Post-Doc: Doing Things Less Wrong
My wife was running a movie theater for her family and I used to stop by and show the kids who worked there how to “up-sell” on the concessions. “Would you like a large drink for twenty cents more with that jumbo popcorn?” “Have you tried our nachos? It’s a pretty long movie.” It was as far from the sports world as I could get so that’s where I asked Doc to meet me to discuss our future. But it wasn’t really a discussion, it was a decision, the most difficult one I’d ever made. He showed up with a young girl he was seeing, so we asked her to wait in the theater and went off to talk. I told him I had something difficult to say and I think he knew what was coming. I said I’d loved working with him but I had to take my life in a different direction. (I guess I sounded a little like the players and their clichés telling us why they’d decided to go with another agent.) I was married, about to raise a family. I had to make this change. I told him I loved him. He nodded and said he understood. And we both cried.
I had been talking to Gary Wichard, by then one of the bigger agents in the business, to see if he had a place for me in his company. I’d met him at the Senior Bowl, which was like the annual convention for agents—you could meet anyone, do business in hotel lobbies, discuss trade secrets, spin stories, and maybe make your next career move. Gary was in the lounge of the hotel, sitting at the table next to me, talking to the mother of Darren Howard, a defensive end out of Kansas State who was going to be in the 2000 draft. I had already been thinking about which agents it made sense to hook up with. I wanted someone who would value my ability to recruit on the West Coast and Gary was at the top of my list. Even though his office was in Pacific Palisades, ten minutes from UCLA, he had few to no West Coast clients. His players were from places like Syracuse, Oklahoma, all over the place really—except in his own backyard. I’d studied Gary and I knew I could fill a void in his business. In fact, I collected marketing material from other agents, stuff other players would throw away, all part of my obsessive research—names, addresses, client lists, anything I might need someday.
I leaned over to Darren’s mother, right in front of Gary, and told her how fortunate she was to be working with such a great agent—Gary Wichard. I regurgitated his own marketing pitch from his printed promos, complimenting him more effusively than he could himself—an A.P. All-American quarterback out of C.W. Post College, who was drafted by the Colts; Seahawks linebacker Brian Bosworth, Cardinals receiver Rob Moore, Pro Bowl tight end Keith Jackson; his role in pioneering free agency—all parts of Gary’s spiel. I wasn’t trying to sell Gary to Mrs. Howard; I was selling Josh Luchs to Gary. Then I got up and said good-bye. I didn’t say a word to him the rest of the week of the Senior Bowl.
But when I got back to Los Angeles, I called and asked if we could talk about a big move I might make. I sat in Gary’s office overlooking the ocean, with his framed articles, pictures with players, and awards everywhere, all very impressive. And he knocked Doc as we talked, saying Doc was a dinosaur, an old-time hustler at best, ill-equipped to land big-name players in the modern game. I explained to him I’d been selling Doc more than myself because I was a kid in my twenties and the best way to build myself was to build on someone else. He acknowledged I had been able to get some good players. “You’ve been hitting singles with a twig for a bat,” he told me. “If you were selling me, you’d have a real piece of lumber. Let’s see what you could do then.” He was cautious, saying I’d have to meet John Blake, the guy he referred to as his “partner,” which eventually turned out to be a subject of controversy. Much later Blake would become defensive line coach at the University of North Carolina. And then, later still, he resigned from that job after—guess what—being accused of funneling clients to Gary Wichard (his former partner?) in exchange for money. None of this had happened at the time, though. I was just making a career move, and meeting a future colleague.
I spent the afternoon with Blake and it was great. He had a Super Bowl ring for coaching the defensive line for the 1993 Cowboys; he was the former head coach at Oklahoma; and he was an incredibly persuasive communicator. I could sell this guy. What a mentor he’d be for players, working on technique, going over game films, grading their skills, telling them how the pros were going to size them up. Instead of having to give a kid money, I could give him something better: John Blake. He could be worth a fortune to a kid’s career. And we hit it off right away. Gary dragged his feet but finally agreed to take me on to start recruiting. He made it clear from the start that he didn’t recruit the traditional way, cold-calling, going to games, hanging out in tunnels. He had relationships with coaches, assistants, and trainers who were influential with players and created a pipeline for him. And he had been a Heisman Trophy candidate (even if he only got one vote) and had the ballot hanging on his wall. He made it clear he wouldn’t be associated with giving money to players. He referred to other agents as “scumbags” and “slapdicks” and said he’d never do the things they did to get a client. (Of course, his “pipelines” from coaches and agents were every bit as improper as paying college kids, but he didn’t see it that way, at least until he was investigated for it.) He was closing 40 to 50 percent of the players he talked to, way above the 10 percent I was used to. Gary said I had talent and ability but needed to be “completely reprogrammed” to do things his way, which was fine with me.
I didn’t get an office. Gary had a guy, Mike Sasson, trying to build a baseball business, and Jeff Friedman, a PR and marketing guy, plus John Blake, and they each had offices and paychecks. Not me. I made my calls from the conference room, a step up from the trunk of Doc’s car, and I didn’t get a salary or benefits. I got 25 percent of anybody we signed who was in the Pacific and Mountain time zones, except for Utah, where Gary had some history and a contact in the football program. If I got somebody from farther east, it was on a player-by-player basis and had to be approved by Gary ahead of time. I was going from 50 percent of the commissions down to 25, but I also knew that Doc’s style of doing business was on its way out so my cut could soon be 50 percent of very little. Marvin Demoff had taken Tony Banks, and he would’ve taken Ryan Leaf if he’d had the chance. Leigh Steinberg was the king of quarterbacks, IMG was the sports rep powerhouse, and Octagon had reinvented sports marketing. The era of Doc Daniels types was coming to an end.
And Doc himself was coming to the end. He got very sick in the next year, developing an infection in his leg, and kept traveling anyway. Between trips he’d go to the hospital for treatment and I visited him pretty regularly. He kept deteriorating and was ultimately put into the ICU. The day I was to go to my first Senior Bowl with Gary, I got a call from Doc’s first wife, Patricia, who I barely knew, to tell me Doc had died. I was supposed to leave for Mobile, Alabama, for what amounts to the second most important event of the football year, just behind the draft. That year we had Willie Howard from Stanford and Adam Archuleta from Arizona State, plus Todd Heap, who wasn’t playing because he was still a junior. But there was Doc’s funeral. I thought about what he’d have told me to do … and I got on the plane to Mobile for the game. He’d have told me to take care of myself and take care of my players.
As soon as I got back from the Senior Bowl, I went to the cemetery and had my own private memorial for Doc. I put flowers at his gravesite and reflected on our time together, as unlikely a pair as there had ever been. I’d never had a friend like him and may never again. I thanked him for his love and guidance. And I said good-bye to him.
