Game changer

— -- ON THE EVE of the landmark O'Bannon v. NCAA trial, Michael Hausfeld, the lead attorney for former UCLA basketball star Ed O'Bannon, huddled with his colleagues in a small conference room overlooking Oakland's Lake Merritt. The words "WAR ROOM" were written on a Post-it note attached to the doorframe. Around a lacquered table, a half-dozen lawyers and economists stared into laptops save for Hausfeld, who, at 68, still takes handwritten notes, peering through his round, wire-rimmed glasses like a courtly scrivener.

The O'Bannon case boils down to the question of whether the NCAA can legally prevent athletes from earning money on their names and identities, which are plastered on everything from video games to jerseys to ESPN Classic broadcasts. Andy Schwarz, a sports economist who has been picking apart the NCAA for over a decade, brought up Johnny Manziel and Jadeveon Clowney, who would have been multimillionaires years ago if not for the NCAA restrictions.

"You're going to have to help me out there," Hausfeld told Schwarz, sheepishly, "because I don't know who those people are."

Hausfeld wasn't kidding: He had no clue who Manziel and Clowney were. Just as he had no clue who O'Bannon -- the Final Four Most Outstanding Player of UCLA's 1995 title run -- was before O'Bannon agreed to place his name on the lawsuit five years ago. No clue who Oscar Robertson was before he was added as co-plaintiff. No clue about anything, really, related to sports, at least as it's played between the lines.

But Hausfeld does have one big idea -- that the people who run our games ought to play by the rules that govern society and industry -- and that has made him one of the most powerful people in sports. He has gone after the NCAA for allegedly operating as an illegal cartel. He has pursued the NFL, pushing the league to address the treatment of players in the areas of concussions and licensing rights. He's even brought heat on the National Federation of State High School Associations in an attempt to hold some entity accountable for the fact that prep football players are nearly twice as likely as college players to suffer a brain injury.

In the coming weeks, a judge will rule on the O'Bannon case, the greatest challenge to the NCAA's economic model in its 108-year history. Hanging in the balance is not just the battered ideal of amateurism -- and who gets access to the billions of dollars flowing through college sports -- but what the entertainment product fans consume will look like in the near future. Even a limited injunction could allow the next Manziel to sell his autograph without touching off a national scandal.

"A favorable ruling," Schwarz says, "will expose to the world that the emperor has no clothes."

Hausfeld is hardly the only class-action lawyer descending on sports: There are at least 350 cases pending in federal court against the NFL, the NCAA and the major athletic conferences, according to an analysis by "Outside the Lines," in what has become an industrywide attack over issues ranging from concussions to the distribution of prescription drugs by the NFL. The wave of litigation already has helped change how football -- from the NFL to Pop Warner -- deals with head injuries and has triggered a spate of reform proposals within the NCAA.

But among the hundreds of lawyers seeking to capitalize on the recent frenzy, Hausfeld is, in many ways, the most controversial. A small, balding man who wears bowties and talks so softly his wife says she feels like a "lip reader" at the dinner table, he nonetheless has participated in a disproportionate number of legal knife fights; after 37 years, he was fired from his previous firm via a note left on his chair. Hausfeld is perhaps best described as a legal activist. In 1998, he wrested $1.25 billion from Swiss banks on behalf of Holocaust survivors seeking to reclaim their dormant assets. Hausfeld doesn't go as far as to compare NFL linemen with concentration camp victims, but he does frame the cases in the same way. "There is no comparison in terms of the gravity of the evil," he says. "What you need to do is disconnect the gravity of the evil but still look at the magnitude or the systemic nature of the wrong."

Hausfeld has gained a following among some athletes and reformers as the man who can end the exploitation. "He kind of brings that David versus Goliath thing," O'Bannon says. But it hasn't always worked out that way. One group of NFL greats believes Hausfeld drew them in with promises of taking on the NFL in the same way he once took on Texaco and Exxon, only to sell them out.

"I thought he was sent from God to help us," said Joe DeLamielleure, the Hall of Fame Buffalo Bills offensive lineman and one of Hausfeld's former clients. "Then I realized he was the devil."

