How a Top Hollywood Agent Found Purpose Beyond Fame pt. 1 w/ Darren Prince
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Journey to the Sunnyside. I'm Mike Hartenbrook, and today we're shaking things up a bit. Usually, we dive into strategies and tips to help you live a more balanced life, but sometimes a story comes along that offers lessons far beyond the tactical. And today, we have one of those stories. I'm excited to welcome Darren Prince, a sports and celebrity agent who represents legends like Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Hulk Hogan, Chevy Chase, David Goggins, and many others.
Speaker 1:He's also worked with the late Muhammad Ali, Smokin' Joe Frazier, Evel Knievel, and Jerry West. Darren's also a bestselling author of Aiming High, where he shares his journey through addiction and recovery, how he hit rock bottom despite reaching incredible career heights, and how we turned it all around. Today, we're diving deep, and I know you'll find this conversation both powerful and inspiring. And let's get into it with Darren Prince. All right, Darren, before we
Speaker 2:jump into the challenges that you've overcome, I think it's important to start with the beginning. You've had a unique journey, but people with success aren't without understanding the struggles that come with it. Let's rewind a bit. So tell us a little bit about your childhood. What was it like?
Speaker 2:And tell us a little bit about your baseball card collecting background and what led to a multimillion dollar business at the age of 14.
Speaker 3:So I grew up in Livingston, New Jersey. I had a great supportive loving mother and father, sister, but I just never fit in with the crowd kind of felt like it was almost, like I, from day one, had uncomfortable in my own skin. I never felt a part of it. You know, you would have thought from the outside that wasn't the case. I had a lot of friends, boys, girls, and I, when I look back at it now, I always say I was in small classrooms.
Speaker 3:I was classified as special education. I think a lot of that didn't number on my psyche and my self esteem. So you talk about the baseball cards, from the time I was probably 10 years old, I would more or less lock myself in my bedroom after dinner, watch a little bit of TV with my dad, listen to his life lessons. You know, until the morning till it was time to go to school, I'd be in my room, organize my cards, putting them into holders, putting little price stickers on them back then. The early eighties, there was a price guide called CCP, Current Card Price Guide.
Speaker 3:Nobody even knows of that in today's card boom. They think of Beckett and all this other digital stuff, but you would have to get it like FedExed and it was like the Wall Street Journal of cards, but Rio never had a plan to sell them. And I was challenged one day by my intro to business teacher as the rest of the class. That was the only normal class I was in with about forty, fifty kids. And to this day, he's a dear friend, Elliot Lovie, that we all had to go home and create a business overnight.
Speaker 3:Now in my mind, I had one, but it wasn't, I wasn't buying, selling and trading. So I had a life changing conversation with my dad. I told him I needed insurance on my cards. And he's like, how much do you need? I said, probably about 8 or 9.
Speaker 3:He said, okay, I'll get you a thousand dollars worth of insurance. And I go dad, no, 8 or 9,000. Because how in the world do you have 8 or $9,000 worth of cards and who's gonna buy them? Where can you sell them? And I wound up explaining to him that back then, Don Madden with Daryl Strawberry, Tony Gwynne, Wade Boggs, Roger Clemens, Kirby Puckett, Calvert.
Speaker 3:Those were all the names of the current stars that my friends wanted. So I would give them those cards for these older kind of smellier cards from the thirties, forties, and fifties that they might've got from their dad or their grandfathers or their uncles, because they had that mildewy aroma to them. And those were the valuable ones. So I was getting Mickey Mantle's Willie Mays. You know, Ted Williams, some of the great hall of famers.
Speaker 3:Top it, I had four different odd jobs that I was doing, squeezing orange juice, working at a diner as a busboy, working a stockroom at a sneaker store. Yeah. And I had a couple jobs at that grocery store. It wasn't just squeezing orange juice. I was working the stuff.
Speaker 3:And so I would take all that extra money and put it into courts.
