by Josh Luchs
That year, of the three back-to-back meetings, we landed two—Heap and Archuleta, but not Eason. Both went high in the draft, both signed big contracts. Not bad.
The next year, capitalizing on those successes, I connected with Terrell Suggs, the defensive end/pass rusher from Arizona State, a prized prospect. His case is a real demo on how we used the Game Plans. We’d meet in a hotel room with the player’s family (in Suggs’s case, it was a hotel a few blocks from his school), and we would carefully walk them through the reasons they should go with us, step-by-step. At the end, Gary would hold up two Game Plan books, one in each hand. Book one was filled with data assembled by us on a former draftee who had signed with us and had a great career; and book two was filled with one who had signed elsewhere and failed. One success, one loser—which did you want to be?
For the Suggs meeting, our success story was Adam Archuleta, who, like Suggs, had played at Arizona State. Our Game Plan showed he’d been ranked to go in the fifth round by BLESTO, the NFL’s first scouting organization, which was named the Lions, Eagles, Steelers Talent Organization for the teams that set it up in 1963 and was later modified to include Bears. The National Report, another prominent ranking service, projected him to go in the seventh round. But, according to our Game Plan books, Adam Archuleta made the smart move: he worked with us, worked with a strength coach and with our position coaches and nutritionist. He watched films and did drills with an NFL position coach, and he ended up being picked in the first round, by the St. Louis Rams, who just happened to employ the very same position coach he’d worked with to prepare for the Senior Bowl and the NFL Scouting Combine. Adam signed a contract with guaranteed upfront money totaling $4.2 million.
The second book’s “loser” was Nijrell Eason, the defensive back and teammate of Archuleta we’d met with but hadn’t landed, who our plan said had been graded a second-round pick on the National Report. But he walked away from us and fell out of the draft entirely, and was then picked up by the Cleveland Browns with a contract that guaranteed him only $5,000 as an undrafted free agent.
After presenting the two plans, Gary asked Suggs and his family, “Next year, which hand do you want us to be holding your Game Plan in—the Adam Archuleta hand or the Nijrell Eason hand?” Suggs signed with us. Terrell Suggs went in the first round of the 2003 draft to the Baltimore Ravens and signed a contract with upfront guarantee of $7.3 million. Suggs is now a four-time Pro-Bowler on a very competitive team. Happy ending.
Just one thing: The facts weren’t facts. They were stretched, altered, or just plain changed if necessary. Archuleta was always ranked to go high in the draft. Our services may have bumped him up a round … or his performance may have improved between spring, when the prospect rankings were released, and the actual draft almost a year later. Nijrell Eason had rated high in the spring and had fallen off in fall during the season. By the time the season ended, he was no longer an elite prospect. And when the winter report, released sixteen weeks before the draft, came out, he was graded seventh round or “undrafted.” It had nothing to do with not working with us. In fact, he didn’t even turn us down, we’d lost interest in representing him and walked away. And Suggs? We were talking to him when he was a junior, still unranked but already highly touted by experts. By the time he declared himself eligible for the draft, the reports had him in the top five to ten in the first round … but we didn’t make it happen.
The next day or next week, if we had a meeting with a second-round ranked defensive back, we’d highlight and adjust based on the player, the school, and the agents we were competing with, complete with stats and scouting reports adjusted just for him. If we had a cornerback, I created numbers that would sell him. We made sure we didn’t make claims that were outrageous, such as raising someone from the seventh round to the first. We stuck to credible embellishment and made sure we never fabricated a number that could easily be checked—actual draft outcome, professional stats, or anything too visible. Those numbers were often common knowledge or could be found. But smaller stuff, like predraft rankings or scouting reports, that stuff you could invent, and we did so often.
Did other agents do it? Yes, absolutely. I have the presentation material that three of the most successful agents used to recruit the top seven picks in the 2005 and 2006 drafts. I have audio recordings of two of them in their pitches citing client contract details of 40 percent incentive bonuses for making the playoffs, $1.5 million for being named All-Pro, and deferred comp packages of $3 million tied to playtime performance bonuses. I have proof of inflated and/or false statements of guaranteed money in contracts they negotiated for players.