Doc took care of me right up to his last days. Even beyond. A couple days after he died, I got an envelope with a check for $16,000, my share of the commission for Carlos Jenkins, who’d been a veteran free agent we signed with the Rams. I’d never met Jenkins but we’d signed him when I was Doc’s fifty-fifty partner, so I got the payment even after Doc was gone. And, in all my time with Doc, we never had a written contract between us, just a handshake. You could say he taught me how to do things wrong, like paying players, or you could say he taught me how to do things right, like being fair. Nobody else I worked with treated me like Doc did. I learned that the hard way.
Pro Tect Management: Gary Wichard’s Way of Doing Business
At this point, I was working with Gary at his company, Pro Tect Management. No more greasing palms to buy players’ loyalty. I was learning to do business the way I imagined big-time NFL agents did it, more respectably, maybe not exactly right, but at least less wrong … if there is such a thing. Right away, I coupled Gary’s reputation and approach with my local skills to get us meetings with Pac 10 players, West Coast players, any kid who called California home. They were all untapped by Gary, and they were all gravy. I’d get a player on the phone and say, “Gary Wichard wants to say hello” and put them together on the speakerphone and it was working. My job was bird dog. His was pitchman and closer. I set them up; he went for the kill.
One of my first meetings for Gary was with Freddie Mitchell, a wide receiver from UCLA who was a first-round draft pick by the Eagles. I got him on the phone and he sounded very bright, sharp, charismatic. I went to his neighborhood to pick him up. That’s a violation—giving a kid transportation to meet with an agent before his eligibility—one of those things that’s wrong but not so wrong. I had no idea what he looked like and when I got to the right place, I saw this kid on the street who looked scrawny and disheveled, almost like a homeless person. That can’t be Freddie, I thought, but it was. I drove him to our office and we went into our routine. It was a beautiful performance.
First thing, Gary came in, introduced himself, and made some small talk, and in a couple of minutes the phone rang. Gary hit the speaker button, said hello, and there’s Mel “the Viper” Kiper, the ESPN football analyst who can single-handedly put a guy on the NFL radar, just by repeating his name on the air. Gary said something like, “Hey Vipe, I’m sitting here with the best wide receiver in college football.” And Kiper said, “You must be with Freddie Mitchell.” That got Freddie’s attention. Wow, he must’ve been thinking, Mel Kiper thinks I’m the best. And he’s tight with these agents. Of course, it was all set up in advance. Gary would call Mel and ask him to call in at a certain time. Then he’d tell his assistant, Beth, to put Mel’s call through to the conference room. Mel would talk to the player—Freddie in this case—about the season he’d had, the upcoming All-Star games, inside-football talk. He’d never say, “Hey, you ought to sign with these guys”; that would have been blatantly inappropriate. It was just an endorsement by association. I know about you. And I know Gary. Good luck. In fact, Gary would tell the players that he represented Mel. In what way, I’m not sure; as far as I knew, he didn’t do Mel’s contracts. But just saying it carried a lot of weight.
Then Gary would follow up with another call—Steve Hale, Executive Director of the Senior Bowl. Gary would say, “Steve told me he saw your last game and he wants to talk to you.” And then, if the timing was right, and the player was about to be invited to the Senior Bowl, Steve would tell him, “You’re going to be getting your formal invitation as soon as you get back to school.” It was like a great sneak preview. Hale never said a player should sign with us. We would let them connect the dots on their own. These guys know Mel Kiper; they know Steve Hale; they’ll take care of me.
Did Mel personally talk to other players or other agents? I don’t know. In 2010, Kiper went on a variety of sports radio stations across the country, responding to allegations that he was being used by Gary Wichard. As quoted from a station in Kansas City, he said, “… Well, I guess I’m being used by a lot of agents. I guess in life you’re used by a lot of different people without your knowledge. If that’s the case so be it. I’m also not ‘using’ them, but I’m using them as a vehicle to get to a player and ask questions and get to know that player … I’m not going to cut off that avenue to get to know a kid because somebody says I’m being used.” That sure doesn’t sound like a denial to me.
Kiper, who is well known for his ability to rank players according to talent level, also defended his position on ESPN’s Mike and Mike Show, saying Wichard’s players were frequently drafted higher or lower than where he’d ranked them. “So, in terms of my relationship with Gary, it has allowed me to make some of the best calls, good and bad, that I’ve ever made in this business.” Kiper has said he would advise players as to where they stood in the draft, what all-star games to attend, if they should work out at the combines—all of which is a lot like what an agent does. Still, he insists his access didn’t influence his ratings and he didn’t knowingly use his influence for agents. Maybe. But his ratings and analysis are broadcast nationally, over and over, and like anything that gets a lot of air time, it can eventually sink in, especially if it comes from an “expert.” Fans hear it, agents hear it, and most importantly, NFL team decision-makers hear it. Let’s say, they hear him repeatedly say a given player is being neglected, has great talent, and should be ranked higher. Instead of that player sneaking under the radar and getting “stolen” by a smart team, as a result of the Kiper drumbeat, maybe he gets bumped up just a little in the rankings. Let’s say Mel’s influence only helps move the kid up one notch. How much difference can it make? Well, if that notch is from the first pick of the second round up to the last pick of the first round, a lot. In the 2010 draft, the first pick of the second round signed for an overall average income of $1,027,500 per year versus the last pick of the first round who got $1,617,000 per year. That’s a difference of almost $600,000 a year over five years, for about $3,000,000. Sprinkle that throughout the draft and Mel Kiper can be a powerful “influence” to contend with.
As for Steve Hale, sometimes we’d have players tell us they’d already heard from him, by way of another agent, that they’d been selected for the Senior Bowl. Then I’d play it down. “That agent didn’t help you get invited. You earned it. The agent just told you what you were going to find out anyway. In fact, your school’s athletic department should have told you already.” This last bit is true; athletic departments hold back the information because they say it distracts players from concentrating on the season. Which of course shows the players that their school is protecting the self-interest of the school and the team, not the interests of the individual kid hoping for a pro career, who could benefit from knowing where he’s been invited to play. Agents like me use it as a wedge to create doubt about who’s really looking out for them—evidently not their coach or college—and to demonstrate why they can trust us more. If we’re the first to get the invitation info to the player, we tell him we saved the day because if the bowl doesn’t know he’s accepted, they may give his spot to another player. And these are the games NFL decision-makers rely on, so we’ve shown we’re there for the player’s future.
