MOORESVILLE, N.C. (and many points beyond) -- The complex story of Motorsports Management International begins in Los Angeles, winds through Indianapolis and even parts of rural Ohio before coming to rest, for now, at MMI's spacious new office on the outskirts of Charlotte.

What is MMI, exactly? It is a good question.

There is no one answer to it.

The simple and most popular answer is that MMI is the House That Tony Stewart Built, an assumption that isn't disputed even by Cary Agajanian, who started the company and today splits his time mostly between L.A. and the rural farm he and his wife own in Cambridge, Ohio, with frequent side trips to tracks across America and the occasional sojourn to the MMI home office in Charlotte. But it is an overly simplified answer that neither explains where the company has been, nor how powerful it has grown in NASCAR as it expands rapidly both inside and outside of Stewart's considerable shadow.

To even begin to understand the spider web of operations that is MMI these days, a little history lesson is in order. No one can teach it better than Agajanian, who has spent nearly five decades deeply involved in all facets of American motorsports.

The No. 1 business in which MMI is immersed is driver representation -- and their roster of clients is deeper than any other company in the arena. It includes not only Stewart, but also Kasey Kahne, Denny Hamlin, Kyle Busch, David Reutimann, Jamie McMurray, Bill Elliott, Reed Sorenson, David Stremme, Regan Smith, Aric Almirola, Landon Cassill, Michael McDowell, Johnny Sauter, Bryan Clauson, Josh Wise, Brian Scott, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Brad Sweet.

They also are involved in various efforts to bring corporate sponsors into the sport on a wide variety of levels. Chris Newman, the company's director of marketing and consulting, said, "This may sound arrogant, but it's true. We don't just read the news. We help make the news everyone reads about."

Agajanian has assembled an impressive team of employees that has grown from "two or three" when he formed MMI in 1995 to more than 25 today. Expansion has come so rapidly that he joked he met the most recent hire during a recent flight layover at the Atlanta airport.

"I went through Atlanta the other day and was introduced. I was like, 'Oh, you must be our new employee,'" Agajanian said with a chuckle.

THE HISTORY

The Agajanian story of involvement in motorsports begins not in 1995, but 63 years earlier in 1932, when Cary's late father, J.C. "Aggie" Agajanian, was a race car owner and promoter in Southern California.

"My dad always enjoyed watching and assisting young drivers as they came up in their careers," Cary Agajanian said. "Not in the exactly same way that MMI does now, but he looked after the drivers who drove for him as much as he could -- or even drivers who drove in races he promoted or just drivers he became friendly with over the years. I always felt like that was the seed that had been planted in me."

For years the elder Agajanian, who is widely credited with coming up with the term "sprint car," promoted races at Ascot Park, a popular half-mile dirt track on the outskirts of Los Angeles that drew all of the top driving talent in Southern California. J.C. Agajanian was a character known for wearing his Stetson cowboy hat so often that his own son -- Cary's brother J.C. Jr. -- once joked, "I didn't know my father was bald until I was a teenager. He used to wear that hat even when he sat down to breakfast."

J.C. Agajanian also was a prolific car owner at the time, having been discouraged from driving by his father, an immigrant from Armenia who threatened to kick J.C. out of the house if he got behind the wheel himself. From 1948 through 1971, Agajanian's cars won three Indianapolis 500 poles and a pair of Indy 500 races.

Therein lies the real key to what MMI has become today, according to Cary Agajanian. Call it the Cautionary Tale of Two Drivers.

"Troy Ruttman won the Indy 500 in 1952 in one of my dad's cars when he was only 22 years old," Agajanian said. "My dad really liked him, and had known him since he was 14 or 15 years old. He cut school one day and drove over to my dad's when he was 15, and told him he wanted to drive for him. My dad didn't know who he was, but he took him to lunch and told him to go back and do his studies and that they'd get back together one day. Amazingly, that's what happened.

"He did keep racing and came back to my dad when he was 21, because that's how old you had to be back then. And my dad put him in his car and they won the Indy 500."

