by Josh Luchs
I went to the DMV and got a new license; my dad called his friend at the police department to get our car released from impound, and we got it back … minus a gym bag full of $7,500 in cash. Worse yet, it wasn’t my money. It was money I owed Doc. As usual, Doc understood. And it all seemed minor compared to what my father was going through. Despite the most aggressive treatments, with trips back and forth to Duke Medical Center where pioneer work was being done, he died within weeks of attending a special graduation arranged by the law school because they knew he wasn’t likely to be alive for the regular ceremony. My father had signed a DNR—Do Not Resuscitate—order and after what had happened with my mother, we didn’t try to fight it. His valiant fight for life and for his degree were written up in several newspapers. And Doc was with me through it all.
(Jewish) Boy Meets (Jewish) Girl
I was an orphan at age twenty-seven, too old to need a legal guardian but too much of a kid to deal with life on my own. Then came Jennifer. But neither of my parents lived to meet her. It pained me to think my mother would never know the woman who would become my wife and moral compass. Jennifer is the person my mother would have created for me if she could have—smart, grounded, beautiful—and the first Jewish girl I’d ever dated. I met her at a birthday party for a mutual friend. I was with someone else and the scene played out like a corny movie: she walked in and it was as if a spotlight hit her. The music played, and I was done, finished, off the market. Up to that time, when it came to girls, I’d been focused on such admirable goals as sleeping with a member of every pro team’s cheering squad and I was well on my way. Like the Rams cheerleader who came by my parents’ house one Father’s Day and I wouldn’t let her change out of her uniform—short skirt and fishnet stockings—because I wanted to show her off. Plus the Hooters girls. And the actresses and models and various hook-ups. Ah yes, in search of deep and meaningful one-night stands.
Jennifer was different, and I was different with her; she was my true partner. I met her family and passed the entrance exam … barely. I moved out of my bachelor townhouse/motel, where girlfriends and jock groupies had checked in and out (Adam Baratta, a pretty-boy actor, was one of the great wingmen and sources of beautiful girls in history, and he’d been living in my basement). Football players stopped by like it was an ATM for their monthly “allowances.” Now the players stopped by my wife’s place for their money, including the aptly named Phalen Pounds, the four-hundred-pound lineman from USC who made the floor shake. By this time, Doc’s health was failing. The big intimidating force I had known was literally shrinking and faltering. Still, he stood by my side throughout the wedding, a long, traditional ceremony. From then on, Jennifer began to help me shape a new direction. Life was finally changing. I knew one day it would mean leaving Doc, but not yet.
Wanted: Quarterbacks
I was working with Doc, recruiting, handling a lot of defensive players, and we realized we had to broaden our representation. Kids or their parents would ask us what other running backs or quarterbacks we represented, as if there was something different about making a deal for them. Top agents, then as now, are associated with quarterbacks. At one time or another, Steinberg, Demoff, and Condon represented Steve Bartkowski, Mark Brunell, Steve Young, Troy Aikman, Warren Moon, John Elway, Dan Marino, Ben Roethlisberger, Peyton Manning, and Chad Pennington.
We needed a quarterback. Several years earlier, Doc had signed star USC linebacker Chip Banks, who went on to play for the Browns. Chip’s nephew was Tony Banks, a kid from San Diego and the Michigan State quarterback. Doc set me up to meet Tony in East Lansing. I did my usual drill, working his need for extra cash into the conversation, letting him get interested, and eventually paying him. He was in his last year at MSU and was invited to the collegiate All-Star games. The most prestigious of these is the Senior Bowl, which is coached by NFL staff and attended by many NFL scouts and personnel people. If we wanted Tony, a talented QB, to crack the first round, the Senior Bowl was key.
