From Accounting to Air Jordan

The shot clock is winding down. Everyone is watching. You’ve got two choices. Will you take the shot and risk losing it all? Or pass and let someone else have the glory?

Curtis Polk ’81 had a decision to make. He was president of the financial services division of ProServ, a Washington, D.C.-based sports management firm, with some of the greatest athlete clients in history—Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing and Stan Smith to name just a few. He also befriended the firm’s Vice Chairman, renowned basketball agent David Falk. He was finally at a place where he felt fulfilled.

“Then one night, [David] calls me up and says, ‘Meet me tonight at 8pm at the Omni Shoreham Hotel,’” where Falk informs him that he resigned from ProServ and he’s going to start his own agency. He wants Polk to join him. “At this point we weren't able to talk to any clients, so I don’t know if Michael Jordan would go with us,” Polk says.

ProServ founder Donald Dell offered Polk triple his salary if he were to stay. “So now I have a really tough decision to make,” Polk says. “Do I triple my salary, which is pretty awesome for a 32-year-old, and stay where I know there is this business that’s been around for 20 years? Or do I take a risk and become an owner with David and know there’s probably going to be a lawsuit,” Polk says.

He takes the shot. “I go with David.”

The decision resulted in the launch of FAME (Falk Associates Management Enterprises) in 1992. All of Polk’s clients and staff from his financial group at ProServ joined the new company and the risk further paid off as NBA player salaries and endorsements reached new heights in the years following FAME’s founding. For his part, in the summer of 1996, Polk negotiated four of the five highest contracts in NBA history at that time.

After FAME was sold in 1998 to SFX Entertainment, Polk stayed on until 2001. As he contemplated what was next, Jordan gave him another career choice. “He said why don’t you just set up an office with me?” Today, Polk and his team oversee investments and financial partnerships for the Hall of Famer as well as his marketing, public relations and philanthropic activities, through Jump Management, Jordan’s family and business office.

Since the establishment of Jump Management, Polk has invested alongside Jordan in such endeavors as the purchase and sale of the Charlotte Hornets and the NASCAR Cup Series team 23XI Racing. He also became an Emmy Award-winning producer for his work on the 2020 documentary series, “The Last Dance,” with fellow Smith Terp Estee Portnoy, MBA ’96. Polk also negotiated contracts between Jordan and Nike, one in 1993 and the most recent agreement in 2021, which he calls the “biggest professional accomplishment I take pride in.”

His relationship with Jordan, he says, has been a good balance. “He’s a very optimistic person. He always sees the glass half full and I’m always looking at, ‘what’s the downside here,’” Polk says. “We’ve been a good team in that regard, and I think it's helped me be successful particularly in my work with him.”

As a kid growing up in Brooklyn, Polk was an avid baseball fan, playing stickball with his friends and basketball on the playground. “I liked sports, I liked watching sports. But I never thought of it like a career.”

He did like numbers, and a childhood hobby of racing slot cars in East Coast tournaments brought him to Greenbelt, Md., where he happened upon the University of Maryland campus. Polk later enrolled and studied accounting. A passion for tax law and a mentor, former U.S. Senator George Smathers, helped him pursue his law degree and eventually land a job working with athletes.

Polk says it isn’t about where you want to work, but building skills so you are ready for whatever industry calls you off the bench. “I didn’t think of sports as a career but because I had homed in on these other skills, it worked really well.”

Curtis and his wife, Amanda, split their time between Florida and Potomac, Md.