Q&A With Rob Villanueva: Athletes Advocate For Change
This article was originally published on Elbow Bump — Hochberg Sports Marketing’s blog — on June 8, 2020.
We’re excited to share our conversation with Rob Villanueva, the Athlete Influencer Lead at The Players’ Tribune. Villanueva works to facilitate first-hand accounts from athletes while collaborating with their agents, and the Tribune’s editorial team.
The media outlet was originally founded by New York Yankees star Derek Jeter in 2014. In November 2019, the outlet was acquired by Minute Media.
In Villanueva’s current role, he has worked with hundreds of professional athletes including the late Kobe Bryant, Tom Brady, David Ortiz, and others. Let’s put it this way — there is a good chance your favorite athlete has appeared in TPT.
Villanueva has a unique background and brings an interesting perspective to the conversation. After beginning his career in Information Technology, his little brother, Charlie was drafted into the NBA in 2005 as the №7 overall selection. Rob became Charlie’s personal and business manager, helping him with everything — from making a dinner reservation to deciding which shoe brand to endorse.
Villanueva has worked with athletes for more than fifteen years. As such, his insight regarding the ways in which athletes are responding to the current protests can provide helpful context regarding their actions and mindsets.
So without further ado, here is our conversation with Rob Villanueva.
Elbow Bump: You’re the Athlete Influencer Lead at The Players’ Tribune. That’s quite a unique title to have — we haven’t seen many jobs in the industry like it. Can you tell us about what you do?
Rob Villanueva: I work with the athlete marketing team. In simple terms, we’re there to help connect athletes with our editorial team.
When our editorial team and our content team want to reach out to an athlete to publish a story, they do it through us because we have those relationships. Sometimes, athletes come to us to share their stories. We play the middleman role of helping navigate the process and when we do connect the athletes to our team, we are there to make sure they feel comfortable.
To give you background on how it typically works, whenever we are doing a story with an athlete — whether it’s face-to-face or over the phone — they have a conversation with one of our editors. That conversation is recorded but it’s less of an interview and more of a free-flowing space for the athletes. Everything is off the record before it’s on the record, so it’s a place of trust.
Once that conversation is done, we take the athletes’ words and construct them into a story. That’s why our editorial team does so well. We then send it back to the athletes who have final approval, can make revisions, and make sure we capture the right tone of voice. We always feel like every story we do is an opportunity for the athlete to become the director of his or her own movie, and we’re just co-directing it and helping produce it.
Our main responsibility, from end to end, is to make sure athletes feel comfortable to share these intimate moments in life or issues they feel passionate about. We provide that platform for them. And when we publish, it is something they can stand fully behind.
EB: Stories in TPT have appeared from a number of high-profile athletes — how do you usually get ahold of them?
RV: It’s complex. There’s no necessarily right or wrong answer. Sometimes, it’s all hands on deck and we have to figure out how to get to this athlete as best as we can. Typically, it’ll either be through a direct relationship with their rep, whether their agent or someone who works in public relations within their agency. It could also be through the public relations agency or the marketing agency that athletes hire outside of their primary agency to handle some of this.
And at times it’s also direct. One of the reasons I was hired is because I have some prior relationships — relationships with athletes because of my brother — either his former teammates or guys that I came across and met — and I have their phone number and can text them at any time.
And if none of those work, then we usually try to figure out who knows who. Is there a cousin, a mother, a girlfriend, a wife, their parents, someone like that who knows someone who we can reach out to? It’s the world of relationships. How do we connect these dots and figure out who knows who and how can I best get the message across? For me to say we’re here to help you and not because we’re here to sell a headline or sell clicks.
EB: Since TPT’s founding in 2014, there have been countless heartwarming, heartbreaking, emotional, and humorous stories. It must be tough to pick, but are there one or two that have stuck with you?
RV: For me, personally, it is Ben Gordon’s piece. He’s a dear friend, too. Ben Gordon’s piece was super powerful, it was real talk.
It was about something that was a problem in his life that he was battling. It was ongoing, and when troubles were reported in the media due to some of his actions, it was easy for the mainstream media to run with it — like in a TMZ tabloid. But nobody was asking why. Why was it happening? They were just focusing on the problem.
