Ladies' man.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: SPORTS BIZ - Patrick Linden, laywer, National Professional Fastpitch president - Interview

Patrick Linden has the smarts, the drive and the contacts to fulfill a career as the deal-making attorney his business card, his crisply fitted suit and his office on the 16th floor of a downtown Denver law firm suggest he is destined to be. There's just one thing: He still remembers The Catch.

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The Catch happened years ago when Linden was patrolling center field for Denver University's baseball team with men on, two outs in the ninth and the Pioneers nursing a thin lead. Linden's diving snare of a fly ball to end the game was one of those storybook moments young athletes dream about--especially young athletes who have been consumed by sports all their lives.

"Growing up, it was everything I thought about," says Linden, a compact 32-year-old who played football and baseball for Dartmouth before transferring to DU early in the 1990s.

Linden still has the sports bug. After practicing corporate law for a few years, he registered with the National Football League as a player agent before the 2003 NFL season. Linden signed a handful of players to contracts (an obscure Buffalo Bills long-snapper, Tony Case, was the first) before returning to corporate law with Denver's Kamlet Shepherd & Reichert, where he now practices.

But Linden's sports industry career isn't done. Since last January, he has been doing double-duty as corporate attorney and as the president of National Professional Fastpitch, a little-known women's professional softball league based in Denver that Linden believes has a shot at going mainstream.

It's a tough charge. The six-team NPF, in its present form and in a previous incarnation, has been around for years, but hardly anybody knows about it, despite some national television exposure through ESPN.

Linden, an undersized jock who once held his own as an Ivy League defensive back, hopes to change that. His game plan is to think and act big, partly by cultivating a new breed of team owners who bring serious ambition, a love of the game, and a willingness to plow through close to $500,000 a year in operating expenses.

Emblematic of them is Bill Conroy, a technology industry consultant whose Chicago Bandits brought in close to $1 million last year in sponsorship revenue. Linden also is negotiating a new national TV deal that should kick in before the start of the 2007 season, and he plans to fill out the NPF's geography soon with new teams in Phoenix and either Southern California or the Pacific Northwest. (Two...