Dan Gacetta Jr. has had a thing for sports marketing for a long time. The 36-year-old Cape Elizabeth native first got the bug for it at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid.

Gacetta’s father, Dan Gacetta Sr., was Maine’s representative to the U.S. Olympic Committee and took his 14-year-old son along with him.

“It rubbed off on me. My desire for sports marketing began there. It just blew me away,” Gacetta said.

Gacetta is a marketer for Octagon Worldwide, the second largest sports management firm in the world. Octagon Worldwide manages athletes in just about every sport imaginable. Recently, there has been a growing interest in so-called extreme sports. Gacetta works out of the company’s action sports and Olympics division.

“I negotiate on behalf of athletes with the corporate world,” Gacetta said.

The athletes he represents include 10 who competed in the Salt Lake City Olympics. Among those were gold-medalist snowboarders Kelly Clark and Ross Powers.

Gacetta said his job is to link the athletes with advertisers. While Mountain Dew, for example, has used extreme sports as an advertising tool for years; other advertisers have been slow to come around to the idea. Gacetta said the popularity of the sports at the Salt Lake City Olympics might have opened some eyes.

“The Olympics helped bring to light the opportunities for these athletes, particularly the snowboarders,” Gacetta said. “The corporate world is beginning to realize the opportunity here. There are so many kids involved in snowboarding and these sports.”

Gacetta is not alone in this effort. While he operates out of an office in New York City, his division’s headquarters is in Portland.

He said Cape Elizabeth’s Peter Carlisle, the former president of Carlisle Sports Management, a company that was bought by Octagon Worldwide last year, is the division’s director.

UMaine grad and Sugarloaf-area native Erich Schneider is the division’s recruiter, who tries to bring athletes into the fold. And Morgan Bois of Brooklin coordinates schedules for the athletes and handles media requests.

“It might seem strange that a large marketing firm operates out of Portland but we have agents based all over the country. The way you can communicate today everyone doesn’t need to be in one place,” Gacetta said.

Gacetta entered the advertising world after earning a degree in advertising from Syracuse University. In those days he was on the other side of the fence, working on behalf of advertisers.

“I negotiated contracts with talent, athletes and celebrities, on behalf of clients,” Gacetta said.

Among some of the celebrities he has worked with are boxer Sugar Ray Leonard, singer Clint Black, actors Anthony Edwards and George C. Scott, and the most famous letter-turner in the world, Vanna White.

“It was a print campaign for NEC cellular phones focused on the best hands in the world. Obviously she was perfect,” Gacetta said.

He also worked on an ad campaign for AT&T that used New York Yankees manager Joe Torre and bench coach Don Zimmer.

“It gave me an afternoon to sit around with Don Zimmer and talk about his old Red Sox days which was a lot of fun,” Gacetta said.

Gacetta and his wife Cindy, a New Yorker who attended Colby College in Waterville, live in Norwalk, Conn., with their 21/2-year-old son, Gareth.

Gacetta claims all of his sports marketing talent came from his dad, who is president of the Maine Sports Hall of Fame. It just might be a family thing. He says his son is already showing an interest in athletics.

“We were up in Vermont last weekend and Gareth had so much fun hanging out with the snowboarders at the U.S. Open. He is a huge snowboarding fan.”

Don Perryman can be reached at 990-8045, 1-800-310-8600 or dperryman@bangordailynews.net