Tony was involved with a girl in northern California at that time and she wanted him to play in the East-West Shrine Game, not far from her. We just wanted him in the Senior Bowl, fresh and healthy. Against our advice, he wanted to play in the Shrine Game first; we said okay, but get on a plane right after and get to Mobile in time for practice for the Senior Bowl too. But after the Shrine Game ended, we couldn’t find him. He was out with his girlfriend, hanging with her family and friends. He was one of the only guys in the country picked to play quarterback at the Senior Bowl and he was a no-show. Steve Hale, who ran the Senior Bowl, was livid. So was I. I was so furious that Doc had to calm me down and remind me the most important thing was keeping the client—we would just have to deal with it. Tony had played well in the East-West game, which helped his cause, but he still fell short of the first round. He was picked in the second by the Rams, the first quarterback of the 1996 draft, but had probably cost himself a million dollars. That’s an expensive weekend.
But we did everything we could for Tony, even giving up our marketing commission to put him into something called the Quarterback Club, a marketing organization that arranged group licensing deals for star quarterbacks like John Elway, Dan Marino, and—we hoped—Tony Banks. Still, he told Doc maybe he needed more of a “quarterback agent,” someone who could get the big deal done. I kept saying, what else could somebody do for him? Doc knew the answer. If we didn’t want to lose him, we needed to find that known “quarterback agent” before he did. Doc had a connection to Marvin Demoff, who represented Marino, Elway, and other superstars and had an office in west L.A. Our plan was to deliver Tony Banks to him and share the commission. Getting 33 percent of something was better than 100 percent of nothing. We made a handshake deal, like mine with Doc; no written contract. And of course, it wasn’t long before Doc and I were out of the deal, handshake or not, and Tony Banks was exclusively a Demoff client.
The postscript on Tony was a classic case of what-if. A few years later, Tony was released by the Rams, Trent Green was made the starter, and an unknown Arena Football League player named Kurt Warner was brought in as his backup. When Green tore his ACL (anterior cruciate ligament), Warner stepped in and had one of the great breakout seasons in football history. He took the team to the Super Bowl and retired ten years later as a football legend. What if that had been Tony Banks? And what if I’d been his agent?
Ryan Leaf: Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda
Where Tony was a what-if, Ryan Leaf was an almost. That word says a lot about him—almost a client, almost a great player, but not quite. He was the Washington State University quarterback, a Heisman Trophy finalist, and one of the two highest-rated players in his draft year. The other one was Peyton Manning. One became a superstar; the other became a punch-line for jokes. What went wrong? It’s a sad, complicated story but one incident puts it in perspective.
I’d paid my dues, literally, to get inside the program at Washington State. We were picking up the tab on Torey Hunter, Singor Mobley, John Rushing, all defensive backs, and Leon Bender, a defensive lineman. Word was, if you need extra money, call Josh Luchs. Ryan got the word. I had my first meeting with him at a hotel near the campus, just after his sophomore season, just before his career was going to take off. Right away, he let me know he’d run up a big credit card bill, around $5,000. One thing I knew by then: Don’t pay it all off. That would bring our nonrelationship to a fast halt: he’d have what he needed, and he’d have no more use for me. I asked him how much he’d need month to month to “make life a little easier.” About $500, he said. I considered that a bargain for a guy with Ryan’s star-potential; he was in the running to be the next number-one overall draft pick. We stepped into my office, the bathroom of the hotel, and he signed a rep agreement, undated, and a loan agreement. Then I started getting monthly money orders to him, usually around $500. And we established what I thought was a good relationship, him at age twenty, me at twenty-six, a cross between friend, big brother, advisor, and an ATM. He and other
players would come to my place in L.A., raid the beer, soda, and steaks in my fridge, play my video games, and party with great-looking L.A. girls. It was heady stuff for Ryan, a boy from Great Falls, Montana, population 50,000, give or take.
