LeBron James’s Agent Is Transforming the Business of Basketball

Rich Paul is known for driving hard bargains for star clients, giving them new power in the N.B.A.
Rich Paul
Paul and his client LeBron James believe that athletes should have more control over their careers.Photographs by Micaiah Carter for The New Yorker

Rich Paul, the trusted agent of LeBron James and a bevy of other National Basketball Association all-stars, has spent the pandemic working from his property in Beverly Hills. He often takes calls in a small house in the back yard, which is decorated like an old-time cigar lounge, with framed vintage photographs, dark-brown furniture, and low lighting. When we met there recently, Paul, dressed in a Nike T-shirt, basketball shorts, and sandals, sat in an oversized chair, in front of portraits of James Baldwin and Michael Jackson. There was a poster of Muhammad Ali that took up almost an entire wall, as well as a few stills from gangster movies. “I was watching ‘The Godfather’ at a very young age,” Paul said.

Paul, who is forty, is trim and about five feet nine inches tall, which means he stands eye-to-shoulder with many of his clients. He has a cool, even speaking style that must serve him well when he’s asking a team owner to part with many millions of dollars. He isn’t likely to laugh at your joke or concede a point just to make you feel more at ease. When I asked him why he had chosen Beverly Hills, after deciding to leave his home town of Cleveland for Southern California, in 2019, he said, without a glimmer of a smile, “Axel Foley”—Eddie Murphy’s character in the “Beverly Hills Cop” franchise. Lest anyone doubt his seriousness, Paul said he owns the same Detroit Lions jacket as Foley wore in “Beverly Hills Cop II.”

He began to speak about the pop culture of his childhood. He was an obsessive consumer of movies and TV and saw them as subjects to be mastered as much as relished. “I remember when ‘Bloodsport’ came out—I used to watch that movie over and over again,” he said. “I was a big Ninja Turtles fan.” Now he was watching documentaries about the great producers of that era—Norman Lear, who developed “The Jeffersons,” Quincy Jones, who worked with Michael Jackson and produced “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”—revisiting the eighties and nineties from the vantage point of a Beverly Hills executive. Paul said, “I’m just playing all those things back in my mind, where I was at that time as a kid, just dreaming big.”

Later, as Paul worked, personal assistants and other colleagues filtered through the property. Much business seemed to be done in his back yard. It was February, and Paul mentioned that he hadn’t been vaccinated yet, but I was the only person in a mask. The N.B.A.’s health-and-safety protocols are famously strict, so I was surprised when Paul told me that he was going to James’s house in Brentwood that evening.

Paul started his agency, Klutch Sports Group, nine years ago. Since then, he has negotiated nearly two billion dollars in deals for his clients. His list is growing and includes some of the N.B.A.’s most extraordinary athletes—Anthony Davis, of the Los Angeles Lakers; Ben Simmons, of the Philadelphia 76ers; Trae Young, of the Atlanta Hawks—but his biggest client, by far, was also his first.

Paul met LeBron James in 2002, at the Akron-Canton Airport. They were both waiting for a flight to Atlanta. James, who was seventeen, was widely expected to be the N.B.A.’s No. 1 draft pick the following year; he had already appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated and had been described as the next Michael Jordan. Paul, who was twenty-one, was selling vintage sports jerseys out of the trunk of his car. James spotted Paul wearing a Houston Oilers jersey with the name of the quarterback Warren Moon on it. He was impressed and said so. Paul told James that his source was a store in Atlanta, called Distant Replays, and said that James should mention him if he went. The two stayed in touch. James told me that they talked about “basketball, football, and the greatest that have ever played the game. And then just about being a Black kid growing up in the inner city, and the struggles that come with that.”

When, in the summer of 2003, James signed with the Cleveland Cavaliers, he started paying Paul a salary of forty-eight thousand dollars, as an investment in what the relationship could become. A few years later, Paul went to work at Creative Artists Agency, under James’s then agent, Leon Rose. “I have always felt that he had a purpose, and that’s why I kept him around,” James said. “I knew he was going to be something more than even what he thought he could possibly be at the time. It was just a feeling I had.”