It’s kind of like what is happening now. When protesters and people who are fighting this cause say “Black Lives Matter,” and people respond with “All Lives Matter.” The people who respond like that don’t understand what is really happening. That’s just an analogy, but with Ben’s situation, there were issues taking place and he was being triggered because of an issue with his health. He wasn’t stable.
When I contacted his circle and started hearing these stories, it didn’t seem like him. We knew there was a problem and our team wanted to do a piece with him, to figure out what was happening and give him an opportunity to explain himself. But he wasn’t in the state of mind to do that, and if we pressured him, it would have come off as disingenuous.
First, though I wanted to reach out to him as a friend make sure he was okay. The piece took two years to publish, from when we started the conversations with him to when we published it. It’s called Where Is My Mind? He was diagnosed as bipolar and was dealing with problems. The fact that he was able to detail his battles and discuss his mental illness — it showed he wasn’t there because he was necessarily ready to talk — he was there because I made him feel comfortable. And it reminded him that we’re here for him first. So If I wasn’t there he probably wouldn’t have done the piece.
And it goes to show the importance of the relationships that we try to establish with our athlete community. These aren’t just pieces that are being put out because it’s hot at the moment or it’s trending — these are pieces that are super thoughtful from the beginning, learning what is happening with the athletes before even getting started. We want to make sure we put the athletes first. It is an athlete-driven platform and we want to make sure it comes off organically and not as some sort of PR stunt.
EB: In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, there have been countless protests in all 50 states and in countries around the world. Athletes have been a part of this too — positively and negatively. We have stories like NBA star Jaylen Brown driving 15 hours to lead a peaceful protest in his hometown of Atlanta. And we had statements from NFL stars like Drew Brees who came out against kneeling during the National Anthem, only to walk back those comments after heavy criticism.
What is something that athletes have been doing that has stood out to you?
RV: First of all, we have to have an understanding that we’re not going to please everyone — as much as we are fighting for the same human race. We’re in a world that’s been programmed in a way that society has divided us — and this is long before Trump. This has been happening for decades. Racism and police brutality is nothing new to America.
A lot of us were inspired by the protests of Colin Kaepernick and other athletes, but the majority of athletes, like Drew Brees and his statement last week, didn’t think they should respect those who aren’t respecting the flag. It’s just confirmation that they’re missing the agenda and don’t understand what the issues are actually about.
It’s brave and courageous for athletes to speak up and stand up, especially during a time like this when there’s a lot of uncertainty around sports and when leagues will return. These athletes speaking out is a reminder that it is about humanity first. Not about being an athlete.
Whether you’re silently protesting about an issue or you’re using your platform and you’re loud and you want to make your message heard, I think it’s important to keep it real. Just keep it real. Whether it’s right or wrong, like with Drew Brees. Instead of apologizing, I wish he just said ‘this is what I believe, this is what I’ve been taught to believe. Let me have a conversation, to better understand with my fellow teammates and fellow experts.’ I salute and encourage athletes to stand up for what they believe.
We’ve been reaching out to athletes to speak out and we’ve gotten some ‘Nos’ and we’ve gotten rejections from the agents because they’re looking to protect their athletes who, for example, are going through contract negotiations or there’s a new collective bargaining agreement being discussed that could impact them. But if now is not the right time to speak out, when is?
Ultimately, to bring awareness to make people realize what’s going on is something that athletes should not be held back from and should never be afraid of. They shouldn’t feel the need to put a disclaimer or a filter on their voice.
And that’s why we’re here, as The Players’ Tribune, to create that bridge and help them construct and help them empower and amplify something that they may already be feeling.
EB: You’ve been around professional athletes for a long time. How have you seen them evolve, specifically in the ways in which they address social issues?
RV: We’re living in a different time and even though we do have a lot of the same problems, I think the difference-maker here is how the internet has evolved and how social media has played a role in the sharing of conversations across the world. And that’s something that obviously, athletes previously didn’t have.
A lot of athletes back in the day would have been a little more outspoken if they knew they can speak without being afraid or without being targeted. Sports are a part of the fabric of American society. We know that athletes often use their platform as a way to either leverage their voice or the message. Other athletes tend to stay quiet.