Sometime before what would turn out to be Ryan’s last college season, 1997, he and I were sitting in a Jacuzzi, smoking cigars, contemplating the good life that was sure to unfold for him. He told me a story about having just been to the Playboy All-American photo shoot. Leaf and Manning, along with a slew of other top-rated football players, were waited on hand and foot, fed a banquet, and generally treated like royalty. And then there was the after-partying—unofficial, unsanctioned, and unpublicized. But Ryan told me that Peyton Manning hadn’t partied. He had dinner, socialized a bit, and then said he wanted to “get some shut-eye.” Ryan couldn’t believe this country bumpkin could go to bed when the parties were just getting started. I remember thinking, this Manning sounds like a pretty solid guy, surprisingly mature and grounded for a guy who is being worshipped everywhere he goes. And I remember thinking, too bad Ryan didn’t seem to have that discipline. But … he was going to sign with us, and he had a world of talent, so he was my guy. I just hoped the Playboy event wasn’t a glimpse of the future, of the difference in two promising players. When the time came, Ryan would step up.
As good as our relationship was, it was always like dating a diva. One wrong move and you could be frozen out. Case in point: a week-long binge in Las Vegas with Ryan when I didn’t pick up the tab for the two backup QBs he’d brought along, Steve Birnbaum and Dave Muir. I didn’t mind spending money on this kind of thing, but these guys weren’t potential clients, just Ryan’s sycophants. I made a lot of risky loans, but if I hadn’t limited myself to possible stars, I would’ve been broke in a week flat. But Ryan didn’t like it. Despite the girls, the drinks, the meals, and the bad behavior I enabled, nothing I did was enough. I could tell on the ride back that I had offended the diva and jeopardized our future together. Plus, around the same time, we began to hear rumors that Ryan’s coach was pushing him to sign with Leigh Steinberg.
The only guy in the business whose client list could hold a candle to Steinberg’s was Marvin Demoff. And this was during the time we were corepresenting Tony Banks with Marvin, but before he cut us out; so Doc suggested we bring Demoff in on Ryan Leaf as well. Again, it wasn’t what we wanted, but a piece of something was better than all of nothing.
I was supposed to fly out to Montana with Demoff to meet Ryan’s father and get his final blessing on the deal. I’d been selling Marvin hard to Ryan and his family. This was a very stressful time for me, given that I was still dealing with my father’s death while spending every spare minute with Ryan. But, at the end, he had even gone with me one day and told my dying father he could be at peace knowing, “Josh doesn’t need to recruit any other players. He’s got me.” Ryan seemed to be on board with Demoff. Then, at the last minute, Marvin bailed out on the trip. Why? He thought he had a good shot at landing Peyton Manning and didn’t want to risk that by meeting with Ryan Leaf. So, suddenly, we were screwed. Doc decided to go with me but he was really out of place in redneck, outdoorsy, woodsy, very white Montana. We were done. I kept paying Ryan, even meeting up with him before the Rose Bowl. I went into the bathroom, checked to see the stalls were empty, and gave him his $500 for the month, but he could barely look at me.
Ryan Leaf ended up signing with Leigh Steinberg. Peyton Manning signed with Tom Condon of IMG. If it sounds like agents have no loyalty, no scruples, no rules, and just chase the hottest skirt in the room, you’ve got it.
Ryan announced he was coming out after his junior year, after his school’s first Conference championship and Rose Bowl appearance in sixty-seven years. I saw him on television, having been picked number two, right behind Manning, by the Chargers. I’d like to say that I knew way back then, in the Jacuzzi, that this guy was going to be a bust in the NFL, but I didn’t. I thought he was in the mold of hard-partying quarterbacks like Joe Namath or Kenny Stabler, superstars who had a good time. Sure, I had a little nagging feeling about him, but mostly I just wished he’d signed with us.
One thing I will say about Ryan: he paid us back most of the money we gave him, roughly $10,000. We had represented Chris Mims with the Chargers and a couple of others on the roster so I asked Chris to tell Ryan I was coming to collect the money he owed us. He came out and saw me and I told him we had some unfinished business. He gave me a kind of embarrassed look and we walked to his car and he handed me a stack of money. But it was short. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t count it. So we drove to a gas station with an ATM and he gave me some more, not quite all, but … almost.