Speaker 2:I don't think it's a normal thing for a kid to ask for insurance from his parents.
Speaker 3:No, no. And my dad challenged me in that moment because when he told me that I ran upstairs and it kind of felt like, oh, he doesn't think I could sell them. And I had a big newspaper I had in our local paper called the West. And I run up, I come downstairs and for $20, he can get an eight foot table. And the convention was in like two weeks at the local holiday in.
Speaker 3:And so me and Steven Simon has been my boy since I was 10, who ironically runs my agency now Prince Marketing Group. We've been together for twenty five years with daddy's the vice president. We flipped the table. He went in for fun. I went into just absolutely crush it.
Speaker 3:I had a feeling that was my calling and I was phenomenal with numbers. My dad always pointed that out. He would always say that most of your friends have a part of their brain that I understand doesn't work the way you'd like it to. But I've noticed something when it comes to statistics and watching baseball and sports, you remember everything up here. So we're going to hone in on that.
Speaker 3:And that's what's going to make you a success. Yeah, that Sunday afternoon, made over a thousand dollars at 14 years old. Steve did it, like I said, for fun, he probably made $50 and just enjoyed supporting me. You know, the rest was history. The drug and alcohol abuse all eventually came into play right around after that baseball card convention.
Speaker 2:Well, when I say normal, I say it in the most lovingly of ways, because like, most adults don't have to be told to buy insurance.
Speaker 3:No, he looked at me like I had three heads, like I said, at the beginning of the story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. And I also think I want to get into it later. But I think you've discovered, know, through your journey how, how to identify and really, connect with deep love like that with your father and with other people in your life. But before we do, you know, I think it's really important to talk about addiction, whether the person listening is in addiction or can't relate because we're all addicted in some way, I think to some thing. Listening to somebody's story is always important, especially when it comes to, you know, a lot of the people listening right now are related to alcohol and they might not be in the spectrum that would be in something that would need treatment.
Speaker 2:But nonetheless, that doesn't make it easy to change anything, whether it be diet, alcohol, social media, or anything like that. So I'm really excited to get into your story, because I think there's so many lessons that everybody can draw from that. So obviously, you had an early love for sports, and that leads you to the path that you're in. So why don't you give me a little fast version after you had this successful baseball card venture, and then you moved in to representing these big, sports icons and celebrities, fill in some of those gaps. And also, I'd like you to talk and brag a little bit about what you've done.
Speaker 3:So, I started when I started the baseball card company, I had that until I was 19. Eventually it was called baseball card city. We changed it to Prince of Cards. My dad came up with the name that that became my moniker at every convention. It was like, Hey, the Prince of Cards this year.
Speaker 3:Was getting, you know, national media attention was just remarkable in the late eighties from the cover of USA Today and New York Times and, Wall Street Journal, like some really, really big media outlets and print outlets. It almost in a way, it kind of felt like, man, a few of the young pioneers would be like, we actually feel like young drug dealers, legal drug dealers, because we had the ability to just print money and set the temple on the market and supply and demand. And we kind of had our pulse on what was out there, what wasn't and what was more rare and what wasn't. And, you know, so many stockbrokers, corporate people dealing with us. And I think I was in Westchester County Center, in, in White Lanes 1989 or 1990.
Speaker 3:I pulled up and I saw like just the line trapped around the corner outside the building. And I didn't realize that Mickey Mantle to DiMaggio really amazed Pete Rose, Daryl Strawberry that all these baseball players and athletes signing autographs that day. So now you take that broken, shy, introverted kid who sees this. I go, wow, this is really cool. People are waiting hours and hours to use icons and these legends actually sign autographs.
Speaker 3:It's a business arrangement. Then some of these dealers sell the merchandise on the aftermarket. I want to look into that and throw me to a friend. I, reached out to shows one of my mentor and closest friends to this day, Harlan Munner, who was the head of, Muhammad Ali's camp. And I asked him about doing an autograph signing with Muhammad.
