Steve Feldman was a former sports law professor at Cal State who now looked to me like a cross between Harvey Keitel’s character, the Wolf, in Pulp Fiction and Sean Penn’s Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High—a middle-aged guy wearing surfer’s board shorts. At one time, Steve had represented a powerhouse list of young prospects, but now he focused on recruiting mostly established NFL veterans. His roster had included All-Pro defensive end Lee Roy Selmon, for whom he had negotiated a contract that made Selmon the highest paid defensive player in NFL history; Rickey Dixon of the Bengals, the highest paid defensive back; future Hall of Fame offensive lineman Jackie Slater of the Rams; Redskins Super Bowl quarterback Doug Williams; and all-world linebacker Junior Seau of the Chargers. Steve was smart, aggressive, and highly effective, with a reputation for successfully navigating controversial player negotiations, like the deals that brought Carl Pickens to the Bengals, Andre Rison to the Colts, Corey Dillon to the Patriots, and Lawrence Phillips from the Rams to the Dolphins. What Steve didn’t do was go after rookies anymore. He had soured on the whole sordid process, the minefield of families, friends, hangers-on, and oversized immature egos—the stuff I was good at.
When I met with him, I put on a mock presentation, as if I was talking to a player and his family. I had morphed the Game Plan from a bound book into a PowerPoint, the digital format of the moment, and renamed it “the Playbook.” It showed off the key stats, player histories, Wonderlic tests, copies of the classified interview process, even video—clips of the drills players would be run through, Senior Bowl clips, confidential NFL video from the Combine, and so on. I was proud of my changes; the whole presentation could be altered with the click of a button, plus there was no book left behind to be fact-checked, or shared with another agent. The bottom line was: Here’s how we’re going to help you, the player, do better on these tests and impress pro teams. Here’s how we’re going to handle the media to get buzz, and how it’s all going to get you drafted higher. Here’s our competitive edge. Steve sat in the darkened home office at my house and watched, totally mesmerized. When I finished, he stood up, gave me a bear hug, and said, “We’re going to make a shitload of money.” He’d been old-school, nondigital, paper and ink, printed fliers, concentrating on negotiating contracts, which he was very good at. I’d taken what I’d learned with Gary to a higher level. Together we were going to be a force to reckon with.
On day one, I reached out to some of the people I knew could open doors for us in recruiting. My first call was to the best recruiter I ever knew, John Blake. He was, at the time, a coach at Nebraska.
Back when I was still with Gary Wichard, John had briefly coached at Mississippi State, just long enough to help Gary sign his first Mississippi State player, Tommy Kelly, who went on to become one of the highest-paid defensive tackles in the NFL with the Raiders. Kelly had been a top-rated defensive lineman in college but due to his failing a drug test, he tumbled hard on draft day, ultimately not getting picked at all. After the draft, Gary hadn’t secured a free-agent contract for Kelly and had been ready to give up and go home. I told him that if we didn’t find a home for Kelly within a few hours of the draft, all the rosters would be full and he’d be lucky to get into anybody’s training camp. Gary said he had dinner plans but if I wanted to, I could get on the phone and try to find a spot for Kelly. I called my old buddy George Karas and cut a deal to bring Kelly to Oakland. Gary came in the next day, made a few tweaks to the contract so he could say it was his, signed it, and Tommy Kelly had his chance to play in the NFL. Since Tommy was from outside of my territory, I wasn’t entitled to payment and, as expected, Gary didn’t offer.
Wherever John Blake coached, Gary signed players. In fact, it started back before Blake was officially a coach, when he was working for the Oklahoma Sooners as a graduate assistant to the coaching staff. He cultivated relationships with some of the players and then helped steer them to Gary, guys like linebacker Brian “the Boz” Bosworth and tight end Keith Jackson. Later in his coaching career (including his ill-fated stint as Oklahoma head coach, in which he was a great recruiter off the field but on the field could never measure up to the Sooners’ legendary Barry Switzer), he connected Gary to defensive end Cedric Jones, tight end Stephen Alexander, and cornerbacks William Bartee and Jacoby Sheppard. After he was fired from Oklahoma, he became a full-time employee at Pro Tect. Blake used to tell me that without his delivering players to “G,” his nickname for Gary, Wichard would never have made it in the business. Blake is a colorful guy, full of colorful phrases and his own country-boy humor. I’d talk to him about how we had to recruit a certain player and he’d make his favorite bad pun, “You got to cruit him before you can re-cruit him.” Once when he heard Gary and me tell a joke that happened to involve cunnilingus, Blake said with his slight lisp, “Cunnilingus? I don’t know nothing about no cunnilingus. Why you guys always got to use all them big Jewish words around me?” Blake is a true original, charming, disarming, and as good as they come in the game. I hoped to follow the same path Gary had and have Blake endorse me so that I could get a kick-start in recruiting in my first year with Feldman.
Once I’d started working with Steve Feldman, the first guy John connected me with was another player from back when he was at Mississippi State, nose tackle Ronald Fields. When Blake had moved to Nebraska, safety Josh Bullocks, one of his players, called him for a reference on me, and Blake said, “Yeah, Luchs is a good guy. He’ll take good care of you.”
In our first year together, Steve and I signed both Bullocks, who went to the Saints in the second round, and Fields, who was picked in the fifth round by the 49ers. We also had Claude Terrell, an offensive guard from New Mexico, picked by the Rams in the fourth round; James Sanders, a safety picked by the Patriots in the fourth round; Ryan Riddle, a linebacker out of Cal Berkeley, who went in the sixth round to the Raiders; and David Bergeron, a Stanford linebacker and seventh-round pick by the Eagles. (Willie Howard, by this time no longer in the NFL, was technically Gary’s former client, but we had stayed close. I helped hook him up with the East-West Shrine Game as a D-line coach and he helped hook me up with David Bergeron.) All that, plus Maurice Clarett, the notorious and superathletic Ohio State running back, a story unto himself, who went—miraculously—in the third round to the Broncos. We didn’t have a first-rounder but we represented players in six out of seven rounds, contrary to Gary’s prediction of my future.
I got so much help from Blake that now it was my turn to get the call from him like Gary got, asking for a “high five” in return. Around Christmas, John Blake reminded me of the favors he’d done and said he needed a “high five” in the form of a $1,500 flat-screen television for his family. He called me from the electronics store and I gave them a credit card number. No problem.
I never forgot that Gary told me I’d be nothing without him, and it was sweet to prove him wrong. And it was especially sweet that I got key leads from people I’d met and worked with at Pro Tect, Gary’s people, like John Blake and Willie Howard, and even Wade, the street runner.
Recruiting Big Samoans: Is That Redundant?
During the 2006 college football season, I reconnected with Gary’s runner, Wade, and he offered up connection to Tennessee Volunteers players, by way of a man called Navy, a gigantic Samoan who had connections to a couple of other gigantic Samoans, two Tennessee players. When Navy walked into our hotel room in Knoxville for our first meeting, I realized that he was a former offensive lineman Doc had represented, whom I hadn’t seen in years. He explained how he was “involved with the agent selection process” (any deal would have to go through him) for star defensive tackle Jesse Mahelona and offensive tackle Albert Toeaina. Albert was a lesser-rated prospect but a superb athlete with enormous upside … and an enormous backside. He also had a temperament issue, having been suspended by Coach Phil Fulmer for the final game of the regular season for spitting on a cameraman on his way off the field.
After Steve and I had good initial meetings with both players, they made it clear they both wanted to work with the same agents—us—provided we got the blessings of their parents. Steve and I flew up to northern California to meet Albert’s father, Pastor Alex Toeaina. After a warm Samoan greeting—“Talofa!” and a full-body hug—and the presentation of our “Albert Toeaina Playbook,” Pastor Alex proclaimed he and his family had prayed on it and determined we were the agents sent from God … with one catch. Obviously, God would not want his son to get anything less than what other agents were offering. (I hadn’t realized God even got involved in these negotiations.) Pastor Alex then showed us an e-mail from a financial advisor who worked with another agent, which promised a credit line of $250,000 for Albert if he signed with them. The pastor asked if we would match that offer. I diplomatically explained that, as good as Albert is, he wasn’t rated high enough to justify that much, and more importantly, that that amount of money would put his son too deeply in the hole to start his career. But I told him we could arrange for a $25,000 credit line, more than enough for the next few months since we’d be covering his living and training expenses in Long Beach, preparing for the Senior Bowl and Combine.
They went off to consider the offer, and, after what we assumed was more praying, we ended up signing Albert. Evidently Jesus gave us the nod. Then, a few days later, I got an emotional phone call from Pastor Alex, confessing that he had altered the e-mail from the other agent, adding a zero to the $25,000 credit line offer. Steve and I had already suspected this; I’d personally heard from that same financial advisor earlier, offering to create a credit line of $25k for players we signed, provided we worked with him. No doubt this was a financial advisor of great integrity. I knew that game. And anyway, it didn’t matter; we were fine with the $25,000 credit line since we weren’t on the hook for it; the financial planner was. The pastor just had one more request. He said his son would work even harder to get ready for the draft if he had a custom Escalade with chrome rims and every option available including having his son’s name, “Albee,” embroidered on the headrests … and to please have it delivered during his sermon to inspire his congregation. Amazingly, the financial advisor agreed to make the arrangements, put the car in Albert’s name, and had it delivered. We can only assume the congregation was uplifted. One gigantic Samoan down, one to go.