Okay, actually—I don’t have any evidence of what others did. But note how the supposed figures and facts I rattled off above—three agents, top seven picks, draft years, percentages, incentive bonuses, deferred comp—made my story seem credible. That’s how our Game Plans worked. As for actual BLESTO and National Reports, we weren’t supposed to have them but we did. How did we get them? Well, I can put two and two together. The fax number from where the reports were sent was the Redskins front office and Gary had at least one close friend (GM Vinnie Cerrato) in Redskins management. I still have our Game Plans with real names, real and altered grades, real contract numbers. They worked.
And Gary was a maestro. I had been in meetings with Doc Daniels and with Marvin Demoff. I’d seen them in action with dozens of prospects. I’d taken Flozell “the Hotel” Adams (also known as “Roach Motel” and “False Start” Flozell for his dirty play), the massive offensive tackle from Michigan State, on a trip to see the Super Bowl. We thought, with Demoff and his partner, former Raider Sean Jones, we had a shot at him. Demoff represented Jonathon Ogden, maybe the best tackle in the game. Marvin was big-time. I’d been with Mike Trope, as smart a guy as there ever was at handling players and deals. Gary was better than all of them at a pitch. He performed at the meetings as if he were conducting an orchestra.
And then, once we signed a prospect, Gary was a master at identifying a hole in a player’s game and setting out to plug it—on-the-field issues like times in the forty-yard dash or off the field behavior issues. Once agents took action to address a problem, we could get scouts to check it off their list. We would take what the players offered to work with, build on it, enhance it, and and try to minimize or eliminate the negatives. Sometimes a player didn’t give us enough to work with and we couldn’t raise his stock much. We signed Joe Tafoya, defensive end out of the University of Arizona, and he just wasn’t generating much buzz and there wasn’t anything we could do. After the Senior Bowl, Joe fired us. In the 2001 draft, he was picked up in the seventh round, which was about right. It was the same story in 2003 for Cal pass-rusher, Tully Banta-Cain, also taken in the seventh round by the Patriots. After the draft, he fired us. Sometimes no magic would change the outcomes.
Joe Tafoya thought we were giving our attention to Adam Archuleta and Willie Howard, which was true. Gary was cultivating interest in Adam through his relationships with Mel Kiper and other sports writers at ESPN the Magazine, and USA Today. He even hyped his media contacts in the Game Plan. He’d say, “See this writer, good friend of mine. Notice almost every year, he does a feature on one of my players.” Gary helped the writer get access to the player and the story helped the player. The scouts were traveling around the country, staying in one hotel after another, and what was on the floor outside every hotel door, on every airplane? A copy of USA Today with a story on our player.
And Gary could spot the stories. Like when Adam Archuleta was making a position change. He was an undersized linebacker in college, the Pac 10 defensive player of the year, in fact. But he was switching to safety. And we knew he had better speed than he was getting credit for. In the BLESTO report, they had him estimated at 4.7 in the forty. But if, at the Combine or a private workout, he ran a 4.4 or even 4.3, the next thing you knew, people were saying, “Maybe we underestimated this guy. He’s fast.” Now the question was, could he ma
ke it as a safety? Did he have the athleticism, the hips? So Gary leveraged his relationship with Ron Meeks, at the time the secondary coach for the Rams. Before the Senior Bowl, Meeks flew into L.A. and did ten days of defensive back drills with Adam. Meeks taught him techniques like backpedaling, flicking his hips, and changing direction, so when Adam was on the field during Senior Bowl week, he showed off moves and techniques that the scouts were looking for, moves they hadn’t seen on college films.
These private workouts with NFL coaches are strictly prohibited by NFL rules. Gary had lots of NFL assistant coaches do it, at least one of whom has gone on to become a head coach. Coaches are not supposed to even see a player until the Senior Bowl, let alone be training him. So, besides training Archuleta, we were building more buzz around his unorthodox workouts with trainer-guru Jay Schroeder (later we had Jay and Archuleta make the video Freak of Training). The result of all this? Adam Archuleta was drafted twentieth overall in the first round, higher than anyone believed he’d have gone otherwise.
