The Wise Exit

Wayne Parrish - Episode 62 | CASHING OUT M&A PODCAST

00:00:00:09 - 00:00:22:14
Wayne Parrish
I'm 11 years old again, and that is so much of the attraction, I think, of sports to older dudes like myself or other dudes like you that aren't as old as me. Is that sort of connection to childhood, connection to memories and this sense of history unfolding and the continued that that brings to a life.

00:00:22:16 - 00:00:50:18
Todd Sullivan
Welcome to the Cashing Out podcast, where our fellow founders share real stories and offer honest advice around selling their companies to some of the top acquirers in the world. My name is Todd Sullivan, CEO of Exitwise, where we help business owners create the exits they deserve. Today, my guest is Wayne Parrish, the owner of the Sport Collection, one of the largest collections of sports photography and magazine covers representing five decades of behind the scenes sports history.

00:00:50:20 - 00:01:15:00
Todd Sullivan
During his illustrious career as a sports journalist. Wayne was also the CEO of Canada Basketball and a director of the Canadian Journalism Foundation. Wayne and his partners have amassed more than 150,000 sports related images that share a unique perspective on the lives of elite athletes on and off the field, as well as highlighting the social issues of the time in a way that only sports can.

00:01:15:02 - 00:01:37:21
Todd Sullivan
Wayne and his partner, Marc Appleman, approached Exitwise looking for help to find the next steward of this unrivaled piece of sports history. And we gladly obliged. In our conversation, you'll hear the passion Wayne has for this historical election, and you'll see a sense of how intertwined sports and social issues can be and how a photographic reference can be an amazing piece of our collective history.

00:01:37:23 - 00:02:02:14
Todd Sullivan
I hope you enjoy my conversation with Wayne Parrish. Wayne, thank you for being here. I've been really excited to chat with you. You know, we got to know each other over the last couple of months because you and your partner, Marc, came to us and you had this incredible asset, frankly, that is kind of this historical guide through sports, through photography.

00:02:02:16 - 00:02:34:18
Todd Sullivan
And you came to us thinking, hey, what is this collection worth? Are there buyers for this type of collection? You had a lot of different business models that you could enable through these assets. And although not our typical straight M&A process, we got just so fascinated with the collection that we really wanted to help. And so getting you on today, I think our listeners are going to find the story fascinating of your background and how you came to be the owner of the sport collection.

00:02:34:20 - 00:02:36:22
Todd Sullivan
So thanks. Thanks for being here and doing this.

00:02:36:23 - 00:02:40:15
Wayne Parrish
It's so wonderful to be here. I'm looking forward to it.

00:02:40:17 - 00:02:49:00
Todd Sullivan
Why don't we start with your background, obviously, as a journalist, But, you know, we're really where did you start before the sport collection was a thing?

00:02:49:01 - 00:03:08:06
Wayne Parrish
So try to I mean, I have a varied background, which is, as my late father used to say, that just means you can't keep a job. Right. But the reality is, I've had the privilege of enjoying many careers. I am Canadian and have always lived in Canada, although much of my work over the years has been done in the U.S. and around the world.

00:03:08:06 - 00:03:31:20
Wayne Parrish
But I'm still based in Canada today, and I started out life as a science major in university. But somewhere along the way, I was seduced by both sports. That happened quite young and media, and that happened quite young as well. And so when I was in university, I had to make some money to make ends meet, to be able to pay my tuition.

00:03:31:22 - 00:04:10:10
Wayne Parrish
And so there was a job advertised at the local daily newspaper in Vancouver, where I grew up to cover University News, which was big in the seventies, back back in my day and University Sports. And so I inquired about the job. I pursued it quite heavily and eventually I got a call from the sports editor of the newspaper who said, We need someone to cover the University of B.C. football game and the University of B.C. For those of your viewers who probably don't know, the Canadian college landscape is one of the biggest schools in Canada, probably one of the top three or four, and it's globally ranked among the top 50 or 60 of the world.

00:04:10:12 - 00:04:33:12
Wayne Parrish
But it has had then a terrible, terrible football team. And so I was paid $5 to go out and cover the first UBC football game of that particular season. And I fell in love with everything about journalist or by love of everything, journalistic and sports wise, kind of coalesced in that moment. And I just went head over heels.

00:04:33:12 - 00:04:58:20
Wayne Parrish
And although I continued to attend university for many years, I really put my energies into media, newspapers and writing. I was a journalist for several years, but eventually moved to the media, to the business side of media. I've run a number of different, significant media companies in Canada. I've overseen digital publications and launched many digital publications and companies in Canada.