For us to meet Jesse’s father, Mr. Mahelona, was a little longer excursion, twenty-five hundred miles from L.A. to Kona on the island of Hawaii and back again in twenty-four hours. It was a trip, in every sense of the word: an expedition, a journey, and a bizarre experience. First, Mr. Mahelona said that no business would be conducted until we had dinner together, which he would arrange. He selected an Italian restaurant that we assumed was very good because it was packed. We made small talk about Hawaii, family, and football, and had what at best would be a less than mediocre meal. At the end of dinner, the waiter brought the check toward Mr. Mahelona, who executed a perfect last-second body-feint, steering the waiter and the bill to us. To eliminate any doubt about who was paying, Mr. Mahelona thanked us for taking him and his family to dinner. I looked at the check and it seemed to have one too many zeroes, like the credit line offer for Albert. When I looked a little closer, I realized that most, if not all, of the people in the restaurant were supposedly part of the extended Mahelona family, which explained why, despite the bad food, it was packed.
A thousand dollars or so later, it was finally time for business. We followed Jesse’s father to his home perched at the top of a hill with breathtaking views of the Pacific Ocean. This barefoot Jabba the Hut plopped himself down in his huge chair and grunted, his signal for me to begin the pitch. I told him about our company, Steve’s history and mine, and began to explain that we had a track record of managing the draft process so that our clients got drafted as high as possible. He interrupted me, screaming, “You don’t get my son drafted; my son gets my son drafted.” He hoisted his enormous body out of his chair and demanded we leave his house and never come back. Steve and I looked at each other with the same disbelief as when we had seen the dinner bill, only this time I didn’t just swallow it. I got up in his face and yelled back, “We flew all the way here, six hours from the Mainland, to meet you, to get your blessing, to do our best to represent your son, and we are not leaving until we at least get through our presentation.”
Mr. Mahelona was stunned but unrelenting. Steve, always the cooler head, pulled me outside while he calmed Mr. Mahelona, making small talk about anything but football, picking through their garage full of old surfboards, buying time, letting Mr. Mahelona cool down. He let us back in, and over the next few hours, we laid out our plan and he seemed to warm to it, and even to me. At the end, he proclaimed that we had his blessing. We took out a representation agreement for him to sign (meaningless and nonbinding without his son’s signature, but getting a player to sign is almost always easier if his father has already signed). He then called Jesse in Knoxville and told him he was giving us his blessing. From a total disaster to a save—miraculous. Two for two, a Samoan Sweep.
Mr. Mahelona listened a little on the phone, and hung up. We were ready to celebrate when he explained that Jesse had decided to sign with an agent in Tennessee, Chad Speck, who said he was representing players with a philosophy of “Christian ethics,” according to Mahelona. All I knew about Speck was that he represented the feared and brutal Titans defensive tackle Albert Haynsworth, who later that year would become infamous for his suspension for stomping another player’s head at the end of a play. Where ethics fit into this picture was a mystery to me. The father gave us both smothering bear hugs, thanked us for making the trip, and for dinner, and said good-bye. Our miracle was short-lived. We flew all night and arrived back in California wiped out, in every sense of the word. I called Jesse’s dad—why, I don’t know. He said hello, and without even identifying myself, and for no particular reason, I sang, “No New Year’s Day …” There was a long pause and then Mr. Mahelona completed the lyric in his deep, island-accented voice, “… to celebrate …” and together we went into the chorus of Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” Steve Feldman was looking at me as if I were nuts which, after no sleep, a thousand-dollar dinner for a village-sized family, being thrown out of the player’s father’s house, begging our way in again, bringing a deal back from the dead, and then losing it to an agent who they said claimed to have “Christian ethics” and they all bought it … well, maybe I was nuts at that moment. I hung up the phone and Steve and I just laughed. What else could we do? That’s the business we were in.
It would just be an expensive but funny story if it weren’t for the ending. Albert was signed as an undrafted free agent by the Panthers, went to the Raiders, then went to the CFL, then the UFL. Jesse was drafted in the fifth round by the Titans in 2006 but died in an alcohol-related car accident in 2009 at the age of twenty-six.
Close Encounters of the Sleazy Kind
Maybe the reason I find most agents claiming “ethics” laughable is that despite my own long and convoluted path to reform, I never ceased to be amazed at how low some guys could go. Before the start of the same season we tried to sign the Samoans, Steve Feldman and I were approached by a wanna-be agent peddling a player like a hot watch on a street corner. I got a call from a guy named Chuck Price, who’d been involved with a company called Air 7, an academy for quarterbacks run by a great QB coach named Steve Clarkson. Price, who wasn’t yet an agent, was dangling Matt Leinart, the quarterback from USC, the 2004 Heisman Trophy winner as a junior, and the odds-on favorite to win it again. USC was the preseason number-one team in the country, and Leinart was basically the hottest guy in football at the time. Price had talked to other players including Manuel White Jr., whom we’d also talked to and White supposedly told Price I claimed to have represented Terrell Suggs, which evidently impressed Price enough to come see us. He sat in our office, going on and on about how he hated Gary Wichard and just wanted the best representation for Leinart. Oh, and one other thing—he also wanted over 50 percent of the commission for himself.
Later, much later, we came to find out that Price also dangled Leinart in front of Wichard, during which he relayed the story that I claimed to have represented Suggs, which led to Gary going ballistic, calling me up yelling and screaming that I hadn’t represented anyone (and the Suggs story would reappear later in my legal battle with Gary). Price was pitting one agent against another to squeeze out the best deal he could, not for the player, but for himself. Nice business. Eventually, after a lot of agent-shopping, Leinart ended up with Tom Condon of CAA (after hiring and firing Steinberg) … with Chuck Price, not surprisingly being named as co-agent. One other thing: Not only was Price an officer of Air 7 academy, but as of 2005, so were Gary Wichard and Bob Leinart, Matt’s father. That’s the year before Matt Leinart, the country’s number-one player, played his final season at USC. Are all of those intertwined relations okay? Do they constitute possible conflict? Or at least warrant close scrutiny? It’s not as if the corporate papers are hard to find. They’re public record and I found them in preparation for my lawsuit with Gary Wichard. I wonder why the NFLPA, the NCAA, or USC never found them. Or if they did, why they didn’t raise an issue. But at that point, nothing should have surprised me. Because there’s always a more sordid, more twisted, more bizarre story.
Maurice Clarett: Shooting Star
I got a call one day in the fall of 2004 from my wife’s brother, who, like the rest of the family, worked in real estate. In his work he’d come across someone named Hai Waknine, an Israeli “businessman” (later referred to as a “mob figure,” “mobster,” or “gang member” by the L.A. Times, ESPN, and various online news sources). My brother-in-law said, “Have you ever heard of a guy named Maurice Clarett?” and I started laughing because nobody who does what I do within five hundred miles of a college football game hadn’t heard of Clarett. After Ohio State won the National Championship, he attempted to declare his eligibility a year earlier than the NFL allows. His decision wasn’t so much trying to set a ground-breaking legal precedent, as it was a practical one. He’d been suspended by OSU for the 2003 season for misconduct, so his choices were to sit out a whole season, then play another year as an amateur, or go pro and get paid. It wasn’t a tough call.
Clarett won the first round in his legal battle for eligibility but lost round two in a higher court. Once he lost, and his attorney Alan Milstein reported to NBCsports.com that he’d hired an agent, he forfeited all his remaining college eligibility. At that point, he had no choice but to wait for the next draft, which was what he was doing. My brother-in-law said that Hai Waknine was taking care of Clarett—who was living at Waknine’s house—and they were looking for help in representation. Wow! Clarett was not exactly an ethics major, but he was the kind of high-profile player that could really put us on the map. It was a chance to start recruiting big-ticket prospects again. So my brother-in-law made a call and patched me in to Hai Waknine, and other than him being a little scattered, a little ADD maybe, the opportunity seemed legitimate and I started thinking I could end up representing this kid. I told Steve and even though we’d only been together a few months, he trusted me and said he was all in.
I put together a Playbook on Clarett. Even though we were going to meet with Hai first before we could get an audience with Maurice, I took a page from Gary. I came prepared in case Hai wanted to see what we’d do, in case we did meet with Maurice, in case whatever. Gary was always prepared. He had “preparation” written at the top of every day of his pocket calendar book. He preached never, ever going anywhere unless and until you’re ready for whatever eventualities may come. I made preparation my mantra like he had.