Game Plans: We’re Holding Your Future in Our Hands
Whatever happened, my job was to spin it our way. That applied when we were meeting with a player who’d been pitched by other agents and in prepping what Gary called our “Game Plans.” They were bound books, custom-assembled for each prospective player, laying out our plan for his future, complete with stats on him, on other players, on pro teams, and where we would almost promise he’d come out in the draft. Gary had been putting them together for years.
The books were very impressive, but telling the truth was less important than selling the prospect. If the player ratings didn’t serve our situation, we “adjusted” them. He taught me how and then I surpassed my teacher. I’d graduated from First National Bank of Player Loans to Truth Embellisher. I stretched and massaged data with the creativity of an artist. Sexy embellishment is more persuasive than dull facts. Everyone wants to believe things are better than they are. Promise a college player success in the NFL draft and you have a shot at becoming his agent. Back it up with what looks like data and case studies and you have an even better shot. Before me, Gary did it with scissors and tape. I introduced him to the magic of the computer: Internet search, copy-cut-paste, data seamlessly lifted from here, dropped over there, altered, enhanced, embellished with digital perfection.
Before we ever met with any player, I’d talk to him on the phone and send out a Pro Tect brochure and cover letter from Gary and me. The brochure was very slick, very expensive, splashed with color shots of our clients—Brian “Boz” Bosworth, Seahawk and movie star; Jason Taylor, Dolphin Pro Bowl defensive end; Keith Brooking, Cowboy Pro Bowl linebacker; Mark Gastineau, Jets Pro Bowl pass-rusher; Rob Moore, Jets wide receiver; Darren Howard, Saints and Eagles defensive end; Keith Jackson, Pro Bowl tight end; Kevin Dyson, wide receiver drafted ahead of Randy Moss; Keith Bulluck, Titans Pro Bowl linebacker; Jim Druckenmiller, 49ers first-round quarterback—plus company bios and history. I’d go back through old cover letters and make changes suited to impress the players. If it was for a safety, I’d reference defensive backs. If it was a linebacker, I’d note that we represented Bulluck or Bosworth or Ken Norton Jr. Gary was compulsive about the language in the letters, changing “a” to “the” and back again. He was a control freak, but it had been working for him.
I got us an audience with Adam Archuleta, the safety from Arizona State. I tracked down a phone number, talked to his stepfather a couple of times, and, most importantly, persuaded his mother, Vange, that it was a good idea for us to meet. Then I got Adam on the phone and put Gary on and we arranged to go to Arizona. On the same day, we’d set up meetings with Nijrell Eason, a cornerback, and Todd Heap, who was a great tight end. Todd was a junior, which these days—post–Junior Rule—would make it an NFLPA violation for us to talk to him. (The Junior Rule now stipulates agents cannot contact players until they have completed three years of college eligibility and have declared their intention to turn pro.) But in 2000, when the meeting happened, it was still legit. I had called Todd and told him we (really Gary, before I worked for him) had represented Stephen Alexander, a tight end from Oklahoma, who’d been a second-round draft pick and was having a good year with the Redskins, as well as Keith Jackson, one of the best tight ends in NFL history. Representing such talented players, at Todd’s own position, really got his attention.
We had three meetings scheduled back-to-back, at the Tempe Mission Palms Hotel. Gary thought three was too many so he called Kiper on the speakerphone and said, “Mel, I have three guys—Heap, Eason, and Archuleta—and I only have time for two. Who should I skip?” Mel said, “Don’t meet with Archuleta.” Gary hung up the phone and told me to cancel the meeting with Adam, but I was adamant about it. We butted heads, but I kept at him until finally I got him to do it. In the end, Adam was drafted the highest of the three. I’d like to say I knew it then but I just thought he was good. And Adam ended up being very close with Gary over time.
We met with all three guys, an exhausting day in a suite, each meeting two or two and a half hours. We’d have a tray of cookies and sodas—also technically illegal—but what two-hundred-plus-pound football player could talk for two hours without something to eat or drink? And all three showed up, Todd Heap, Adam with his stepfather, and Nijrell Eason, a great turnout. Sometimes you’d schedule a meeting and just get a no-show—no reason, no call, just a player who was suddenly impossible to track down. We had a video player to run films or training tapes and we had our Game Plans.
I’d seen agents go through their pitch with players, talking about who they represented and what kinds of contracts they’d signed. But the Game Plans elevated the process to a whole other level. They made it formal, official. Here is a bound book devoted to you. Here’s your Game Plan. We focus on your position, what we can do to raise your draft stock to the maximum, how we’ve done it and will do it for you. Here are the stats to back up what we say. It wasn’t our word, it was written in a book … even though we had written the book. It was genius.
I remember the first time I saw Gary change the information to make a book look better. He took an article with a sentence he didn’t like and he put white-out tape over it, cutting and pasting, and then photocopied it again. He’d hold up the final result and say, “Magically, no longer there.” This was before I introduced him to the real magic of a digital OCR program—to convert a scanned image into a document you could edit. Gary wasn’t good with computers, but I was good enough.
That year, of the three back-to-back meetings, we landed two—Heap and Archuleta, but not Eason. Both went high in the draft, both signed big contracts. Not bad.
The next year, capitalizing on those successes, I connected with Terrell Suggs, the defensive end/pass rusher from Arizona State, a prized prospect. His case is a real demo on how we used the Game Plans. We’d meet in a hotel room with the player’s family (in Suggs’s case, it was a hotel a few blocks from his school), and we would carefully walk them through the reasons they should go with us, step-by-step. At the end, Gary would hold up two Game Plan books, one in each hand. Book one was filled with data assembled by us on a former draftee who had signed with us and had a great career; and book two was filled with one who had signed elsewhere and failed. One success, one loser—which did you want to be?
For the Suggs meeting, our success story was Adam Archuleta, who, like Suggs, had played at Arizona State. Our Game Plan showed he’d been ranked to go in the fifth round by BLESTO, the NFL’s first scouting organization, which was named the Lions, Eagles, Steelers Talent Organization for the teams that set it up in 1963 and was later modified to include Bears. The National Report, another prominent ranking service, projected him to go in the seventh round. But, according to our Game Plan books, Adam Archuleta made the smart move: he worked with us, worked with a strength coach and with our position coaches and nutritionist. He watched films and did drills with an NFL position coach, and he ended up being picked in the first round, by the St. Louis Rams, who just happened to employ the very same position coach he’d worked with to prepare for the Senior Bowl and the NFL Scouting Combine. Adam signed a contract with guaranteed upfront money totaling $4.2 million.
The second book’s “loser” was Nijrell Eason, the defensive back and teammate of Archuleta we’d met with but hadn’t landed, who our plan said had been graded a second-round pick on the National Report. But he walked away from us and fell out of the draft entirely, and was then picked up by the Cleveland Browns with a contract that guaranteed him only $5,000 as an undrafted free agent.