Speaker 3:I want to just go right for the biggest name in the world. And we figured out a deal. We did that. I eventually, during that time periods, gold prints of cards. And when man, what did it
Speaker 2:feel like when he said yes, and that first deal that you got,
Speaker 3:it was unbelievable. I mean, we had, we had butterflies. I remember me and my boys from high school, we ought to drive up to Boston from New Jersey. It's a four hour ride in a, in a big, rider truck and our big U ball. And it was just like, we had to order all these gloves and these iconic photos and the black and white everlast boxing trunks.
Speaker 3:And it was like this whole learning experience about what color and learning how to like let things dry properly after he signed some. So it was, yeah, it was like the first day of like little league or something times 10, because we're like, holy crap, this is going to be so freaking cool. And the day was just incredible with him and got about five, six hours, tons of photos and videos and Mohammed and his wife and attorney told Heartland who didn't fly in for it, Darren's crew was top notch. They did a tremendous job. Darren's a great guy called me up that night to thank me for making sure I took care of him and did everything professionally and organized.
Speaker 3:It just, I think my own life became like another addiction. I got to go full steam into this because that was the external validation I needed. Like that broken kid was still there. And let me now surround myself with some of the biggest icons in the world. And I did that for about four years, moved on to names like smoking Joe Frazier, Chevy Chase, magic Johnson, Dennis Rodman in his heyday with the bulls that first year.
Speaker 3:I got in trouble as I wrote about it in my book, Aiming High. There was one outside vendor back then there really wasn't much authorities on authentication, but there was a group out of Chicago that was authenticating in the Bible of the hobby was praising him as like the best third party authenticator and was buying and selling a bunch of fine Michael Jordan memorabilia for about a year and a half period. And my whole world came crashing down. I was allowed, never forget. It was like right after I saw Lee and this Sittag came home on a Sunday night, got a call from the FBI in Chicago.
Speaker 3:And at this point I was an authority. I was writing a column called the autograph experience for tough stuff magazine. And about all the experiences with signings with different icons and fans loved it. They would write in letters. I remember there wasn't really much email back then or anything.
Speaker 3:So you get handwritten letters about loving a certain icon, whether it was Larry Bird or whoever I was working with that day. And so they said they were going to pay me to come to Chicago. They need my expertise. The next morning I get a call and from a different agent asking if I have an attorney. So now I'm like, oh, this is bizarre.
Speaker 3:And I call them my attorney because don't call them back. Give me their number. Let me reach out. Tells me, you know, later that day, you need to bring me with you to Chicago. I don't know what the heck this is about.
Speaker 3:And, you know, went out there in advance. I spoke to my guys who was a supplier and he told me that they're trying to get them on tax evasion. We have nothing to hide. You pay me by check on everything. Don't worry about it.
Speaker 3:So just go speak to them and give them whatever they need. And during the process, I kind of twisted a story a little bit. I don't know if it was maybe getting nervous and not remembering, but my whole motive was to say hello to my guy because he became such a good friend over a year and a half. I never would have thought in years. And they had my phone lines tapped.
Speaker 3:Didn't realize it later that afternoon, after a break, come back. They basically said, Prince, you've been very helpful in the interview, but now you've been actually upgraded to a target on our investigation. And my heart just, I'm like, what the heck just happened? And after about two years of back and forth investigating the case, A bunch of foragers went to prison. There was a huge mail fraud case that went on with it.
Speaker 3:Most of the stuff was considered obviously fraudulent. The authenticators went to prison. This whole big racket and I wound up getting charged with making a false statement to the FBI. Had letters sent to the judge from Mohammed and his wife and Magic and his then agent, Lon Rosen is still a dear friend and a mentor. All the icons got behind me knowing I made a mistake, but it ruined me financially.