We arrived at Waknine’s house, or rather compound, in Marina del Rey, right on the water. As we drove up, helicopters hovered. I just figured they were checking traffic, but later I realized they were checking Hai. We rang the bell and an enormous black guy opened the door, big enough to play defensive lineman, with a big gun in his belt bulging out of his sports jacket. He showed us to this expansive sofa facing a wall of glass overlooking the ocean. After a few minutes, Hai Waknine entered—a heavyset, dark-skinned, balding Israeli with a tic, sort of a mild case of Tourette’s. He sat on the sofa flanked by gorgeous European models, crossed his legs, and revealed an ankle bracelet. The kind that notifies the Feds if you leave town. He gave us a tour, as nice as could be, and told us to try his special espresso. I don’t drink coffee, but I know enough to drink it when a guy with an ankle bracelet tells me to.
He told us Maurice was working out with Charles Poliquin, who, according to Body Builder online magazine, was known for “producing faster athletes,” having trained several Olympians, NHL players, and NFL wide receiver David Boston, of whom Maurice Clarett was enamored. On the one hand, we were salivating because Clarett had superstar potential, but on the other hand, he wasn’t doing this right at all. First, living with an alleged Israeli mobster, likable or not, isn’t good. Second, David Boston had tested positive for GHB (gamma-hydroxybutyrate), a banned drug associated with bodybuilding, and had been dropped by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Whether they were true or not, rumors of steroids swirled around Poliquin’s techniques, and Boston had done nothing to distance himself from them. It seemed a distinct possibility that Maurice could run the risk of being “juiced” and maybe test that way.
I told Hai about Steve and his credentials. Hai told me he’d met Maurice through his relationship with Fizz and Boog, two rappers of the group B2K, and now had a contract giving him a big piece of Maurice in exchange for providing him trainers, lending him a new BMW, and giving him a video game console for Madden Football and a roof over his head—with a stunning ocean view. Hai had control over who would be Maurice’s agent, along with everything else in Maurice’s life, and set us up for a face-to-face meeting.
When we all got together, I showed Maurice our Playbook. Maurice made it clear that he wanted more than anything to play in the Senior Bowl. I’d already contacted Steve Hale, who runs it, and I knew they didn’t have a place for Maurice. It just wasn’t happening. Having tried to come out as a sophomore, Maurice was still technically in his junior year and the Senior Bowl had one overriding rule: like the name says, you have to be senior.
For the next meeting, I arranged for my old acquaintance Jack Hart, the director of the East-West Shrine Game, to fly out to L.A. and personally pitch Maurice on playing the Shrine. The Senior Bowl is more prestigious but playing in the Shrine would fill a hole in his story. If he could break off a run or two in practice, then pro scouts could see how good he still was, even though he hadn’t played football in two years. It would answer the question, “What has Maurice Clarett been doing for two years out of football?” If he played well, we could say he’d been working out, training, practicing. We could say he was ready, and even if he’d been playing Madden for six months straight, as long as he performed well, we’d be right. Jack shared my vision of taking Maurice around to Shriners hospitals, looking for PR opportunities, and rehabbing his image as a guy who cared about kids. We’d put his face on the Shrine Game ads on buses and billboards, give him his chance to be the star in the game, a win-win for everyone.
I prepped Jack, the Shriner, the best I could for what he was going to see—the guard with the guns, maybe helicopters, foreign models parading around in almost nothing, the alleged Israeli mobster (I called him a “real estate investor”), an oceanfront palace. We walked in, sat down, and waited until they ushered Maurice in as if he were royalty. Jack made his earnest pitch: the history of the game, the hospitals, the good work the Shriners do for kids, their role in the community, the photo ops, how well it reflects on the players, some of the high draft choices who’ve played.
Maurice listened and then asked what other big-name players were committed to being in the game. The answer was, so far, none … there were a lot of good prospects but it was too early to send out invites. Maurice asked Jack to give him the phone numbers of the players he wanted so Maurice could call them and convince them to play. Jack couldn’t do that, and said so. It would break every rule of confidentiality. He offered to show Maurice some of the names but not their personal contact information. This didn’t sit well with Maurice. He’d been living with an Israeli Larry Flynt for months, absorbing the house culture, operating by the house rules. Maurice had seen that every Friday night, when the sun went down, no matter what they were doing, all work ended. Hai, his entourage, and his family lit candles and said their evening prayers. So, at that moment, when the discussion wasn’t going his way, Maurice suddenly stood up and said, “This meeting is over. It’s Shabbat.” He walked out of the room. Jack turned to me and said, “What’s he talking about?” I said, “I have no idea. Today is Wednesday.” I rode with Jack to the airport, apologizing, and he was very understanding. The whole ride, I was thinking, What can we possibly do to reshape this kid’s image?
During my time with Gary, I’d gotten to know Tom Friend, a writer with ESPN the Magazine. He’d done several pieces on Gary’s players and I thought he would be ideal for a puff piece on Maurice. I set up a preliminary meeting for Friend, Hai, and Maurice at my house. That led to a second meeting, held at the office of David Kenner, an associate of Hai and coincidentally the attorney for the infamous gangster rap label Death Row Records, founded by Suge Knight and Dr. Dre—just to add to Maurice’s wholesome entourage. My goal was to get a story written about how Maurice was preparing for the draft, his training and conditioning, as the only player ever to go through the NFL Combine twice, a pretty juicy story for Friend and ESPN the Magazine.
Hai and his people had a different agenda. He and Maurice thought it was a good opportunity to tell his side of the story of his troubles and suspension at Ohio State. According to the official reports at the time, Maurice had publicly criticized OSU officials for not paying for his airplane ticket home for a friend’s funeral. A few months later, a teaching assistant at Ohio State told the New York Times that Maurice had been given favorable treatment by a professor, but upon investigation there had not been adequate evidence for academic misconduct. However, in the 2003 athletic year, Maurice was suspended for filing a false police report, claiming that in excess of $10,000 in goods had been stolen from a car he’d borrowed, and for having misled investigators. In addition, Maurice had pleaded guilty to a lesser criminal charge.
Now refuting the official version, Maurice told Friend that when the misconduct investigation took place, he didn’t tell the whole truth in the police report on the car break-in because he wanted to protect coach Jim Tressel and his brother Dick, an assistant coach, who had arranged for him to “borrow” cars from local dealers. The truth, Maurice said, was that the school had promised him passing grades to stay eligible, professors easy on ballplayers, do-nothing independent-study courses, a tutor to do his homework (Bob Eckhart, who’d helped other players), a car-of-the-month, a no-work job, and bonuses for reading stories to boosters’ kids, the amount of the bonus determined by how well he’d played the previous Saturday. After OSU beat Michigan in November 2002, a game in which Maurice ran more than a hundred yards and a touchdown, a booster paid him more than $6,000.
According to Maurice, Tressel’s staff arranged for him and at least twenty other players to receive special treatment, including allowing them to live off campus their freshman year though it was against university rules. (I can’t say what is true and what isn’t but this is what Maurice maintained in his interview with Tom Friend.) What had begun as my spin for a light-weight piece on prepping for the draft had suddenly exploded into a juicy exposé for Friend and ESPN. Partway through the process, Hai and his group started to balk. Either they realized this wasn’t such a good idea or they decided that if they went ahead with it, they wanted to be guaranteed the cover of the magazine. Friend couldn’t promise the cover. But the story had been told.
I did my best to run interference, almost always working through Hai, rarely directly contacting Maurice. They wanted to kill the article. And they weren’t the only ones. I learned the Ohio State University Athletic Director, Andy Geiger, had flown to New York for what turned out to be a contentious meeting with the bigwigs at ESPN the Magazine, trying to bury the story. It was too late. Friend wrote it, ESPN ran everything they could corroborate, and it caused a furor, albeit short-lived. There was a burst of outrage … and then nothing. Ohio State adamantly denied everything. They attacked Maurice’s credibility—not hard to do. Friend got hate mail, even death threats from Ohio State fans. The NCAA took no more than a cursory look. Why didn’t they launch a big investigation, with all these alleged rules violations? Simple: they didn’t want to know. Or maybe they realized they lacked the authority to find out since Maurice was no longer a student-athlete and didn’t have to answer their questions. Of course, later, the NCAA would turn the heat up, largely due to public pressure, and the whole ugly matter would be exposed (much more about this later).
By this time, my role with Steve had evolved into being the specialist on the draft and the rookie process. I was the blunt force, telling Maurice how he was being perceived in the draft process, what his deficiencies were, and how to fill the holes to get drafted as high as possible. But Maurice had an urge to constantly do what was bad for him, as anyone could see by taking one look at his living situation and entourage. Steve and I used to joke, if you put a pile of shit and a pile of money on the table, Maurice would reach for the pile of shit. He was probably the first player I worked with who I didn’t like personally. We had moments of clarity in which I’d find him to be a sympathetic character, but they wouldn’t last and he’d revert to prima donna. Thankfully, Steve had a higher tolerance level for his behavior. Ultimately Maurice signed with us, but it was clear that this would be our one rep agreement with only Steve Feldman’s name on it.
