by Josh Luchs
I was relieved to be able to tell him what he wanted to hear. “No, I don’t touch the stuff, never have, never tried it, never …” But he interrupted me. “Don’t be bullshitting Greg. You Beverly Hills kids, you get the good shit. Don’t lie to Greg.” I told him, “I swear, I don’t do drugs.” Evidently he believed me because he reached down next to his chair, picked up this glass jug, put it on the table, and looked at me like I was supposed to understand. After a pause he explained, as if he was talking to a little kid. “Josh, Greg needs some piss. Can Greg trust your piss? Is your piss trustworthy?” I was slowly beginning to get it. He went on. “I was with this fine lady and we smoked a little weed. Now I got a drug test tomorrow and Greg needs some clean piss. Can Greg trust your piss, Josh? Are you gonna step up for Greg?” “You want me to pee in the jar right now?” He nodded. I thought for a second, and decided I wanted to do anything to help. I didn’t want him to get suspended. I didn’t want to hurt the team and as far as I knew, my pee had always been trustworthy. I said okay. I knew it was kind of wrong, but it wasn’t that wrong—he seemed like a good guy, and he trusted me. And it was for the Raiders and Greg. It was another preview of the agent world, where the gray areas get darker and darker, a little bit wrong at a time. But I didn’t care about the gray at the time, just about my duty to help. Or try. The problem was, I had trouble peeing in the living room with an audience. He said, “Don’t worry, Greg is a patient man. We’ll wait.” He got me some water; I relaxed and filled up half the jar. He said, “Thanks, that’s why we’re tight,” and sent me back to my room.
I didn’t hear anything about it for several days. Greg didn’t say anything. Then one day, one of the other ball boys came into the office and said, “Josh, they nailed your boy, Greg.” When I asked what he was talking about, he said that Greg was leaving camp because he’d tested positive on the drug test. I turned white. How could this happen? I didn’t do drugs. He used my piss. And now he was going to kill me. He was from Compton, not Beverly Hills, even the rough part. The team was going on a road trip for a preseason game and left me, along with some other office staff, back at training camp in Oxnard. I drove from Oxnard as fast as I could, to see my father. Who better to talk to about my situation than a urologist? I told him everything, while he sat in the backyard Jacuzzi, his cigar in his mouth, insisting I didn’t do drugs but had peed for Greg, and now somehow he had tested positive. My dad asked, “Is there anything else you want to tell me?” as in, “Josh, if you do drugs, say so.” I swore to him I didn’t. He asked again. I swore again. Finally he believed me and said there had to be some other explanation.
I had to confront Greg. I went to his apartment and knocked on the door, and he answered in his full lounging uniform. He didn’t look upset; he was very cool, like a bald, black Hugh Hefner. I blurted out, “Greg, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say, I don’t do drugs. I don’t know how it happened.” He burst out laughing. “They wouldn’t take your piss, man. They said, ‘Greg, you can’t hand us piss. You need to piss in front of us.’ ” He wasn’t mad at me or my pee. It was his that had failed the test. Thank god.
From there, our relationship grew. I guess he figured if I’d do that for him, and come to his house to see what had happened, I must be okay. I looked out for him and he came to trust me. A couple different times he asked me if I’d ever considered repping athletes, just because I cared, because I was willing to do things to help.
But at the time, I wasn’t really thinking about becoming a sports agent. I had my heart set on sports broadcasting. I’d been doing it at school and working at the radio station. I could hear myself on ESPN or doing Raiders play-by-play. But Greg said his deal would be up in a year or two and by then, he might need someone new. He didn’t make promises but it was out there. He said, “You’re a smart Jewish guy and you have to deal with Al Davis. He’s a smart Jewish guy. You like to look out for players. You could do this.” That was my qualification—a smart Jewish guy. I was only seventeen, going into my senior year of high school, but the fact was, Greg wasn’t much older. When you’re both naive about the world, this kind of talk doesn’t sound so crazy.
