by Josh Luchs
Doc and I had done right by UCLA players, getting them drafted high and signing them to good deals. And we’d done right by Coach Donahue, not meddling with his star receiver’s senior season. But despite our cooperation, the coach did nothing to reciprocate. Under Donahue, J. J. never talked to us again, and he later signed with another agent. Looking back, I guess I could chalk the whole incident up to a bad break or chance. Maybe Donahue played no part in J. J.’s decision, was never asked and never offered an opinion. Or maybe J. J., who’d been open to talking to us, woke up one day and decided not to. I might say it was just chance if it weren’t for the Othello Henderson story, which had happened two years earlier but which I didn’t learn about until much later. Henderson, a safety, had agreed to work with us and announced he was going to come out as an underclassman. (We had signed him early with a postdated contract, effective as soon as he was draft-eligible. It wasn’t by the book, but by the time Donahue got involved we were officially Othello’s agents.) After Othello declared himself for the draft, Terry Donahue called him into his office and introduced him to Marvin Demoff, essentially putting his stamp of approval on Demoff as an agent. We were recognized as Othello’s agents of record but his coach was now presenting his own guy—very inappropriate, to say the least.
Why would a coach influence who his players sign with after they’ve given up college eligibility? Sometimes it’s because coaches have their favored agents. Sometimes the agent is the coach’s agent. Sometimes the agent is a friend. Sometimes the agent is powerful. And sometimes, I can only assume, there might even be money or favors exchanged. Am I saying Donahue got something out of the deal? No, I have no way of knowing that. I’m just saying everybody is a commodity; everything and everyone has a price, whether it’s dollars and cents or something less tangible.
After I did my Sports Illustrated agent exposé in 2010, Othello told his hometown newspaper the way things were back then.
(excerpts from online article)
ON THE TAKE: FORMER ELLISON STAR ADMITS HE TOOK MONEY FROM SPORTS AGENTS
Posted On: Monday, Oct. 18, 2010, 10:43 P.M.
By Alex Byington, Killeen Daily Herald
After last week’s Sports Illustrated cover story named him as one of 30 student-athletes who allegedly took money from former professional sports agent Josh Luchs, Henderson said he hopes current high school and college players can learn from his mistakes.
“I wasn’t breaking the law, I was breaking NCAA rules that nobody agrees with,” Henderson said. “But in rebuttal to that, I was doing the wrong thing, because I knew I was doing wrong.”
While still in college at UCLA, the former Ellison football and track standout said he jeopardized his amateur status with the NCAA by accepting thousands of dollars and other benefits—not just from Luchs, but from multiple agents.
“Once you put your hand in the candy jar, and you realize that candy is rotten, you can’t pull it out when you’re in college, because you’re risking your college eligibility,” Henderson said.
“If you always feel like you can win, then sometimes that’s a negative,” Henderson said. “It starts to feel like you’re invincible. (Everyone is) pretty much telling you, everything you do is good, and anything you touch is gold.”
Over a six-to-eight-month period between the end of his sophomore year and the end of his junior season (May through December 1992), Henderson estimated he took monthly payments of a “few hundred dollars just to get by” from more than one agent.
“I don’t remember who introduced me to (Luchs), but within the first conversation, it was, ‘If you need money, I got you [taken care of],’ ” Henderson said.
“I wasn’t in a situation where I could call my mom and be like, ‘Hey mom, I need like $500,’ ” Henderson said. “… It’s not like I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, and I could call and ask for 5, 6, $700.”
For most student-athletes, tuition payments and on-campus housing represent the bulk of their athletic scholarships. However, the NCAA doesn’t allow student-athletes to seek employment during the school year, a fact that Henderson said played into his decision to take money.
“At 17, 18 years old, you’ve got a one-track mind, and if I got bills to pay, if I need money in my pocket, I’m looking to get that money,” Henderson said. “I don’t break any laws to get it, but I’m going to find out an avenue to do it.”
“Agents have been giving kids money for decades,” Luchs wrote in the article. “It was more open in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, before states passed sports-agent laws making it illegal. Now, agents still do it, but they are more secretive and use middlemen.”