Still, the shit had hit the fan from the ESPN article and it was up to both of us to clean it up. This was January 2005, time to focus on the Combine, training, and then the draft. After we had signed our other players and set them up in apartments in Long Beach, we got them started with our trainer, Chuckie Miller, out of his private gym, on the field at Long Beach City College and up and down the sand dunes at the beach. Chuckie had played for many years and had trained a lot of great players. Hai would often brag to us that Maurice’s training was so far superior to what anyone else was doing, saying that he’d run circles around the other guys at the Combine. But when I heard about his regimen, there was one thing missing: running. Not to state the obvious, but Maurice was a running back. And we were never allowed to see him actually training. Except once when he was working with the USC Olympic sprinter Quincy Watts, before he started to work with Poliquin. Even then, even working with an Olympic sprinter, Maurice wouldn’t run; he just jogged around the track. We wanted Maurice to work out with Chuckie Miller on the sand dunes, so Steve and I went to Hai’s house and got Maurice to follow us out to Long Beach. When we arrived at the dunes, Maurice was in his car on the cell phone and wouldn’t get off. Finally, he finished his conversation and said he doesn’t run on the sand. We told him, “It offers great resistance and strengthens all the muscles in your lower body. It helps with explosiveness. If you can run shuttle drills and three-cone combine drills in the sand, it’s much easier to do it on a flat surface, when you get timed.” He just said, “No.” Oh shit, we thought, we’re in for trouble at the Combine.
In February, Steve and I told our concerns to Hai and David Kenner (whose whole rap history mesmerized Maurice), hoping they could influence Maurice. I wasn’t just a little worried; I was going berserk over what could happen at the Combine in Indianapolis. We reiterated that Maurice had to show up at the Combine at the same weight or less than what he’d been a year earlier, because he sure looked too heavy. Maurice also had to nail the interview process and give the answers the NFL people wanted to hear to every question, showing that he’d matured, especially in light of the ESPN story. We told Hai and David that he had to do better on the Wonderlic than last time. It seemed as if they were listening, especially Hai, who, after all, was paying the bills on everything. He knew Maurice was his investment, boom or bust. We started working with Maurice right away on the interview and the Wonderlic, but his weight was not looking good. He refused to get on a scale.
We got to the Combine, checked into the hotel, and still didn’t know what he weighed. Maurice was set to be officially weighed the next morning, then run through the whole process. This was the first time the Combine was televised, and Steve set up a live interview with Rich Eisen and Terrell Davis on the NFL Network to be held after Maurice’s performance at the Combine. That night Maurice was dressed in layers and layers of clothing, and he worked on the treadmill and elliptical at the hotel for hours, pouring sweat, trying to lose water weight before the weigh-in, like a boxer.
The next morning, Maurice weighed in a couple of pounds lighter than he had the year before, and the buzz was great. “Wow, Maurice is in shape.” Nobody knew how he got there. And he managed to do well with the bench press, lifting 225 pounds twenty times. Then came the press conferences. We had prepped him very well and he’s a good speaker. This was the new Maurice Clarett, new attitude, new maturity, a new man, just what the teams want to hear. So far, it was going great. Next was the Cybex test, a part of the physical that we had told him not to take. In fact, I’ve told lots of players not to take it. For the Cybex, they strap one leg down and have you do leg extensions until your leg is completely exhausted, so the next few days you have dead legs when it comes time to run the forty-yard dash. If they really pressed a player to do it, we always told them to do it after the forty, which pisses off the people running things but there’s not much they can do and they’ll never actually reschedule it. Amazingly, Maurice did what we said and skipped the Cybex.
Instead, we worked on more prep for the Wonderlic. The next day it was time for the forty-yard dash and the other field work. Gil Brandt, an NFL legend who runs the Combine and happened to be supportive of Maurice, broke precedent and let me and Steve into the media green room, with all the writers, to watch the monitor while Maurice ran. Most of the beat writers had no idea his agents were floating among them so they were openly rooting against Maurice. He got ready to run and it was as if everything was in slow motion. Not because that’s how I imagined it, or because it was important to me—this was because Maurice was literally running in slow motion. No burst, no explosion, just flat. He finished the forty in 4.7-plus seconds, a good two tenths of a second slower than the 4.5 he needed. Disaster.
There was laughter and howling in the media room, pretty cold delight. Now Maurice was supposed to run routes and running back drills. The only thing he could do worse than his forty time would be to just quit. And that’s exactly what he did. He walked off the field. He knew he was fucked so he walked. But instead of going to his hotel room, he went into his interview with Terrell Davis and Rich Eisen to discuss the most anticipated but worst Combine performance in NFL history. Somehow he stumbled through it. When they asked him why he’d walked off, he said he just wasn’t feeling it and besides, he was going to work out at Ohio State’s Pro Day the next week and scouts could see him there. That sounded like a reasonable answer but it opened up a can of worms. First, we couldn’t get him fixed up in a week. Second, we had no idea if Ohio State, having thrown him out of school and then read about him ripping Jim Tressel apart in ESPN the Magazine, would let him work out there.
We just tried to hustle him out of the hotel—Steve, David Kenner, and me—and out of town, past the fans yelling at him, stuff like, “I can drink a forty faster than you can run one,” and him just staring at the ground. Once on the plane, he started downing miniatures of Grey Goose, one after another, never showing any sign of being drunk. Steve and I were hit with another rude awakening. Maybe he was an alcoholic too. Maybe that, plus being out of shape, was the thing slowing him down.
We followed up the trip with a “Come to Jesus” meeting—it was time to train, according to our rules, or we were dropping him as a client. And if Steve Feldman, who’d made a name for himself dealing with misfits, walks away from you, that’s a curse the scouts won’t miss. We recommended, and Hai and David agreed, to have Maurice train with Todd Durkin, a phenomenal trainer who’d worked with LaDanian Tomlinson, which ought to be as impressive as Poliquin working with David Boston.
While Maurice was doing that, I had to deal with the Ohio State Pro Day problem. No way would Maurice be ready in a week, and we couldn’t have him pull out of Pro Day on his own; it would just confirm him as a quitter. So the only way out was to hope Ohio State would kill it. That was our bet. I sent a formal request for Maurice to participate, crossed my fingers, and luckily they sent us a formal rejection. Then I leaked that story to John Clayton of ESPN—Maurice wanted to do Pro Day at Ohio State but the school wouldn’t let him—and, as I expected, it went viral. Now all we had to figure out was where scouts would see him and when he could actually be ready. The NFL rule was that teams can only attend a player’s workout where he played college or high school ball or at a “conjoining metropolitan area,” meaning pretty close to either of those. It turned out Charlie Frye, the quarterback prospect out of University of Akron, was going to do his Pro Day in Akron in early April, one of the last scheduled “pro days” of the cycle. If we could piggyback with him, that would buy us an extra eight weeks. Akron isn’t that close to OSU, which is in Columbus, but after some back and forth with the league, they agreed to let Maurice work out there.
But there will still problems. The athletic department at Akron wouldn’t agree, and most importantly, Charlie Frye wouldn’t agree. Everyone thought it would create a circus atmosphere and steal attention from Frye. All the while, Maurice was supposedly working out in San Diego but Durkin reported that it had been a struggle to get him to workouts each day. Finally Hai and Kenner got Maurice’s cousin, Vince Morrow, to live with him, like a babysitter, to make sure he showed up every day for his drills. And I kept searching the state of Ohio for a place to do a Pro Day. Maurice wanted to do it at Warren G. Harding High School, in Warren, Ohio, because it’s where he played and they have a hard Tartan track. And he knew it was the same surface that fellow college exile and NFL hopeful Mike Williams of USC had run on. On this kind of track, you can’t wear track spikes and instead have to wear flat-bottom sneakers, but it lends itself to fast forties. Of course, scouts know this and adjust for it, but each scout adjusts differently so maybe it was worth it … unless it rained, and the track got slick and the grass field turned to mud and craters. Then I’d have to find a place for Maurice to run indoors. I gave myself an instant Ohio geography lesson and came across a place called Farmer Jim’s Indoor Soccer Complex in the town of Cortland, just close enough to Warren to meet the NFL rules. And Farmer Jim’s indoor surface is the original Astroturf over concrete—hard as rock, literally, and fast. Maurice didn’t want to do it there so the plan was to go to the high school and if it rained, we’d call an audible and send the scouts to Farmer Jim’s. At this point, I was figuring whatever could go bad, would.
And even on the trip out from L.A. to Ohio, it turned out that way. Steve and I were in the Phoenix airport for a connection, and I was on the phone with John Clayton of ESPN, and suddenly there was a scene with a police officer escorting a prisoner who somehow must’ve convinced the cop to take off his cuffs so he could take a leak or something, and the prisoner started beating the hell out of the cop, right in front of us. I ran over to the fray and asked the cop if he needed help. He said yes, so I grabbed the convict, threw him down, and pounced on top of him while Steve kicked him a few times for good measure. The cop picked himself up and took control again. John Clayton ended up writing a feature entitled, “Clarett’s Agents to the Rescue.” Steve and I concluded that everything to do with Maurice Clarett is trouble, even a walk through an airport. It’s funny but too true.