After presenting the two plans, Gary asked Suggs and his family, “Next year, which hand do you want us to be holding your Game Plan in—the Adam Archuleta hand or the Nijrell Eason hand?” Suggs signed with us. Terrell Suggs went in the first round of the 2003 draft to the Baltimore Ravens and signed a contract with upfront guarantee of $7.3 million. Suggs is now a four-time Pro-Bowler on a very competitive team. Happy ending.
Just one thing: The facts weren’t facts. They were stretched, altered, or just plain changed if necessary. Archuleta was always ranked to go high in the draft. Our services may have bumped him up a round … or his performance may have improved between spring, when the prospect rankings were released, and the actual draft almost a year later. Nijrell Eason had rated high in the spring and had fallen off in fall during the season. By the time the season ended, he was no longer an elite prospect. And when the winter report, released sixteen weeks before the draft, came out, he was graded seventh round or “undrafted.” It had nothing to do with not working with us. In fact, he didn’t even turn us down, we’d lost interest in representing him and walked away. And Suggs? We were talking to him when he was a junior, still unranked but already highly touted by experts. By the time he declared himself eligible for the draft, the reports had him in the top five to ten in the first round … but we didn’t make it happen.
The next day or next week, if we had a meeting with a second-round ranked defensive back, we’d highlight and adjust based on the player, the school, and the agents we were competing with, complete with stats and scouting reports adjusted just for him. If we had a cornerback, I created numbers that would sell him. We made sure we didn’t make claims that were outrageous, such as raising someone from the seventh round to the first. We stuck to credible embellishment and made sure we never fabricated a number that could easily be checked—actual draft outcome, professional stats, or anything too visible. Those numbers were often common knowledge or could be found. But smaller stuff, like predraft rankings or scouting reports, that stuff you could invent, and we did so often.
Did other agents do it? Yes, absolutely. I have the presentation material that three of the most successful agents used to recruit the top seven picks in the 2005 and 2006 drafts. I have audio recordings of two of them in their pitches citing client contract details of 40 percent incentive bonuses for making the playoffs, $1.5 million for being named All-Pro, and deferred comp packages of $3 million tied to playtime performance bonuses. I have proof of inflated and/or false statements of guaranteed money in contracts they negotiated for players.
Okay, actually—I don’t have any evidence of what others did. But note how the supposed figures and facts I rattled off above—three agents, top seven picks, draft years, percentages, incentive bonuses, deferred comp—made my story seem credible. That’s how our Game Plans worked. As for actual BLESTO and National Reports, we weren’t supposed to have them but we did. How did we get them? Well, I can put two and two together. The fax number from where the reports were sent was the Redskins front office and Gary had at least one close friend (GM Vinnie Cerrato) in Redskins management. I still have our Game Plans with real names, real and altered grades, real contract numbers. They worked.
And Gary was a maestro. I had been in meetings with Doc Daniels and with Marvin Demoff. I’d seen them in action with dozens of prospects. I’d taken Flozell “the Hotel” Adams (also known as “Roach Motel” and “False Start” Flozell for his dirty play), the massive offensive tackle from Michigan State, on a trip to see the Super Bowl. We thought, with Demoff and his partner, former Raider Sean Jones, we had a shot at him. Demoff represented Jonathon Ogden, maybe the best tackle in the game. Marvin was big-time. I’d been with Mike Trope, as smart a guy as there ever was at handling players and deals. Gary was better than all of them at a pitch. He performed at the meetings as if he were conducting an orchestra.
And then, once we signed a prospect, Gary was a master at identifying a hole in a player’s game and setting out to plug it—on-the-field issues like times in the forty-yard dash or off the field behavior issues. Once agents took action to address a problem, we could get scouts to check it off their list. We would take what the players offered to work with, build on it, enhance it, and and try to minimize or eliminate the negatives. Sometimes a player didn’t give us enough to work with and we couldn’t raise his stock much. We signed Joe Tafoya, defensive end out of the University of Arizona, and he just wasn’t generating much buzz and there wasn’t anything we could do. After the Senior Bowl, Joe fired us. In the 2001 draft, he was picked up in the seventh round, which was about right. It was the same story in 2003 for Cal pass-rusher, Tully Banta-Cain, also taken in the seventh round by the Patriots. After the draft, he fired us. Sometimes no magic would change the outcomes.
Joe Tafoya thought we were giving our attention to Adam Archuleta and Willie Howard, which was true. Gary was cultivating interest in Adam through his relationships with Mel Kiper and other sports writers at ESPN the Magazine, and USA Today. He even hyped his media contacts in the Game Plan. He’d say, “See this writer, good friend of mine. Notice almost every year, he does a feature on one of my players.” Gary helped the writer get access to the player and the story helped the player. The scouts were traveling around the country, staying in one hotel after another, and what was on the floor outside every hotel door, on every airplane? A copy of USA Today with a story on our player.
And Gary could spot the stories. Like when Adam Archuleta was making a position change. He was an undersized linebacker in college, the Pac 10 defensive player of the year, in fact. But he was switching to safety. And we knew he had better speed than he was getting credit for. In the BLESTO report, they had him estimated at 4.7 in the forty. But if, at the Combine or a private workout, he ran a 4.4 or even 4.3, the next thing you knew, people were saying, “Maybe we underestimated this guy. He’s fast.” Now the question was, could he make it as a safety? Did he have the athleticism, the hips? So Gary leveraged his relationship with Ron Meeks, at the time the secondary coach for the Rams. Before the Senior Bowl, Meeks flew into L.A. and did ten days of defensive back drills with Adam. Meeks taught him techniques like backpedaling, flicking his hips, and changing direction, so when Adam was on the field during Senior Bowl week, he showed off moves and techniques that the scouts were looking for, moves they hadn’t seen on college films.
These private workouts with NFL coaches are strictly prohibited by NFL rules. Gary had lots of NFL assistant coaches do it, at least one of whom has gone on to become a head coach. Coaches are not supposed to even see a player until the Senior Bowl, let alone be training him. So, besides training Archuleta, we were building more buzz around his unorthodox workouts with trainer-guru Jay Schroeder (later we had Jay and Archuleta make the video Freak of Training). The result of all this? Adam Archuleta was drafted twentieth overall in the first round, higher than anyone believed he’d have gone otherwise.
Willie Howard, the defensive end from Stanford, was another case where there was simply no rabbit to pull out of the hat. I was tight with Willie and with his mom, Deby. Willie was originally projected to be a first-round pick but he had a history of knee injuries. Medical red flags are tough to beat. Even with a clean bill of health, some players just get labeled as “injury-prone.” Willie fell to the second round, number fifty-seven overall, was picked by the Vikings, played two years, and then suffered a career-ending knee injury.