Willie Howard, the defensive end from Stanford, was another case where there was simply no rabbit to pull out of the hat. I was tight with Willie and with his mom, Deby. Willie was originally projected to be a first-round pick but he had a history of knee injuries. Medical red flags are tough to beat. Even with a clean bill of health, some players just get labeled as “injury-prone.” Willie fell to the second round, number fifty-seven overall, was picked by the Vikings, played two years, and then suffered a career-ending knee injury.
Then there was Todd Heap. By the time we were leaving for the Senior Bowl, we didn’t have him signed. It was a competition between us and another agent. Gary flew to Arizona on the way to the game to meet with Todd and his parents, while John Blake and I went straight to Mobile, Alabama, for the Senior Bowl. Gary closed the deal. We now had the number-one-rated tight end in the draft. He hadn’t played in any all-star games because he was a junior so Gary brought in Richard Mann, tight-end coach for the Chiefs. “This is the coach who works with Tony Gonzalez, the Pro Bowl tight end with Kansas City,” Gary said. “And now he’s going to spend a week or two with you.” By working with these coaches, we were giving players training in what the actual drills would be at the Combine. The NFL Combine is a skills competition, where players are tested for strength and speed and a variety of football techniques, agility drills, passing, and so forth. These days it’s televised but back then it was very secretive; the official results just leaked out, little by little. Everybody knew about the forty-yard dash, vertical jump, broad jump, and long and short shuttles; they could prepare for those. But we were selling access to training on the position drills, the specifics of exactly what coaches would be looking for at a given position, so Todd wouldn’t be surprised or unprepared. He would have a competitive advantage … thanks to Gary and me. Todd was projected to be the top tight-end pick and in the end, he was. Number thirty-one in the first round. We didn’t add value; we maintained it.
Two years later it was Terrell Suggs’s draft—the happy ending from the Game Plan example. But what happened before the happy ending? Suggs, a linebacker at Arizona State, was another underclassman, so he wasn’t going to be in any all-star games. Gary had done his magic with a USA Today story and Mel Kiper was saying Suggs could go as high as number three in the first round. But then two things happened. One, Suggs didn’t run a great forty. When you run slower than expected, you can shoot firecrackers out of your ass and you’re still going to fall in the draft. And two, there was what we came to call the basketball incident. He was in a pickup game and somebody started a fight with his cousin; they went out to a parking lot, somebody hit somebody with a crowbar, and not too long later, a letter arrived from an attorney asking for money to settle damages or they’d file an assault charge—fancy language for extortion—all conveniently before the draft.
Suggs said he had been defending himself and wasn’t afraid of the incident going public. We didn’t feel the same way—even if he was innocent, it could still have affected his draft status—but the story came out anyway, and Gary handled it very well with the NFL, and Terrell was acquitted. The slow forty time, coupled with the “off-field issues,” caused Suggs to drop to number ten in the first round. We did what we could for every player, sometimes moving them up, sometimes maintaining their position, sometimes trying to make problems go away.
Despite Suggs’s problems, he was a top pick, and though Gary had represented many great players, this was the first time he was invited to the draft in New York. And, I figured, it would be my first time too. I’d made the first contact with Suggs, through another Arizona State player; I had cultivated the relationship, attended almost every day of his training, and kept in touch with Suggs as his lawyer talked him through the basketball incident. But Gary wouldn’t let me go. He said I needed to stay back and take care of Kevin Curtis from Utah State and “man the ship.” It wasn’t as if we had a complex business. It was Gary, me, Blake, and a couple of others. No ship—barely a rowboat, really. I was disappointed, and angry. It was an early sign of how he’d treat me, keeping me from getting too close to players or from getting too important. I was selling him, but he wasn’t grooming me.