Of course, when we got to Warren, Ohio, it poured rain. We gave ourselves a head start and told everybody to re-route with directions to the location twenty minutes away, so we could get to Farmer Jim’s ahead of the pack.
Typically the order of the workout is they take height and weight, then bench press, vertical jump, broad jump, then the forty, shuttle drills, and position work. We had about an hour and a half until the workout started and we figured Maurice was still a little heavy so the first thing we did was crank up the heat until it was like a sauna. Then we hid the scale in a locked closet so we could say, “Who’d have thought they wouldn’t have a scale?” Even if they came up with a scale later on, we’d have ninety minutes for him to sweat off another couple of pounds. Then Steve and I took a measuring tape to recheck the distance for the forty because Maurice couldn’t afford the time of a fraction of an extra step. The workout started and there was more media than scouts—about four or five teams, including the locals, the Browns and Bengals. After warmups, Maurice was ready and the scouts started bitching about wanting a scale. We said we’d scheduled the run for one o’clock and we were ready. We videoed the whole thing for the teams that weren’t there and we were planning to do the entire workout first (the parts that would make him sweat), and the measurements afterward. If Maurice got weighed later, we could edit the tape to put the weigh-in at the beginning of the workout. Every little bit that might help. Embellishment. Finally … he ran: 4.68. Not the 4.5 we wanted but more than a tenth of a second faster than his 4.7+ last time. We called John Clayton at ESPN and on Sports Center they reported, “Maurice Clarett had his workout today and though he was two pounds heavier than at the Combine, he ran faster.” All they focused on was the improvement. In reality, it was the surface he ran on, but sometimes perception is better than reality.
It had been a roller-coaster ride since the Combine. Before it started, there were people saying Maurice might not get drafted at all. Then after his interviews, some said he could go as high as the second round. Then he worked out and went into free-fall. Now, three and a half weeks before the draft, we’d had his Pro Day and the positive chatter was picking up. We thought we were doing great, a minor miracle in fact.
But it wasn’t okay with Maurice and his handlers. Kenner, Hai, Maurice, and his mom, Michelle, seemed to think I was getting quoted too much in the press. Plus Hai and Kenner had the idea of building their own athlete management business, with Maurice as the centerpiece. To them, my media attention was stealing thunder from their new business plan. To me, I was managing the media blitz the way I’d observed Wichard doing it for years, and it was working. They weren’t happy and they summoned Steve to a private meeting—very ominous. I was in Palm Springs for a couple of days off with my family. Steve was very uncomfortable given all we knew, had heard, and read on the Internet about these guys. Who knew what they might do? Steve even called Tom Friend to let him know the meeting was happening so somebody in the media would know where he was that day in case he disappeared. He got to the meeting and they really unloaded on him, saying how dissatisfied they were, how much they disagreed with what I was doing and how I was doing it. They didn’t threaten Steve but even so, these are not people you want to have mad at you.
We just kept doing our job. Our goal wasn’t just to keep Maurice or ourselves in the headlines; it was to get some meaningful buzz—draft news—out there about him, something with some shred of truth that we could leak to the press. And we got it. One morning, Steve was on his treadmill and he got a call from Bill Parcells, then the head coach of the Cowboys, giving him the third degree about Maurice. Was he really ready to play? Was he getting in better shape? What was his attitude like? And he indicated, if the answers were good, the Cowboys were interested in taking Maurice at some point in the draft. We embellished that conversation in the retelling to suggest Parcells had targeted Maurice for the fourth round. It was not exactly what he’d said but, to coin a phrase, it was “leakable” and the morning of the draft, it “somehow” got out. The Internet is amazing. Click: the bloggers get it, couple it with a quote or two from Parcells about interest in a “big back,” then the sports sites pick it up, then the national media run it, and the more it runs, the more real it gets. Once it was out, we figured the fourth round was the floor, the latest we projected he’d go in the draft, and if another team was interested, they’d think they would have to draft him ahead of the Cowboys.
We knew that Mike Shanahan and the Broncos had an interest in Maurice because, even though they weren’t at his Pro Day, they’d asked for a tape of it. We knew the Broncos had a nontradable compensatory pick (a selection the league gives based on free agents lost the previous season), the last pick in the third round, but didn’t have a pick in the fourth. We figured they didn’t want to take the chance the Cowboys would take him in the fourth, as we had spread the word they planned to. It was a long shot—the Broncos had only rumors to gauge Dallas’s interest—but, to our amazement, it worked. Maurice Clarett, the magnet for trouble, was picked on the first day of the draft. He didn’t fall out of the draft like some people predicted. He didn’t even go late. He went to Denver, a team that had a history of a great running game, and he went to Mike Shanahan, who everybody thought was a genius with running backs—the guy who’d drafted Terrell Davis. Finally, Hai Waknine and David Kenner were happy. So were Maurice and even his mother.
It really was a miracle. Maurice had been consistently lazy, constantly in or flirting with trouble, and had been away from football for a long time. He wanted to be a pro running back, whose job was to be fit and fast, but he’d run slow times twice and was overweight. He’d been suspended, banned, and arrested—and he didn’t even look like he was trying hard to come back. Yet somehow, he was drafted ahead of one hundred fifty other guys. If ever I’d earned my money as an agent, it was while representing Maurice Clarett. So, how did he repay us?
The next step was mini-camps, immediately after the draft. Rookie mini-camp is three to four days for the teams to see the players they’ve drafted. Right away, Maurice had a run-in with the strength and conditioning coach and went to Denver’s GM Ted Sundquist, and demanded that the coach be fired. Here was a third-round pick demanding the ten-year strength coach get canned … and we hadn’t even negotiated his contract yet. Then his drinking problem resurfaced. We got a call from the Broncos one day informing us that Maurice was frantic that he had left a bag in the back of the limo he had taken from camp to the airport. We started calling to track down the bag and the driver said Maurice hadn’t left anything in the car except a Gatorade sports bottle, which he took to Maurice, who snatched it from him as if it were more than a plastic bottle. We came to find out Maurice had his bottle with him at practice, on the sidelines. He took a swig and allegedly told Rod Smith—Mr. Bronco—his All-Pro wide receiver teammate, that he’s “gotta get his Goose on.” Yup; his water bottle was evidently full of Grey Goose vodka. The more the team saw him in action, the more they saw that the wiser, more mature Maurice Clarett was fiction.
Still, Steve and I managed to come out with a good contract in our dealings with the same Ted Sundquist that Maurice had asked to fire the strength coach. We worked out the structure of a guaranteed $410,000 signing bonus, plus his salary. Just keeping Denver interested was no small feat in itself. Fortunately ego sometimes overcomes logic: If we picked him, we can make him a star. The Broncos seemed to believe the franchise history showed they worked magic with running backs and could do it again, and they had the magician in Mike Shanahan. Magic or not, this would be some trick. We then went to David Kenner’s office in Encino and got Sundquist on the phone to review the details. But Kenner said he’d already discussed it with Maurice and it was unacceptable. They didn’t want a piddling four hundred grand up front. Maurice Clarett was going to be a superstar and he wanted a deal built on incentives that would reward him like the first-round pick he should have been. Kenner told us to work out the details and walked out of the room.
What they wanted was basically a suicide deal, especially for a player as volatile as Maurice. A little bit of contract negotiating background here: the NFL instituted a salary cap in 1994, permitting teams only so much money they can spend per year. (The actual figure is complicated to arrive at, and varies based on a lot of factors.) If they give a player a big bonus, they pay it out up front, but for bookkeeping and salary cap calculations, it gets amortized over the term of the deal. However, if the team lets the player go early, they have to accelerate the bookkeeping, paying out all the guaranteed money, including the bonus, immediately. That, in turn, means it eats into their total team salary cap number immediately. Sometimes a team’s inducement to give a player a second or third chance is to prevent taking the salary cap hit all at once. We wanted those extra chances for Maurice.
Instead, because of David and Maurice, we were losing a good deal. And Steve and I looked like fools to the Broncos. Worst of all, it was bad for Maurice. Fortunately Sundquist was a decent guy and was open to keep talking. At one point in the negotiations, Steve and I went for a walk in Beverly Hills to get something to eat and I said, “You know, the whole thing is a shame because I’ll bet you a dollar Maurice Clarett never plays a down in the NFL.” He took the bet, I think just because it would be too pessimistic not to. We finally worked a deal in which Maurice got heavy incentives on the back end, despite the front office saying they couldn’t do it because it would be changing team policy, and even the players’ union saying it was too far out of the ordinary. We explained that our client was insisting on it even if it wasn’t good for him.
We put the best spin on it we could. We told the media that Maurice was saying, don’t just pay me for showing up, pay me for what I earn, for the way I actually perform. The talking heads on ESPN picked it up and reported that Maurice was showing a mature attitude. Just because he’d been drafted in the third round, and was getting third-round money, he was willing to give it up and show people how hard he’d work. He would prove his value. It made a good story. The question was, would it turn out to be true?