ALL THE PEOPLE who know Hausfeld -- his friends, current and former colleagues, even his wife, Marilyn -- shake their heads in amazement at the idea of him presiding over some of the most momentous sports cases in history. Sports is essentially a foreign language to him. At one point during the O'Bannon trial, Hausfeld referred to the Nike swoosh as a "swish," then attributed the famous logo to Adidas. "When did they change the swish to stripes?" he asked his paralegal, Jim Mitchell. A few years ago, Hausfeld's associates bought him a copy of "Football for Dummies" while Mitchell gave him Football 101 classes on everything from how the draft works to the history of the collective bargaining agreement. "He's come really far: I mean, when I first started working for him I don't think he knew what a touchdown was," said Swathi Bojedla, a 28-year-old associate in Hausfeld's firm. Bojedla, who grew up in Buffalo and still has Bills season tickets, says she frequently finds herself sprinting down the hall with Wikipedia bios to give to her boss when another famous potential client calls.

"Who's Oscar Robertson?" Hausfeld asked Bill Isaacson, a prominent antitrust lawyer involved in the O'Bannon case, one afternoon.

"Michael, he's an incredibly big deal!" Isaacson replied.

Hausfeld takes the ribbing good-naturedly and acknowledges that he knows next to nothing about sports. He says he thinks it might actually help him relate to his famous clients. "It adds to the relationship because they know I'm not responding to them out of sports admiration, I'm responding to them as a person," he says.

Hausfeld was raised in Brooklyn; his father sold material to furriers out of a small shop. Walter Hausfeld had grown up in Poland. Shortly after Germany invaded in 1939, Walter and his brother Meyer fled to New York to join two other brothers who had urged the family to escape. A fifth brother stayed behind. When the Nazis arrived in the Hausfelds' hometown, they liquidated the Jewish population. The brother who had remained behind was marched into the forest and shot. Hausfeld is named after that late uncle, Michael David Hausfeld.

In the early 1970s, Hausfeld met his mentor: Jerry Cohen, a muckraking class-action lawyer who had been chief counsel to the Senate antitrust subcommittee and represented the United Farm Workers. "It was like a father-son relationship," said Marilyn Hausfeld, an actress and singer who met her husband at Brooklyn College. Cohen harbored a suspicion of big business. His 1971 book "America Inc." argued that the growing concentration of economic power was dangerous to society. Ralph Nader wrote the introduction. Cohen "always encouraged me to take the cases that I was most interested in on a social basis," Hausfeld said, "and he always supported me in doing them despite opposition in the firm and whether it made economic sense or not."

Hausfeld stayed at the firm for 37 years, becoming a partner and chairman with a significant equity stake. "Michael was looked at as this absolutely creative, independent-minded genius who would pursue cases that others couldn't identify and then run with them," said Steven Toll, the firm's managing partner. "We looked at ourselves as the white hats -- individuals against corporate misconduct and greed."

Hausfeld initially took on the Swiss banks pro bono; invoking international law and even the Nuremberg trials, he won a $1.25 billion settlement on a lawsuit involving incidents that had taken place in Europe 50 years earlier. Hausfeld won a $176 million judgment for African-American employees who accused Texaco of discrimination and, after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, represented Alaska Natives who sometimes paid him in salmon.

But in addition to his gift for making implausible cases real, Hausfeld's style sometimes grated on those around him. Some colleagues viewed him as imperious and condescending. He frequently fought with lawyers ostensibly on the same side he was. He launched projects over the objections of his partners. In the mid-2000s, Hausfeld made it known that he wanted to open a London office. Europe had little experience with class-action litigation, and his ambitious project aimed to expand European law. It was a classic clash between Hausfeld's visionary impulses and the practicalities of running a law practice.

To some, the London project came to symbolize what they saw as Hausfeld's attempt to take total control over the firm. It eventually ripped the firm apart.

For months in 2008, Hausfeld and his partners rarely spoke even though they sat within a few feet of one another. "The tension inside the office became unbearable," Toll said. One afternoon, with Hausfeld present, the firm's compensation committee voted to reduce his stake. Almost immediately, Hausfeld's opponents used their new majority to fire him.

The partners dispatched a delegate to give Hausfeld notice he'd been ousted. Hausfeld was away at a settlement conference, and when he returned he found the notice on his chair.

"I was to leave the building immediately," Hausfeld said. "I was to take nothing with me. If I was caught on the premises, they would have me arrested as a trespasser."

Toll said the partners wanted to move quickly. Hausfeld is such a good lawyer, he said, the partners feared he'd find a creative way out.

HAUSFELD'S ENTRY INTO sports immediately followed that professional debacle. The day after he was fired, he set up a new firm in borrowed office space, along with a dozen lawyers and two assistants who had followed him out the door.