Since the beginning of his career, James has worked with a tight circle of friend-associates. Maverick Carter, who played high-school basketball with James, became his closest business adviser. Randy Mims, a childhood friend of James’s from Akron, now works for the Lakers. Carter, who was in high school when he met Paul, recalled him as intensely smart and ambitious. “I think LeBron looked up to him as another person he could learn from, and LeBron is an avid learner,” he said. James, Paul, Carter, and Mims refer to themselves as the Four Horsemen, and take enormous pride in their loyalty to one another and in their worldliness—the way they absorbed the intricacies of the sports industry and made it work for them.

With James as his star client, Paul has developed tremendous influence in the N.B.A. The two men have come to be associated with “player empowerment,” a term that refers to the additional clout that athletes—usually superstars—wield as they change teams more frequently and develop fan bases distinct from those in the cities they represent. The argument for player empowerment is that, for too long, teams have had too much control over the careers of athletes, almost all of whom can be traded on a whim, and that players should have some say in where they work and live. Moreover, in the N.B.A., which remains Paul’s principal business—even as he is building a list of N.F.L. clients—it’s hard for a team to be successful without a top-ten player. That gives the league’s best athletes tremendous leverage. As David Falk, an agent who represented Michael Jordan and many other stars, told me, “They bring in the fans. They bring in jersey sales. They bring in the revenue.” Why shouldn’t they have the power?

Player empowerment is also inextricably linked to race. Professional basketball, a majority-Black sport, has always been run by a white commissioner and, almost uniformly, by white owners. But as players have gained sway they have become increasingly outspoken about politics, leading the league to embrace the Black Lives Matter movement. Jeremy Zimmer, the head of United Talent Agency, which bought a major stake in Klutch in 2019, told me, “Underneath player empowerment is also, I think, a real connectivity to what’s happening socially in our country and how we’re dealing with the injustice that lives underneath.”

But player empowerment has downsides. In a league of thirty teams, superstars cluster in New York and Los Angeles, as well as a few other big markets—Houston, Miami, Philadelphia, San Francisco—making it more difficult for teams in other cities to compete. “Player empowerment is a catchall for the fact that the league has done a terrible job of empowering teams,” a current N.B.A. general manager told me. “The players have all of the leverage in every situation. I think it’s the worst thing that ever happened to professional sports on all levels.” Bomani Jones, a sports journalist with ESPN, framed the issue differently: “The N.B.A. has a problem, which is it’s got some bad real estate. They put a lot of teams in places that young Black men don’t necessarily want to live.”

Rich Paul formed Klutch in the wake of the greatest controversy of LeBron James’s career. In 2010, James, at the end of his contract with the Cavaliers, surveyed the league and privately concluded that he could no longer stay in Cleveland. He made the announcement on a grandiose live broadcast on ESPN, called “The Decision,” in which he declared, without a trace of irony, “I’m going to take my talents to South Beach and join the Miami Heat.” James has always been admired among the press as a player and as a person, but “The Decision” was widely criticized as an exercise in egotism. (When I asked Paul if James left C.A.A. because of “The Decision,” Paul answered, “He left because of me. Because I left. That was simple.”)

“I blame the people around him. I blame the lack of a father figure in his life,” Bill Simmons, then a leading columnist at ESPN, wrote. “I blame us for feeding his narcissism to the point that he referred to himself in the third person five times in forty-five minutes. I blame local and national writers (including myself) for apparently not doing a good enough job explaining to athletes like LeBron what sports mean to us, and how it IS a marriage, for better and worse, and that we’re much more attached to these players and teams than they realize.”

Paul saw this as condescension and worse. “That’s why I don’t speak to Bill Simmons,” he said. “A lot of that has to do with race, too. He wouldn’t have said that about Larry Bird. He wouldn’t have said that about J. J. Redick. You get what I am saying? ‘The Decision’ ten years ago is the norm today. It’s what everyone wants to do. Kids won’t even decide where they go to college without it being a big production, and Bill Simmons says some shit like that.”