Then there was Todd Heap. By the time we were leaving for the Senior Bowl, we didn’t have him signed. It was a competition between us and another agent. Gary flew to Arizona on the way to the game to meet with Todd and his parents, while John Blake and I went straight to Mobile, Alabama, for the Senior Bowl. Gary closed the deal. We now had the number-one-rated tight end in the draft. He hadn’t played in any all-star games because he was a junior so Gary brought in Richard Mann, tight-end coach for the Chiefs. “This is the coach who works with Tony Gonzalez, the Pro Bowl tight end with Kansas City,” Gary said. “And now he’s going to spend a week or two with you.” By working with these coaches, we were giving players training in what the actual drills would be at the Combine. The NFL Combine is a skills competition, where players are tested for strength and speed and a variety of football techniques, agility drills, passing, and so forth. These days it’s televised but back then it was very secretive; the official results just leaked out, little by little. Everybody knew about the forty-yard dash, vertical jump, broad jump, and long and short shuttles; they could prepare for those. But we were selling access to training on the position drills, the specifics of exactly what coaches would be looking for at a given position, so Todd wouldn’t be surprised or unprepared. He would have a competitive advantage … thanks to Gary and me. Todd was projected to be the top tight-end pick and in the end, he was. Number thirty-one in the first round. We didn’t add value; we maintained it.
Two years later it was Terrell Suggs’s draft—the happy ending from the Game Plan example. But what happened before the happy ending? Suggs, a linebacker at Arizona State, was another underclassman, so he wasn’t going to be in any all-star games. Gary had done his magic with a USA Today story and Mel Kiper was saying Suggs could go as high as number three in the first round. But then two things happened. One, Suggs didn’t run a great forty. When you run slower than expected, you can shoot firecrackers out of your ass and you’re still going to fall in the draft. And two, there was what we came to call the basketball incident. He was in a pickup game and somebody started a fight with his cousin; they went out to a parking lot, somebody hit somebody with a crowbar, and not too long later, a letter arrived from an attorney asking for money to settle damages or they’d file an assault charge—fancy language for extortion—all conveniently before the draft.
Suggs said he had been defending himself and wasn’t afraid of the incident going public. We didn’t feel the same way—even if he was innocent, it could still have affected his draft status—but the story came out anyway, and Gary handled it very well with the NFL, and Terrell was acquitted. The slow forty time, coupled with the “off-field issues,” caused Suggs to drop to number ten in the first round. We did what we could for every player, sometimes moving them up, sometimes maintaining their position, sometimes trying to make problems go away.
Despite Suggs’s problems, he was a top pick, and though Gary had represented many great players, this was the first time he was invited to the draft in New York. And, I figured, it would be my first time too. I’d made the first contact with Suggs, through another Arizona State player; I had cultivated the relationship, attended almost every day of his training, and kept in touch with Suggs as his lawyer talked him through the basketball incident. But Gary wouldn’t let me go. He said I needed to stay back and take care of Kevin Curtis from Utah State and “man the ship.” It wasn’t as if we had a complex business. It was Gary, me, Blake, and a couple of others. No ship—barely a rowboat, really. I was disappointed, and angry. It was an early sign of how he’d treat me, keeping me from getting too close to players or from getting too important. I was selling him, but he wasn’t grooming me.
Mixed Signals
From day one, I was getting both pats on the back and slaps in the face. After our first season, Gary called up my wife to tell her what an incredible recruiter I was. In the office, I’d overhear conversations through the walls, like Gary telling a young guy who was starting the baseball division of the agency, “Look what Josh came in and delivered. If you deliver like he did, we can talk about paying you more …” But I got my first real wake-up call around the time my wife was pregnant, when I found out my name wasn’t going to be on the rep agreements. With Doc, we always put both of our names on them, so I assumed it would be the same with Gary and Pro Tect. I had prepared a rep agreement for Willie Howard, the first player we’d gotten together. Gary signed; I thought I was about to sign; and he said, “No, you don’t sign those. This is my company. My name is on the door.” I remember thinking, So this is how it’s going to be? We’d had a really good haul this first year—Adam Archuleta, Todd Heap, Willie Howard, Joe Tafoya. We’d scored at Arizona, Arizona State, Stanford, the West Coast, the Pac 10—all the places I’d promised to help him with. But he wanted me to be invisible. I had a child on the way, and I’d developed strong relationships with players, especially Willie Howard, but I’d only worked there a year, so I was in no position to walk. When I brought up my concern about not signing agreements, he’d say, “It’s not about ego. Take care of your family. What do you care if your name isn’t on the contracts as long as the check clears?” I didn’t like it, but I had diapers to buy.
Around this time, the NFLPA passed a new regulation that stipulated if you went more than three years without representing an active player, you couldn’t remain a registered agent. If Gary kept my name off all the contracts, I would soon lose my registration, and then I would find myself essentially a “runner,” a dirty word in the agent game. (More about this later.) So, in order to keep my certification alive, Gary let me negotiate and sign the contract for Keenan Howry, a wide receiver out of Oregon. He was a seventh-round pick in the 2003 draft, so it was a bone Gary thought he could throw my way with no skin off his hide. Gary would even say that dealing with a player drafted in such a late round was bad for his image, because it made him look small-time. Howry would later become a very important player in our business relationship, but that’s another story that can wait for now.
Besides the issue of my name on contracts, there was something else that haunted me: a comment from fellow agent Kenny Zuckerman, who had worked for Gary in the same role I had. I bumped into him at my first Senior Bowl with Gary and Kenny said, “Watch your ass. Gary’s got his people in New York—the Rothmans. Don’t trust him or them. It’s only a matter of time before he fucks you.” I didn’t yet know much about the Rothmans—Gary’s favorite financial advisors—but when I looked down our roster, I saw that Kenny had been active in the recruitment of a lot of players but hadn’t been their agent—maybe because he hadn’t been allowed to sign the contracts. I shrugged it off because I knew Gary despised Kenny after litigation and a settlement when Kenny left Pro Tect. I chalked it up to bad blood on both sides … but I didn’t forget it.