Henderson agreed with Luchs on the prevalence, both back in the early 1990s when he was in school, and now, stating he believes that up to 90 percent of college athletes are getting money under the table.
“When you compare your stories in the league (NFL), it was like everybody else was doing the same thing,” he said.
We had investments in players, paying them, bailing them out, picking up tabs, whatever it took, flaunting NCAA regulations. But Doc rationalized, “We ain’t members of the NCAA. These aren’t our rules.” And since we were hardly alone in what we were doing, we’d go to almost any lengths to keep our prospects away from the competition.
After LaChapelle, I had other players living with me in my townhouse. It was a good way to bond with them and our best way to shield them from other agents. We’d been paying Carl Greenwood for a while so I had him in the upstairs bedroom of my townhouse, and at the same time I had Darick Holmes from Portland State with his baby and his baby’s momma living downstairs. (Darick named all of his babies after himself, à la George Foreman.) It was just easier this way; despite the NFLPA rules against soliciting players from other agents, the competition was always lurking. High-profile agent Drew Rosenhaus has been accused of stealing players from other agents for years but nothing has ever been proven. He claims the players come to him because their agents have done a lousy job (though his own book is titled A Shark Never Sleeps). Either all those other agents are miraculously innocent or the rule is hard to enforce. In any case, we had an investment to protect.
We concentrated on UCLA but we also tracked down players with any ties to the L.A. area. We’d landed Chris Mims, a local kid who was a defensive end at Tennessee, and paid him $500 or so per month, plus we paid a high school coach who helped us get to him, all worth it since Mims was taken by the Chargers in the first round. We paid Greg Thomas out of Colorado and Delon Washington from USC and they signed with us. We also paid Joel Steed at Colorado and Travis Claridge at USC but they didn’t sign with us. The cost of doing business.
Around this same time, there was Rob Waldrop, a nose tackle for Arizona in what was called the “Desert Swarm Defense.” We paid him, too, even though he later denied it. But recruiting him and getting to the point of paying him was one of the more “colorful” adventures of my young agent life. Rob was short and squat, not an ideal example of what the league wanted; but he still won an Outland Trophy (awarded to the best interior lineman in the NCAA) in 1993. In his junior year, I went to meet with him, waiting outside the athletic facility, waiting to stumble on him like I’d gotten good at doing, talking my way into his apartment. That’s where I saw two things that were indelible: his enormous white ass and the apartment’s black wall. When I got there, he’d just gotten out of the shower and was talking to me while lying on his stomach, naked, with his incredibly huge, incredibly white ass sticking up in the air like a planet, while we were carrying on what was supposed to be a conversation about how I could help with his future. And then I heard BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! from the living room. His roommates were driving golf balls into the wall they’d painted black, leaving little white holes all over the wall. They asked me if I wanted to take a couple swings but I declined. The wall looked like black Swiss cheese. They were not getting their damage deposit back. The next thing I knew, they asked me to go with them in one guy’
s pickup truck to what amounted to a sex shop, where they planned to watch naked dancers and jerk off. Again, I declined to participate. I would do almost anything to recruit Rob Waldrop, Outland Trophy winner.
Eventually I convinced him to come see us in L.A. and, took him to Raiders camp to show him the guys I knew, and by then, we were paying him. On the way to training camp in Oxnard, I got pulled over for speeding and I was totally paranoid. I thought somehow the cops were going to write up the ticket and it would go into some kind of giant database that went straight to the NFLPA and they’d know an agent had a college player in his car, they’d know everything. It was total paranoia, irrational but terrifying, because I knew what I was doing was wrong and I’d be found out. In the end, Waldrop didn’t sign with us. He said he didn’t “feel comfortable” enough. He was comfortable enough to talk to me with his white orb of an ass in the air, drive golf balls through a wall, and take me to a jerk-off club. But that line, or some variation of it, was what all the players used. “I’m not comfortable.” “I need to go a different direction.” “I have to do what’s best for me and my family.” Stock lines out of a bad script. Still, when he turned pro, he paid us back the money we had loaned him.
