by Josh Luchs
What I knew about Beverly Hills was the TV show, The Beverly Hillbillies. Cool, we’re going where the Clampetts live … swimming pools, movie stars. But we actually went from the huge castle to a little townhouse on the fringe of Beverly Hills, the slums if they had any, where people moved to get their kids into the school district. My father drove across country, back and forth, for quite a while until we got settled and he had his new practice set up. Meanwhile, I was loving my new freedom—swimming pools, and sunshine, two things we’d never had before. In Brooklyn I couldn’t go more than a block by myself. Here I had free rein—Go play and be back by dinnertime. But I did get mugged and somebody stole my bike, which had never happened in New York. At La Cienega Park, I played Little League, a big, wild-throwing pitcher. I wasn’t very good, other than at hitting batters, but I loved the camaraderie. I’d always felt like I didn’t fit in anywhere. It was one of my oldest memories, feeling out of place, that other people were more popular, or better behaved, or smarter than me. When I played sports, I felt like I fit in.
It was in the fifth grade at Horace Mann Elementary that they had me tested and determined I was dyslexic. So, on top of my New York accent, being bigger than a lot of kids, and having trouble sitting still, now they had a name for my learning problems. It wasn’t something my charming smile could overcome. Again, I didn’t fit in. Eventually they sent me to another school in the district. I liked the new school better, we moved closer to it, and I had my first girlfriend there. It was around that time that my dad got season tickets to the Raiders games. The team had moved to L.A., to the Coliseum, from Oakland (before they moved back) and I fell totally in love with them. When I felt bad about life or school or fighting with my sister and got depressed, I would imagine what it would be like to not be here, and then I’d realize I wouldn’t be around for the Raiders’ games, or to see a new draft choice play, and I couldn’t miss out on that.
Then I became a man … or the thirteen-year-old version. I had my bar mitzvah. Like everything else to do with studying, I had trouble learning Hebrew. Reading English from left to right and then Hebrew from right to left was torture to a dyslexic kid. But I was a performer, and in the end, I rose to the occasion. It was important to my father that I not just read the minimum Torah portion that coincided with the time of my bar mitzvah, but that I lead the entire service—the musaf, maftir, and the complete haftorah, the full text of my Torah section—the whole megillah, so to speak. My rabbi, Rabbi Pressman, in classic L.A. style, was the identical twin brother of Monty Hall, the host of Let’s Make A Deal. What better pedigree as the spiritual guide for a future sports agent? “Josh, do you want to keep that check your uncle just stuffed in your pocket or trade it for what’s behind door number one, two, or three?” Afterward, my mother put on a big blowout party with a western ranch theme, my “Barn Mitzvah,” with hay, and stunt men, sets from 20th Century Fox, steaks branded with my initials, and a cake in the shape of a cowboy hat, just like the one I was wearing. And I had my pockets stuffed with checks, over $5,000, a lot of money for a kid. Like a good boy, or now young man, I put it all in the bank, saved for something important. Little did I suspect what that would be.
When I got to Beverly Hills High School, I played football, defensive lineman and tight end. And of course, I was still struggling in class, especially in math. I could do the problems in my head faster than most of the other kids but I couldn’t show how I got there. Again, a good skill for an agent, it turns out, figuring stats, contracts, percentages in your head, but it won’t get you through tenth-grade algebra. I was passing each year, by the grace of God and the school wanting to push the problems out the door. I was just getting interested in broadcasting, working at the school radio and TV stations, K-BEV. Rhoda Sharp, the woman who headed up the internship programs at school, told me about a one-day visit to KABC radio to sit in on the broadcast of Bud Furillo, “The Steamer,” a legend who used to be the sports editor of the Herald Examiner, with ties to every team in town. I jumped at the chance, and I took along a copy of a funny sports report I’d written. I read it to Bud and his producer.
Merchants on Rodeo Drive were stunned yesterday as the Beverly Hills High School girls’ varsity shopping team, the Plastiques, were upset by the Credit Card Cuties of Inglewood in overtime in the first round of the Southern California Invitational Shop-off. When asked why they lost, Plastiques team captain Stacy Schwartz was quoted as saying, “Someone left home without it.” This makes the chances of getting new Gucci uniforms for next season very slim unless the Shopsters can come back victorious and outspend Encino at their home court, the Galleria.