Future Agent Lessons Continued
End of the summer, I go back to high school. I’m doing the play-by-play for Beverly Hills High and I’m still working at KABC. I stayed in contact with Don DeBaca, not wanting him to forget me, as if he had a chance. I told him I wanted to come back, to work in the office, to work with him. Finally, he took me out for a sandwich and said he was going to have me back. It was as if I’d just become an executive in the Raiders front office. Me, Don DeBaca, and Al Davis. Only a slight exaggeration in my mind … or a fantasy … but close enough for me. I worked two more summers for the Raiders, one more in high school, and another after graduation.
One of my jobs, one that I liked a lot, was bringing lunch to Raiders’ owner Al Davis. I’d already gotten to know him, or gotten him to know me, the summer before when I was still a ball boy. We always had a towel hanging from our shorts and one day he called me over to wipe his glasses with my towel, and asked my name. I said, “Joshua,” and went on, “Mr. Davis, I’m originally from New York, and my mother went to Erasmus Hall High School when you were coaching there.” I knew he’d been a coach there and I wanted to make a connection with him, to differentiate myself. He smiled and said, “Oh, really? Erasmus.” And right there I felt like this guy, Al Davis, would remember me. And he did.
So, later I’d bring lunch or game films or whatever to his room. His was the only one that had a black toilet, an odd thing to remember but it must have been on purpose for the owner. I took him his typical lunch, the same almost every day, tuna on dry white toast and water with a little bit of lemon. One day I brought it to him and he was lying on the bed in his undershirt and underpants, hair disheveled. He told me to come in, and asked me a question. “Josh, do you think my players like me?” I didn’t know what to say. I’d been there for the summer and by then I knew he was an intimidating guy, unforgettable. In fact, he wore this strong cologne that I could smell for a half hour after he left a room. You literally knew when Al Davis was there, or had been there. (In fact, his employees would say that aroma kept people from talking about him because as long as you could smell it, you were never quite sure he’d left.) So, I put his lunch down on the side of the bed, trying to figure out how to answer him on his players liking him. I answered him quickly but with what turned out, in hindsight, to be a pretty wise response. “I don’t really know, Mr. Davis, but I know that they respect you.”
I remember he seemed to think about it and made a little clicking noise with his mouth, as if to say my answer was okay. Over time, I had more interactions with him, driving him from Oxnard to his apartment in Marina del Rey. When we got there, he’d take out these Famous Amos cookies that looked like they’d been sitting around for five years, but he offered them to me to be gracious, in his own odd way. He was respectful of people but they all seemed afraid of him. I wasn’t. Maybe I just didn’t know better but I was comfortable with him and he seemed to be comfortable with me. More lessons.
By this time, Art Shell was the head coach. Al Davis had set some kind of record with three coaches in my three years there—Tom Flores, Mike Shanahan, and then Art Shell, who was only the second black head coach in professional football. And as with Shanahan, I had an Art Shell incident. He’s an enormous man, an eight-time Pro Bowl and Hall of Fame offensive tackle. And that day, he was doing a publicity shot in which the photographers had him lying on his side on the field, his head propped up on one elbow, wearing jeans, in almost a fashion pose. I walked by and said, “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins,” quoting the Calvin Klein ad slogan of the time. And he laughed. It could have backfired. He could have thought, “Who’s this wise-ass making cracks about the head coach?” But he didn’t. He thought it was funny and he remembered me because of it. It differentiated me. I wasn’t a great student in school but I was a pretty good student of h
uman nature.
Meanwhile, back at school, I was working at the radio and TV station, K-BEV, not playing football anymore. There’s no chance of somebody stepping on your hand, or of helmet-to-helmet contact, when you’re broadcasting. By this time, Bud Furillo, my mentor at KABC, had left there to start a show on a small station in Redondo Beach, KFOX. So I went there to produce his show.
In the fall I was heading off to Santa Monica, a two-year junior college. Education was like a religion at my house, so community college wasn’t exactly what they dreamed of for their kids. My brother had gone to Marquette and my sister was a very good student. My parents’ attitude was I needed to go somewhere and get serious and then transfer to a “real” four-year school. That was the plan, though I kind of doubted it from day one. I was taking basic education courses, just the requirements. My heart wasn’t in it. To me, college was high school with ashtrays. I did a marketing report for one class with a product and a slogan and I felt pretty good about it but the professor gave me a laughable grade, and I didn’t think it was funny. I wasn’t getting any feedback that told me I was any good the way I did around sports.