00:04:58:22 - 00:05:24:03
Wayne Parrish
And I also spent about a 15 year run with Canada basketball, which is our equivalent of USA Basketball. So I'm not putting myself anywhere near his level. But so Jerry Colangelo, when he was running USA basketball and I were starting really good colleagues and pals, and so I was often shorthanded myself at that point is think of me as the Jerry Colangelo of Canada.

00:05:24:05 - 00:05:46:09
Wayne Parrish
Now his son Brian was running the Raptors at the time, so I think Brian would have taken some umbrage with that. But nonetheless. And so I did that for I was CEO and then chair of the board, and I only stepped down two years ago as chair of the Board of Canada Basketball. And as you probably know, Todd, our Olympic teams, the men's or the women's initially and now the men's have really come of age.

00:05:46:11 - 00:06:15:12
Wayne Parrish
And just a few weeks ago, our Canadian men beat your American men for the bronze medal game. And I flipped Jerry a note and said, hey, your prophecy of 15 years ago came true. And sure enough, it did, because in 2008, when we were in the middle of an exhibition game in Las Vegas at the Thomas Mac Arena, Gerry and I were standing alone underneath the backboard and he turned to me and he said, Wayne, I envy you.

00:06:15:14 - 00:06:42:08
Wayne Parrish
And I looked at him. I looked at the scoreboard. The game finished up 120 to 65 for the U.S. over Canada. I looked at him. I looked at the scoreboard and I said, Jerry, are you absolutely nuts? And he said, No, Wayne, what I what I really envy you for is the talent that is developing in Canada. And he knew it because Brian, his son, had been the general manager of the Raptors for two years at that point, and he had conveyed to Jerry what was happening.

00:06:42:10 - 00:07:02:22
Wayne Parrish
So from that time when I started with Canada Basketball, we had two players in the NBA. The camps that started, or when the regular season started last week, there were 27 Canadians on NBA rosters and that's a growth story that I'm quite excited about. But it's a way away from where you were directing me, which was the sport collection and so on.

00:07:02:23 - 00:07:05:06
Wayne Parrish
So I turn it back to you to get me back on track.

00:07:05:06 - 00:07:38:21
Todd Sullivan
Yeah, Wayne that's awesome though. I think people love hearing where this all came from. And it started out with trying to make $5 covering one one terrible football team still running basketball for Canada. That's fantastic. And then the results that you've had really speak for themselves. So obviously, as a lover of sports and a journalist, you start coming across some of these amazing assets and I don't want to give away quite how big it is and kind of the value yet, but please tell me where it all started.

00:07:38:23 - 00:08:06:03
Wayne Parrish
So as I mentioned, I moved from sort of being a journalist to overseeing media entities and then media companies. And in the late 1990s, a group of us did a leveraged management buyout of our media company from the owners. The owners were the largest cable company in Canada at the time. Rogers Communications. They still are today. We did a leveraged buyout where we which at that time was the largest management leveraged buyout in Canadian corporate history.

00:08:06:05 - 00:08:28:03
Wayne Parrish
And and we did some other things. I led some external acquisitions, IPO, we IPO’d the company, etc. and then we were sort of taken out in a hostile takeover. I stayed on with our white knight that we brought in for a year or so running their digital operations. But then I thought, you know, all the things I've learned, I'd love to try something else.

00:08:28:03 - 00:08:54:07
Wayne Parrish
So we were looking around. I was looking around with some partners at time for an acquisition possibility, and we wound up going to a company that was based in Britain at the time, which is a magazine company, and among the assets it had acquired was Sport Magazine and Inside Sports magazine. And for many of your viewers and listeners, they won't recall that the nature of media in the eighties and nineties.

00:08:54:07 - 00:09:17:18
Wayne Parrish
But but I can shorthand it by saying that magazines were still in Sports magazine particularly, but magazines were still kind of a very high echelon in terms of sports coverage and and just how people across America understood what was going on in the broader scope beyond their local home teams in each of the major sports or the minor sports as well.

00:09:17:20 - 00:09:40:09
Wayne Parrish
And so in that time frame, the there were well, if I go back to the late nineties, there were three magazines, Sports Illustrated. It was number one. Sport Magazine was number two. And there was a magazine called Inside Sports, which was number three. It is think about that. Is that Sport has actually predated Sports Illustrated. Sport was launched in 1946.