“Wait—how many gallons are in a pint?”
Cartoon by Asher Perlman

In retrospect, “The Decision” marked the start of the player-empowerment era—it’s hard to imagine a similar event causing so much anger or upset today. James himself is unapologetic and believes that “The Decision” helped other athletes take control of their careers. He told me, “You are always going to have people that are not going to agree with something that you do, but at the end of the day they can’t stop you, and can’t stop your path, and can’t stop your journey. I am happy that I was able to fall on the sword for the rest of these athletes, men and women, to be able to feel empowered.”

At Klutch, Paul became known for driving hard bargains, especially on behalf of James’s teammates. After winning two championships with the Heat, James returned to Cleveland in 2014 and, two years later, led the Cavaliers to their first N.B.A. title. Paul’s reputation was cemented after James joined the Lakers, in 2018. The following year, Paul all but forced the New Orleans Pelicans to trade Anthony Davis to the Lakers—just the teammate that James needed in order to win the championship in 2020.

Paul’s strategy has become familiar. He first let it be known that Davis, who was under contract, was demanding a trade—a violation of N.B.A. rules—and then indicated that destinations such as Boston and New York were off the table. Paul was effectively making it clear that Davis would sign only with the Lakers, giving them an inside track on trading for him by depressing other teams’ offers. The N.B.A. fined Davis fifty thousand dollars for the trade demand and could have fined the Pelicans if they had benched him—an appealing option for the team, because Davis wasn’t playing his best, and an injury might have compromised the trade. Davis played sparingly during his remaining months in New Orleans, leaving bad feelings all around.

I asked Paul what he would say to a fan who believes that once an athlete signs a contract he owes it to the team to finish it out. “That would normally be a casual fan, and the casual fan doesn’t understand the layers that come with it,” Paul said. I asked him about his early conversations with Davis about leaving New Orleans. He grew circumspect. “I educated him on why I thought the team wouldn’t be . . . ” He paused. “All athletes are competitive and confident, until reality sets in. And I educated him on things.” For a star player like Davis to commit to a franchise, “you either need your team”—a winning mix of players—“in place, or you need flexibility, assets, money, and the ability to make decisions. And, more important, the willingness to pay the tax”—the so-called luxury tax, for exceeding the league’s salary cap, which the Pelicans at that time refused to pay. “This ain’t ‘Moneyball,’ ” Paul said. He was referring to the book by Michael Lewis, in which Billy Beane, the nimble general manager of the Oakland A’s, builds a winning baseball team on the cheap by using advanced statistical methods. But, as Paul knows, nothing quite trumps money. Players have short careers, and very few will remain sentimental about the charms of a small-market existence, particularly if their team is a loser.

Paul hadn’t done much to rebut the notion that he had pushed Davis toward joining LeBron James and the Lakers. As one N.B.A. general manager said of Paul, “He is absolutely unrelenting in getting his players what they want, and he will use every means available to him to do that.” Last year, James Harden, who is not represented by Paul, adopted his strategy, all but saying that he wanted a trade from the Houston Rockets and appearing not to play very hard until his wish was granted. Falk, the agent, called Harden’s behavior “a debacle,” but everyone around the N.B.A. seems to agree that this is the direction the league is headed in.

The rise of Rich Paul has led to heated conversations about what it takes to be a good agent. The role is changing along with the N.B.A. Agents have long done much of their work in bargaining sessions, painstakingly negotiating contracts for their clients. But now, particularly for star clients, the job is also about finding new ways to wield power, including using the media. This is where Paul excels. “It’s not something that you go to school for,” Jones, of ESPN, told me. “It’s the kind of thing that you just pick up along the way, and he has got that resolve and that fundamental, innate understanding of leverage.”