But it’s one of those things that depends on the issues at hand. Obviously, what’s happening now with social justice is something that is trending. It’s in the mainstream media. But there could be other issues happening locally that are just as bad but if George Floyd, rest in peace, would have never been killed, what would these conversations be like today? What would be happening today and what would be discussed in the locker rooms?
I just feel that there are a lot of voices out there and some of them mean well, and some of them are misunderstood but at the end of the day, if you’re just jumping on the bandwagon just because you feel forced — whether you’re white or black — if you just feel like your peers are doing this so I should be doing this, well that is a part of the problem.
We shouldn’t have had something like this happen. But we can’t look back now. I just think it’s more of a question of your intent versus your obligation. As an athlete, you may feel obligated because of the fans and the city you represent, or because your teammate just made an announcement, but it’s really about your heart and your intent as the individual. You need to first figure yourself out before you can speak out.
EB: What do you think is going to happen once sports do return? The NBA — for as progressive as its hailed to be — has a “no kneeling” policy during the National Anthem. We all know the controversy surrounding the NFL, Colin Kaepernick, and his peaceful protests. What do you think will happen?
RV: Obviously George Floyd wasn’t the first black man to have gotten killed senselessly under police custody. There have obviously been numerous protests that have happened in the past 10, 20, 30, 40 years but the conversation seems to stop. Sports are coming back soon. Is the conversation going to stop? Where’s the action going to be?
I’m not sure. I can’t predict the future. I just can base it off the past. And in the past, we’ve dropped the ball time and time again, whether it was me, you, an athlete, a team, an administration, our local elected officials, etc. We made some progress, obviously, but we are not where we are supposed to be acting as one human race.
We all have an obligation to make sure that efficient and effective change is happening in our respective communities. So that’s something that we have to check ourselves about and something athletes have to check themselves about. If they’re being outspoken now, then they have to have some sort of willingness to make sure we all continue to speak out if we keep seeing the same shit.
If this wouldn’t have been an election year, then I would have been concerned about this getting dropped. But the fact is — this is happening in our faces more than ever during a year of an election. When most people think about voting, they think of the President but we need to think about our local officials too.
Athlete voices, protests, etc. have become much louder and much more unified. Although I’ve seen protests in the past, this is the first time I’ve seen protests happening in every single state in America, plus around the world.
You might think you have nothing to do with this, but you actually have everything to do with this. We’re talking about our human race. This is no longer about politics, about where you live, about whose side you’re on — what side? We all breathe the same air.
So do I think athlete involvement is going to continue? I’m hopeful. And then say, next year, we get a new president and Biden enters office and Trump is out — most people think it is going to be “kumbaya” — but it doesn’t stop there. I think the biggest impact is not on who we elect as President, but who we elect in our local office. That’s what’s going to cause real change. And I think athletes are starting to understand that. And people are starting to understand that because now we’re being a little more mindful about things that we look up and what we’re googling.
There’s never going to be a better time than now to fight for the human race, fight for our communities, and pursue the right for equality.
EB: The homepage of TPT is filled with athlete stories related to social injustice and the current movement taking place in America. Have you been receiving a lot of inbound requests from athletes who want to share their thoughts?
RV: Oh my gosh. More than my entire three and a half years at The Players’ Tribune. Overwhelmingly. Even from non-professional athletes — on the collegiate side, on the high school side — young athletes looking to figure out how to contribute and how to share their stories.
Our content team now is actively trying to figure out how — instead of saying, ‘No, we can’t work with you’ — how do we figure out ways for them to contribute toward this movement?
Now more than ever, we’ve been overwhelmed by inbound requests from professional and non-professional athletes from across the world who want to play a role. And to go back to your earlier question, that makes me hopeful. The fact that you, me, and everyone across the world are proactively looking for better ways to live among each other. That speaks for itself.
EB: That is awesome to hear. Are you able to share how many inbound requests you’ve been receiving compared to previous months?
RV: These numbers could be a bit off, but just to give you a rough idea — we had about 25 requests in March. That number doubled in April, and it quadrupled in May. It’s not thousands of submissions, but these growing numbers are happening in real-time. And it takes a lot for some athletes to speak out. So, this just goes to show you as a living testament that change is already happening for the greater good.
Thanks to Rob for taking the time to chat. Follow him on Twitter and on Instagram.