Speaker 3:And I, ramped up about a million dollars in debt. I was sending refunds out to everybody that wanted because, you know, my dad was very big on reputation and credibility, you only get one chance with your reputation. And, my last $3 to my name, man, I decided to take my dad to Alaska on a fly fishing trip. And I say to this day, Prince Mark and Encrypto exists because of that $3. And he didn't want to go because he knew I was strapped.
Speaker 3:On this gorgeous stream with the tour guide fly fishing. He asked me what my next move was. And I was thinking, you dad, I've been thinking about it. I don't want go back to the business. I want to be an agent, but I don't like being here to law school.
Speaker 3:And he drops the fishing pole and says, law school, because life is about who you don't know what you know. It's not an entertainment lawyer out there that wouldn't kill for your resources. You know, why didn't you speak to magic? You know, he seems like he's as close family to us as anybody and tell him your vision. And sure enough, it was two weeks later, I was with Irvin.
Speaker 3:I call him by his real name, Irvin Magic Johnson. And we were in a hotel suite. And I never found this out. But it was almost like Kim and my dad spoke because I know They were very close. And I go into his hotel suite to get ready before the cement that we had to speak public corporate autograph signing.
Speaker 3:And he asked me what my next move was like, how was I doing? And he's glad I'm hanging in there that God test great men and woman, and that he's testing me and I'm going to make lemonade out of lemon. I'm going make lemonade out of lemons. And I told him, I got the courage up as my hands were sweating. My heart's palpitating.
Speaker 3:Like one of those one shots in life. I don't want have to regret. And it was just him and I in this big hotel suite of hips. And he goes, look, I know about making mistakes, especially in the public eye. I remember this was probably four years after the HIV announcement.
Speaker 3:And he goes, if you get yourself a good entertainment lawyer, I'm going give you tears to represent me. But if you don't use me to knock down every door to bring in all the celebrities you can as clients, I know you've been working with a lot. I'm going to fire you before the tears is up because life isn't about how successful I become. I'm going to be a success in the world of sports and entertainment they've never seen before post career. Fast forward has got a multimillion dollar brand because it's about how successful I can make you and everybody else around me.
Speaker 3:Cause when you get there, then you got to pay forward to other people. Mark in a group was born. Every one of those celebrities I just mentioned, and then some all signed on with their agency.
Speaker 2:It's such a cool story. I mean, it kind of blows my mind to think who's actually in it, given their status. I'm too bad we only have an hour because I'm sure you've got a ton of other stories to go through. But you know, as an entrepreneur myself, I think one thing that I can resonate there is that you spent $3,000 to go break away and spend some time with your dad. Some of the best things that you can do before you make big decisions is not push it and just take a step back.
Speaker 2:And it sounds like that made all the difference, you know, as a catalyst to move into the next conversations. %.
Speaker 3:One hundred %.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so so you start this new big thing. And everything's going good from external, you know, But for you, you started to struggle along the way. So I think I want to open it up to let you talk about, you know, what that looked like. I mean, I love, I love being able to open it up knowing how it ends. So, you know, we can go into that if you'd like.
Speaker 3:Yeah. My addiction started at 14. I was asleep away camp, had terrible stomach pains. The nurse gave me this clear green liquid. It was disgusting tasting in a clear cloth syrup cup, but my life changed forever.
Speaker 3:I would then five minutes walk him back to the bunk with my counselor. Not only did that green liquid introduce the world to me. It was also the other way around, you know, it was basically, they got to meet Darren Prince and it was who I wanted to be 20. Felt like Superman, all the inadequacies, the insecurities. I had immediate self confidence.
Speaker 3:I didn't know what it was. Went to bed, did all the activities that next day in sleepway camp. And that next night with no stomach pain, I learned how to lie and con. And I healed over in the bunk and counter asked him what was wrong. And all I wanted to do is get more of that green liquid.