And something else happened, something that shook the sports agent business and Gary in particular. David Dunn, a partner of Leigh Steinberg and Jeff Moorad in one of the largest sports agencies in the country, left the firm. The company had recently been sold for more than $70 million to Canadian conglomerate Assante Inc., but when Dunn left, he took with him somewhere between forty and fifty clients, including some of the highest profiles in sports. Steinberg countered with an enormous, very public, very ugly lawsuit. A Business Week article written after the suit recounted some of the accusations and testimony that had come out, including Steinberg’s drunken and erratic behavior in public. There was one incident, at a social event, where he was said to have licked women’s faces; and he was once quoted as saying to a woman, “I want to eat your leg.” The case was eventually decided in Steinberg’s favor, with a $40 million–plus judgement, but his personal reputation was damaged, perhaps beyond repair.
(That story hadn’t happened yet when Jerry Maguire was made. If it had, and had been included, the movie might not have been so popular.)
When the story came out, Gary vowed that a defection like that would never happen to him. He had total disdain for Dunn, believing that regardless of Steinberg’s questionable social behavior, Dunn was greedy and would have been nothing without Steinberg. And Gary was either cautious or paranoid, depending on your point of view, to prevent an insurrection like that. The only way to assure it couldn’t happen was to keep his employees out of the spotlight and prevent them from having any real influence with clients. In this case, “them” meant me.
Over time, the better we did, the more tension there was. We had a strong 2002, thanks in part to John Blake’s magic. The Super Bowl Cowboys’ defensive line coach went with us to Fresno State to meet and sign defensive lineman Alan Harper. On the ride home from Fresno, we had a particularly unpleasant conversation. In front of Blake, Gary felt the need to explain the key to my success. “Josh, you’re smart enough to realize your limitations,” he said. “Without earning your college degree, you have to make sure you keep yourself surrounded by people more capable than you, with better credentials. If you continue selling accomplished people like me, maybe someday you can hope to achieve a small portion of the success that I have.” Instinctively, I responded, “Why would I ever choose to limit myself to your accomplishments?” Gary nearly drove off the road, screaming that he had represented all these great players, and produced movies, and I could never be as successful as he’d been. Between the car swerving and Gary screaming, I could hear Blake laughing in the back seat. I never understood Gary’s thinking. Why put me down? The better I did in the business, the more he’d benefit.
In 2002 we had Blake work out defensive end Kenyon Coleman and defensive tackles Rodney Leisle and Kenny Kocher of UCLA prior to their senior year. I would pick the guys up from Kenyon’s apartment or meet them at the bottom of a service road right near the UCLA locker room and practice field. This was clearly a violation of NCAA rules but I could rationalize it: no money changed hands and the kids were improving their conditioning. Gary also took credit for getting Kenyon on the back cover of Kiper’s preseason draft preview. We were helping the players. Wasn’t that what we were there for? That same year, Gary signed Dwight Freeney out of Syracuse, and some Oklahoma players, who were also in Gary’s territory, but with a big assist from Blake.
Then I got us in contact with Larry Tripplett, a defensive tackle from the University of Washington who was touted as a top pick. We’d had Willie Howard, one of the premier defensive tackles out of the Pac 10 the year before, and now I had a formal meeting set up with Tripplett and his family, right after a bowl game in San Diego. Bowl games are major events, with lots of demands on players’ time, so if a prospect wants a meeting, it usually means he’s ready to sign, or at least that we’re one of his final two or three. I had a great rapport with Larry; he was really smart, personable; he was one of my big fish for the year. It happened to be the same year elite safety Roy Williams was coming out of Oklahoma. If we signed Tripplett, I would get my 25 percent. If we signed Williams, Gary would get 100 percent. But I didn’t think it was either-or. Why not sign both of them? I made an appointment for Blake, Gary, and me to see Tripplett. Gary canceled at the last minute, saying he was going to see Roy Williams and I could forget about representing Larry Tripplett. He did essentially the same thing the next year in passing up a meeting with Nnamdi Asomugha, a Cal cornerback. These were big-time prospects, guys who were ultimately drafted high and well compensated in their pro careers. Why miss a chance at possible first-round picks? I began to realize Gary was competing with me, making sure I didn’t get too much.
The same was true when I orchestrated the meetings with running back Justin Fargas, who was transferring from Michigan to USC, and his father, Antonio, who had played Huggy Bear in the Starsky and Hutch television series and who eventually represented his son in the 2003 draft. But I got no accolades from Gary. Despite all of our successes, he was determined to keep me on a short leash. But he still wanted those big West Coast players I was getting him. So, eventually, he was going to find an avenue into my geography, to get the players I was bringing in. He got it when his former client Ken Norton Jr. won the linebacker coach’s job at USC. Between that and the doors I’d already opened for the agency at Arizona State, Stanford, and UCLA, he now had his own entrée into my territory.
To add to his West Coast presence, with less reliance on me, Gary decided to use an outside “street runner.” This meant a person who was not certified as an agent, was not a financial advisor or marketing expert, just somebody who was paid to connect the actual agent with a player. It could be a former teammate, a guy from the old neighborhood, a cousin, a girlfriend, even a player’s mom. An agent like Gary didn’t want to know how the runner got a player’s attention. Maybe he invited the player to a party, or hooked him up with a girl, or got him the use of a car, whatever—it’s better not to know. And he was only paid, on or off the books, when and if the player signed with the agency. One thing Gary and every other agent did know was that if any of this took place while the players were still considered student athletes, it was strictly forbidden by NFLPA and NCAA rules, and by forty-two individual state laws.
For recruitment at USC, Gary brought on Wade, a young guy who he said had the right “paint job,” meaning he was black. Wade was a former Fresno State player, so Gary tried to convince me he’d add value to our West Coast recruiting and I should reduce my piece of the commissions to offset Wade’s fee. No way was I buying that. Wade recognized me from my days with Doc; we’d represented, and funded, his teammate Tony Brown, a defensive back who was picked by the Houston Oilers in the fifth round in 1992. Wade knew me and my street reputation with Doc and I knew a lot of Wades—street runners.
Gary was out of his element. I had a pretty good handle on how this new venture was going to work out—not well—but I figured Gary wouldn’t want to hear my take anyway, and I decided to just let it play out. After all, he was using this guy to try to replace me, so why should I help him? Wade promised to deliver a player, his “cousin,” Kassim Osgood, a San Diego State receiver. Wade convinced Gary to front him some cash, pay his cell phone bill, and rent him a car so he could drive down to see his “cousin.” Kassim, of course, was no more Wade’s cousin than he was mine. I’d seen this movie before and I knew how it ended. A week later, Gary couldn’t reach Wade, even on the cell phone he was paying for, and now he thought Wade had stolen the rented car. That was the end of Gary’s “street runner,” but it sent a clear signal to me. He had always bragged he wouldn’t bring a certain type of recruiter into his company, but now he’d gone down the low road to try to assure he never needed me the way Steinberg had needed Dunn.