Paul, who dropped out of college during his freshman year, is intensely aware that he lacks the formal education of most agents. “It used to be, you had to be a lawyer, or have a lawyer,” he told me. “You don’t have to be a lawyer to do anything.” But his background, as well as his approach to his job, clearly rankles others. In 2018, Paul negotiated an unconventional deal for the N.B.A. prospect Darius Bazley, in which Bazley, who had reneged on a commitment to play for Syracuse University, was later paid a million dollars for an “internship” at New Balance (a prelude to a sneaker contract). The next year, the N.C.A.A. announced a new rule: agents could not represent college athletes unless they themselves had a college degree. On Twitter, LeBron James dubbed the new regulation “#TheRichPaulRule.” Within a week, the N.C.A.A. had rescinded it. Paul told me, “It’s a direct target of people of color for sure—a hundred per cent.”

One day, I was talking with Paul and Adam Mendelsohn, a former political consultant and a longtime adviser to Paul and James. As a way of defending Paul, Mendelsohn alluded to the fact that he had worked at Creative Artists Agency before starting Klutch. Paul “came up the same way everyone else did,” Mendelsohn said, by putting in time at a major firm.

“Well, let me tell you something,” Paul responded. “I learned nothing at C.A.A.”

“You know you’re on the record, by the way?” Mendelsohn said.

Paul forged ahead: “Nothing. I learned nothing. Because there was no investment in me for me to learn anything. There was no plan. I used my personal skill set that I grew up with for these opportunities.”

Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, has known Paul for almost two decades, and told me that, from their earliest conversations, he was impressed by Paul. “Rich felt very different to me,” he said. “It was more a sense of collaboration. And it was more a sense of curiosity, too. A lot more questions were being asked. He felt very comfortable to me acknowledging what he didn’t know. There was always that adage that lawyers learn—Don’t ask questions you don’t know the answer to. Rich was willing to ask real questions and say, ‘How does this really work?’ ”

Paul is proud of his willingness to fight for his clients, but he takes pains to combat the impression that he is constantly doing battle with teams. “You’re not kicking in a door,” he told me of his job. “I think the perception of it is wrong.” He paused for a moment. “What I always focussed on was how to educate the athlete. It’s one thing to be a Black man in America, right? It’s a totally different thing to be a Black athlete.”

For Black athletes, Paul explained, the sudden wealth of an N.B.A. contract comes with a “Black tax”: “Their number of dependents is higher, their education in most cases is lower, their financial literacy is lower, their family infrastructure is lesser.” He began to speak in the voice of a young N.B.A recruit: “So now I become the breadwinner, which makes me the decision-maker. But I don’t really know how to make these decisions or why I am making these decisions. In addition, I have this bond through affection, I have this bond through disparity, I have this bond through guilt. I have this bond through absence. I am looking at the household, I am looking at every decision that has to be made, and I have to do this all with a focus on the money. I also have to look the part, which means I have to have the biggest car, I have to have the biggest house, I have to have the fanciest everything.”

Paul and others at Klutch said that they see their job not only as making money for players but also as teaching them how to spend it. When I asked Fara Leff, the chief operating officer, how the company defines player empowerment, she told me, “Putting them in a decision-making role and educating them—not just putting paper or deals in front of them, but really talking to them and educating them about being a basketball or a football player.”

Paul believes that he’s in a unique position to help Black athletes. But he also thinks that many of them are reluctant to sign up with a Black agent. “If you go back in the history of representation, again, there were very few Black agents,” he said. “There were very few families that had solid family infrastructure. So, you had Grandma really leading the charge, right? Well, who’s Grandma going to listen to? She’s going to listen to head coach. And head coach, in more cases than not, was probably not going to look like the player.”

During our conversations, Paul kept returning to how the Black community viewed his role. “We’re going from us feeling like, when you come in a room, if you see more Black people in the room, you’re in the wrong room. No, you’re in the right room. That mentality years ago, we have to change that,” he said.

Draymond Green, an all-star forward for the Golden State Warriors and a Klutch client, told me he agreed with Paul’s assessment: “There was always kind of this thought that, for African-American players, the best-fitting person to represent us wasn’t one of ours.”

