Dialing for a Car Deal for Debi Thomas

In March 1987, Debi Thomas was riding high: she was one year into her studies at Stanford University; she had pushed through injury to place second at the 1987 World Figure Skating Championships; and she was already looking forward to the rigorous training schedule required for the upcoming ice-skating season, which included the 1988 Winter Olympics.

However, there was one problem. Between living in Palo Alto and practicing at an ice rink 33 miles away, Thomas would drive her car many hundreds of miles each week to make all her commitments. During the summer of 1986, her car broke down and the repairs were too expensive to fix (see Exhibit 1). Thomas finished out the rest of the season couch-surfing at friends’ places and biking to her training sessions.

After her upset gold medal victory at the 1986 World Figure Skating Championships, Thomas signed with Mark McCormack’s IMG under Yuki Saegusa’s watchful eye and careful approach to her clients’ endorsement and sponsorship deals (Saegusa is still with IMG to this day; her figure-skating clientele includes Nathan Chen, Madison Chock & Evan Bates, and Kristi Yamaguchi). Once Thomas was forced to drastically adjust her living situation to accommodate her grueling practice schedule without a set of wheels, Saegusa realized they had an athlete sponsorship opportunity on their hands, especially with the Winter Olympics fast approaching.

The Mark H. McCormack Collection, held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, includes the conversations tracking Saegusa’s work to find Thomas a loaner vehicle before the 1986-1987 season ended. With time being the ultimate factor, how could Saegusa make this a positive result for Thomas when the car was needed yesterday?

Saegusa first reached out to IMG’s Amy Kennedy to ask for the contact information the company used most often for domestic and foreign car manufacturers (see Exhibit 2).  At the same time, Saegusa asked an IMG administrative assistant to photocopy the dealership section of the Palo Alto Yellow Pages, then she marked the best possibilities for success (see Exhibit 3).

Next came cold calls to the dealerships to ask if they offered loaner vehicles and would be interested in a trade deal with Debi Thomas (see Exhibit 4). Notice how many phone calls Saegusa made to many of the local dealerships, with accompanying notes detailing when to try again, if the partnership would be a good fit for Thomas, and what the deal’s specifics could include. Those with the red and/or blue stars in the left margin were the top contenders after many rounds of phone conversations.

After narrowing the potentials down to six local dealerships, the final step involved sending official letters to the interested parties, with Debi Thomas’s information included (see Exhibit 5). In Saegusa’s letter to Earl Escue at Buick, she mentions Buick’s current sponsorship of the Olympics as her inspiration for reaching out.

Readers can infer that Buick passed on this opportunity to support Debi Thomas. The last letter saved in the McCormack Papers is to Ralph Van Kempen of Toyota, thanking him for agreeing to the deal and outlining the base requirements of the partnership (see Exhibit 6).  While it may not have been IMG’s first partnership choice at the start, Debi Thomas finally had a functional automobile again and, perhaps not by coincidence, Team Toyota is currently a proud sponsor of Yuki Saegusa’s top athlete, Nathan Chen.