What we did get into the deal was a set of off-season bonuses. All Maurice had to do was show up for off-season workouts and he’d collect the equivalent of the rejected signing bonus. That way the team got some assurance, or at least hope, that he’d overcome his bad work ethic to get his money. As it turned out, Maurice, not being in the shape he should’ve been in, strained his hamstring in training camp and nursed the injury for most of the preseason, saying he wanted to be completely healthy for the regular season. We tried to explain to him that with other running backs showing their stuff in the preseason, if Maurice didn’t win a spot on the roster, for him there wouldn’t be a regular season. For the last preseason game, the Broncos reported that Maurice wasn’t hurt so technically he could play, but as Steve and I had predicted to Kenner, they didn’t play him. The decision had been made. If they had played him, and he’d gotten hurt, they couldn’t have cut him without an injury settlement. They kept him out of the game and then they cut him. Maurice never took a preseason snap, never played a down as a Bronco, and other than preseason pay, never got a salary or bonus.
We had a couple of phone calls from him after that in which he asked, “Now what?” First, he had to clear waivers, that is, give another team a chance to pick him and pick up the terms of his contract. But that would’ve meant paying him those big back-end workout bonuses, which wasn’t going to happen. Maurice cleared waivers in twenty-four hours. Every NFL team had the chance to sign him, and nobody picked him up. No one wanted to touch him.
It was about that time that David Kenner and Hai Waknine started to think maybe they’d bet on the wrong horse. Maurice was headed to the CFL or NFL Europe at best. (In fact, a year later, he was arrested for armed robbery and was convicted. In 2010, he played for the Omaha Nighthawks of the UFL.)
The whole fiasco was sad. We did our best to save Maurice from himself. And we almost did it. In the end, it didn’t hurt our reputation. It probably helped it. It was almost as if prospects looked at us and thought, “Hey, if they can candy-coat a turd and get him drafted in the first day, imagine what they can do with me and with talent instead of drama.”
Unfortunately, I did win that one-dollar bet with Steve (the only dollar I made in working with Maurice Clarett).
Sports Biz Meets Show Biz
The biggest news in the industry in 2006 was Tom Condon’s move from IMG to CAA. Condon, who represented some of the biggest names in the game—Marvin Harrison, LaDainian Tomlinson, both Peyton and Eli Manning—said, “Two years ago, I told IMG that the sports agent of the future needed to have ties with other entertainers. These athletes are celebrities and entertainers just like movie stars and rock stars. But IMG wasn’t interested.” So he made a deal with CAA, Hollywood’s powerhouse talent agency. Condon would remain in his home base of Kansas City, but he’d have the glitz and glamour of CAA to offer his clients. Going Hollywood was the new game in town.
Almost simultaneously, Steve Feldman had been in quiet talks with the Gersh Agency, a talent agency with a reputation for building strong personal relationships with talent and a distinguished client list that included timeless icons like Humphrey Bogart and Richard Burton, and recent TV stars like Debra Messing of Will and Grace and David Schwimmer of Friends. As we started recruiting in late 2005 for the 2006 season, the talks heated up. Steve was talking with Hugh Dodson, COO of Gersh, and with Toi Cook, who they’d brought in to be Director of Player Development. Toi had been a defensive back, out of Stanford, who played with the Saints and the Super Bowl champion 49ers, a very sharp guy and Stanford alum. With Feldman and me, they’d have a sports agent base.
We worked out the details in late ’05 and early ’06 and announced it in the spring. Gersh represented all kinds of major writers and directors, which should theoretically provide opportunities for ball players in entertainment, plus access to red-carpet events, hobnobbing with stars, going to premieres, a really glitzy package. This was big news. Everybody who heard about Condon and CAA could nod their heads and get it. But Feldman and Luchs? That was a coup. One year together, no first-round draft picks, but a lot of PR, a lot of buzz. Gersh was betting on our momentum.
We had to get clients to build our roster under their banner, not only Steve’s NFL veterans or our handful of new guys, but clients for Gersh—with Hollywood potential—and demonstrate real synergy. It was a chance for me to show my value as part of the new venture.
The deal was, we would essentially turn over all of our income to the agency and take it back in the form of salary, but suddenly I was getting health benefits, a beautiful office in Beverly Hills, a support staff, and a great product to sell. I signed a three-year employment contract and collected a paycheck and that, in itself, was an improvement in my cash flow. When you represent athletes, you don’t automatically get paid or have your piece deducted from their paycheck before it gets to you. You have to go collect it, and that’s not always easy. You can get a little bit from the upfront signing bonus, something when the deal is done in August or September, but after that you don’t get paid again until the regular season ends in December. Typically, you don’t have money coming in again until the next crop of players’ signing bonuses the following spring, unless you happen to pick up free agents at the end of the season. You have to manage your money to carry you through these long periods and you have to hope the player makes paying you a priority. But with this new arrangement, I was getting a paycheck every two weeks, plus a built-in bonus structure as a performance incentive. Prior to Gersh, any players Steve and I had together, we had split sixty for him, forty for me, because he picked up the expenses.
Leading up to the Gersh deal, we were out recruiting players. I’d been talking to Jon Alston, a linebacker from Stanford, who was friendly with David Bergeron, who we’d represented the year before. But at the end of the recruiting year, he did a one-eighty. We thought he was coming into L.A. to sign with us but his mother, who had evidently been an attorney, wanted him to go with Gary Uberstine because she thought he had a more substantial company with ties to the entertainment business. Alston just stopped returning our phone calls. Very classy. He’d had dinner with me and my wife. I’d taken him to see guys training. We’d talked every week. Then, suddenly, nothing. No good-bye. I should’ve been used to it by then, but I wasn’t. I left him a pretty harsh phone message, describing him with trash talk he’d relate to, and figured that was the end of it. But, of course, it wasn’t.
That same year, we had a couple of players in the Senior Bowl: Mike Bell, an Arizona running back (who we signed with the Broncos and coincidentally was assigned number 20, the number that would’ve been Maurice’s), and Daniel Bullocks, Josh Bullocks’s twin brother. We went down to Mobile to the game and I was visiting with Bell in his room. I walked down the hall and there was Jon Alston. We kind of stared at each other for a minute, and eventually I waved him off and walked away. He called after me, “No, no, hold on.” I had already told Mike Bell how disappointed I’d been in Alston, which Mike must’ve shared with Jon. In the meantime, though it wasn’t official yet, we’d made our deal with Gersh. And Alston was a drama major at Stanford, so our working with a Hollywood agency would mean something to him. He begged me to talk and, of course, I did. This was my chance to tell him how disrespectful he’d been and how he should have manned up and called me. He was very apologetic and he wanted to know what was happening with our business, with me, Feldman, my wife and kids, and most of all, the Gersh Agency. His apology was obviously straight from the heart … of his ambitions. We left the conversation saying if he wanted to come see us in L.A. to let me know. He’d already signed with Gary Uberstine, who had already paid for Alston’s training at API (Athletes Performance Institute), a very expensive facility, laid out expense money, and flown his mother all over the place, but Jon was as willing to screw Gary as he had been to screw me. And even though he’d already burned me once, all I saw was another high draft choice.
Sure enough, back in L.A., he came to see me and Steve and meet with Dodson, Toi Cook, and Bob and David Gersh. We paraded him around the office, meeting one talent agent after another, this one who handles big-name comedians, this one who has directors, and writers, and so on. We talked about screenings and premieres, and how we could set up auditions for him, and he was eating it up. On the spot, he decided to sign a termination letter firing Gary Uberstine. There’s supposed to be a five-day waiting period between when a client fires an agent and hires another, but most agents get around it by post-dating the representation agreements. There was just one more thing, Alston said. Would we mind flying his parents out from Louisiana? It was just as a formality, but he was very close to his mom and he wanted her blessing.
No problem. We put Alston’s parents up in a boutique hotel in Beverly Hills and gave them the same tour of the office. But his mother gave off a really bad vibe. She was curt, almost rude, hard as nails. When she met with Dodson, she laid out her own plan for the agency to set up a branch in Louisiana where she’d help us recruit players. Ballsy. And a really bad idea. Then we were sitting in Bob Gersh’s office, running through Steve’s track record, the great players he’s represented, from Lee Roy Selmon to Andre Rison to Junior Seau. She was not impressed and said something like if a rock sits by the side of the road long enough, eventually it grows moss … or some such analogy. Steve politely excused himself, which took all the self-control he could muster, and I was stuck taking them out to lunch, where the insult continued. She didn’t even attempt to make small talk. She took out a book and began reading at the table. We got them back on a plane, ducked the idea of her “branch office,” and proceeded with the paperwork with Alston. We didn’t discuss Jon’s momma’s drama with him—why embarrass him? Our goal was to keep him happy and sign him. And we did. Variety did a story on it, featuring Jon Alston, drama major from Stanford, the first player to sign with us at the Gersh Agency, attracted by the Hollywood connection.
