Mark McCormack
American lawyer, sports agent and writer (1930–2003)
Mark Hume McCormack (November 6, 1930 – May 16, 2003) was an American lawyer, sports agent and writer. He was the founder and chairman of International Management Group, now IMG, an international management organization serving sports figures and celebrities.
Career
After his Army discharge, McCormack worked as an attorney at the Cleveland law firm, Arter & Hadden. In the 1950s he helped organize one-day golf exhibitions for professionals around the United States. In 1960, McCormack founded IMG.
McCormack is the author of several books, including The Terrible Truth About Lawyers and What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School, which spent 21 consecutive weeks at #1 on The New York Times Best Seller list. His annual publication The World of Professional Golf, first published in 1967, included an (unofficial) world ranking system. In his book What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School, McCormack tells a fictional story of a Harvard study in which the three percent of graduates who had clear, written goals earned ten times as much as the 97 percent who did not have clear, written goals. The myth is sometimes attributed to a fictional Yale study. McCormack and numerous motivational speakers, including Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy, have used various versions of this non-existent study in their presentations.
McCormack's world rankings
The system used to calculate Mark McCormack's world golf rankings was adapted in 1986 to become the Official World Golf Ranking system, with McCormack chairing the rankings committee made up of representatives from all the major golf tours.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Mark McCormack” as american lawyer, sports agent and writer (1930–2003). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american lawyer, sports agent and writer (1930–2003). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q981795. VIAF identifies the subject as 305303735. The Library of Congress control number is n84032959. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1930, 2003, 1960 and 1967.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mark McCormack” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.