What happened next was as sad as the beginning of the story was amazing. Despite the advice of J.C. Agajanian to put money away while the going was good, Ruttman failed to do so. Not long thereafter, Ruttman suffered an arm injury in a wreck and suddenly his driving career was never again to be as lucrative.

"When he passed away [of lung cancer in 1997], he didn't have any assets to speak of," Cary Agajanian said.

Although Ruttman, the older brother of NASCAR driver Joe Ruttman, kicked around driving in various series for many more years -- including seven NASCAR Grand National series events between 1962 and 1964 -- he was a case study for another of Agajanian's Indy drivers a decade after Ruttman's own 500 victory.

That was Parnelli Jones, who won the Indy 500 in 1963 and listened intently when J.C. Agajanian told him what had happened to Ruttman.

"Right away as soon as he started winning races, my dad explained what Troy had done," Cary Agajanian said. "My dad bought property with Parnelli. Every time they'd win a race or do well, my dad would match the money and they would put it into their investments. Now, Parnelli -- and he probably wouldn't want me to say it -- but he's probably the richest guy in racing. As far as race car drivers go, he did extremely well."

Agajanian said the intertwined, star-crossed stories of Troy Ruttman and Parnelli Jones "almost defines our company" at MMI. First and foremost, MMI is a driver management company that assists mostly NASCAR drivers in all aspects of their careers -- as much or as little as they would like.

It also has expanded to build relationships with corporations who venture into NASCAR on various levels, not only helping the driver clients it represents build relationships with corporate sponsors but helping teams and the corporations themselves find happy homes with each other in the sport. But without the drivers, Agajanian is quick to admit, MMI would not exist. In return for that, his pledge is that none of the drivers represented by MMI will ever face a post-career shortage of funds like Ruttman did.

"Race car drivers' careers can be really short, like Troy Ruttman's, or they can be really long," Agajanian said. "What we try to do is make sure that they put enough money away and make the proper investments, so that when they want to retire or in some instances have to retire, they will have plenty of assets and a nice little nest egg to take care of themselves and their families."

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Cary Agajanian helped a young Jeff Gordon negotiate a career-turning contract with Bill Davis Racing.

'YOU CAN'T RACE HERE'

Agajanian credits two of the biggest superstars in NASCAR history with helping him come up with the idea of MMI as a full-service management vehicle for drivers, and exceptional timing with what has helped fuel phenomenal growth since then. Stewart is the first and most widely credited of those superstars, but the truth is that MMI never would have been formed as a company without Agajanian first becoming involved with a young Jeff Gordon.

Gordon attempted to race at Ascot Park when he was 14 years old, not long after J.C. Agajanian's death. Cary Agajanian, by then well-schooled both in common sense and armed with an undergraduate degree in business and finance management as well as a law degree after a total of seven years at the University of Southern California, turned Gordon away.

"In those days -- and in many ways still today -- the sprint car was and is the most powerful and most dangerous car in racing," Agajanian said. "On a half-mile dirt track, it was really dangerous."

He gave the bad news to Gordon's stepfather, John Bickford, telling him: "John, we can't let him race here. He's only 14 years old."

It wasn't a matter of questioning the young driver's talent. It was a matter of legality. Bickford said he understood. Later that winter Agajanian was lecturing at a workshop when he was asked why Gordon couldn't race at Ascot Park.

"Well, his release isn't really a valid document. So I don't think it's legally the proper thing to do," Agajanian told other race-track operators, citing that in the state of California the legal age of consent was 18.

Suddenly, other tracks in California started turning Gordon and other young drivers away as well. It led to Bickford eventually taking his stepson to Florida and finally Indiana to continue grooming him for a career that Gordon initially hoped would come in IndyCar racing.

"Basically, we ran him out of the state of California when he was 14, 15 years old," Agajanian said.

Bickford still laughs about it, according to Agajanian, who today calls Bickford a close friend.

"If you hadn't run us out of California, we probably never would have ended up where we did," Bickford once told him.

