Dolly Parton started a publishing company at twenty, before she had a hit, so that nobody else would own her songs. Christian McCaffrey let a nine-year Nike deal expire and put his own cash into the shoe company he co-founded instead. Kevin Durant opens a restaurant in downtown Austin next month, nearly twenty years after his one season at Texas. Welcome back to The Closeout. Let's get into it.

Dolly Parton was born in a one-room cabin on the Little Pigeon River in Sevier County, Tennessee, the fourth of twelve children. Her father, Robert Lee Parton, farmed and worked construction and could not read or write. Her mother sang Appalachian ballads to a houseful of kids.

In 1966, at twenty years old, she started a publishing company with her uncle Bill Owens. They called it Owe-Par, Owens and Parton. She did not have a hit record yet. She did not have leverage, a lawyer, or any reason to believe the songs would be worth anything. She built the company anyway, because she wanted the copyrights in her name before there was anything to copyright.

Sixty years later the math on that decision is hard to overstate. She wrote more than 3,000 songs and owned the majority of them. When Elvis Presley wanted to record "I Will Always Love You" and Colonel Tom Parker wanted half the publishing, she said no and kept the song. Whitney Houston cut it in 1992 and it became one of the best-selling singles in history. The royalties went to a woman from Sevierville who had made a decision about legacy at age twenty.

Then she did it again with the park. Dollywood opened in 1986 on 165 acres in her hometown, a joint venture with Herschend Family Entertainment where she held half. It recently celebrated its 40th season.

In 1995 she launched the Imagination Library and mailed free books to children from birth to age five. It has now delivered more than 300 million books across all fifty states and five countries. She started it for her father. In her own words on the program's website: he told her before he died that it was probably the most important thing she had ever done, and his inability to read had kept him from his own dreams.

The list runs long after that. A million dollars to Vanderbilt in 2020 that funded early research behind Moderna's COVID vaccine. A million to Vanderbilt's children's hospital in honor of a niece treated there for leukemia. Another million in 2022 for pediatric infectious disease. A million of her own money for Hurricane Helene relief in East Tennessee, matched by another million from her businesses. A million to the Salvation Army. College tuition for Dollywood employees. The Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in 2022.

She died Tuesday at eighty, at Vanderbilt, in the medical center she had spent years funding.

Fifteen issues of artists fighting to own their work. Issue #12 had Beyoncé buying LVMH out of SirDavis. Issue #14 had Megan Thee Stallion keeping every master and every publishing dollar. Dolly Parton started owning hers in 1966, in a business run by men that gave a twenty-year-old girl from a cabin no reason to think she could.

The ownership was never the point. It was how she paid for everything else.

Rest easy, Dolly. 🦋

Christian McCaffrey let his nine-year Nike deal expire and joined footwear brand while on earth as co-founder and investor, taking an equity grant and putting his own cash in on top of it. His training shoe, The CMC, just launched. The company claims 250% year-over-year growth and more than 10,000 on the restock waitlist. No stake disclosed.

Kevin Durant opens Austin Sports Club on September 10 at 205 E. 3rd Street, built through his Boardroom Hospitality with Rich Kleiman, Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, and local operator Lobos Hospitality. State licensing filings put it at 4,723 square feet and roughly $2.4 million in buildout. First restaurant Durant and Kleiman have done together.

Alex Rodriguez increased his equity stake in the Timberwolves and Lynx as Marc Stad bought control from Marc Lore at a $4.5 billion valuation, three times what Rodriguez and Lore paid Glen Taylor. He stays governor of the Lynx. The size of his new position was not disclosed.

Bud Dupree partnered his Next Play Showcase with Sports Academy to build an evaluation platform for college football players stuck in the transfer portal, starting with a live-streamed event in Melissa, Texas, in January 2027. The NFL veteran co-founded it. No funding, equity, or valuation disclosed.

Nneka Ogwumike went No. 1 out of Stanford in 2012, won Rookie of the Year, won MVP and a title in 2016, made eleven All-Star teams, and will finish fourth all-time in scoring. On Wednesday she announced she is retiring from the WNBA at the end of this season, at 36, while averaging nearly 17 a game.

The part that matters here happened off the floor. She has been president of the players' union since 2016 and steered it through two collective bargaining agreements, in 2020 and again this past offseason. That second deal triggered an unprecedented surge in player pay and a historic shift in revenue sharing, transforming the financial landscape of the league. She was re-elected to a fourth three-year term in June and stays on until the next election, which comes before the end of the year.

She might be retiring from the WNBA but she is not done playing. She was among the first players Project B announced, and the new global league gives every player an equity stake when it debuts in January. Speaking at a Front Office Sports panel last month, she put the appeal plainly:  "Being able to say that I'm a partner in this." She framed it as something women in the game had been asking for long before anyone had the leverage to get it.

Asked by Boardroom whether she wants the commissioner's chair someday, she declined to rule it out.

Ten years running the union, and the raise she negotiated goes to everybody else. The ownership stake is the first thing she kept.

Marshall x Jimi Hendrix, 60th Anniversary Collection. The Major V headphones run about $177 and the Emberton III speaker about $205, both on sale now. The centerpiece is the JMH Studio amplifier at roughly $2,387, arriving with the full collection on September 9. Everything comes wrapped in psychedelic purple oil-on-water graphics, silver detailing, and the all-seeing eye motif, pulled from an Acton III speaker and a 1959 JMH Half Stack.

The sixty years being counted here start in 1966, the year Hendrix first plugged into a Marshall. Same year Dolly Parton started Owe-Par.

She announced the retirement here, fifty minutes into a conversation about everything else. The part worth your time is the eighteen-month CBA fight she ran as union president: emergency calls past midnight, 4 a.m. training because that was the only hour left, and the difficulty of fighting for people who would not always fight for you. She is averaging 16.8 and 8.8 at 51 percent. Most players retire when the body decides. She made the call herself and put a number on how certain she was: 98 percent.

The Big Ten and SEC just banned NFL players from going back to play in college. Should anyone who has taken a professional paycheck be allowed to return? Hit reply.