In fact, almost all of the players we later lost to other agents ended up paying us back, either with bonus money from the team that signed them or with money from their new agents. There was a notable exception.
Then the Rules Changed
In 1999, the NFLPA said if a player took money from an agent while in college but that payment was revealed during or after college, the player did not have to repay the money. It was an odd rule to make, considering the NFLPA didn’t allow players to take money; but it goes to show just how obvious it was that everyone was getting paid. From that point forward, agents lost their threat of suing for the money. Once a player finished his final college season, he was off the hook. It was like amnesty for the players. We had loaned money to R. Jay Soward, wide receiver from USC, who started his college career with a four-touchdown game against UCLA but had a rocky path after that, literally almost getting killed by the USC Trojan mascot horse while gesturing to the crowd at halftime, falling into a daily marijuana habit, and selling the weed for more extra cash. R. Jay’s father knew the rules, so when it came time to enter the NFL draft, his father told us he was not only going with another agent, but he wasn’t paying us any of the fifteen grand we had advanced R. Jay. By then, Doc was going downhill physically and we just let it go. Despite his troubles on and off the field, R. Jay was drafted in the first round by the Jacksonville Jaguars. But along the way, he had apparently taken money from other guys too—agents or agents’ runners—who didn’t swallow losses as easily as we did. He told me he’d once been threatened in the Jaguars’ parking lot by a scary guy with a scary weapon, sent by a very prominent agent with a simple message: “Pay the money now or I’ll blow your fucking face off.” Rule change or not, they got their money.
All in all, it was pretty rare that a player would just flat-out turn money down, but it happened. It happened with J. J. Stokes and Keyshawn Johnson, USC wide receiver and number-one overall draft pick. It happened big-time with Dana Stubblefield, Kansas defensive tackle and first-round pick. I put $10,000 cash money on the table in front of him and he shook his head, no thanks. (What he said to other agents’ money, I don’t know.) And it happened with Michigan State star wide receiver Derrick Mason, who we’d connected with after representing his former teammate, quarterback Tony Banks. We bought Mason a plane ticket to come see us between his junior and senior seasons. When I went to meet his plane, he was a no-show. Derrick had never boarded; I wasn’t able to get hold of him again, and we were out the price of a ticket. But for every Dana, J. J., or Derrick who said no to us, there were ten who’d take it and connect us with ten more.
So, my time with Doc was like going to grad school day and night, my in-the-field, on-the-road education. Doc was a big man, not only in size but in impact and stature. And he was quirky. He had very bad knees and would carry a huge massager with him because if he didn’t rub his knees for a half hour every day, he couldn’t move. And he rubbed some heinous white ointment on his bald head every morning. I don’t know what it was supposed to do—grow his hair back, maybe—but it smelled awful, like funky ass. And he had this thing with hotel maids. He had his own definition of “room service.” He thought maids were there to service him. He’d be sitting in his underwear on the edge of the bed—all six-seven, four hundred pounds of him—when the housekeeper came in, and he’d strike up a conversation. “Hi Baby. You married? Does your man treat you right? You get good lovin’?” Then he’d motion for me to leave the room. I think he slept with a maid in every hotel on every campus we visited. He was married, technically, but not living with his wife, and living with another woman he called his wife. His relationships with women were “fluid.”
One time, at the Senior Bowl in Mobile, while Doc was enjoying “room service,” I was in the hotel lobby on the house phone trying to call a player when another agent, Terry Bolar, came up and punched me right in the face. Bolar was a big black man, a former linebacker with the Oilers, who had worked with Doc as an agent and had been repped by him as a player. No warning, nothing, just pow! He smacked me in the face. He said, “Stay the fuck away from my players.” Several thoughts careened through my rattling brain: 1) This guy may kick the shit out of me in a lobby full of players, which won’t make me look too good; 2) This is Alabama and even if it’s the early 1990s, it’s not a great place to be black; 3) It’s not a great place to be a Jew, either, so I’d better be careful; and 4) I should just walk, or stagger, away. When I got up to our room, Doc was finished with his business and noticed my fat lip, and I told him what had happened. Doc went down, found Terry, and took a walk with him. I don’t know what Doc said, but Terry came up and apologized, and then for the rest of the week he bought me breakfast and lunch, drove me to the practice field, whatever I needed.