Meanwhile, I had my friendship with Greg Townsend and he was telling me about how his agent might be going to jail and may be “unavailable” to represent him anymore. He said, “You know, my deal will be up next year and Mr. Davis seems to like you,” and again, “You’re a Jewish guy from New York like Al Davis”—the ultimate qualification, two guys with circumcisions. I was eighteen years old; I had no idea what it meant to be an agent.
CHAPTER 2
I’m an agent; now all I need is a client.
At a young age, I became a networker; I just didn’t know there was a name for it. Bud Furillo had a friend named Frazier Smith, a classic rock disk jockey, and I started booking guests for him on his Saturday morning show on KSLX. And he was friendly with the Goossen brothers, all of whom were involved in sports: Mike, an attorney; Joe, a trainer; and Dan, the boss. I got to know Mike, asked him what it took to become an agent, and he got the forms for me and walked me through the process. “Send in the paperwork and a check for three hundred dollars and you’re licensed with the Players Association.” That’s it. They don’t care if you have a college degree, a graduate degree, experience, nothing. Just have the check and no criminal record. By those standards, I qualified. Two months later, I got a certificate in the mail saying I was an NFLPA licensed agent. I was nineteen. Cool. Plus they sent me a little card that had the NFLPA logo on it.
The State of the Business 1989
It was well into the modern era of pro and college football—big TV contracts, big Bowl games, big revenue. The AFL and NFL had long since merged. It was Super Bowl XXIII and Joe Montana’s 49ers were winning their third championship of the ’80s. The University of Miami Hurricanes were voted number one in the nation by sportswriters and coaches, the third time in the decade. The NCAA had adopted the “Sanity Code” after World War II to curb abuses in recruitment and financial aid, and became a full-time organization by the 1950s, “to protect young people from the dangerous and exploitive athletics practices of the time.” The NFLPA, established in 1956 to look out for the players, by 1970 had gotten the NFL owners to agree to a player’s right to representation by an agent, and in the Collective Bargaining Agreement of 1982, to NFLPA certification of agents. The qualifications to be certified: 1) a completed application form, 2) a signed statement that the applicant was not a convicted criminal, and 3) a check for $300. No specified level of education. No exam. No hard guidelines for conduct. No formal investigative mechanism for alleged violations. And there was building pressure to lower agent commissions from a maximum of 5 percent of a player’s contract. (In the ’90s, the NFLPA dropped the maximum to 4 percent, then 3 percent, and almost got to 2 percent.) The lower the commission, the more brutal the competition for players, especially the stars who would be most lucrative.
The stakes were rising in the battle for young college players, and at the same time, a door was left wide open. If the NFLPA wasn’t policing agent-recruitment practices, who was watching college players? The NCAA? The conferences? The individual schools? The states? Or had college sports become wholesome and innocent, with no significant problems?
Agent-turned-attorney Mike Trope, in his book Necessary Roughness, published in 1987, tells how after getting friendly with some athletes, he became an agent in 1972 and stumbled across the underground economics of college sports. Boosters paid players and families, coaches steered players to agents, and players took money from agents on the promise of signing with them. Trope says he was literally competing with the team coaches, having to dive into “a cesspool” in order to succeed. And for a while it worked. In one draft, Trope represented four of six top selections. One of the stories is of Eric Dickerson, who was wooed by a University of Texas coach with a promise/threat that if Dickerson didn’t go to UT, he’d never get a job in the state of Texas. Ironically, Dickerson went to Southern Methodist University, another Texas school that, in 1985, received the NCAA’s famous “death penalty”—loss of a full season—for booster-payment violations. When Trope finally decided he couldn’t do it anymore, he took the bar exam, became an attorney, and wrote his book.
In The Business of Sports Agents, written twenty years later, authors Kenneth Shropshire and Timothy Davis claim that in 1979 Trope paid former University of Maryland player Steve Atkins $1,000. Atkins told Sports Illustrated, “I knew I did something wrong. I didn’t want the NCAA to do something to Maryland … I didn’t want to sign with him [Trope], but I just needed some money to pay some bills.”
