I’m an agent; now all I need is a client.
At a young age, I became a networker; I just didn’t know there was a name for it. Bud Furillo had a friend named Frazier Smith, a classic rock disk jockey, and I started booking guests for him on his Saturday morning show on KSLX. And he was friendly with the Goossen brothers, all of whom were involved in sports: Mike, an attorney; Joe, a trainer; and Dan, the boss. I got to know Mike, asked him what it took to become an agent, and he got the forms for me and walked me through the process. “Send in the paperwork and a check for three hundred dollars and you’re licensed with the Players Association.” That’s it. They don’t care if you have a college degree, a graduate degree, experience, nothing. Just have the check and no criminal record. By those standards, I qualified. Two months later, I got a certificate in the mail saying I was an NFLPA licensed agent. I was nineteen. Cool. Plus they sent me a little card that had the NFLPA logo on it.
The State of the Business 1989
It was well into the modern era of pro and college football—big TV contracts, big Bowl games, big revenue. The AFL and NFL had long since merged. It was Super Bowl XXIII and Joe Montana’s 49ers were winning their third championship of the ’80s. The University of Miami Hurricanes were voted number one in the nation by sportswriters and coaches, the third time in the decade. The NCAA had adopted the “Sanity Code” after World War II to curb abuses in recruitment and financial aid, and became a full-time organization by the 1950s, “to protect young people from the dangerous and exploitive athletics practices of the time.” The NFLPA, established in 1956 to look out for the players, by 1970 had gotten the NFL owners to agree to a player’s right to representation by an agent, and in the Collective Bargaining Agreement of 1982, to NFLPA certification of agents. The qualifications to be certified: 1) a completed application form, 2) a signed statement that the applicant was not a convicted criminal, and 3) a check for $300. No specified level of education. No exam. No hard guidelines for conduct. No formal investigative mechanism for alleged violations. And there was building pressure to lower agent commissions from a maximum of 5 percent of a player’s contract. (In the ’90s, the NFLPA dropped the maximum to 4 percent, then 3 percent, and almost got to 2 percent.) The lower the commission, the more brutal the competition for players, especially the stars who would be most lucrative.
The stakes were rising in the battle for young college players, and at the same time, a door was left wide open. If the NFLPA wasn’t policing agent-recruitment practices, who was watching college players? The NCAA? The conferences? The individual schools? The states? Or had college sports become wholesome and innocent, with no significant problems?
Agent-turned-attorney Mike Trope, in his book Necessary Roughness, published in 1987, tells how after getting friendly with some athletes, he became an agent in 1972 and stumbled across the underground economics of college sports. Boosters paid players and families, coaches steered players to agents, and players took money from agents on the promise of signing with them. Trope says he was literally competing with the team coaches, having to dive into “a cesspool” in order to succeed. And for a while it worked. In one draft, Trope represented four of six top selections. One of the stories is of Eric Dickerson, who was wooed by a University of Texas coach with a promise/threat that if Dickerson didn’t go to UT, he’d never get a job in the state of Texas. Ironically, Dickerson went to Southern Methodist University, another Texas school that, in 1985, received the NCAA’s famous “death penalty”—loss of a full season—for booster-payment violations. When Trope finally decided he couldn’t do it anymore, he took the bar exam, became an attorney, and wrote his book.
In The Business of Sports Agents, written twenty years later, authors Kenneth Shropshire and Timothy Davis claim that in 1979 Trope paid former University of Maryland player Steve Atkins $1,000. Atkins told Sports Illustrated, “I knew I did something wrong. I didn’t want the NCAA to do something to Maryland … I didn’t want to sign with him [Trope], but I just needed some money to pay some bills.”