Speaker 3:And I did this for a couple of weeks until mom and dad came up and found that I was taking liquid Demerol. Now you gotta remind you, the opioid crisis wasn't a crisis back then in 1980s. So, you know, just speaking all over the world and sometimes the audience was like, oh, that nurse. I don't blame the nurse because I had a dentist appointment a couple of months later after the summer was over and was given extra strength Vicodin for my wisdom teeth getting removed. I cannot correlate at that age, a green liquid and these white pills given me exact same feeling.
Speaker 3:But when my mom gave me the pills, now one in three kids today that go to a dentist and get opiates become addicts. I was one of those three. And that feeling just came over and calling up people. I'm super confident, stopping my brain just going through all these great ideas. The next morning I go downstairs.
Speaker 3:I didn't realize I only gave my mom six pills. So I grabbed my cheek. I do the same sort of thing. I didn't sleep away. I can't blame my mom.
Speaker 3:My tooth is killing me. Of a horrible infection as a loving mother who wants to see their child suffer. So she, she took the bait, took back to the dentist and he fell for her toe and gave her another dozen pills. It was the honey after that. I mean, at that point, you're not going to tell a 14, 15 year old kid making a few hundred thousand dollars a year selling baseball cards, what he can and can't do.
Speaker 3:Cause if I was unable to get it, from a doctor at that point, because obviously I wasn't legal age, I was buying it wherever I had to get them. And so, it worked, you know, I I'm very careful when I speak to high school kids, especially worked for probably about five, six years until I was arrested four times at 21 for possession charge, not to distribute. I could afford it, you know, the drugs. It was, I was always the guy holding them. Never knowing when my boys or girlfriends would want to party.
Speaker 3:So whatever it was, I had it, I bought it. I paid for it. I was the life of the party. A lot of fake friends thinking they were my real friends, but at the end of the Garen was the guy that everybody was riding off of because I could afford it. And they're still struggling in college.
Speaker 3:And the outpatient program I was put in, I didn't realize that, you know, the judge put a court order for a year and I didn't realize that there's really no such thing as a graduation back then. I thought once I got to the end of it, it was time to party. And a couple of weeks before it was, before the program was over about eleven and a half months in, I got the good news that the judge was, you know, happy, dismissing the rest of my charges in my case. And that next, that same nightmare, we call it stinking, thinking denial. Me and my friend, Dave, I called him up.
Speaker 3:I said, let's go to the city. Let's, let's go celebrate. And we did a bunch of mind eraser shots at a place called Jimmy's cafe in the village, took a handful of Xanax. Our minds were, excuse me, our minds were erased so much. I woke up in the ICU, day fell asleep on Highway 280 in Essex County, New Jersey.
Speaker 3:His car went into a ditch. My face went into the windshield. I still have scars to this day from here to under my chin, to my, to my hand, because the next thing I remembered after doing shots in New York City was my parents coming to visit me in the hospital, ninety stitches in my face, broken nose, my lip. I stood out the scar on my hand to prove it. And, you know, looking back and now that's what addiction does, destroys families.
Speaker 3:And we're not, it's not just the one that's suffering, but again, you're not going to tell a 20 year old kid that he can get his hands on what he wants to get on. You know what I'm saying? And again, I probably went another at that point, man, I was probably told the agency started still doing my thing. And then eventually when I had morality clauses, it switched just purely to opiates. So I had physical pain, sciatica, and doctors gave me anything I needed.
Speaker 3:So it was all about opiates at that point. And again, it worked for four or five years until it didn't work. Couple overdoses, embarrassing situations. And I would say took me probably to 35 years old. So I realized I had a problem even having a talk with magic couple of years before I got sober when he called me from the W hotel in New York City and I opened up to him.
Speaker 3:Still took me another two years until 07/02/2008 came to Tate that changed my life.
Speaker 2:Do you think obviously, I think a lot of this reflection happened, you know, more recently as an adult, looking back at all the sequences, you know, starting with that nurse. And I think during that process, it's, you have to get to your why you also have to get what, what were you trying to self medicate or push away or push aside. And I know now you work with a lot of youth. So if you were to like, go back, you know, and look at your old self and, and know maybe why you were self medicating, how would you like have that conversation with yourself?