Mixed Signals
From day one, I was getting both pats on the back and slaps in the face. After our first season, Gary called up my wife to tell her what an incredible recruiter I was. In the office, I’d overhear conversations through the walls, like Gary telling a young guy who was starting the baseball division of the agency, “Look what Josh came in and delivered. If you deliver like he did, we can talk about paying you more …” But I got my first real wake-up call around the time my wife was pregnant, when I found out my name wasn’t going to be on the rep agreements. With Doc, we always put both of our names on them, so I assumed it would be the same with Gary and Pro Tect. I had prepared a rep agreement for Willie Howard, the first player we’d gotten together. Gary signed; I thought I was about to sign; and he said, “No, you don’t sign those. This is my company. My name is on the door.” I remember thinking, So this is how it’s going to be? We’d had a really good haul this first year—Adam Archuleta, Todd Heap, Willie Howard, Joe Tafoya. We’d scored at Arizona, Arizona State, Stanford, the West Coast, the Pac 10—all the places I’d promised to help him with. But he wanted me to be invisible. I had a child on the way, and I’d developed strong relationships with players, especially Willie Howard, but I’d only worked there a year, so I was in no position to walk. When I brought up my concern about not signing agreements, he’d say, “It’s not about ego. Take care of your family. What do you care if your name isn’t on the contracts as long as the check clears?” I didn’t like it, but I had diapers to buy.
Around this time, the NFLPA passed a new regulation that stipulated if you went more than three years without representing an active player, you couldn’t remain a registered agent. If Gary kept my name off all the contracts, I would soon lose my registration, and then I would find myself essentially a “runner,” a dirty word in the agent game. (More about this later.) So, in order to keep my certification alive, Gary let me negotiate and sign the contract for Keenan Howry, a wide receiver out of Oregon. He was a seventh-round pick in the 2003 draft, so it was a bone Gary thought he could throw my way with no skin off his hide. Gary would even say that dealing with a player drafted in such a late round was bad for his image, because it made him look small-time. Howry would later become a very important player in our business relationship, but that’s another story that can wait for now.
Besides the issue of my name on contracts, there was something else that haunted me: a comment from fellow agent Kenny Zuckerman, who had worked for Gary in the same role I had. I bumped into him at my first Senior Bowl with Gary and Kenny said, “Watch your ass. Gary’s got his people in New York—the Rothmans. Don’t trust him or them. It’s only a matter of time before he fucks you.” I didn’t yet know much about the Rothmans—Gary’s favorite financial advisors—but when I look
ed down our roster, I saw that Kenny had been active in the recruitment of a lot of players but hadn’t been their agent—maybe because he hadn’t been allowed to sign the contracts. I shrugged it off because I knew Gary despised Kenny after litigation and a settlement when Kenny left Pro Tect. I chalked it up to bad blood on both sides … but I didn’t forget it.
And something else happened, something that shook the sports agent business and Gary in particular. David Dunn, a partner of Leigh Steinberg and Jeff Moorad in one of the largest sports agencies in the country, left the firm. The company had recently been sold for more than $70 million to Canadian conglomerate Assante Inc., but when Dunn left, he took with him somewhere between forty and fifty clients, including some of the highest profiles in sports. Steinberg countered with an enormous, very public, very ugly lawsuit. A Business Week article written after the suit recounted some of the accusations and testimony that had come out, including Steinberg’s drunken and erratic behavior in public. There was one incident, at a social event, where he was said to have licked women’s faces; and he was once quoted as saying to a woman, “I want to eat your leg.” The case was eventually decided in Steinberg’s favor, with a $40 million–plus judgement, but his personal reputation was damaged, perhaps beyond repair.
(That story hadn’t happened yet when Jerry Maguire was made. If it had, and had been included, the movie might not have been so popular.)
When the story came out, Gary vowed that a defection like that would never happen to him. He had total disdain for Dunn, believing that regardless of Steinberg’s questionable social behavior, Dunn was greedy and would have been nothing without Steinberg. And Gary was either cautious or paranoid, depending on your point of view, to prevent an insurrection like that. The only way to assure it couldn’t happen was to keep his employees out of the spotlight and prevent them from having any real influence with clients. In this case, “them” meant me.