Page 75 - OVATION Magazine (Issue 1)

Home-Run Hitter
Big-league real estate broker Jamie Adams goes to bat for the pros.
Jamie Adams’s life story reads like a Texas tall tale.The oldest of five broth-
ers, raised by a single mom in remote West Texas, strikes out on his own in the big city— Arlington, that is—where he scrapes together a living work- ing as a rodeo clown, a coun- try western DJ, and a boot salesman. One day in 1983,
at the height of the Urban Cowboy craze, a fateful sale of boots to Texas Rangers second baseman Bill Stein changes everything. Stein takes a shine to the fledgling salesman and arranges a job for him with a local real estate broker—and then buys a house from him. “That was the biggest check
I ever had in my life, six or seven thousand dollars,” Adams recalls.
Today, some 30-odd years later,Adams has helped more than 200 professional ath- letes—from Nolan Ryan to Tommy John—buy and sell their homes.“The guys who play this game, they don’t know the word no,” he says. “They want something; people help them out.” So yes is Adams’s answer to any request, whether it’s a home with a media room, a pool, an office,
“The guys who play this game, they
don’t know the word no. They want
something; people help them out.”
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a guest house, or a five-car ga- rage—or to picking up clients’ kids at the airport, putting together parties and entertain- ment, or dog sitting.
Adams does it all from the third-floor Center Field Office Building at the Rangers’ Globe Life Park stadium in
an office suite crammed with signed jerseys, baseballs and basketballs, trophies, and per- sonal letters—and with a fish- bowl view from center field. With the Rangers moving on to a new ballpark next year, Adams is staying behind to manage the team’s offices and
to watch the baseball diamond that he calls home transform into an XFL football field. “It’s kind of bittersweet,” he says, but his enviable office
is one piece of real estate he won’t be parting with soon. jamieadams.com
—michalene busico
DANIEL CARDEA