00:09:40:11 - 00:10:08:19
Wayne Parrish
Sports Illustrated came along eight years later. And actually many of the ideas that are given for which Sports Illustrated is given credit were initially pioneered by Sport magazine. But it was a small company. It was owned by a small company, whereas Sports Illustrated was owned by Time Inc. So from the call it the early fifties on, there was this sort of continued growth of Sport magazine, but Sports Illustrated sort of started lower and then eventually passed it.

00:10:08:21 - 00:10:33:04
Wayne Parrish
So by the late nineties, Sports Illustrated was clearly number one. Sport was number two. But ESPN was about to launch ESPN the magazine coming into the market. And the guys at Sport, which had now been sold to a British magazine company, said, Oh, my God, what are we going to do? They went and bought Inside Sports magazines, so they left back in to close to Sports Illustrated in terms of circulation.

00:10:33:06 - 00:10:53:21
Wayne Parrish
But what they did in order to fight off ESPN the magazine is they kind of blew their brains out in terms of putting copies out there for distribution. Remember, this is back in the internet had launched, and the World Wide Web was there, but this is still when print was big. So they flooded the market with magazines and they got into financial trouble very quickly.

00:10:53:21 - 00:11:17:22
Wayne Parrish
So we our team heard about the asset that was available, which was the combination of Sport, an Inside Sports magazine. And we began talking to the owners, which was impulsive in Britain as we understood it over the course of those negotiations, there were two other players at the table. One was ESPN because they were interested in the asset, perhaps to fold it in, probably to fold it into ESPN the magazine.

00:11:17:22 - 00:11:40:12
Wayne Parrish
And there was one other private equity player, and we were a private equity player as well. In the end, none of us would meet the price that EMAP PLC was looking for, and they made the decision within 2 to 3 months of none of us meeting the price that they were going to close the magazine down. They announced this in roughly June and they closed the magazine in August.

00:11:40:14 - 00:12:17:10
Wayne Parrish
But we had spent a lot of time in our due diligence in New York and Los Angeles, at the offices. And in that process we had begun to go through the archives and the heart of the archive that was most significant in our minds from very early on was this incredibly rich, deep photographic archive. And at the time I was working with a couple of colleagues working on the front lines that a couple of colleagues on this project who both like me and like Marc Appleman and my partner of today, were sports writers in former lives and so we would go down to L.A. to do due diligence and we would go to the business meetings

00:12:17:10 - 00:12:39:07
Wayne Parrish
and go through all that. But then we would say, okay, we'd like to take a look at the archive and we'd go bury ourselves and get lost in this incredible trove in the back room for the rest of the day. And about so at once EMAP PLC made the decision they were going to close the magazine. The other two would be suitors, stepped away from the table and began to look at other operating magazines.

00:12:39:07 - 00:12:59:09
Wayne Parrish
For us, although we had planned to relaunch the magazine, this wasn't as much of a deterrent because we were not going to do a mass two and a half or 3 million circulation magazine as sport was. We were going to do something more finite, focused on what we thought of as classic sports. And this archive seemed to be such a wonderful baseline.

00:12:59:11 - 00:13:33:15
Wayne Parrish
So we wound up continuing to talk to them and a few months later we did what was initially a licensing deal and a purchase deal for the archive. So long winded story, but that's how we wound up taking what was at the time, and I believe still is today, one of the most significant collections of images related to 20th century sport anywhere in the world and wound up taking it from office buildings in in Los Angeles, in New York and L.A., originally, in fact, initially in Vancouver and then eventually in Toronto, where it still resides today.

00:13:33:17 - 00:13:38:16
Todd Sullivan
It now is that the 450,000 images that we're talking about?

00:13:38:18 - 00:14:06:07
Wayne Parrish
Yeah, it's actually a little more than that. But we never, Todd we have we have never gone through and counted them. We have we have estimated and we certainly have when we did the acquisition, we had numbers involved, etc., etc.. But it's an incredibly deep archive. But because so many of the shoots, the individual photographic shoots that a photographer would shoot on June the 14th, 1957 have never seen the light of day.

00:14:06:09 - 00:14:33:23
Wayne Parrish
We've never gone in and actually counted one by one how many, but it's in the range. It's between 150,000 and 200,000, we believe. You know, and again, it has it covers this period of a sport between the forties and some of it goes back to the thirties predating the launch of the magazine. But from the time of the magazine's launch in 1946 through 2000, it's just it's got a great breadth and depth of content.