At the same time, Paul said, “It’s very difficult for me to represent a white player.” I expressed surprise that this was the case.

“It just is. Look around. There’s very few,” he said. “I represent a player from Bosnia. But, again, he’s international. He looks at it different.”

“So white players who are American don’t want a Black agent?” I asked him.

“They’ll never say that,” Paul answered, cracking a rare smile. “But they don’t. I think there’s always going to be that cloud over America.”

In early May, Paul was in Cleveland for the N.F.L. draft. He showed me Glenville, the neighborhood where he grew up, on the east side of the city. When Paul was young, he said, there was a family in every house, and he and his brother knew the names of the people in each one. Now even the main streets of Glenville looked empty, and nearly every residential block had several abandoned houses. As we drove past a mural proclaiming “Our Lives Matter,” Paul pointed to a lot where he used to meet friends and play ball. It was now overgrown with weeds. His gleaming white Mercedes attracted attention, but it wasn’t clear if people were staring at the car or at him. Paul seemed to know many of those we passed, all of whom looked happy to see him.

Paul spent his early years with his mother and three siblings. His father, Rich, Sr., owned a corner store, R & J Confectionery. Paul described his father as serious and business-oriented, which is how everyone in Cleveland described Paul as a child. There wasn’t much to eat some nights, but his dad occasionally splurged on something his kids wanted. Two people close to Paul in Cleveland recalled that he wore a tiny tuxedo to his third-grade graduation.

“I definitely wanted to be an athlete” as a kid, Paul told me. He played basketball and football, but it was obvious that he wasn’t headed for a professional career. “Your heart is big, but I’m small in size,” he said, so he tried to think more like his dad, “as an entrepreneur and businessman.” Paul recalled that, at night, he stayed up late to watch the N.B.A. Western Conference games, and he studied every element of the players’ behavior, “everything from mannerisms to what they said at press conferences.” When he was twelve, he played in a local basketball league’s championship game, and he was named most valuable player. Because he had spent so much time studying N.B.A. broadcasts, he said, “I kind of knew how to handle myself in the interview, thanking my teammates and so on.”

Paul’s mother, Peaches, battled drug abuse for much of her life, and when Paul was ten he went to live with his grandmother and a great-uncle, in a house several blocks away. He said of his mother, “I was never really angry, but I was definitely protective, and I was definitely sad in a lot of ways. Because, as a kid, you see other kids and their experience with their parents, and you want the same.” (Peaches died, after getting clean, in 2016.)

When Paul was in ninth grade, his father sent him to Benedictine High School, which was Roman Catholic, and mostly white. Paul was excited that it offered what he called “a bigger stage” for basketball. “My dad was enthusiastic about it because he felt I would get a better education,” he said. “He didn’t really give a shit about basketball.”

Paul and James have been close friends since James was a teen-ager. “I always felt that he had a purpose,” James said.

In 1999, when Paul was in college, at the University of Akron, his father was diagnosed with intestinal cancer. Paul transferred to Cleveland State to be closer to him. His father died a few months later, and Paul dropped out of school. “He was always telling me my education was important,” Paul said. “I always wanted to work. But I still probably would have finished school if my father was alive. I never wanted to let him down.”

We pulled up near an empty lot—the site of R & J Confectionery.

“This is my first time seeing it tore down,” Paul said. “I’m so used to seeing a building right here.” He told me that he plans to buy the lot. Paul’s brother, Meco, who still lives in Cleveland, got into the car and began reminiscing. “That boy ain’t switched up at all,” he said of his brother. “He was exactly how he is right now. There’s really no change, just he got a little bigger.”

As Paul drove, the brothers talked about the neighborhood and the tragedies that had taken place there. Paul kept pointing out telephone poles and trees that had been turned into shrines for victims of gun violence.

“You’ve been to my house in Beverly Hills,” he said to me. Now, showing me his old neighborhood, he asked, “Would you think there was a way out?”

“An old man got hit in the head right there,” Meco said, pointing to the sidewalk.

“Really?”

“Yeah. He was walking with his grandkids.”