We were in contact with Michael Hoffman, a young agent who worked with Uberstine, and they were plenty pissed at us. We assured them, and Jon, that all the costs they had laid out on behalf of Alston—training at API, per diem living, whatever—would be reimbursed. Jon was obligated to repay the money, so we were just promising that we’d make good, out of our pockets, on his promise. They sent us a breakdown of expenses and we disagreed with some items, such as travel to Las Vegas for him and his family, a laptop computer, entertainment costs, some things not directly related to training. We cut a check for what we thought was right but Jon was worried they’d file a grievance against him, which they did. He paid some of the costs that were in dispute. Part of the deal with API, the training facility, was that they’d get a bonus if Jon was drafted in the first, second, or third round, a different amount for each round. He was the thirteenth player taken in the third round by the Rams that year so they got an additional $1,500, which we thought was excessive; but we paid it.
NFL Economics: Short Course
Jon Alston’s was a typical NFL deal, not as lucrative as most people think—not for him, and not for his agents. Take a look at the economics: We got him a signing bonus of $550,000, plus his first-year base salary of $275,000, for a total of $825,000. As his agents, we received 3 percent, which was $24,750. But between Uberstine and API we paid back almost $25,000, so we were essentially at breakeven, or worse if we factored in the nonrecoupable expenses of recruiting him. His salary went up in year two to $360,000, so if all went well, we’d get 3 percent, or $10,800. There may be glamour in the business, but except for the superstars, the money is less and you can’t spend glamour. It takes a lot of deals with a lot of players to add up to a real business.
Meanwhile, we were out beating the bushes for clients. Alston had been a good get, but we still needed more that year. So, to bring us to the attention of players, at the Super Bowl, Gersh sponsored the Hawaiian Tropic Model Search. The event featured beautiful girls in bikinis showing off their tans for the judges who just happened to be our clients … and yes, it brought players and their friends, some of whom became new clients. And, at the Senior Bowl, I’d connected with a financial advisor to some of the players and asked him if any of them might be lured by the Hollywood connection. He told us about Marcus Spears, first-round pick out of LSU drafted by the Cowboys, a client of Jimmy Sexton. Spears was a charming, good-looking guy with a big personality, and we set up a conversation. I started pitching him about how Gersh represents these big-name comics, Jamie Foxx, Chris Tucker, Dave Chappelle, and Monique. Marcus loved Monique, who was going to do a concert in Dallas, and we got him VIP tickets. He was trying to decide whether to come out to L.A. to meet with us, and if he did, he wanted to bring his sister. I had him on the phone and I held the phone up to the window, to the outside traffic, and I said, “Marcus, do you hear that? Do you? You know what that is? That’s Hollywood calling, baby. Are you gonna answer the call?” He laughed, eating it up, and he and his sister flew out to see us. Besides Hollywood, I had a connection with Jim Rome and his syndicated sports radio show. I’d known him for years, including in our childbirth classes and from trick-or-treating with the kids, and our wives had become close friends. I called and asked if he wanted to have Marcus on his show, and he jumped at it. (Cowboys training camp that year was all over the news, because they’d recently signed superstar receiver and one-man circus Terrell Owens.) We had Marcus picked up in a limo and taken to the studio and he hadn’t done much national media so his head was spinning from the attention. By the end of the trip, we had him. Even though he and his coach, Bill Parcells, were both represented by Jimmy Sexton, Marcus fired Sexton and hired us.
Next up was Mike Patterson, a defensive tackle from USC, picked by the Eagles in the first round in 2005. Now, in 2006, we obviously weren’t going to get a commission on his current contract, but he was still a talented young player, and we thought he had potential to earn us some money and some cred with Gersh.
We’d actually gone after Patterson the year before, ahead of the draft, but not signed him. Funny story, actually: Steve and I had pursued him in his last year at Southern Cal, met with his family, since he was a local kid, and finally, thanks to an undrafted player named Johnny Walker, were able to get a formal meeting with Patterson in December 2004. We were at his apartment in a complex filled with other USC players, like Lawrence Jackson, who was going to be a first-rounder the next year. Patterson told us he was about to sign with Gary Uberstine, who was also the agent for Pete Carroll, Patterson’s own coach at USC. But we told him about how some of Uberstine’s players had fallen in the draft but we could maximize where he got picked (the old Gary Wichard pitch). We showed him our client list, went through our Playbook presentation, and created good chemistry. The meeting went well and Patterson said that, instead of signing with Uberstine as he’d planned, he was going to hold off, wait for the Senior Bowl, and think about it. Patterson walked us to our car and Steve, in his usual surfer shorts and T-shirt outfit, broke into an impromptu tap dance in the parking lot, stomped his feet, stopped, and said, “Can Gary Uberstine do this?” Patterson was laughing and we clearly had made a lasting impression.
Then something unusual happened. We went to the Senior Bowl to spend some time with our players and keep up contact with Mike Patterson. Pete Carroll, who was supposedly in Hawaii on vacation with his family, suddenly showed up in Mobile, Alabama, on the practice field. We talked to Patterson after practice and he told us that Coach Carroll had talked to him about Uberstine. Evidently Uberstine knew we were all over Patterson and he was about to lose out so he called in his big gun, his client Pete Carroll, to save the day. And that’s just what he did for Uberstine. Patterson didn’t want to go against his coach’s wishes so he stuck with Uberstine and walked from us.
So, could that make Pete Carroll a runner for Gary Uberstine? I guess it depends on how you define “runner.” A runner, by my definition, is any unofficial, unsanctioned, unlicensed go-between who gets paid, or stands to gain in some other way, by helping to recruit a player for an agent, typically frowned upon by the NFLPA, and using a runner is improper without full disclosure.
Fast forward to 2006, when Patterson had just completed his rookie year and Steve and I had joined Gersh. Patterson’s financial planner happened to be the financial planner for Jon Alston, who we’d just signed. The planner said, “Mike, do you know Steve Feldman and Josh Luchs at Gersh?” And he said, “Yeah, I almost went with those guys.” So we brought Patterson to our new offices and talked with him about all the opportunities Gersh offered outside of football. He already knew our track record, and he explained to us why he had signed with Uberstine in the first place, why he now regretted it. He said he had now decided to make the switch. He got a letter together to fire Uberstine, sent it, and started to wait out the NFLPA’s mandatory five-day waiting period to make it official. As soon as he sent the termination letter, his phone started ringing. First it was Pete Carroll, whom Patterson hadn’t heard from probably since the Senior Bowl, insisting that firing Gary was a mistake. Then Mike heard from Derrick Deese, another USC player, another Uberstine client, now with the 49ers, saying virtually the same thing. We’d gotten Patterson an invitation to a party at the Playboy Mansion by way of Toi Cook at Gersh, also an ex-49er. Derrick Deese was at the party too and he was all over Patterson to withdraw the termination letter to Uberstine. But this time Mike had made up his mind and stood by his decision to come with us.
We always knew Pete Carroll was tight with Gary Uberstine, dating from when we’d tried to recruit at USC and Carroll’s rules kept us away from the field or the locker room, but allowed Gary in with access to players under the guise of being Pete’s agent. During the Carroll era, the list of USC players signed by Uberstine was impressive—nine players from one school—and would seem more than coincidental.
But Uberstine didn’t sign all the best USC players during Carroll’s tenure. In 2003, agent David Dunn promised Pat Kirwan, perhaps Carroll’s closest friend, $100,000 for helping to deliver the USC quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner Carson Palmer to his agency, Athletes First. (Kirwan and Carroll’s friendship goes back to when they both worked for the Jets, continuing through Carroll becoming head coach of the Seattle Seahawks and Kirwan’s name even being bandied about as a GM candidate.) The Dunn-Kirwan arrangement was controversial since, at the time, Kirwan was a commentator for NFL.com, a job one might assume required independence and objectivity, not simultaneous employment by a sports agency … aka “runner.” Once in the door, having represented the number-one draft pick in the country, Dunn signed ten USC players during the Carroll years.
Compare Uberstine’s or Dunn’s results with Tom Condon of CAA, acknowledged to be one of the top agents in the game, who signed only four players. Or Drew Rosenhaus, supposed powerhouse agent who only signed two USC players. I signed three—one with Wichard, two with Feldman.
Thanks to our record, plus the Hollywood wild card, Steve and I were meeting with almost any player we wanted, not always signing them, but always in the hunt. Between the players we already had, the defections to us, and the rookies, we were off to a great start at Gersh, and I was finally making a pretty good living—in six figures with bonuses and benefits.
After signing Josh Bullocks in 2005, we got his twin brother, Daniel, in 2006. We had advised the brothers, and their mother, Peaches, to avoid coming out the same year and competing against each other in the draft (they were both safeties, and both played for the same school, Nebraska). The odd thing was, a year apart, both were drafted number forty overall, eighth in the second round, Josh to the Saints, Daniel to the Lions. The same year, 2006, we had Richard Marshall, defensive back from Fresno State, picked in the second round by the Panthers.