00:14:33:23 - 00:15:02:02
Wayne Parrish
And for people like myself, like Marc Appleman, my partner today, there's just an enormous fascination attached to that. And for me, I mean, I grew up essentially in sport in the ‘60s / ‘70s / ‘80s and I covered it in the seventies, eighties and nineties before turning the business side. All of the great athletes, I would almost say globally, although the international aspect of it is not quite as well developed as the North American aspect, but are represented there.

00:15:02:02 - 00:15:26:21
Wayne Parrish
So it's just like a I'm still like a 11 year old kid. Sometimes when I walk into the archive room on a quiet rainy November morning and sort of think, okay, I'm going to go and look and see if we have anything on this individual. I go and open up a file and I come across this sort of set of slides from a particular shoot of Pete Rose sliding into sliding into second base.

00:15:26:21 - 00:15:54:04
Wayne Parrish
That is just I mean, I put it on the light table, I start going through it. I'm just I mean, I'm 11 years old again and that is so much of the attraction. I think, of sports to older dudes like myself or other dudes like you that aren't as old as me. Is that sort of connection to childhood, connection to memories and this sense of history unfolding and the continuity that that brings to a life?

00:15:54:06 - 00:16:17:08
Todd Sullivan
Yeah, you're not alone. This is one of the reasons we tried to take on this assignment or help out, is that you just create an emotional connection with some of these photographs. And it's not just the hero shot, right? Somebody standing there holding the bat after winning some big, you know, winning the World Series. It it's a photograph, a collection of almost behind the scenes.

00:16:17:08 - 00:16:43:17
Todd Sullivan
Right. Seeing Muhammad Ali in between interviews or Billie Jean King, you know, behind the scenes at some gala. It was just incredible, the history of what a sport really is in the lives of these people just come to life. And, you know, for me, you could tell, right. I was incredibly moved. And you do have some of those hero shots, Gordie Howe slamming somebody and into the boards where it's a chain link fence instead of glass.

00:16:43:19 - 00:17:05:01
Todd Sullivan
Those are there. But boy, it is really interesting to look back at the lives of these athletes through this collection. Now, in addition to all of those original photographs you have, the magazine covers as well, right? Because I was familiar with Sport magazine. I was reading that in the eighties, in the nineties. And and you have over 600, right.

00:17:05:01 - 00:17:18:18
Todd Sullivan
600 actual covers as part of this collection. And those are just beautiful. Like Bo Jackson. That's one of my favorites. And as a baseball player, I think he's on a cover. So was that part of that initial acquisition?

00:17:18:20 - 00:17:41:04
Wayne Parrish
It was. It was Todd, but it was very it wasn't a focus of it wasn't part of our focus at the time because it was kind of one of those ancillary things that you think that's kind of cool. And where it really came to life was on the walls of the SPORT offices in Manhattan. There were all these old covers in in canvas or prints on the walls.

00:17:41:04 - 00:18:08:16
Wayne Parrish
And at one of the things that we acquired with the collection was all of the prints that they had done internally. And there were over 150 frame prints that we that we, we received as well as part of this. And, and looking at those and those hats had hung on the walls of Sport magazine, going back, I believe, to the fifties, but certainly certainly to the to the late fifties, but I believe to the early fifties, maybe even the late forties, that was really cool.

00:18:08:18 - 00:18:27:12
Wayne Parrish
The other thing this is really apropos of the point, the observation you made a moment ago, which I think was a very prescient one, and that is when you talked about the non hero shots, if you will, because SPORT was, as I said earlier, sports started it was launched in 46. And SI came along in 54, eight years later.

00:18:27:14 - 00:18:58:00
Wayne Parrish
But what sport became more and more known for through the fifties, the sixties and seventies was its social conscious around sport, and particularly in terms of the respect, development, evolution of the black athlete, the emergence of women in sport. The issues around is boxing. The road rules of boxing have to change after, you know, there were, as there were at the time, occasional deaths and so on.

00:18:58:02 - 00:19:25:07
Wayne Parrish
And all of that social consciousness of sport played out in the pages of sport magazines. So as they went out to illustrate articles that they were writing, they would try and find images and would shoot images that were attached to that. And I remember one of my greatest joys when one day was when I was going through a and because everything, you know is either in slide format, but prior to that, a lot of the black and white is in negatives.

00:19:25:07 - 00:19:52:07
Wayne Parrish
So it's not easy to it to look at them and understand exactly what they are at first glance at the light table. But I was going through it and I came across a file that was just a tennis miscellaneous file. And by the way, one of the challenges that we had when we acquired the archive? It probably took us a good 6 to 8 years in the beginning to begin to organize it in a way that it was even accessible.

