James Rothschild, WWE sports marketing expert, dies

James Allan Rothschild, a sports marketing expert who helped put smiles on the faces of many children born with cleft palates, died Tuesday of brain cancer at Southampton Hospital. He was 49.

A native of White Plains, he moved to Southampton five years ago.

"We rented a summer home there five years go, and we never left," said his wife of eight years, Vesna Rothschild. "Jim fell in love with the area."

After graduating from the University of Rhode Island, Rothschild went to work for AT&T in sales and marketing, his wife said, adding that he left there after a few years and went to Maclean Hunter, a media and entertainment publishing company.

She said he landed at World Wrestling Entertainment, where he helped their portfolio grow from $2 million annually to more than $500 million. "He got Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson his first television commercial, for a spaghetti company," she said. "Johnson always called him 'Cool Breeze.' "

Rothschild would become senior vice president at WWE before leaving in 2007 to start his own small company, the Revenue Farm, a media sales company he based out of Southampton.

"At the same time, he was also the chief sales officer for Take2 Media, a Chicago-based firm that exclusively did the marketing and advertising for the YMCAs of America," Vesna Rothschild said.

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She said Rothschild got involved with children with cleft palates after she gave him a gift of fixing one child's palate through a program in Manhattan called The Smile Train.

"At $250 for each one, he just thought it was so great to be able to better a child's life so greatly for so little," she said, adding that he raised funds by getting friends to contribute money based on the number of laps he would swim.

"Whatever he raised he would match. He paid for 45 operations in two years," said Vesna Rothschild. "His goal was 500, and we'll try to make that happen with an annual swim in his name."

Besides his wife and two daughters, Sophia and Lola, he is survived by his parents, Gloria Rothschild of White Plains and Robert Rothschild of Roslyn, and two brothers, David of Hillsborough, N.J., and Daniel of Pittsburgh. A service will be noon Sunday at the Brockett Funeral Home in Southampton, with burial to follow at Southampton Cemetery.