In 1986, then-agent Mel Levine (and mentor to agent Drew Rosenhaus) said in his book, Life in the Trash Lane, that he won over future clients with similar tokens of appreciation, a practice he says was commonplace. “These kids come to your door, their hands are out. They said if I didn’t give them money, they could get it from other agents.” Levine handed the keys to a used silver Corvette to University of Miami running back Cleveland Gary, then gave a new black Corvette to Miami defensive tackle Jerome Brown, at which point Gary objected: Why had he been stuck with a used car? He demanded a new one.
Levine ultimately lost more than $80,000 in money advanced to players but never repaid. Was he punished by the NFLPA? Were the players penalized by the NCAA? No. In fact, it was only when the state of Florida made paying college-eligible athletes a felony that he got out. Mel Levine did go to prison, but it was for crimes unrelated to football: tax and bank fraud.
In 1987, Norby Walters, a show-business booking agent, had begun to pay promising college players to buy their allegiance when they entered the NFL draft. He claimed to have given money to at least five first-round picks in one year, plus many others, all prior to their eligibility, “investing” as much as $800,000. The problem was, some of the players decided to sign with other agents and Norby Walters thought he was entitled to get his money back. Walters’s associate, Lloyd Bloom, was accused of passing the word along to those who owed, saying, “Players who don’t pay their debts can have their hands broken.” It led to an FBI and grand jury investigation, as well as NCAA and NFLPA reviews. Never convicted, Walters said paying players was nothing new. In 1989, they were convicted but the convictions were overturned. In 1993, in an unrelated incident, Bloom was found murdered in a Malibu home.
How widespread was paying players at this time? According to a Dallas Morning News story in November 1985, a former University of Texas All-American defensive lineman said well over half the players were “being taken care of.” Agent Leigh Steinberg estimated 40 percent of seniors were receiving money, but he insisted, not his clients. In fact, he stipulated that players he represented set up foundations to give back to their hometowns and high schools. Moral stance, marketing tactic, or both?
By the time I was certified in 1989, the NCAA already had no shortage of questionable behavior.
So, just like that, I became a sports agent. The only thing I did
n’t have was a client. I had a “maybe” from Greg Townsend. Before I tried to officially sign him up, I went through my self-styled “Rolodex,” every name and number I’d collected in my Casio Wizard since I was sixteen years old, searching for the one and only agent I’d ever met, an African-American guy named Neil Allen, who represented Stefon Adams. Allen was a powerful presence, handsome, well dressed, well spoken; he looked like Denzel Washington and sounded like Barack Obama. I called and ask if he remembered me from Raiders camp and he said he did. In hindsight, he may have been bluffing, but he was smooth enough to sell it. I told him about my opportunity to become Greg Townsend’s agent, which got his attention. I explained that I needed some guidance and was hoping he’d help. He offered to buy me lunch in Beverly Hills and I walked from my house to meet him, I was certainly the only sports agent who lived with his parents.
As we talked, he came around to his angle: “Maybe we could work on Greg together, cut a deal together,” which sounded good for me since I had no idea what I was doing; and maybe it would lead to more deals. All I knew about Neil was that he had a couple of Raiders he repped and he was charming and charismatic. We agreed to go see Greg together and be co-agents if he signed.
When we arrived at Greg’s house and told him our plan he thought I’d gone insane. Be his agent? What? He’d just been talking. He hadn’t promised me anything. I was blown away. I was a naive—okay, maybe dumb—kid who’d bought what he had said. Your deal was up in a year. Your agent might be going to jail. You needed me. I went to the NFLPLA. I sent them $300. I got licensed. I hooked up with an experienced agent. I did it all because Greg Townsend, LA Raiders defensive end, told me I was a smart Jewish guy who could talk to Al Davis, who could be Greg Townsend’s agent. This was my plan, my dream. And even though Greg was resistant at first, I just kept at it. And somehow, eventually, I got through to him and he agreed. It was a miracle, that seems obvious now, but I didn’t know it at the time. That’s the advantage of being dumb. You don’t know what’s impossible or a miracle. You just try to do it.