“Oh, man,” Paul said, shaking his head.

Maverick Carter, LeBron James’s childhood friend and financial adviser, told me that he and Paul “developed a kinship and friendship based on how we grew up. We both had a view of the long term, and if you came from a neighborhood like I did or Rich did it’s very hard to have a long-term view, because you have to figure out what you’re going to eat the next day.” He continued, “I think Rich is very good at giving people tough love. He has an ability to not be afraid and not back away from a tough conversation, because of the way he grew up, in part from having a father who died at a young age and having a mother who was a drug addict. Usually, our parents protect us from tough conversations, but he had the opposite experience.”

LeBron James told me that he believed Paul’s upbringing allowed him to connect with young players. “A lot of these kids that are being brought into these situations and being drafted, they are first-generation money-makers, they are from the inner city, they are from either single-parent households or from two-parent households, but they are from what we call the hood,” he said. “And Rich and I are from that as well, so he can relate to these kids. There is nothing they’ve seen that he hasn’t seen, so he is able to have real conversations with them.”

At dinner at a crowded upscale Cleveland restaurant, Paul seemed more relaxed than he had in Beverly Hills. He was sitting in a booth, and friends kept stopping by the table, often teasing him about his constant phone use, and the challenges it would pose to a romantic relationship. (Paul, who has three kids, has never married.)

The conversation turned to the pandemic, and I asked him if he’d been vaccinated since we last saw each other. He said he had. “What percentage of N.B.A. players will get vaccinated?” I wondered.

“Probably thirty,” he told me.

“Why is that?” I asked.

Paul tapped the side of his head and rolled his eyes. (An N.B.A. spokesman said that eighty per cent of players have had at least one shot. James has refused to say whether he has been vaccinated.)

We started talking about the Lakers, who were in a slump. Paul brought up the Nets, saying that they were “the only team that can beat us.” This sounded like a strangely partisan observation for an agent with clients across the N.B.A., especially after all the criticism he had received when bringing Anthony Davis to the Lakers. “I’ve got six guys on the team,” he said, shaking his head. “C’mon.”

Because of Paul’s close friendship with James, detractors have long claimed that Paul’s influence in the N.B.A. derives from his star client. When I asked Jeremy Zimmer, the head of United Talent Agency, about the connection between the two, he conceded the point: “I think that LeBron loves the success that his friend and agent Rich Paul has had and understands that a lot of that success has to do with his relationship with LeBron.”

There is a rumor in basketball circles that James owns a large stake in Klutch. Paul described such talk as an attempt to undermine him. “So why is it that LeBron has to own Rich Paul’s business?” he asked. “Let me tell you what that’s about. That’s all putting things in the atmosphere to discourage, right? That’s all they want to do.” Zimmer said, “LeBron doesn’t own Klutch Sports,” and the N.B.A. agrees. The spokesman for the league said, “Current players are prohibited under the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the N.B.A. and the Players’ Association from holding an equity interest in a business entity that represents other players. We have seen nothing to suggest Klutch Sports is in violation of this restriction.”

When I talked to James about Klutch, I was surprised that he spoke of “our company.” James told me, “I would say Rich and our company—I mean all of us around each other and Klutch—have done a great job of empowering their athletes and letting them understand the platform they have.” I later asked Mendelsohn whether this indicated that James has a financial stake in Klutch. He responded, “LeBron does not and cannot have any ownership in Klutch. He refers to Klutch as ‘us’ because Klutch is his family. It’s a dumb rumor, and while it doesn’t bother Rich I don’t think anyone paying attention is confused about why his detractors say it.”

Brian Windhorst, an ESPN reporter who has known James for more than two decades and has written several books about him, told me, “The burden that Rich faces is that people question his legitimacy. They want to delegitimize him because of his race, because of his lack of education, because he used to sell jerseys out of the trunk of his car. If that’s the best they can do, they have to do a lot better.” When I asked him about James’s role in Klutch, Windhorst cut me off: “Is there some secret arrangement? So what if there is? If he tosses LeBron some sort of kickback, so what?” He added, “Rich may have been pulled up on his feet by LeBron, but he grew his own wings.”