Meanwhile, they stayed in touch -- and when Gordon was offered his first contract to race stock cars for Bill Davis Racing, it was Agajanian who received a surprise phone call from Bickford.

"Next thing you know they were calling me up and saying, 'You're the only lawyer we know who understands racing. Would you look at this contract Bill Davis is giving him?' I guess I could say the rest is history," said Agajanian, who re-drew the contract and turned it into a mutual option that gave Gordon the ability the next year to accept a better offer from Hendrick Motorsports.

The experience led Agajanian, who then was running his own law firm out of Los Angeles after earlier spending 10 years as Deputy Attorney for the city, to form MMI as a separate company that could handle such details as contract negotiations for drivers. He had been giving free advice to drivers for years, but the deal with Gordon opened his eyes to the fact that there was more to be done than most realized and the playing field rapidly was changing and becoming more complex -- not to mention more lucrative for all who grabbed a piece of the financial pie.

"Before, most of the drivers were starving, so I would never charge them for advice anyway," Agajanian said. "But when I saw what was happening in NASCAR, especially with Jeff, I said to myself that there was really a need with the amount of money that was being made to help guide the drivers. And that philosophy really went all the way back to the story of Troy Ruttman."

Assisted greatly by the late Gerry Tolman, who went on to fame as the manager of the popular band Crosby, Stills and Nash, Agajanian set up MMI "very similar to other management companies in other professional sports and entertainment companies."

There was money to be made, but Agajanian had no illusions at first of it growing into the behemoth it would become.

"If drivers were successful, we'd be successful. And if they weren't, we wouldn't get paid -- which happened more often than not," he said. "I also always kept my law firm as a separate entity, so I would always have a source of income."

The company plodded along until fate -- in the form of Tony Stewart -- intervened late in 1995.

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When Tony Stewart was approached for NASCAR, it was Cary Agajanian offering advice.

SEALED ON A NAPKIN

Stewart, then 24 years old, had just become the first driver in history to win the United States Auto Club (USAC) Midget, Sprint Car and Silver Crown championships in the same year. He was a hot commodity and was beginning to field offers to drive for car owners in more prominent series, including IndyCar and NASCAR. The legendary A.J. Foyt had just had Stewart out to Phoenix to run a test session in an IndyCar.

Unsure of what to do next, Stewart turned to Agajanian. The two knew each other from some races Stewart had run earlier as Ascot Park before the facility closed in 1990, but they were only casual acquaintances at best. Stewart's initial phone call, asking for career advice as folks were starting to show interest in the young driver, caught Agajanian a little by surprise.

“

This company was built on the backs of Cary and Tony for sure. It was late nights every night.

”

JEFF DICKERSON

Agajanian told Stewart to stop at his Los Angeles law office on his way to Australia, where Stewart was headed to race sprint cars. Once there, Agajanian laid out the particulars of how he had formed MMI for just this purpose -- to assist young drivers in all aspects of helping manage their careers. Then he did what he never did previously with Gordon or anyone else. He presented Stewart with a contract authorizing MMI to represent him.

Stewart readily agreed to sign it, and then boarded a plane for Australia. Almost simultaneously, Agajanian was named executive vice president of operations for the newly formed Indy Racing League.

"At that point, we were sitting around trying to figure out who was going to run in our first race in the next few months," Agajanian said. "They asked me about Tony. And I said, 'Well, people are looking at him in stock cars. But he loves IndyCars. I think he would love to race in the Indy Racing League. Let me see what we can do.'

So Agajanian flew to Orlando, Fla., and met for dinner with Larry Curry, a crew chief with owner John Menard's teams.

"Larry, you really have to hire this kid Tony Stewart. He's going to be a great, great champion, I'm just telling you," Agajanian said.

"Well, yeah, I've heard of him," Curry admitted. "But I don't know that much about him and Menard will never hire him."

The two men began arguing about it back and forth. Finally, Curry said, "Let's call John right now."