Bud loved it and let me read it on-air. People called in, laughed, loved it, and I was flying high.
So I had the chutzpah to just show up at the station the next day and they let me in. That’s all the encouragement I needed. I went every day after that. The producer, Michael Setsuda, sort of made a job for me—an unpaid job—in the booth, editing, splicing, researching, anything. I had gotten this little electronic Casio Wizard, back before BlackBerrys, that would store information and I collected every name and phone number of everyone who came through or called the station, and everybody I ever met. Nobody had a cell phone so these were the office numbers and home numbers, for people like Magic Johnson and Tommy Lasorda, some of the biggest sports personalities in town, who were remarkably willing to give them to me. At the time, I didn’t know why I was collecting all these numbers, but it turned out to be like a super-Rolodex. Maybe I was an agent-prodigy without knowing it.
I kept at the job, unpaid year after year. One day, as a reward, Bud invited me to go with him on a road trip to Dallas for a Monday-night game, flying on the Raiders’ plane. I thought I was dreaming and didn’t want to wake up. My parents were ecstatic just to see that I was interested in something. My dad said, “If you learned your schoolwork the way you learn the bios and stats of every player on every roster, you’d be a straight-A student.” I went on the trip and Bud took me to the media lunch before the game, up into the press box, down into the locker room. I met Marcus Allen, the running back. (Actually, I’d met him a year earlier, through a family friend, a pretty girl in her twenties who knew Marcus, knew I worshipped him, called him, got invited over, and took me along—which was not what Marcus had in mind with what he thought was a booty call. But I got to meet him and see his Heisman Trophy and hang out while he played the piano.) When I saw him after the Raiders game, he remembered me and said, “Man, what you doing here? I remember you from my living room.” On the plane, on the way back, I talked to James Davis, defensive back, Mike Davis, safety, Greg Townsend, defensive end, and Sean Jones, who had to fold down the seats in front of him because his legs were so long. I was just sixteen! They talked to me like friends. I fit in. Without exaggeration, it was the single greatest experience of my life to that point.
Raiders Ball Boy: Does life get any better than this?
After a year of working with Bud Furillo, he told me he couldn’t pay me, but asked what he could do for me. I didn’t even have to think. “Can you get me a job as a ball boy with the Raiders for the summer?” He made a couple of calls, ostensibly to Al Davis, the team owner, and then announced on his show, “Josh, guess what? You’re going to training camp at Oxnard. You’re going to be a ball boy for the Raiders this summer.” I went berserk. Instead of going to sleep-away camp, I was going to the Raiders training camp! I got there and checked in with the security guard, who pointed me past the Radisson bungalow suites where everybody lived for the summer, to the locker room and Dick Romanski, aka Oscar the Grouch, the equipment manager. The only problem was, Oscar/Dick had never heard of me. “I was told Mr. Davis had arranged for me to come here today,” I explained. Within seconds, he’d handed me a mesh bag and a room key and said, “If Mr. Davis sent you, it’s okay.” He gave me Raiders T-shirts, Raiders shorts, Raiders socks and shoes, and a little hat and pointed me to where lunch was served. They weren’t expecting me (or Bud h
ad never confirmed the job) but they were all so intimidated by the mention of Mr. Davis’s name, the wheels started spinning into motion. I was officially a Raiders ball boy, one of about six, being paid $50 a week. Right away, I wasn’t like the other guys. The first day of camp, there was a wide receiver named Christopher Woods, who’d come from the Canadian Football League, and he was stretching on the field. He asked me to push down on his back to do a hurdler’s stretch. Instead of just pushing, I sat on his back. There was a herd of photographers looking for anything out of the ordinary and there I was sitting on Chris, relaxing, hat tilted, on this guy’s back, like I was getting a tan. The cameras started clicking and the next day, there were Chris Woods and I on the front of the sports section. The other ball boys told me that Oscar the Grouch Romanski was pissed because he’d been there since before cameras were invented and nobody had ever taken his picture.
