owners, long before he would be instrumental in setting up the game’s arbitration system and forcing the disastrous 1994 strike toward a settlement, it was evident to anyone who came across his kinetic personality that Tom was possessed of an out-sized confidence. From somewhere, from someone, he’d gotten the idea that whatever it was, he could do it.
“I understand Tom’s degree of self-confidence but I don’t know where it came from,” Sam said. “My father was a very confident person, but not like that, not like being able to take on the world. My mother was very smart, and Tom, in his way, sometimes his profane way, was a civil libertarian. When we were kids, Jackie Robinson was one of his heroes. Not bigger than Kiner; no one was bigger than Kiner. But Tom did a lot to defend and represent minority athletes. He inherited that from my mother.”
When Tom branched out into hockey, his boisterous presence changed the landscape of representation in the sport. He was the agent for Mario Lemieux and for Ron Francis, and was part of Lemieux’s negotiating team as No. 66 became owner of the franchise.
“Tom was a maverick, a real solid person that I got to know over time, and I really appreciated everything he did for me and my family,” Francis said in an email this week. “He’ll be sorely missed.”
Yet as Sam indicated, he and Tom were baseball guys at their core, and one of Tom’s closest friends later in life was former Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy.
“A great friend and a great person,” McClatchy said on the phone from Europe. “Tom had a lot of characteristics, but he led with passion. Everything he did had passion behind it. As our friendship grew, we talked about everything — baseball, hockey, politics, life, family, we covered it. He was a very loyal person and he had a great sense of humor. I was honored to call him a friend.”
He was cooperative with the media, and he knew how to leverage it.
“Is that for the record?” a columnist once asked him.
“No, don’t quote me; just say it yourself and make yourself look smart.”
Tom Reich died July 2 in California. He was 82.