In 1986, then-agent Mel Levine (and mentor to agent Drew Rosenhaus) said in his book, Life in the Trash Lane, that he won over future clients with similar tokens of appreciation, a practice he says was commonplace. “These kids come to your door, their hands are out. They said if I didn’t give them money, they could get it from other agents.” Levine handed the keys to a used silver Corvette to University of Miami running back Cleveland Gary, then gave a new black Corvette to Miami defensive tackle Jerome Brown, at which point Gary objected: Why had he been stuck with a used car? He demanded a new one.
Levine ultimately lost more than $80,000 in money advanced to players but never repaid. Was he punished by the NFLPA? Were the players penalized by the NCAA? No. In fact, it was only when the state of Florida made paying college-eligible athletes a felony that he got out. Mel Levine did go to prison, but it was for crimes unrelated to football: tax and bank fraud.
In 1987, Norby Walters, a show-business booking agent, had begun to pay promising college players to buy their allegiance when they entered the NFL draft. He claimed to have given money to at least five first-round picks in one year, plus many others, all prior to their eligibility, “investing” as much as $800,000. The problem was, some of the players decided to sign with other agents and Norby Walters thought he was entitled to get his money back. Walters’s associate, Lloyd Bloom, was accused of passing the word along to those who owed, saying, “Players who don’t pay their debts can have their hands broken.” It led to an FBI and grand jury investigation, as well as NCAA and NFLPA reviews. Never convicted, Walters said paying players was nothing new. In 1989, they were convicted but the convictions were overturned. In 1993, in an unrelated incident, Bloom was found murdered in a Malibu home.
How widespread was paying players at this time? According to a Dallas Morning News story in November 1985, a former University of Texas All-American defensive lineman said well over half the players were “being taken care of.” Agent Leigh Steinberg estimated 40 percent of seniors were receiving money, but he insisted, not his clients. In fact, he stipulated that players he represented set up foundations to give back to their hometowns and high schools. Moral stance, marketing tactic, or both?
By the time I was certified in 1989, the NCAA already had no shortage of questionable behavior.
So, just like that, I became a sports agent. The only thing I didn’t have was a client. I had a “maybe” from Greg Townsend. Before I tried to officially sign him up, I went through my self-styled “Rolodex,” every name and number I’d collected in my Casio Wizard since I was sixteen years old, searching for the one and only agent I’d ever met, an African-American guy named Neil Allen, who represented Stefon Adams. Allen was a powerful presence, handsome, well dressed, well spoken; he looked like Denzel Washington and sounded like Barack Obama. I called and ask if he remembered me from Raiders camp and he said he did. In hindsight, he may have been bluffing, but he was smooth enough to sell it. I told him about my opportunity to become Greg Townsend’s agent, which got his attention. I explained that I needed some guidance and was hoping he’d help. He offered to buy me lunch in Beverly Hills and I walked from my house to meet him, I was certainly the only sports agent who lived with his parents.
As we talked, he came around to his angle: “Maybe we could work on Greg together, cut a deal together,” which sounded good for me since I had no idea what I was doing; and maybe it would lead to more deals. All I knew about Neil was that he had a couple of Raiders he repped and he was charming and charismatic. We agreed to go see Greg together and be co-agents if he signed.
When we arrived at Greg’s house and told him our plan he thought I’d gone insane. Be his agent? What? He’d just been talking. He hadn’t promised me anything. I was blown away. I was a naive—okay, maybe dumb—kid who’d bought what he had said. Your deal was up in a year. Your agent might be going to jail. You needed me. I went to the NFLPLA. I sent them $300. I got licensed. I hooked up with an experienced agent. I did it all because Greg Townsend, LA Raiders defensive end, told me I was a smart Jewish guy who could talk to Al Davis, who could be Greg Townsend’s agent. This was my plan, my dream. And even though Greg was resistant at first, I just kept at it. And somehow, eventually, I got through to him and he agreed. It was a miracle, that seems obvious now, but I didn’t know it at the time. That’s the advantage of being dumb. You don’t know what’s impossible or a miracle. You just try to do it.