00:19:52:09 - 00:20:20:06
Wayne Parrish
The reason for that is that between its launch in 1946 and when we acquired all the rights in 2000, there were ten different owners of the publication. And that meant that the assets of the publication, including the archive, would move from office to office to company to company. And along the way it was not always treated with the kid gloves and tender loving care that assets of this caliber should be.

00:20:20:08 - 00:20:45:20
Wayne Parrish
And so we had in fact, I remember when it arrived in Vancouver that one of the shipments arrived in Vancouver, there were literally boxes that had negatives without any identification and not even in envelopes. And stacked on top of them were staplers and business files and pencils, and it was just unbelievable. So we spent a lot of time just sorting out what the images were.

00:20:45:20 - 00:21:05:19
Wayne Parrish
And we never did. We we have not completed that process to today. But the one I was, I guess my own track, what was a table was I was going through a random sort of miscellaneous tennis file one day. It was just a shot that I could see it in what appeared to be a black and white negative of a bunch of people sitting around the table.

00:21:05:21 - 00:21:38:06
Wayne Parrish
And I thought, this is this is weird. I don't get this. I kept looking further. I would go into other files of tennis players, individual players, and I finally found a color negative of the same thing. And eventually we printed it. We blew it up and we started looking. And what it was, it was a bunch of tennis players, male tennis players sitting around a picnic table at Forest Hill in the off day of the U.S. Open in 1958.

00:21:38:08 - 00:22:06:13
Wayne Parrish
And just seeing that who's who of the greatest tennis players in history to that point, just casually hanging out of their short shorts, white short shorts at Forest Hill that afternoon. I mean, that it was so little little moments like that that have really galvanized this energy and the effort that we brought to bear over the last many years and and that we still bring to bear today in the various projects that we that we work with.

00:22:06:15 - 00:22:31:18
Todd Sullivan
That's so interesting. Right? You know, I grew up in a tennis family and my dad won the U.S. Open three times, twice with Billie Jean King, once with a woman named Patty Hogan. And it was pre-Open era. And you just got the sense growing up that the sports were not as commercialized. Right. So, you know, he'd he'd go play in some tournament and he'd go to a restaurant and Rod Laver would be like, Hey, Sully, come sit with us.

00:22:31:18 - 00:22:52:17
Todd Sullivan
And it was just a community right where they competed. They just loved the sport. It was very hard to make money doing it. And, you know, even with hockey, which was really ended up being my sport, you know, we would have Johnny Bucyk and Bobby Orr coming over to our house. And again, it was just like athletes respecting athletes.

00:22:52:17 - 00:23:22:23
Todd Sullivan
And you just got to see the the the inside of life, not just what you see on a screen or at a game. You know, the heroes that we look up today. And I think that what resonated so much with me is this collection took me back into that time period not only kind of revealing social issues, but just looking at sports and the athletes in it in a slightly different way and in a way that's just totally respect for people.

00:23:23:01 - 00:23:24:06
Todd Sullivan
Yeah, they're really people.

00:23:24:10 - 00:23:46:04
Wayne Parrish
I mean, absolutely. You know, the unfortunate thing today, I think, is that and this is this is across the board in terms of celebrity. But the only part of athletes that we see like that now, we do see through social media today, much more of them is is out there for their fans and the world at large to see.

00:23:46:06 - 00:24:06:02
Wayne Parrish
But we also know that a lot of that is is not as genuine. Perhaps as if the athlete were always doing it himself. Certainly many of the athletes do, but some have teams that work on those kinds of things, but that access to the athletes that certain people had back in the days that you're talking about that doesn't exist today.

00:24:06:04 - 00:24:26:10
Wayne Parrish
And so you feel that the action and the athletes were much closer at hand in those in that era. And I believe that that's true. And reaching into this, you know, this collection on a regular basis daily, weekly, etc.. So you just you get very much that sense. So I think you're absolutely right.

00:24:26:12 - 00:24:49:13
Todd Sullivan
So Wayne, you know, just an amazing collection and it must be something that is hard to part with, frankly. Right. I have so much emotion just looking through some of the photographs, the negatives, the the covers are amazing. What's your dream as this collection ends up in someone else's hands? Who is the best person to kind of take this take this collection on?

00:24:49:15 - 00:24:54:02
Todd Sullivan
Or maybe it's more than a person, you know, what do you think is the best next place for it?