One day he received a call from Ken Feinberg, a prominent lawyer who handled the claims for the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. Feinberg had served as a mediator on some of Hausfeld's cases. He mentioned Sonny Vaccaro, the street-wise former marketing executive who once shod young basketball players for Nike (and, later, Adidas and Reebok). Vaccaro, as much as anyone, built the empire of camps, tournaments and sneakers that still drives millions of dollars to coaches and universities. He had come to see the NCAA as an exploitative cesspool. By 2008, Vaccaro was touring the country as a reformer, denouncing the NCAA as "the worst organization in the world."

"I Googled him and saw who he had gone after: Nazi Germany and the Swiss banks! Apartheid!" Vaccaro says. "His cases were unbelievable." Vaccaro flew to Washington to meet Hausfeld in his K Street office. "He walks in and he's this little meek guy with a bowtie, 5-6, maybe 145 pounds, very soft-spoken," Vaccaro says. "You wouldn't think there was any energy there. Until we started talking." For the next hour, Vaccaro described his personal journey. When he finished, Hausfeld walked over and threw his arms around him.

"Let's go after them," Hausfeld said, according to Vaccaro.

Hausfeld says he took on the case "because it was right." But it was also a business opportunity his new firm desperately needed. The potential financial payoff for the firm was unclear. "But it was an opportunity for us to say, 'We're still here, and we're doing bigger and better things,'" says Jon King, a lawyer and former walk-on basketball player at Santa Clara who followed Hausfeld to his new firm.

King, who became the lead investigator on the case, said that at the time the firm had no ambitions to expand into sports law. But the NCAA seemed ripe for a challenge. Much of the case was sitting in plain sight. Vaccaro showed Hausfeld the obscure 1997 autobiography of Walter Byers, the NCAA's executive director from 1951 to 1988. Byers was astonishingly repentant: His book, "Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes," asserts that, with his help, the NCAA erected a "nationwide money-laundering scheme" that enriches conferences, schools, coaches and TV networks on the backs of unpaid athletes. Byers confessed that he helped invent the term "student-athlete" to shield the NCAA from having to pay the players.

To Hausfeld, the book was "an amazing revelation" that helped to convince him he had a case. He found that other economists had reached the same conclusions about the NCAA. Two years after the publication of Byers' book, a former Berkeley economics professor named Ernie Nadel was watching a bowl game when an announcer mentioned that Florida coach Steve Spurrier earned $2 million a year. Nadel approached one of his colleagues, Dan Rascher and asked how it could be that the head football coach for a public university was making so much money.

"Because he's good at recruiting talent," Rascher said. "And you can't pay the talent."

"This is legal?" Nadel responded.

That inquiry ultimately led to one of the first class-action antitrust cases against the NCAA. Rascher and fellow economist Schwarz hoped the case would go to trial. But in 2008, attorneys accepted a $10 million settlement from the NCAA for "bona fide educational expenses" to be distributed to some 12,000 athletes over a three-year period. The lawyers made almost as much money. The NCAA emerged unscathed. Schwarz and Rascher were furious. Hausfeld, who hired them as expert witnesses, gave their cause new life.

All Hausfeld needed was a name to attach to the case.

"After the hug, that's when I had to go out and find people," Vaccaro says.

Over the next two months, he called up nearly a dozen prominent players, trying to persuade one to take on the NCAA. None would agree. Then one day, O'Bannon called him. He explained to Vaccaro how a friend had asked him one day, "Want to see yourself in a video game?" The game featured a UCLA power forward with O'Bannon's height, weight, skin tone, No. 31 and left-handed shot. He even had the player's bald head.

O'Bannon wondered how it was possible that he wasn't getting paid. Vaccaro put him in touch with Hausfeld, whose lack of sports knowledge did not bother O'Bannon. "I can appreciate someone who is of a certain cause, not a fan but someone who realizes right is right and wrong is wrong," he says. Ramogi Huma, who has led the recent campaign to unionize college athletes, says Hausfeld is "always on the right side, always fighting for the little guy."

During a bruising deposition in 2012, an NCAA attorney asked Vaccaro whether he had a criminal record. Hausfeld halted the proceedings and accused the NCAA of acting like a state police agency. He asked the lawyer whether he had a criminal record.

"Have you? Now you answer," Hausfeld insisted. "It's your turn."

Vaccaro says the retort gave him confidence to proceed, knowing Hausfeld had his back. "Michael is like that guy in the Jimmy Stewart story ["It's a Wonderful Life"], that angel looking over me."