One afternoon in Beverly Hills, Paul and I walked into his living room with Mendelsohn. “She was over yesterday,” Paul said.

Mendelsohn clarified whom he meant, dropping the name of a major pop star. “Doing what?” he asked.

“Hanging out,” Paul replied.

“Why are you hanging out?” Mendelsohn asked.

“Why not?” Paul replied.

I wasn’t entirely sure whether this exchange was for my benefit.

“I like the kind of art that when you’re up close you’re, like, ‘This doesn’t look like anything,’ but when you back up you go, ‘Oh, it’s a face.’ ”
Cartoon by Zachary Kanin

Paul said, “I’m not dating, I’m single. Put that in the story.” He laughed for the first time all day.

That morning, Paul had had a Zoom call with the mother of a potential client who was likely to be a first-round N.B.A. draft pick. She wanted to talk with Paul about what he could offer her son that other agents could not. “I just need someone to sell his quality points,” she said. “You have got to believe in him.”

“I think you hit on some good points,” Paul responded, without much emotion. “Some of them I definitely agree with. Some of them I don’t.” He described the process that her son would undergo before being drafted, the workouts in front of team executives and the meetings with general managers. “We help them understand how to approach these interviews, because that’s where you really rise,” Paul said of young athletes. “They will interview his teammates, and ask him, ‘Did your teammates like playing with you?’ . . . ‘Well, why didn’t your teammates like playing with you?’ How he answers that question matters. It really does.”

Paul began speeding up his speech, rubbing his hands together. “Some guys are, like, ‘I want to be an all-star, I want to be the M.V.P., I want to be this, I want to be that,’ ” he continued, clearly anxious to get to the reveal. “Well, that’s wrong. You can be that, but you haven’t yet said anything about how great you want to be as a teammate, how you want to do the things on both ends of the floor to help your team win.” Suggesting what an ideal young recruit would say, he added, “ ‘Whatever the coach asks me to do, I am going to do it a hundred and ten per cent.’ ”

“It just sounds so generic,” the mother said. “I thought you have to be authentic and say, ‘Get to know me and my personality.’ ” Paul looked slightly skeptical but didn’t respond. “ ‘My teammates, my teammates,’ ” she said, lightly mocking him. “That’s what they want to hear. I get it. But that’s not the real authentic parts. I don’t get the generic answers. Everyone is going to say similar answers. Is that what they are looking for?”

“That’s exactly what they are looking for,” Paul replied. “There’s a fine balance, because you got to remember who’s drafting these kids. In most cases, fifty-five-plus Euro men who have certain criteria and are stuck in their ways. The last thing they want to do is deal with what they perceive to be a headache to come.” Paul sounded as though he had given a version of this speech many times, but he didn’t betray any impatience. If this was tough love, so be it.

“I got you,” the mother responded. “I know this sounds weird, but why does this process sound like, how do I say it, I am not going to say slave-mentality type, but I guess that’s what I am saying. Why does this process seem like we have to bow down?”

Paul exchanged a glance with Mendelsohn.

“I don’t think there is a bow down, because I don’t bow down to anybody,” Paul said. “I think it’s a balance. He has to be who he is. But, at the same time, what you don’t want to do is come off as a ‘me’ guy.” Paul then began discussing the intricacies of contracts. Eventually, they agreed to continue the conversation later and ended the call.

I asked Paul if he enjoyed talking to players’ families. “Yeah, I do,” he said, exhaling loudly. “One thing people don’t understand about our job is you’re not going to get every player the first time around. Because they don’t know the difference. But then, they get in and realize, ‘Hmm, Rich told me that all these things were going to happen. And they happened. This guy told me that things are gonna be different. And they’re not.’ And then they switch.”

