I first met Josh Luchs in the summer of 2010, and I learned his name only a few days before we gathered at his home in Southern California, but it would not be inaccurate to say I had been searching for him for a decade.
Anyone who has covered or worked in sports understands the integral role that agents play at almost every level. They occupy the space between the players and the professional teams, and it is in this gray area where so many of the great stories begin. When I joined Sports Illustrated in 2000, as an investigative reporter, one of my goals was to find an agent willing to disclose how the business really worked. This was no small task; there is no incentive for agents to talk. Disclosing the inner workings of that world would anger the athletes, fellow agents, and raise the ire of coaches and league officials. An agent who was honest about how he rose up in the profession and how he succeeded would be blacklisted—out of the profession forever.
It was no wonder then that I failed many times in my efforts to find an agent willing to blow the lid on the profession. But then, ten years after I started searching, happenstance led me to Josh and to one of the most important stories of my career.
In Josh, I found an agent who had seen the business from all angles. He started at the bottom, the youngest agent ever to be registered by the NFL Players Association, with few clients and little understanding of how the business worked. Year by year he moved up the ladder, eventually representing All-Pro players and conducting business from the swank offices of a Hollywood talent agency. The triumphs and setbacks he experienced along the way make his story a universal one: A young man who succeeds but pays a price for his success.
The Sports Illustrated article I wrote with Josh—his first-person account of his career—was over seven thousand words, one of the longest narratives to run in the magazine in several years. Yet even at that length it felt like a thin outline of his incredible journey. During the editing process, anecdotes ranging from funny to poignant to heartbreaking were chopped. I knew a book publisher would be eager to bring Josh’s full story to light, and so with each painful trim I offered a consoling mantra:
“Save it for the book.”
The complexity and significance of Josh’s story will become apparent as you read Illegal Procedure. As an avid consumer of sports titles, I find that too many are propaganda, tools used to burnish the image of an athlete or coach. In Sports Illustrated and now with this book, Josh has offered something different: an uncompromised examination. Rare is the insider willing to give an unvarnished account of themselves and their profession, for whom getting the truth out supersedes self-interest.
Some have branded Josh a whistle-blower, but that descriptor has never been a perfect fit. He exposed wrongdoing, pulled back the curtain on some of football’s shadiest dealings, but his wild odyssey through a cutthroat business is about far more than the rules that were broken.
Simply put: It is a heck of a story, an important story, and one well worth the wait.
—George Dohrmann
2011