00:24:54:04 - 00:25:20:22
Wayne Parrish
It certainly could be more than a person. To your point, it's interesting because, you know, we think in terms of collections like this going to, you know, high end collectors of, you know, photographs, historic photographs, also high end collectors of sports memorabilia. But it's interesting because this collection spans both those worlds so completely. And but it does something else as well.

00:25:21:00 - 00:25:47:06
Wayne Parrish
There is a significant business opportunity attached to this, and we have had a tremendously positive experience and frankly, a good time over the last couple of decades in in working with this. But we have barely scratched the surface. We originally thought that there were as many as five or six different platforms that you could extend this collection and indeed the History of Sport magazine along.

00:25:47:08 - 00:26:08:06
Wayne Parrish
And you look at the digital realm today and the opportunity, as so many other publications have faded and dropped by the wayside, both print publications, but also really high quality digital sports publications. You look at what other ones have come into the field and been able to do, like The Athletic, which of course is now owned by the New York Times.

00:26:08:08 - 00:26:45:00
Wayne Parrish
But this a tremendous backdrop and history here that affords many business opportunities both for the photographic archive and the images archive, but also for the archive of sport writ large. Sport was the initial sports publication that sort of spanned across North America. And it's the idea that it's an entrepreneur that has that is a collector, that perhaps high has a decently high net worth that's interested in moving into media or connected fields in the digital realm.

00:26:45:05 - 00:27:06:23
Wayne Parrish
I think that could be the best opportunity. You know, we've had we've been able to publish books attached to the archive. We've been able to publish magazines attached to the archive. We have we've been able to have retail outlets. At one point we had galleries in in New York and Boston, but there's so much more that can be done with the right in the right hands over the years.

00:27:06:23 - 00:27:32:03
Wayne Parrish
It's also because of the historical significance of the archive. There is a real opportunity, we think, particularly in the U.S. and as you recall, I'm based in Canada, but in the U.S. to connect with a museum or a somewhere along the lines of the Library of Congress, etc., that would recognize and understand the historical value of this archive.

00:27:32:05 - 00:27:47:15
Wayne Parrish
There is no archive that we're aware of that has the same historical impact covering sports across North America in the 20th century. And there's some incredible value, both intrinsic and real attached to all of that.

00:27:47:17 - 00:27:58:03
Todd Sullivan
Wayne, are there any favorites of yours, images or negatives, something that kind of really brings you back that, you know, has just been very special to you over time?

00:27:58:05 - 00:28:22:12
Wayne Parrish
There are so many it's difficult to remember them all, but there have been many days. And by that I mean over a period of a couple of decades here, but many individual days that I can recall the first day that we uncovered this strip of film actually shot of a Notre Dame practice in 1948 in color. That was just just incredible to us.

00:28:22:14 - 00:28:51:14
Wayne Parrish
There's a there's an old timers game at Yankee Stadium in 1966 or 67 that had negatives that are that have never been printed, even that we just looked at in terms of a negative viewer of of Casey Stengel and and Mickey Mantle and so on are phenomenal. There's a wonderful little shoot of Robert Kennedy and Mickey Mantle shot in 65, 66 at Yankee Stadium.

00:28:51:16 - 00:29:32:06
Wayne Parrish
But I think my personal favorites have have become the shoots of major fighters in the late 1940s. And these shoots were a big five by seven color graphic cameras and images. And so they're full color, incredible richness of color, and they're shot in a gym when the fighter was training. And so whether it was Joe Louis or Rocky Graziano or Willie Papp, etc., or Jake LaMotta, I mean, the the quality of the images and there is no other color from that period of time anywhere extends in the world that we're aware of.

00:29:32:08 - 00:29:56:06
Wayne Parrish
And so I think those that series of shoots is probably about 20 of them are just have become my personal favorites. I often just when I'm when I'm working of a day and I go in and I dig those out of the archive and I put them on the light table and look at them in and there's just something that takes you back to a different time and place, a place that connects to today in terms of what sports has become.

00:29:56:08 - 00:30:18:01
Wayne Parrish
But when sport in its full form of the the economic engine is today was in the very beginning. It's very nascent stages. And I think that kind of activity from the forties through the ‘50s / ‘60s / ‘70s vs nineties and right up to today I think is what really is the treasure and the strength of the archive and it's what I connect to.

00:30:18:03 - 00:30:22:13
Wayne Parrish
But that series of shoots is probably my absolute favorite.

00:30:22:15 - 00:30:44:18
Todd Sullivan
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