They reached Menard, whose son Paul later would race in the Sprint Cup Series, in Eau Claire, Wis. Agajanian could tell Menard wasn't buying into the idea of putting Stewart in one of his cars. He already had two other cars he was running with veteran drivers in Eddie Cheever and Scott Brayton and wasn't thrilled about putting an untested rookie in a third car.

Eventually, Curry handed the phone over to Agajanian.

"I can't put him in our car," Menard said. "I mean, he's a midget driver. He's gonna go crash my car and wreck. I want to support the league and all that, but come on."

Agajanian was nonplussed.

"Well, we really need cars [in the IRL] -- but most important, this is a kid who is going to go and win races for you," he told Menard. "You just need to give him a chance. I guarantee you he'll do it for you."

Menard finally gave in, muttering: "Awright, awright. We'll do it for one race."

"Absolutely. Do it for one race," Agajanian replied. "If you don't like him, you can fire him on the spot as soon as the race is over. We'll write it up on the cocktail napkin right in front of us."

And so they did.

"As much as you read those stories, this one was true. I wrote up a one-paragraph contract on the napkin with Curry right there and then. And then I said, 'I gotta go make a phone call.' I walked right out of the bar/restaurant and called Tony Stewart in Australia and said, 'You'd better get on a plane and get back to the States.'

"He packed up, flew through Indianapolis, didn't even sleep or stop and got down to Orlando and got right in the race car. He ended up second in the first IndyCar race he ever raced, and lapped both of Menard's other two cars. And he had Cheever and Brayton, who were two great race car drivers.

John Menard approached Agajanian after the race and said, "I guess we'd better draw up another contract."

"On real paper, this time," they mutually agreed.

At the same time, Lorin Ranier, then-car owner Harry Ranier's son, was eyeing Stewart for a NASCAR seat. He told his father that everyone had missed out on Jeff Gordon at first and that "this Tony Stewart is the same thing as Jeff Gordon." With Agajanian offering advice on the driver's end, Ranier ended up signing Stewart to run nine races in what was then the Busch Series that same year, keeping open all of Stewart's options for the future.

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No matter the series, Kyle Busch doesn't celebrate a victory without NOS Energy Drink.

FAST FORWARD

Fast forward nearly 15 years. It is less than three hours before the Chevy Rock & Roll 400 at Richmond International Raceway, and Jeff Dickerson is holding court in a motorhome that belongs to MMI.

Dickerson is the new poster boy for MMI. Cary Agajanian can spill stories about the old days all night long, but he is the first to admit that Dickerson and others such as executive vice president Rod Moskowitz are the true lifeblood of the company these days.

A former driver himself on smaller circuits, Dickerson now manages most facets of the career of Sprint Cup star Kyle Busch. In an odd twist, he also serves as Busch's spotter not only in his Cup races, but also in the Nationwide Series and Camping World Truck Series.

Dickerson said his past experience helps him relate to today's drivers and he wears multiple hats not only in Busch's own camp, but within MMI itself, where he holds the title of vice president and is more or less in charge of the all-important driver development program that scours the nation for new talent to represent.

Kyle Busch celebrates a Nationwide win earlier this year at Texas.

Of his own midget/sprint car driving career, Dickerson laughed and said: "I ran against Tony when he would come back to Indiana from the IndyCar and Busch Series. I ran against (former Cup driver and USAC champion) J.J. Yeley. I ran against [current Nationwide driver Jason] Leffler. I couldn't ever beat them, but I was fast enough that they would at least talk to me."

This is no longer the era of contracts on cocktail napkins. This is the era of contracts with race teams, personal-services contracts, and contracts that determine the cuts drivers receive for all kinds of licensed merchandise from hats to T-shirts to die-cast cars.

Then there are all kinds of other deals to be cut, from driver development agreements that (hopefully) secure the future both of the driver prospect and of the management company itself, to making certain an already successful Cup driver has a deal with a beverage sponsor so he can get paid to spray something when he reaches Victory Lane (see: Kyle Busch and the MMI-forged relationship with NOS Energy Drink that has blossomed in the past two years).