In 2019, Paul sold what was described as a “significant stake” in Klutch to United Talent Agency, and became the head of the agency’s sports division. The move surprised many who know him. Draymond Green recalled that, in their early conversations, Paul had said, “Dray, I want to make all of these huge agencies obsolete.” Paul told me, “What I was saying to Draymond was there has been a monopoly in our space for many years, and I wanted to disrupt that.” He compared his own ascendance to the moment in “The Godfather” when “Michael went and killed all the heads of the five families.” Windhorst said, “That is as old as time. Klutch has absolutely gone corporate. There is no doubt about that. Some of the deals that they have made, you can tell there was more compromise. But joining U.T.A. has helped Klutch become a major power player.”

I recalled Paul’s conversation with the mother of his prospective client and his counsel of prudence; it had made me wonder about when Paul tries to use his leverage and when he doesn’t. LeBron James is known as one of the most politically outspoken athletes of his generation, campaigning for Democratic Presidential candidates and delivering his opinions on matters such as the killing of George Floyd and Georgia’s restrictive voting laws. Paul made it clear that he supports similar activism in his other clients. “You can’t turn a blind eye and just act like things don’t exist,” he said. “How you choose to involve yourself is up to you personally. The only thing you have to do is be aware. You can’t be tone-deaf to what the hell is going on around here.”

But there are limits to James’s political risk-taking. In 2019, Daryl Morey, then the Rockets’ general manager, tweeted about freedom for Hong Kong. At the time, the Lakers and the Nets were about to travel to China for a couple of exhibition games. James, who has a billion-dollar contract with Nike, which does business in China, was silent until he returned, and then criticized Morey. “We all talk about this freedom of speech,” James told reporters. “Yes, we all do have freedom of speech, but at times there are ramifications for the negative that can happen when you are not thinking about others and only thinking about yourself.” James, who often speaks about the importance of being educated about politics, went on to say that he and his teammates had not responded to Morey earlier because they had not “had enough information to even talk about it at that point in time, and we still feel the same way.”

Many liberals thought that James’s response had blemished an otherwise exemplary record of liberal activism. Unsurprisingly, Paul defended his client. “The thing about him criticizing Morey was that it wasn’t whether Morey said something about right versus wrong,” Paul said. “It was Morey’s comment affecting the environment and the business of the N.B.A. It wasn’t just LeBron being affected. It was everyone being affected.” I brought up Muhammad Ali, who had risked his career by refusing to serve in the Vietnam War. “I think there was a way to address it without—” Paul began, before catching himself. “I think people take it so literal, like he didn’t want to address what was going on in China because he didn’t want to hurt his Nike business. I mean, that’s so far away from the truth.”

At other moments, Paul was more forthright about how he weighed his interests. Last winter, the N.B.A. announced that it would hold an All-Star Game in Atlanta. The season had been condensed because of the pandemic, and players, already exhausted, expressed reservations about using what could have been five days off for an exhibition game that’s lucrative for the league but pretty dreary for them. James himself spoke up, saying he had “zero energy and zero excitement” about the game—but he never said he wouldn’t play, and he eventually agreed to do so. I asked Paul why he and James didn’t just decline to attend or demand that the game be cancelled.

“You can’t do that,” Paul replied, sounding frustrated that I didn’t grasp the obvious point. “You have to value what drives our business. All-Star weekend is a very important part of our business.” He mentioned the league’s corporate partners and sponsors. “To not have the All-Star Game, or not have all-stars playing in the All-Star Game, I think that would be a form of doing bad business. You don’t have to like it, and you don’t have to always feel up to doing something. No one feels up to doing something all the time. But you have to toe the line, and you have to be a good partner.”

Mendelsohn cut in. “Rich is the first to tell LeBron and these players, ‘You have to do this,’ ” he said. “There is this idea about player empowerment that we are taking on the league and taking on the owners. But there is more time spent figuring out how to help the owners and the league be successful than there is spent trying to take them on. And a lot of people assume it’s some sort of activist orientation. It’s not.”

“The perception is that you are busting into the room,” Paul said. “No. You are really trying to have conversations at the highest level, on How are we able to grow our game? How are we able to grow the business of our game?” ♦