I talked to my wife, Jennifer, about the episode but we agreed I should swallow it for the time being. We’d planned our life around family and my career. It wasn’t a good time to rock the boat. We even went so far as to plan her pregnancy so she’d deliver after the draft, and before the start of the season, so I’d never risk missing a birthday party. The draft was in April and her C-section date was May 15.
The Wonderlic Test: The Test Nobody Should Fail
So, I just put my head down and did my work. Sometimes it was more like homework, like when we prepped players for the Wonderlic test. In addition to all the strength and speed tests at the Combine, the Wonderlic is given to every player in each year’s draft, supposedly to provide an objective evaluation of their intelligence as another of the tools they will need to excel in the pros. In a word: bullshit. What it really provides is an evaluation of agents’ ability to get their hands on the test in advance and teach players how to answer the questions. It’s all about cheating—agents cheating to help players pass a test. (Not that the players should need our help, of course, because they were getting a college education while they played football, right?)
We had copies of the Wonderlic, every year. So did a lot of other agents. In fact, I’d say, if your agent couldn’t get you a Wonderlic test, you needed a new agent. We got them from people who got them from people … I don’t know where it started. There were five or six versions of the test, same concepts, same format, fifty questions of increasing difficulty, taken over twelve minutes. We drilled the players to memorize the questions and answers, if not verbatim then at least the concepts, which were the same from year to year. Sometimes the order of questions would change, and number six became number twenty-two, or sometimes in a math problem the apples one year were lemons the next, or sometimes Betty became Nancy, Nebraska became Texas, or June became September. But overall, not much changed. Even if you didn’t understand the questions, you could still memorize the answers. But plenty of players, even after we’d been spoon-feeding them the answers, quizzing, and repeating, still couldn’t get them right. Some refused to learn. Some had almost no experience of actually learning other than Xs and Os on a chalkboard. Some never had to go to class or had tutors who did all their work for them. A score of twenty is acceptable. Still, plenty—too many—can’t score a twenty or even close.
I watched Mike Sasson, a guy who worked for Gary building a baseball practice, who’d also been coaching players on the Wonderlic for years, learning his techniques and adding some of my own. It was as important how many questions were answered as how many you got right. The teams wanted to make sure the player could make his way through the test. Our goal was that the player would get a decent, respectable score … but not get them all right and raise suspicion.
Plenty of scouts, general managers, and coaches know the players are getting tutored—that is, memorizing questions and answers they’ve been fed—and some are okay with that. There even are some people in the NFL who say they don’t want players who are too smart, just enough to do what they’re told, run a pass pattern, or cover an opposing player. On the Internet site ProFootballTalk.com on February 13, 2004, in his “Daily Rumor Mill,” Mike Florio wrote, “With as many as six versions of the [Wonderlic] test floating around, there are some league insiders who think that if the players are smart enough to memorize the answers, they’re smart enough to memorize their plays.”
According to Charlie Wonderlic Jr., president of Wonderlic Inc. and grandson of the founder-inventor of the test, “The closer you are to the ball, the higher your score.” That axiom is commonly accepted knowledge in the game—though never logically explained—but it was corroborated by a chart published after the 2004 Combine:
Our job was to get our players up to the acceptable level, high but not too high. Ironically, I wasn’t a great student and here I was tutoring these guys. Maybe I could relate to them. In any case, we got our players through the test with respectable scores. Kevin Curtis from Utah State got forty-eight out of fifty even though I begged him to miss more. Willie Howard was the same way. He figured he went to Stanford so he should get a high score. Adam Archuleta scored in the higher range, smart enough to learn the plays but not too smart to be coachable. Later on, we had trouble with J. P. Losman, the Tulane quarterback. The first time he took the Wonderlic, he had a ridiculously low score, but we managed to get him into the low twenties the second time. Then it was our job to explain the big difference to the scouts. We said he just hadn’t taken the test seriously the first time, had got up and gone to the bathroom and not even finished the test. Not a great excuse, but good enough. He was drafted in the first round by the Bills.
In the end, the Wonderlic is another box to be checked. Time in the forty-yard dash—check. Vertical jump—check. Shuttle drills—check. Interview—check. Our players could all check the Wonderlic box. And we never had to worry about disasters like what happened to Vince Young. In 2006, the National Champion, Heisman-winning University of Texas quarterback got a score that made national headlines, but not in a good way. He scored a six out of fifty.
(Excerpt from story posted on USA Today after Vince Young’s score became public)
WONDERING ABOUT THE WONDERLIC? TRY IT.
By Mike Chappell, the Indianapolis Star
INDIANAPOLIS—Wonder why there’s so much fuss at the NFL Scouting Combine regarding the Wonderlic test, the one Texas QB Vince Young purportedly bombed?…
The Wonderlic has been part of the NFL’s player evaluation process for nearly three decades. It consists of 50 questions and must be completed in 12 minutes. The average score is 21 correct answers …
Michael Callans, the president of Wonderlic Consulting, describes the examination as a “short-form intelligence test.” Others consider it an exam to assess an individual’s problem-solving skills.
The test starts off with simple questions, perhaps pertaining to the days of the month or, according to Callans, “adding 2 plus 3. As you go through the test, it gets more and more challenging, and we begin to add more content and types of questions.”
The key is for an individual not to dwell too long on one question …
TEST YOURSELF
Here is a sampling of questions included on a Wonderlic Personnel Test:
1. Assume the first 2 statements are true. Is the final one: a) true, b) false, c) not certain?
The boy plays baseball.
All baseball players wear hats.
The boy wears a hat.
2. Paper sells for 21 cents per pad. What will four pads cost?
3. How many of the five pairs of items below are exact duplicates?
Nieman, K.M./Neiman, K.M
Thomas, G.K/Thomas, C.K.
Hoff, J.P./Hoff, J.P.
Pino, L.R./Pina, L.R.
Warner, T.S./Wanner, T.S.
4. PRESENT, RESENT—Do these words: a) have similar meanings, b) have contradictory meanings, c) mean neither the same nor opposite?
5. A train travels 20 feet in 1/5 second. At this same speed, how many feet will it travel in three seconds?
6. When rope is selling at 10 cents a foot, how many feet can you buy for 60 cents?
7. The ninth month of the year is: October, January, June, September or May?
8. Which number in the following group of numbers represents the smallest amount?
7, .8, 31, .33, 2
9. Three individuals form a partnership and agree to divide the profits equally. X invests $9,000, Y invests $7,000, Z invests $4,000. If the profits are $4,800, how much less does X receive than if the profits were divided in proportion to the amount invested?
10. Assume the first two statements are true. Is the final one: a) true, b) false, c) not certain?
Tom greeted Beth. Beth greeted Dawn. Tom did not greet Dawn.