On the plane ride home, I asked Doc what he had said to Terry. “I told him, nobody fucks with my Jew-boy. He’s my Jew-boy.” And he added, “And I told him your father is a doctor for the Mafia and he already made some phone calls and I didn’t know if I could help him.” I laughed my ass off. It was funny. But more than that, it showed Doc’s loyalty. He had my back and I could trust him completely. So could his players. We worked on a handshake for ten years. And I was paid every penny I was owed. Even much later, after we went our separate ways in business, if there was a payment from a player we’d signed together, I always got my share.
Say what you want about Doc’s practices with the NCAA rules—he always looked out for me, and unlike a lot of other football people, he never tried to screw me.
CHAPTER 5
Sudden Death
Doc and I were together through so much, even the illnesses and deaths of both of my parents. My mother had been sick on and off for ten years after a kidney transplant and rejection, and ultimately an infection that attached itself to her heart. Finally, she was in intensive care for four months and Doc and his mother, who was a preacher, would pray for my mom every morning. She died on the operating table and even then, I kept thinking she’d be okay because somehow she’d always been okay. Not this time. Then my father got sick, and Doc was there for me again. My father’s death was almost too much, coming so close to my mother’s. He died within days of my first Mother’s Day without her. Unlike her death, his came fast. After years of practicing medicine, my father, the lifelong scholar, decided to go back to school at night to earn a law degree, to supplement his understanding of medical-legal issues and fight the HMOs. But soon after, he was diagnosed with an inoperable, malignant brain tumor. It was an awful, crazy, emotional, horrible time. I’d be on three days, staying at his house, then my sister would be on for three, each of us taking him for chemo and radiation, and me trying to juggle these players who needed constant coddling.
There were two incidents I’ll never forge
t. One day I was driving to pick my father up to take him to UCLA for treatment, in my Range Rover, stuck in traffic, and I acted in a way I never had in my life and never have since. A guy in a Mercedes kept edging up as the lanes merged, almost side-swiping my door, coming to a stop within inches of my car. I yelled out, “Hey, back off,” and his college-age kid next to him rolled down the window and said, “ Fuck your mother.” Not the right member of my family to pick on, especially when I was on my way to be with my dying father. This put me over the edge. I lost it. I put my car in park, jumped on the guy’s hood, pounded on the windshield, and threatened to beat the shit out of his kid, who had jumped in the back seat out of my reach, while the father yelled at him never to say anything like that. I took a breath, somehow cooled down, and got back in my car thinking, Josh, what’s wrong with you? You’re out of control. Now you’re screwed. Somebody’s going to see that and report you. I was doing my best to keep it together for my dad and I guess the pressure was just too much.
The other incident I remember was taking my father to make rounds at the hospital, at his sickest but still determined to see his patients, then to his office, then for his own treatments. I happened to have picked up $7,500 in cash, in a gym bag, from a player who paid us back money he owed and it was in the trunk of my father’s Lexus, which I was driving him around in. We turned down a street and there was a police barricade where they were doing random searches. They asked me for my driver’s license and it was expired. I told them I was taking my father for chemo treatments; I had just buried my mother in October, right after my birthday in September when I should’ve gotten my license renewed; and I promised to go right to the DMV afterward, but the cop wasn’t buying it. He made me get out of the car, and he called a tow truck to take our car away, at which point my sick father practically threw himself on the hood of his car, yelling at the cops that he needed it to get to the cancer center. He said they’d have to shoot him to take our car since he was a dead man anyway (maybe jumping on car hoods is genetic). I calmed my father down, sitting on the curb as they towed the car, and we waited for the nurse from his office to come and take him to UCLA for his treatment.