And he took it out on me with extra “dick watch” duty. We were all supposed to rotate through “dick watch,” scooping soggy bandages off the shower-room floor with a snow shovel while players were showering and our point of view was dick level. Let’s just say, I saw more than my share that summer. It wasn’t the only disgusting job, either. We wheeled a plastic garbage can through the locker room picking up towels. I remember one day seeing Bruce Wilkerson, an offensive lineman, stark naked with a towel that looked like a wash cloth in his hands, wiping the crack of his ass with the towel and then dropping it on the floor, where I was supposed to reach down and pick it up. No way. Where was that snow shovel when I needed it?
It was that first summer that I got to know Greg Townsend, the defensive end. I’d met him on the trip with Bud Furillo, so I could hardly wait for him to get to camp. He pulled up in his black Mercedes, license plate GET 93, his jersey number, and I was like a puppy, opening the door, grabbing his bags: “Greg, how are you?” But he didn’t remember me, so I reintroduced myself, carrying his stuff to his room, reminding him we had met on the Raiders’ plane to Dallas. Then he asked me where I was from but I didn’t want to tell him and sound like a spoiled little brat. So I tried to avoid answering.
“Man,” he said, referring to himself in the third person, “Greg’s from Compton. So where you from can’t be that bad. Just tell Greg where you’re from.” I mumbled, “Beverly Hills” but I followed with, “but not the rich part, the rougher part, south of Wilshire.” He got hysterical. “Man, you’re a funny motherfucker.” That was the beginning of our bond. It was no doubt more from my end than his; that is, I thought he was pretty cool and so did he so we had something in common. I’d check in on him to see what he needed, or just to talk, me trying to be around him. I was sixteen and he was maybe twenty-six but we’d hang out together and he started to trust me. That turned out to be one of my intangible agent talents—winning people’s trust—and it’s not something you learn in school. Either you have it or you don’t.
It was clear to me very early that I wasn’t going to be asked back as a ball boy for another season. Romanski probably thought I didn’t deserve to be there, I’d come from too much privilege and was connected to Mr. Davis instead of him. I knew I’d have to find another way to stay on.
I grabbed the job of holding up a white board during practice that had each play on it so the team could review it on the films. I had a big smile on my face, so happy that I was the guy holding the white board for the Raiders. Finally they had to tell me to stop grinning and hamming it up, that it was too distracting. But they remembered me.
And I remembered something I heard from one of the players, Todd Christensen. An interviewer asked him how he made these incredible acrobatic catches, one-handed juggling, falling backward—how did he get open all the time? Todd said, “They don’t suspect me. They never pay attention to the slow white guy up the middle.” I heard that and I thought, he’s not the fastest or the biggest or strongest but he outsmarts everybody. That’s what I’m going to do. I listened to everything he said, between plays, on the sidelines, as if he were my tutor. And I was determined to make myself something more than a ball boy.
There was a guy named Don DeBaca in the front office and I went to him and said I wanted to answer phones and was willing to work all night, when the other ball boys were finished for the day, after practice, before dinner, or even later. I’d take calls from the press, from vendors, from wives and girlfriends (plenty of players had both). And as always I had my Wizard with me, taking down any information that might ever be valuable—players’ home numbers, coaches, agents, girlfriends, anything. I had the direct lines for Bill Parcells, then head coach of the Giants; Georgia Frontiere, then majority owner of the Rams; and plenty of other big shots. I’d sort mail, work the phones, whatever they asked. I became an asset to George Karas, team executive and Al Davis’s right-hand man. He taught me the value of information and also to shred everything.
Future Agent Lessons: “Josh, can Greg trust your piss?”
Every day was a learning experience, like a series of casebook studies for an MBA, real-life encounters—some crazy, some humiliating, some challenging, some profound—in what turned out to be my advanced degree.
One time, a six-foot-three, 250-pound linebacker named Jamie Kimmel ripped into me because somebody—I had no idea who—had been rude to his wife on the phone. He seemed as if he was ’roided out of his mind, ready to kill me, and not open to my protests that it hadn’t been me, so I just waited for the rage to recede and escaped with all my limbs. Mostly, I was distraught that a Raider player would be mad at me. I never wanted to do anything to upset any of them.