11. A boy is 17 years old and his sister is twice as old. When the boy is 23 years old, what will be the age of his sister?
Answers: 1. a; 2. 84 cents; 3. 1; 4. c; 5. 300 feet; 6. 6 feet; 7. September; 8. .33; 9. $560; 10. c; 11. 40 years old.
There was a brief but temporary outrage over Young’s score and the education, or lack of it, that college athletes were getting. You’d think if a college quarterback can get the snap count under center, he’d be able to answer a reasonable number of questions. The colleges squirmed. The NCAA squirmed. The NFLPA was silent. The NFL wanted the story to just go away. And eventually it did. Young was the number-three pick in the draft. Would he have been number one or two with a higher score? Who knows? He got a big signing bonus and contract, the Tennessee Titans got a quarterback, the fans sang the national anthem, and the game went on.
Was It Wrong? Not If It Worked
From the time we began wooing a player to the time he signed with a team, and throughout his career as a pro athlete, we were a full-service agency, offering Game Plans, test tutoring, strength and training coaches, media management, contract negotiation, financial advisors, even insurance agents. Gary had the connections with coaches in the business. No matter the position, he could hook up a player with the expert. Gary had a media network that was unmatched—from Mel Kiper and Tom Friend of ESPN to Larry Weisman of USA Today. And when it came to financial advisors he had the Rothmans, Judd and his son Erik, the guys Kenny Zuckerman had warned me about.
A twenty-two-year-old kid who wakes up one day with a seven-figure signing bonus and a multiyear contract has no idea what to do with his money. Gary sent them to the Rothmans. Even if they weren’t NFLPA-certified, and therefore not legal to recommend, they were Gary’s pick and that was good enough for most players. (Though later on, Brian Bosworth sued Gary for sending him to someone Gary allegedly knew had been involved in fraudulent activities—Judd Rothman—and for allegedly getting a kickback from Rothman.) Gary also had his favorite insurance agent who got all the business we could send him. I had my insurance license at the time, so I’d work with the players on getting their policies, then run them through Gary’s guy, who would give us half the commission in return. As an agent, Gary was not supposed to receive any referral fees without full disclosure to the players, which Gary did not provide. But since I was not the agent of record on most contracts, I could receive referral fee checks, which I then cashed and split in half with Gary. Anything was okay if he could rationalize that it was in the name of taking care of the client.
Was it wrong, what we were doing and the way we were doing it? Hyped-up Game Plans with fake data? Bootlegged Wonderlics and spoon-fed answers? Financial advisors that weren’t NFLPA approved? Splitting insurance commissions without disclosure? It was all certainly against the rules, but was it wrong? I didn’t think so. I didn’t think too much about the right and wrong of it. I did what I always did in working for someone else: increased my value by doing things his way, learning his methods, improving on them where I could, and mostly by helping the clients. Gary knew how to create these Game Plan books and they worked. I knew how to take the books up a notch with computer skills. He was a good recruiter in the Midwest and East. I was good at recruiting in the West. Added value. And every agent out there was telling his story as persuasively as possible, bending the truth, buying dinner, wooing relatives, saying and doing whatever it took to close the deal. We were doing it with Game Plans and Wonderlics. And we weren’t handing out cash to players. In my mind, I was getting clean … or at least cleaner. The lesser of two evils? Maybe. Where does salesmanship end and deception begin? When does embellishment cross the line into lying? It’s a gray world we work in.
The Way Other Agents Were Doing Business
Manning Money: Brothers Carl and Kevin Poston, agent-partners in Professional Sports Planning Inc., made outrageous demands for their clients—mostly defensive players—that NFL insiders referred to as asking for “Peyton Manning money.” Carl Poston denied using that term but he and his brother did push teams to the brink and beyond, sometimes failing to make deals at all. Carl Poston once allowed LaVar Arrington to sign a contract with the Redskins, the final version of which they had not read and did not contain the $6.5 million bonus they thought they’d secured. That negligence resulted in NFLPA fines and suspension.
Cover Your Assets: Steve Weinberg, one of the leading agents in the game since 1982, allegedly hid assets from a judgment creditor, the result of which was that players he represented were being served with writs of garnishment—to collect those assets. The judgment creditor happened to be Weinberg’s business associate and co-agent, attorney Howard Silber. Silber went to the NFLPA to intercede, supposedly to protect players’ interests, but ultimately to destroy Weinberg. It was a preview of the tactic that Silber would use as a lawyer representing Gary Wichard in my lawsuit years later.
Who’s Wooing Who: Agent and author of Winning with Integrity, Leigh Steinberg, continually insisted he was above the fray, never soliciting players, always waiting for them to come to him. But Sean LaChapelle, among other players (see story in chapter 4), was said to have received repeated phone calls from Steinberg offering his services. And every year, Leigh’s company threw extravagant Super Bowl and Pro Bowl parties, inviting not just their own clients but plenty of other high-profile players, the ones they wanted to represent. The rules say an agent cannot “initiate communication” with another agent’s client. But they don’t prevent an agent from being a good host.
The High Five: John Blake left Gary Wichard and returned to coaching, first at Mississippi State, then at Nebraska, then at North Carolina. He had historically used his influence to help steer players to Wichard’s company, Pro Tect, and in return would get what he called a “high five,” meaning money or something of value.
I was with Gary Wichard and Pro Tect from 2000 to May 2004. In hindsight, I’d like to say I left because I was uncomfortable with the way we were doing business, but to be honest, I didn’t think we weren’t doing business any cleaner or dirtier than any other agent. We just worked the way that was most effective for us. The truth is I left because no matter how well I did my job, Gary made it clear that I’d never be an important player in his company. The better I did my job, the more he treated me like a threat.
When I had the chance to hook up with another big agent, Steve Feldman, I grabbed it. I had talked to other agents, including the infamous David Dunn at his new outfit, Athletes First, but I got wind that he was trying to steal Todd Heap from Gary. I declined to pursue working with Dunn for two reasons: My arrangement with Gary was that I’d be paid for as long as Pro Tect represented a player, so I didn’t want any part of Dunn’s poaching Heap; and Dunn verbally proposed a deal to me but the papers his lawyers later sent bore no resemblance to the deal he’d discussed. In August 2004, I went in to see Gary and resign. He told me two things. He said I was “a great salesman,” but I should pursue a new profession. And he said, “You’ll never sign anyone. No one without me.” He offered to hook me up with a friend of his at Mattel, the toy company. I thanked him and swallowed my real thoughts, and we parted. Not exactly like my emotional departure from Doc Daniels. Ironically, after I left the agency, and in some ways because of his actions, I eventually became just what he didn’t want me to be: a threat.