VSGA Member Spotlight
Interviewed by LEONARD SHAPIRO | Photography by ANDREW HARNIK
AGENT OF
EMPOWERMENT
CLIENT-FIRST APPROACH, DIVERSE
EXPERIENCES HAVE ALLOWED VSGA
MEMBER JOHN MASCATELLO AND
HIS COMPANY TO BUILD A STRONG
CLIENT BASE
John Mascatello, a VSGA member at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club,
has risen to the top of his field in the sports representation business.
J
ohn Mascatello has been
representing professional golfers
for most of the last 25 years.
Among his earliest clients were Scott Verplank, Scott Hoch and
Roger Maltbie, soon to be joined by John Daly nine months before his
victory in the 1991 PGA Championship at Crooked Stick Golf Club
in Indianapolis.
Mascatello is now an executive vice president and managing
executive for golf with Wasserman, one of the largest sports agencies
in the world. He lives in Middleburg, Va., has been a longtime member
at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Gainesville, Va., and now includes
some of the game’s brightest stars—Zach Johnson, Rickie Fowler and
Jason Day, among others—on the Wasserman list of clients.
VIRGINIA GOLFER: Tell us a bit about your background and
how you broke into the business.
JOHN MASCATELLO: I grew up in Brooklyn, went to Poly Prep
(Country Day School) and later, the University of Vermont. Then I
got my J.D./M.A. degree at American University in Washington, D.C.
After law school, my first job was with ProServ, a D.C.-based company
run by Donald Dell. He represented a number of tennis players, and
a few golfers as well. I worked there for about five years. Then Bud
Martin, another ProServ alum, and I decided to start our own business,
Cambridge Sports International. Bud was doing a lot of financial work
in Pittsburgh at the time. We joke that I wanted to sell him Donnie
Hammond and he wanted to buy Bobby Clampett. Not long after we
started, we added another partner, T
erry Reilly, who had worked in the
mergers and acquisitions field, and over the years we added two more
partners, Brad Buffoni, Zach Johnson’s agent, and Sam McNaughton,
who represents Rickie Fowler.
VG: Was your split with ProServ amicable? And fast forward
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from how Cambridge ultimately led to yo \