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Alan Taylor, founder of Alan Taylor Communications (now known as Taylor) and one of the founders of sports PR, has just put out a book that tells the story of his career and the many prominent athletes he encountered (Billie Jean King and Muhammad Ali, for starters) along the way.
In “A Perfect Pair: PR and Event Promotion,” Taylor offers both an inside look at how sports and event promotion are done and an up-close view of the many sports figures who benefited from his work.
Taylor handled the Muhammad Ali-Sonny Liston championship bout in 1964 and worked on eight Olympics, among many other events.
“Sports have always been my number one passion,” Taylor says. “I was never good enough to play, so I did the next best thing: write about sports and eventually promote sports activities.”
Starting out as a sports writer in Florida and California, Taylor eventually moved into public relations, where his experience in covering sports and dealing with sports figures inspired him to carve out what was, in the 1980s, a new niche in the PR world. “The natural progression in my generation was from media to public relations,” he says. “So it was an obvious choice for me to make sports public relations a specialty after spending a number of years doing more traditional public relations activities."
Taylor’s book covers and illustrates numerous client activities. It also lays out some “how-to-tips” from the age of traditional public relations to the modern day explosion of digital and social media.
Published last month, “A Perfect Pair” is available on Amazon.com. To order a copy, click here.
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