Then Neil introduced me to Mike Trope, an agent-turned-attorney in Century City. He’d been a pretty prominent agent but had had enough, especially of the recruiting part, the players’ bad behavior from alcohol to weed to Quaaludes to girls to cars to money, what you had to do to win, and he had turned to practicing law. He had no interest in chasing players anymore but he was willing to advise us on negotiating. So I’d turned to Neil for counsel and now he was turning to Mike.
Mike is a story in and of himself. He started young, when he was in college or law school, and became an early superagent, before the era of Leigh Steinberg. His office was crammed full of pictures of him with some star athlete or another in glossy magazine spreads—Johnny Rodgers, the Heisman Trophy winner from Nebraska; Chuck Muncie, the running back from Cal who played for the Saints and the Chargers; Anthony Munoz, the USC offensive tackle who played for the Bengals. Trope was big-time, or had been at one point. Now, he told me, he just wanted to be a lawyer, leaning back in his big chair, in blue jeans, with shoes that had holes worn through, being comfortable and not killing himself in the crazy world of athletes anymore. Mostly, he had developed a cynicism about the business, and about life.
I should’ve learned something from that but I was young and intoxicated with the thrill. So now there were three of us—Neil, me, and Mike—but Mike didn’t want to be the agent, just the advisor. Besides, he hated the NFLPA, hated the industry. He’d burned out. He shared stories now and then about what had happened to this player or that or a deal gone bad or someone in the union you couldn’t trust; and how he was divorced and had two daughters now and didn’t want to be in that kind of business. (That’s a little ominous to look back on too, having two daughters of my own, not wanting them to see me in that business today.) He became my first mentor, even more so than Neil.
One day, I was in his office and he let me in on an odd secret. He was about to get married for the second time, to a beautiful blonde woman, and he said, “I want to show you something.” He reached in a drawer and pulled out a big legal document and said, “These are my divorce papers, already filled out.” I was thinking, “You have divorce papers for a marriage that hasn’t even happened yet?” I was young and sheltered and thought of marriage as a permanent bond, not something disposable (and even now, older and wiser, I still do). I remember when the Raiders would have Family Day and all the players’ families would come—the wives and kids—and take pictures and have a big day. I thought it was great. Of course, when it was over and the families went home, then the players’ girlfriends would reappear. So I knew it wasn’t the ideal picture it seemed to be. But I still thought marriage mattered and here was Mike Trope, who hadn’t yet said “I do” and he’d already drafted the papers to get out. That’s how jaded he’d become. And, of course, he wound up needing them when he got divorced again a few years later.
But I worked with him and learned from him, and he fronted me the money to travel and recruit players. That also had an odd twist to it years later. After all the trips he paid for, one day after I’d been in the business awhile, he asked to borrow $10,000 from my share of commissions we’d collected. He said he’d pay me 20 percent interest so it would be a good deal for me. And I felt like I owed him anyway. But why was this successful lawyer coming to me, still a kid, for that kind of money? I never asked. And he didn’t pay me back for years. I’d almost given up on getting it but right before my own wedding, when I needed the money to buy an engagement ring, he made good. (Although not before taking me to a pawnshop and trying to convince me to buy a ring that I thought he must have had there on consignment.) He paid me back the money, though without interest. There were lots of lessons from Mike—some good, some not so good.
Here’s how we were operating: Before Greg Townsend’s deal came up for negotiating, I was doing some recruiting with Neil, and Mike was staying strictly in the background as backer/advisor, never the agent of record. I’d go to Mike’s house, pick up a plane ticket and cash in an envelope, and take off to some campus. I was so young, I couldn’t rent a car most places. I’d use Mike’s name and track record to give me credibility with the players, get their attention, because otherwise why would they pay attention to me, a guy their age with nothing to sell of my own? I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to recruit defensive back Henry Jones, defensive tackle Moe Gardner, and defensive end Mel Agee, and then on to Fresno State, then to Boulder, Colorado, for linebacker Kanavis McGhee, in what turned out to be a fateful trip.