We went to Columbus, Ohio, to make a run at stars Troy Smith and Santonio Holmes. Our intro came by way of Steve’s former client, Greg Bell, a former first-round draft pick out of Notre Dame who in 1988 had led the NFL in rushing TDs, played for the Rams and Bills, and was now a financial advisor with ties to players at Ohio State. Troy Smith, it turned out, wasn’t going to come out until the next year, 2007, when he’d go on to win the Heisman Trophy but free-fall in the draft after a big loss to Florida in the BCS Championship. But Santonio was still available. We met him as he was coming out of the football building. As I recall, when he saw us, he must’ve immediately thought, these guys are here to offer me money, because early in the conversation, he said to us, “Listen, I want to save you the time. We don’t need to meet. I’ve been taking money from Joel Segal the last couple years, and he’s been taking care of my family too.” Clearly, while I had stopped paying players, the practice hadn’t died. Segal was a prominent agent who had gotten busted by the NFLPA for improper benefits but had been reinstated, and had signed Reggie Bush and become an NFLPA “favored” agent. He signed Santonio, who was taken in the first round by the Steelers. Santonio later denied having said Segal paid him, but I heard him say it and so did my partner, Steve Feldman.
“Favored Agents”
I know firsthand that the NFLPA has favored agents because of a conversation I had with a former client and friend. Nolan Harrison and I were as close as a player and agent could be. In fact, when the Rodney King verdict was read in 1992 and riots broke out, Nolan was with me at my parents’ house and my mother wouldn’t let him leave the house for a few days fearing for his safety. Never mind that Nolan was a six-foot seven-inch, three-hundred-plus-pound defensive tackle for the L.A. Raiders who could take care of himself. To my mom, he was just a twentysomething kid who needed someone to look out for him. I was honored when Nolan asked me to be a groomsman in his wedding. And Nolan was the only client I had who’d attended both of my parents’ funerals, signing a deal Doc and I had completed with the Pittsburgh Steelers in my parents’ driveway while we were sitting shiva for my mother.
Nolan became the team’s Players’ Union representative and had gotten close with the powers at the NFLPA office in Washington. As the last active client I had recruited with Doc, it came as a shock when he fired us without any explanation. I was stung by it for years. After Nolan was long retired, and I had become the VP of football at Gersh, one day he came to see me and explained what had happened. Apparently, some of the honchos at the NFLPA had questioned how he could be represented by agents like me and Doc. They listed agents they preferred, not just hinting but naming names, and it’s safe to say that neither Doc nor I was among the names they listed. So he hired an agent from the NFLPA “favored” agent list, Ralph Cindrich.
A good gauge of how you’re doing as an agent isn’t just who you sign, it’s who you meet with, who feels they need to meet with you. Feldman-Luchs-Gersh was getting to be a must-meet for some of the top-tier players. It was like having a list of who you had dated on your résumé. For the 2007 draft, we had good talks with Steve Smith, the wide receiver who played at USC and was drafted by the Giants in the first round. He signed with Eddie DeBartolo, who’d been an owner of the San Francisco 49ers but was barred from active control of the team for a year, and fined $1 million, for failing to report a felony. DeBartolo later lost control of the team altogether and opened a sports firm. To recruit Smith, he called in the biggest of big guns and got All-Everything receiver Jerry Rice to put the heat on Smith to sign. Even so, I kept on top of Smith, figuring maybe he’d defect at some point.
We also met with JaMarcus Russell, the quarterback out of LSU who would be the number-one draft pick of 2007 by the Raiders. We got to him by way of Marcus Spears, who had been his roommate; we even met with his mother at their home in Mobile, Alabama. To get his attention, we bought a not-very-subtle billboard ad close to JaMarcus’s apartment that he had to drive past every day on the way to practice. It featured huge photos of his good friend Marcus Spears both as National Champion at LSU and as a Dallas Cowboy and was signed “Gersh Sports” so the connection between college success and NFL success was crystal clear: us. We met with Joe Thomas’s dad about Joe, an offensive tackle from Wisconsin and a 2007 first-round pick by the Browns. Plus we were in the running for Marshawn Lynch, a Cal running back drafted in the first round by the Bills, and Adam Carriker, a Nebraska defensive end, drafted in the first round by the Rams (a bad fit for the Hollywood pitch).
We were even getting meetings with players from teams we’d never previously gotten around to recruiting. Just before the 2007 Rose Bowl in Pasadena, we had somebody who was tight with a lot of Michigan players hook us up with LaMarr Woodley, a linebacker and second-round pick by the Steelers. We were late on these guys and had never flown to Ann Arbor to meet with them, but LaMarr came to the office at Gersh along with his teammate Alan Branch, a defensive tackle and second-round pick by the Cardinals.
We did sign Chris Henry, a running back from Arizona, ultimately a second-round pick by the Titans in 2007. We’d gotten him a part in a TV pilot for MTV, “24 Before,” a docu-drama in which people were followed for twenty-four hours before a major life-altering event, in his case the NFL draft. They were going to intercut between Chris and a young female soldier being shipped out to Iraq but Chris’s dad, who was a corrections officer, vetoed the idea of cameras in his house. Even though Steve Smith had signed with DeBartolo, we put him in the show and he had MTV cameras with him on draft day, something Eddie DeBartolo couldn’t do. We thought it might pay off for us down the road. In the end Chris Henry was the eighteenth pick and Smith was nineteenth, back-to-back in the second round.
We were also chasing Kenny Irons, the Auburn running back. He and his brother, David Jr., a cornerback at Auburn, both NFL prospects, came from a big football family. Two uncles and three cousins played college and/or pro ball. Kenny and David’s father, David Sr., made it clear that the selection of an agent went through him, or rather through his garage. To paraphrase, his blunt terms were, “Whoever is going to represent my boys is going to make a lot of money and whoever that’s going to be is up to me. Their agent is going to buy me an S-class Mercedes.” That was the price of representation. Plus, he had his own gym and said whatever an agent might have paid for a facility to train his boys before the Combine, would be paid to him. The Irons brothers didn’t sign with us but it was because we backed out early due to the “terms” dictated. They eventually went with Fletcher Smith. Whether he ponied up the price of entry, who knows. Kenny got hurt, was drafted in the second round by the Bengals, got hurt again, and only played two years. David was a sixth-round pick by the Falcons. Did the father get his Mercedes? I don’t know that either. If it was after the season, it wouldn’t have been illegal to give him a car unless the promise of the car came during the season, in which case, it’s an illegal inducement to sign. In any case, based on the Irons’s careers it would have been a bad investment. And it would have been sleazy, not that that’s anything new.
Solo, I made my first trip to Florida State to meet with linebacker Buster Davis, short, squat, and undersized, and running back Lorenzo Booker, also undersized but not in ego. I really hit it off with Davis; I flew to Daytona to meet his family at his request, and then he called us the night before the Orange Bowl to say when he came out to Los Angeles, he wanted us to have arranged for a Mercedes for him, with his specific list of options. I ran around to dealers to find somebody who would do all the paperwork, have a car ready for him to buy, with the options he wanted, just waiting for his signature, and then he vanished. Somewhere in the Valley, a Mercedes was sitting on a lot that never got picked up and a car salesman was pissed off at me. I never heard from Buster again. He signed with another agent, Todd France, and again, I have no idea if he ever got his Benz. As for Lorenzo Booker, he was good-looking, charismatic, with stars in his eyes. In fact, he told me that when he had the ball and was headed for the sideline, he just let himself run on out of bounds, rather than fight for an extra yard and run the risk of hurting his body. He was saving it for a longer career. Lorenzo had a cousin, a wanna-be agent, who got himself inserted into the process, came to visit us a couple of times, and eventually got himself a cut of whatever deal they’d make. They went with an agent named Ryan Slayton who I’d never heard of. Lorenzo has had an inconsistent career in football and no career in Hollywood, so we dodged a bullet.
In 2007, Troy Smith ended up going with Eddie DeBartolo Jr., the NFL owner–turned felon–turned agency owner, who had also talked to Toi Cook about joining us at Gersh. Big-time sports can be a small, sordid world. And the rules can be, shall we say, fluid. You can’t own a team if you commit a crime, but you can own a company that represents players. Agents can’t lend money to players but coaches can steer players to agents. Players can’t take money while in college but if the fact that they had taken money comes out once they turn pro, there are no consequences to them individually. And it’s incestuous: the agent who was your enemy on one deal is your ally on the next. That is, the fucker becomes the fuckee and vice versa.
And I was about to become the fuckee.
I was recruiting for the 2008 draft, going after Keenan Burton, a wide receiver from Kentucky, drafted by the Rams; Eddie Royal, a Virginia Tech wide receiver drafted by the Broncos; and Dustin Keller, a tight end from Purdue, first-round draft pick by the Jets. Keller was so taken with us and the Hollywood world that he flew his brothers out to L.A. on his own dime and went to Venice Beach and bought his one brother, a big reggae fan, a painting of Bob Marley. And then I had my world turned upside down.