He lasted less than four years in the NFL and never did hold down a starting job. As of this writing, Peyton Manning is in his fourteenth season, well on his way to the Hall of Fame. So what happened to Ryan Leaf? Was it a poor work ethic? Immaturity? A shoulder injury? Or all of those factors? And why? No one really cares, sadly—not the NCAA, not the NFL, not the NFLPA—because he failed, and in American sports nobody wants to be associated with that. He remains, to this day, probably the biggest draft bust of all time.
I learned a lot that year. I’d grown up, literally, having lost my parents. I’d had some rude awakenings, from Ryan Leaf’s false promise to my dying father that I was his agent … to watching him on TV next to Leigh Steinberg announcing he was entering the draft … to Damien Covington, a Buffalo Bills linebacker who we paid when he was broke during the off-season, asking me for still more money, for a nicer apartment, while I was caring for my failing father. And let us not forget offensive lineman Travis Claridge, whose fiancée, Tiffany, coldheartedly bragged of shopping the USC roster for a player likely to make it in the pros (which he did); and when we advised him to have a prenuptial agreement, she convinced him not to sign with us. This was the life I’d chosen. Heady and exciting—sometimes. Self-absorbed and infantile—often. Soul-eating—daily. There wasn’t one aha moment. There were a thousand of them. Something had to change. When I married Jennifer, I knew it was the beginning of that change. Together, we set a new course. The business I’d known was evolving fast, becoming more sophisticated, more polished, with higher stakes, and on a whole new level of competition. It was time to stop working out of the trunk of Doc’s car, hustling for every chance I had. It was time to clean up my life. And time to have the toughest conversation of my life.
CHAPTER 6
Post-Doc: Doing Things Less Wrong
My wife was running a movie theater for her family and I used to stop by and show the kids who worked there how to “up-sell” on the concessions. “Would you like a large drink for twenty cents more with that jumbo popcorn?” “Have you tried our nachos? It’s a pretty long movie.” It was as far from the sports world as I could get so that’s where I asked Doc to meet me to discuss our future. But it wasn’t really a discussion, it was a decision, the most difficult one I’d ever made. He showed up with a young girl he was seeing, so we asked her to wait in the theater and went off to talk. I told him I had something difficult to say and I think he knew what was coming. I said I’d loved working with him but I had to take my life in a different direction. (I guess I sounded a little like the players and their clichés telling us why they’d decided to go with another agent.) I was married, about to raise a family. I had to make this change. I told him I loved him. He nodded and said he understood. And we both cried.
I had been talking to Gary Wichard, by then one of the bigger agents in the business, to see if he had a place for me in his company. I’d met him at the Senior Bowl, which was like the annual convention for agents—you could meet anyone, do business in hotel lobbies, discuss trade secrets, spin stories, and maybe make your next career move. Gary was in the lounge of the hotel, sitting at the table next to me, talking to the mother of Darren Howard, a defensive end out of Kansas State who was going to be in the 2000 draft. I had already been thinking about which agents it made sense to hook u
p with. I wanted someone who would value my ability to recruit on the West Coast and Gary was at the top of my list. Even though his office was in Pacific Palisades, ten minutes from UCLA, he had few to no West Coast clients. His players were from places like Syracuse, Oklahoma, all over the place really—except in his own backyard. I’d studied Gary and I knew I could fill a void in his business. In fact, I collected marketing material from other agents, stuff other players would throw away, all part of my obsessive research—names, addresses, client lists, anything I might need someday.
I leaned over to Darren’s mother, right in front of Gary, and told her how fortunate she was to be working with such a great agent—Gary Wichard. I regurgitated his own marketing pitch from his printed promos, complimenting him more effusively than he could himself—an A.P. All-American quarterback out of C.W. Post College, who was drafted by the Colts; Seahawks linebacker Brian Bosworth, Cardinals receiver Rob Moore, Pro Bowl tight end Keith Jackson; his role in pioneering free agency—all parts of Gary’s spiel. I wasn’t trying to sell Gary to Mrs. Howard; I was selling Josh Luchs to Gary. Then I got up and said good-bye. I didn’t say a word to him the rest of the week of the Senior Bowl.