by Robert Devine
“I got into law school at the University of Indiana at Indianapolis by the skin of my teeth,” he said. “This was after spending six years getting through Purdue spending most of my time playing golf and drinking.”
It is a familiar refrain. A life stuck in neutral gear, when, suddenly, there is a gap, a crease, a moment in time where the achievers obtain the revelation that anything is possible.
Such is the story of Mark Shaw.
Mark Shaw is a man in motion. Catch him if you can. Fortunately, he can be caught on July 30 when he is a keynote speaker at the Jacksonville Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Section’s Annual Meeting. Shaw will be speaking to Jacksonville’s young lawyers to spread the message that anything is possible provided one is willing to accept that a closed door just means that another one is open. The trick is having the perseverance to find it. That truism, coupled with seeing one failure as an alternative opportunity, is the makeup of Mark Shaw.
“Most of the positive moments that you have in your life will come after a failure,” Shaw opined. “You can either say, ‘I lost, I give up.’ Or you can say, ‘I believe in this. I want to do it and it can be done.’”
Once Shaw made it into law school, his life turned from seeing walls to seeing possibilities. And he has made the most of it. Once completing law school, Shaw began his legal career as a criminal defense attorney. After six years, he moved on to practice entertainment law in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Indianapolis.
From his legal career spawned a career in television. The opportunity in television came from his decision to enter the world of law. During the 1970s, F. Lee Bailey retained Shaw to act as local counsel in a murder case where a doctor was accused of murder involving a gruesome headless torso. That experience led to an ongoing relationship with Bailey. Shaw later took a break from the legal profession and moved to Colorado. When he was there, a famous murder trial took place where Claudine Longet, wife of famous singer Andy Williams, was accused of shooting a snow skier over a love triangle. ABC’s “Good Morning America” had struck a deal with Bailey to work as a legal analyst for the trial. As it happened, Bailey was not able to handle it and asked Shaw to step in.
That was all it took. Shaw turned his performance as an analyst for ABC in that trial into a successful career in television as a legal analyst. This later led to a regular position as co-host with Phyllis George on the CBS show “People.” The show aired in prime time on Monday nights, but was later canceled because it could not compete with “Monday Night Football.” One door closes and another opens.
It came in the form of the rape trial in Indiana of legendary boxer Mike Tyson. Shaw was covering the trial as an analyst for ESPN, CNN and ABC television. During the coverage of the trial, he formed a relationship with USA sportswriter John Saraceno. Saraceno, who talked Shaw into writing an analysis column on the trial for his newspaper. When the trial was completed, Shaw was sitting on a pile of notes from his observances of the trial. From that pile came his first book, “Down For The Count”, a blow-by-blow legal account of the Tyson trial.
A career as an author was born.
Shaw drew back on his first interest—golf—to find his next book, “Diamonds In The Rough”. The book was an account of the 1997 Senior PGA Tour. Shaw stayed in the sports realm for his third book, this time baseball. Shaw picked a moment in time that is remembered by many, so much so it was honored as one of the 30 greatest moments in baseball history at this year’s All-Star Game. It was Don Larsen’s Perfect game against the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1956 World Series.
“Don Larsen was from Indiana and I learned that he had moved to San Francisco,” Shaw began. “When I first called him about a book on his perfect game, he did not want to do it. But while he was telling me ‘no,’ I could hear his wife in the background saying, ‘C’mon, Don. Don, C’mon.’ I think he shied away from talking about the perfect game because his career never went as great as he had planned.”
In fact, Larsen’s career, other than his perfect game, was less than memorable. In the season before the perfect game, Larsen had a dismal record of 3-21. He was a pitcher with a live arm, but had problems locating his fastball. Shaw created the idea of making the book less about Larsen and more about the perfect game itself. Shaw’s book wraps the story of Don Larsen around each inning of the perfect game for which Larsen will always be remembered.
Shaw moved on to write “Nicklaus, A Biography,” before moving off the topic of sports to write “Forever Flying,” an autobiography of Bob Hoover, generally known as one of history’s greatest aviators. Chuck Yeager, the person who first broke the sound barrier, referred to Hoover as “the greatest aviator I ever saw.”