Speaker 3:I mean, a lot of it was internal stuff, inner traumas, inner demons, feeling worthy, not feeling a part of, rather than doing the deep soul searching, just numbing from an external space and wanting everybody else to believe the hype that, you know, on the surface, was clearly the most successful person to come out of that high school. And I wanted everybody to know it because like I said, on Jay Shetty, I'm looking backwards. Yeah. Look at me and look at you. You know, you're the ones that great.
Speaker 3:Go, go get your, your doctorate degree, your law degree. You're going to be doing my contracts for my clients. If you're an entertainment, what begging me for my business, it was all ego, all just, you know, nobody gets into the world. You have to be 1,000,000, the 1% to be in the world of sports and entertainment, working with the most iconic figures in the world. And it's why we have a business to this day that the biggest, most successful fortune 500 CEOs and entrepreneurial savages, Juan Arlbo was with David Goggins, Magic Johnson, Hulk Hogan, you know, Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, Ric Flair, it doesn't matter who it is.
Speaker 3:Charlie Sheen, Chevy Chase, because they become little kids. And they want that as part of their role because it's an access. It's the one thing they cannot buy, but you bring them into a company keynote, you bring them into, you know, endorse an initiative or a service that you have a holiday party, a commercial to promote your products and services on social media. So it's also an ego boost for a lot of, a lot of big guys that don't have access like that. And I understood it early on, but it took me until I got sober to be humbled enough to realize like, this has nothing to do with me.
Speaker 3:They're the ones that became who they were long before I came into their lives. I have absolutely nothing to do with their accolades on the field, the court, in the boxing ring, you know, on a movie set, on a TV show. I just happened to be a good negotiator, care more than anything about personal relationships. It's what my superpower is to this day that, you know, clients are more family than anything than the business. We put the focus on the personal relationship first, business part comes second.
Speaker 3:And then I think once I started understanding that, that, you know what, the whole super agent bullshit, all this stuff I would read, it's exactly what it is. Like, I'm not super at anything. Once I started this recovery journey, my God is the one that's the super one. My God is the one that humbled me and saved. And we had a white light moment together on 07/02/2008 when he knew that I was ready.
Speaker 3:And I begged him to take the money of the business and notoriety. And if he took me out of hell, I would spend one day at a time taking other people out with me. And it was like a lightning bolt happened, you know, right through my shoulder and made me sort of transform into this person I was always meant to be and do the deep soul searching, work on the 12 steps, be accountable for everything. Don't blame anybody. You know, nobody put a gun to my head disease.
Speaker 3:The disease of addiction isn't a disease. It's a dis ease. I tell people in a recovery, it's more of an allergy and extremely selfish for us to compare that to something like cancer or diabetes. You know, we make a choice. We make a choice.
Speaker 3:We don't get addicted to these substances. We get addicted to the escape of life from childhood trauma, heartache, disappointment, friends that treat us over, job problems, whatever it might be that we're not equipped up here to have the right coping mechanism. We just want that instant gratification, that escape. Okay.
Speaker 1:And that wraps up part one of our conversation with Darren Prince. We covered a lot, from
Speaker 2:his rise in the world
Speaker 1:of celebrity agents to the struggles he faced along the way. But there's so much more to this story. So make sure to tune in for part two, where we'll dive into Darren's recovery, how he turned his pain into purpose, and what's next on his journey. In the meantime, if you're looking to take more control of your own wellness, head on over to sunnyside.co and take our three minute quiz. You'll get personalized insights to help you live a more balanced life when it comes to alcohol, and it's the perfect first step.
Speaker 1:Don't forget to follow us on Instagram joinSunnyside for daily inspiration. Thanks for listening and I'll see you in part two.
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