There also is the matter of insurance. Agajanian likes to tell the story of going to England to insure Stewart's entire contract with Joe Gibbs Racing years ago, guarding against the dire prospect of debilitating injury.

"We did that with Tony when he signed the first major contract with Joe Gibbs Racing," Agajanian said. "We went to Lloyd's of London and I personally went up and down all the different of what they call the benches, which basically is a conglomeration of hundreds of underwriters. We took up the whole capacity of Lloyd's for disability. They only have a certain amount of millions of dollars that they can insure for someone being injured -- whether it's a soccer player or a Formula One driver or whatever.

"When I went over there, it opened their eyes -- because they had never seen anyone from America making that kind of money. They had never seen a stock-car driver even come close. We had to go from place to place and get $5 million here and $5 million. It went on and on until we pieced enough together so that if Tony had gotten hurt, the full amount of his contract that he had just signed with Joe Gibbs would have been paid."

Agajanian and others at MMI are programmed not to call themselves or really anyone in the company "agents," but Dickerson doesn't care or at least never received the memo. And while he refers often to himself as one, he said it doesn't mean much if there is no substance behind it.

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Jeff Dickerson is one of the more interesting behind-the-scenes operators in NASCAR these days, working as an agent (his company, Motorsports Management International, prefers to call him "a manager") and also as Kyle Busch's spotter during races.

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"In the early days, you could just call yourself an agent," Dickerson said. "You could have the title and say, 'Hey, look at me.' You wouldn't make any money, but you could have the title."

And don't get Dickerson going about driver development, another aspect in which MMI seems to be ahead of the game when it comes to other companies attempting to build their list of motorsports clients. Dickerson sort of unofficially heads up MMI's all-important driver development program, which includes Lorin Ranier and others who serve as full-time scouts, scouring the country for the next Tony Stewart or even the next Landon Cassill.

"We could talk driver development all day long. But again, I think it's been hi-jacked. I think it's been exploited," Dickerson said. "Other companies say, 'Hey, we'll do driver development.' And then they charge parents to have their kids in their driver development program. That's not driver development."

He insisted that the way MMI does it sets the company apart from everyone else.

"We invest in them. We put our resources behind them. We put our name behind them," Dickerson said. "We don't charge any of our drivers anything until they sit in a Truck. It's not pay-us-as-you-go. It's not, 'Hey, give us $5,000 a month or $10,000 a month.' That's not good for the sport."

Lorin Ranier, the man who once told his father he couldn't ignore the potential of Tony Stewart in a stock car, spearheads the efforts to find new young talent that can be represented by MMI. One of those, current Truck Series driver Brian Scott, stops by the Mooresville offices of the company frequently and said he couldn't be happier with they way they have molded his fledgling career, calling MMI "a great incubator of young talent."

As for Ranier, Dickerson said: "Him and three or four other guys, that's what they do every day, every weekend. They're out there preparing scouting reports. We've taken this to an entirely different level. It's slowed down for sure. But it doesn't stop. We still have to be prepared for when the curve comes back around for young drivers, we want to make sure we're positioned to get the right guys, and the best guys."

They believe they are like no one else is, meaning their already considerable stable of talent is likely to swell in the coming years. What keeps them all motivated, said Dickerson, is remembering the early days of the company.

"This company was built on the backs of Cary and Tony for sure. It was late nights every night," said Dickerson, who came on board in 2001 when there were only two or three other employees. "You needed a proposal or you needed this or you needed that. The whole management thing hadn't really taken off in the garage yet. So if a driver came up to you and said he needed a proposal for something, you didn't say no to anything. This company really was built on Tony and on not saying no.

"A guy needed a proposal? It didn't matter who it was. You just didn't say no, because it was so fragile. Besides Tony, you didn't know where that next client was coming from."

They still don't. But now there is less desperation and more beauty in waiting to find out.