Shaw then drifted back to golf, but not from the players perspective, when he penned “Bury Me In A Pot Bunker,” the autobiography of famed golf course designer Pete Dye. Dye is the designer of The Stadium Course at TPC in Sawgrass, that so many Jacksonvillians have both cursed and admired. Shaw talked Dye into writing an autobiography when the two were playing golf together at a course Dye designed in the Dominican Republic. While playing the course, the duo came to a par-5 hole. After a successful drive off the tee, Shaw pulled a 5-wood out of his bag to take a run at making the green in two shots. Dye stopped Shaw.
“You can’t hit that shot,” Dye told Shaw. “That’s not how I designed the hole to be played. If you hit a 5-wood, the green will not hold it. You’ll end up off the green” and in a series of pestilence and plague that Dye had designed for the golfer who made such a choice. Shaw took his advice, turned to Dye and said, “Pete, we have got to write this down.” The golf course conversation was the genesis of the book.
Interestingly enough, for all of his golf architectural genius, Pete Dye cannot lay claim to the famed island 17th hole as being his idea. During the construction of the course, Dye’s wife, Alice, whom Shaw is also writing a book about, noticed that Dye had dredged a tremendous amount of sand around the green at the hole. She then told Dye, that since he scooped out so much sand, why not just make the hole an island green. So, if when playing the 17th hole in the past you cursed Pete Dye, your anger is misplaced.
After “Bury Me In A Pot Bunker,” Shaw authored “Larry Legend, The Life and Times of NBA Superstar Larry Bird,” and “Miscarriage of Justice: The Jonathan Pollard Story,” a book about the case of the naval analyst and Zionist who was accused of passing top secret documents to the Israeli government.
Shaw can accurately be described as prolific. Author, lawyer, founder of a foundation, television personality, book store owner. All this in addition to still maintaining his connection with the law as an entertainment lawyer and consultant. Yet every one of his pursuits have a common theme–Six Dogs.
“I married late in life, at 44, and was never married before that,” Shaw said. “The woman I married had four children, including three eight-year-old triplets. Like any family, we have gone through tough times. Whenever something difficult happened to us, we would buy a puppy. Puppies just give you a wonderful cleansing feelings about everything. As it turned out, we ended up buying a puppy for everyone in the family. So when it came time to name my book and film company, we ended up naming it Six Dogs Book and Film Company.”
Shaw’s book store is called Six Dogs Books and Gifts.
After blazing his own trail, creating a swath wide enough for a superhighway, Shaw thought it was time to help others to follow in his path. He understands the struggles it takes for an unknown, and previously unpublished, aspiring author to catch his first break. Shaw’s first idea was to land a teaching position at a university, where he could share his knowledge.
“I really wanted to pass on my experience and information about publishing,” Shaw began. “I contacted a number of universities to talk about teaching. No school was interested. It’s tough to break into that arena without significant teaching experience, and I had only taught a few classes.”
But where others simply see a wall, Shaw knows that there is a way around it.
“Since no one wanted to permit me a chance to teach about publishing, I decided there had to be another way to do it. You never know when there is another opportunity around the corner. I have had so many experiences that way,” said Shaw.
Consequently, Shaw wrote a book to help writers named “Book Report: Helping Aspiring Authors to Help Themselves.” Following the book, Shaw created the Books for Life Foundation that assists aspiring authors in their endeavors. The foundation went from an idea to a reality, after Shaw seized an opportunity that fell into his lap–or rather, his mailbox.
“I wanted to start the foundation, but I needed a funding source,” Shaw remembers. “Then one day, I received a change of address card in the mail from a well-to-do friend of mine. I contacted him and he agreed to fund the foundation.”
Shaw’s future holds a quick- paced life that is remarkably similar to his past and present. Shaw is currently working on a book about Melvin Belli, the famed attorney who represented such notables as the Rolling Stones, Muhammad Ali, Errol Flynn, and Lana Turner. Belli’s greatest fame came from his defense of Jack Ruby after he murdered Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Shaw is also taking his first crack at fiction, which should be coming to book stores in the near future.
Still, it all comes back to the training and experiences he gained through the law.
“My legal career has given me credibility and I have used it in so many ways,” Shaw said. “It has saved me so many times. I have been able to use it to help people, like I use it now to help aspiring writers get a fair book contract. Law is logic coupled with imagination. You can use the same mindset that you use in the law in other aspects of your life. It’s what makes you creative when there are obstacles in front of you.”
For Shaw it comes down to one phrase: If you can imagine it, you can do it.