I learned the value of silence. Like when Zeph Lee, a running back, showed me and another ball boy a documentary video about rock music and the devil (featuring AC/DC’s no-doubt satanically inspired “Back in Black”), the message being that if we didn’t accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, we were going straight to hell. I didn’t think it was a good idea to tell him I’d been a yeshiva boy so I did a lot of nodding and waited for it to be over.
I learned to play along. I was surrounded by Howie Long, Lyle Alzado, Lester Hayes, Mike Haynes, all kinds of stars I was in awe of. One day Marcus Allen was sitting in his Ferrari in the parking lot between the bungalows and said, “Josh, come here.” I trotted over thinking, How cool, Marcus Allen wants to talk to me. He asked me, “Yo man, you a virgin?” I wanted to be cool so I said, “I get my share.” But I had no idea why he was asking. He explained, “There’s these girls in the hotel room over there and they been blowing up the phone all night [calling him]. There’s two of them. I need you to go up the steps to that room up in the corner, and I’ll pull my car around, and you get them to come out so I can see what they look like. If they’re good-looking, I’ll come up, one for me, one for you. But I want to judge for myself.” I was thinking this was great. I was wearing my ball-boy shirt and my ball-boy shorts and socks and my Raider cap—a total Raider geek. And I was jazzed. At that age, if the wind blew, I was sporting wood—this was my lucky day. Not only was I going to get laid—I was going to get laid with Marcus Allen! So I ran up the stairs, doing the Heisman pose on the landing halfway up, looking down at Marcus in the parking lot. I knocked on the door and said, “Raiders Welcoming Committee.” I heard giggling and laughing and the door opened to reveal two of the most enormous Samoan women I’ve ever seen. Huge. Beyond huge. One of them said, “Hey ball boy, how would you like to be a ball man?” I looked down at the parking lot and Marcus was pulling away, laughing hysterically. I made an excuse—“Sorry, I thought this was one of the players’ rooms”—and backpedaled as fast as I could. I’m sure Marcus got a kick out of messing with me. I was there to make the stars happy, after all.
I learned it helps to be liked or lucky or both. Like in the Mike Shanahan incident. He was the head coach, and I was a lowly ball boy. I didn’t want to piss him off. I took my job seriously; but I was seventeen, so I horsed around with the players. One day Stefon Adams, the cornerback, had a bucket of water and it was
a hot day and he was throwing it on people, including me, and I wanted to get back at him. So I went upstairs in the two-level bungalow where there was a landing, and I had a big cup of cold water I was ready to pour down onto Stefon from one story up. I dumped the water on Stefon’s head, laughing hysterically—until I realized it was not him at all, but Mike Shanahan. When I saw my mistake, I panicked. I was screwed, done. My life was over. I said, “Coach, I’m so sorry. I thought you were Stefon. I didn’t mean to …” He was soaking wet but he’s a very low-key guy and he just looked up at me, shook his head, and kept walking. It’s kind of the story of my life. I get in trouble, doing things a little bit wrong, and I’m lucky enough to get away with it. People shrug a lot. Or they kind of like me. It turns out to be another qualification for the agent business.
I learned to be there. One night, at two A.M., I was asleep in my room at training camp. The phone rang and this voice said, “Josh? It’s Greg … Greg Townsend.” He told me he wanted me to go over to his room right then. “It’s important,” he said. “I need to talk to you.” I asked if it could wait until morning and he said, “It’s important, motherfucker.” I didn’t know it at the time, but this was another preview of being an agent—dropping whatever you’re doing to take care of who-knows-what. So I threw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and I walked past the seven or eight bungalow buildings to his room.
He opened the door wearing black silk pajamas and a red smoking jacket with black satin collar, Grand Marnier in one hand and a Salem hanging off his lip. I didn’t have any idea what I was getting into but I was there, sitting on the sofa, and he just stared at me in total silence. Finally he said, “Can Greg trust you? Are you there for Greg?” again talking about himself in the third person because he must have thought it sounded more important, or he’d heard Ricky Henderson do it. I said, “Sure Greg, you can trust me with anything,” hoping it wasn’t something too crazy. “Josh, do you do drugs?” I declined, thinking it was an offer. “No, motherfucker, I ain’t offering you drugs. I’m asking if you does drugs.”