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MMI's Rod Moskowitz talks with Kasey Kahne, one of the company's many driver clients.

HOME OFFICE

It is shortly after lunchtime when the phone rings in the busy Mooresville office of Rod Moskowitz. On the other end of the line is driver Denny Hamlin, who is seeking advice about an offer that just was made on the Cornelius, N.C., home Hamlin is attempting to sell.

A few days later, there is Moskowitz again. This time he's standing behind driver Kasey Kahne in the garage at Richmond International Raceway as Kahne talks with the media about driving Fords next year instead of the Dodges he has driven his entire Cup career.

As with Dickerson or Eddie Jarvis or any of the others in MMI with titles that vary from Jarvis' "Special Consultant to the President" to the client manager status held by Cary's Agajanian's son, Jacob, and others, Moskowitz's wide-ranging role, like MMI itself, is hard to define in a simple sentence or two. To call him an agent or manager would not be entirely inaccurate, but nor would it be entirely accurate. Like MMI, he seems to be everywhere.

A former collegiate soccer player at Vanderbilt, he cut his teeth in the representation arena when he was 18 or 19 years old and helped establish the Tate George Foundation for the former NBA player. When Moskowitz arrived in Charlotte to work in the first cramped office MMI operated out of in Cornelius, N.C., he spent his nights sleeping on the couch of former client and current Truck Series driver Ron Hornaday.

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I was pretty young when I started at MMI. And it was right around when Tony burst onto the scene as a star. ... All of a sudden we were into all kinds of stuff.

”

ROD MOSKOWITZ

Moskowitz previously worked for Advantage International before joining MMI in 2000 and is into all sorts of ancillary stuff these days. Ever wonder how Stewart's dirt-track race from Eldora Speedway, the Prelude to the Dream, ended up raising so much money for charity via HBO Pay-Per-View? It was Moskowitz's idea, as was getting the Chili Bowl on national pay-per-view television.

He performs many duties for clients such as Hamlin and Kahne, helping them with their foundations and putting on various charity events while also advising them on a variety of money and general life matters.

"I was pretty young when I started at MMI, maybe 28 years old. And it was right around when Tony burst onto the scene as a star," said Moskowitz, now 35. "Through Tony and working with Eddie Jarvis [Stewart's day-to-day client manager], who had the contacts and relationships in the sport that I didn't have, we were able to help Tony and sign some other guys like Kasey Kahne and Jamie McMurray and Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch. It really just took off, especially after Tony won the championship in 2002 -- and all of a sudden we were into all kinds of stuff."

Soon Moskowitz was able to move off Hornaday's couch and into his own place.

"I think I slept on his couch for about two months," he said. "Kevin Harvick and Jimmie Johnson also slept on Hornaday's couch. Maybe I'm not as successful as those guys, but I guess I've done all right."

So has MMI. The company is preparing to move into a new, state-of-the-art, 19,000-square-foot office in Mooresville that will include a spacious lounge for their driver clients, complete with elaborate video-game systems and flat-screen televisions.

Providing a driver's lounge with video-game hookups is new school, and MMI has it covered. Agajanian, who represents old school, has the other end covered. Chief Operating Officer William Anthony, Dickerson, Moskowitz, Jarvis and a host of others seem to have everything in between blanketed.

In the end, the goals are simple. Sure, MMI wants to make money and expand its growing empire, especially on the corporate end where already it has teamed with Dollar General, LifeLock, NOS Energy Drink and others on countless ventures and promotions related to NASCAR. But what Agajanian really wants is to ensure that none of the drivers his company represents ever go the misguided route of a Troy Ruttman.

"One of our drivers who used to be famous for spending money, we wrote into his contract -- and his owner couldn't have been happier -- that a pretty good portion of his money went straight into an investment fund," Agajanian said. "He never saw it or touched it. And he's got a lot of money in the bank right now."

Joe Menzer is the author of "The Great American Gamble: How the 1979 Daytona 500 Gave Birth to a NASCAR Nation." Click here to purchase.