Illegal Procedure

by Josh Luchs

  The Way Other Agents Were Doing Business

  Manning Money: Brothers Carl and Kevin Poston, agent-partners in Professional Sports Planning Inc., made outrageous demands for their clients—mostly defensive players—that NFL insiders referred to as asking for “Peyton Manning money.” Carl Poston denied using that term but he and his brother did push teams to the brink and beyond, sometimes failing to make deals at all. Carl Poston once allowed LaVar Arrington to sign a contract with the Redskins, the final version of which they had not read and did not contain the $6.5 million bonus they thought they’d secured. That negligence resulted in NFLPA fines and suspension.

  Cover Your Assets: Steve Weinberg, one of the leading agents in the game since 1982, allegedly hid assets from a judgment creditor, the result of which was that players he represented were being served with writs of garnishment—to collect those assets. The judgment creditor happened to be Weinberg’s business associate and co-agent, attorney Howard Silber. Silber went to the NFLPA to intercede, supposedly to protect players’ interests, but ultimately to destroy Weinberg. It was a preview of the tactic that Silber would use as a lawyer representing Gary Wichard in my lawsuit years later.

  Who’s Wooing Who: Agent and author of Winning with Integrity, Leigh Steinberg, continually insisted he was above the fray, never soliciting players, always waiting for them to come to him. But Sean LaChapelle, among other players (see story in chapter 4), was said to have received repeated phone calls from Steinberg offering his services. And every year, Leigh’s company threw extravagant Super Bowl and Pro Bowl parties, inviting not just their own clients but plenty of other high-profile players, the ones they wanted to represent. The rules say an agent cannot “initiate communication” with another agent’s client. But they don’t prevent an agent from being a good host.

  The High Five: John Blake left Gary Wichard and returned to coaching, first at Mississippi State, then at Nebraska, then at North Carolina. He had historically used his influence to help steer players to Wichard’s company, Pro Tect, and in return would get what he called a “high five,” meaning money or something of value.

  I was with Gary Wichard and Pro Tect from 2000 to May 2004. In hindsight, I’d like to say I left because I was uncomfortable with the way we were doing business, but to be honest, I didn’t think we weren’t doing business any cleaner or dirtier than any other agent. We just worked the way that was most effective for us. The truth is I left because no matter how well I did my job, Gary made it clear that I’d never be an important player in his company. The better I did my job, the more he treated me like a threat.

  When I had the chance to hook up with another big agent, Steve Feldman, I grabbed it. I had talked to other agents, including the infamous David Dunn at his new outfit, Athletes First, but I got wind that he was trying to steal Todd Heap from Gary. I declined to pursue working with Dunn for two reasons: My arrangement with Gary was that I’d be paid for as long as Pro Tect represented a player, so I didn’t want any part of Dunn’s poaching Heap; and Dunn verbally proposed a deal to me but the papers his lawyers later sent bore no resemblance to the deal he’d discussed. In August 2004, I went in to see Gary and resign. He told me two things. He said I was “a great salesman,” but I should pursue a new profession. And he said, “You’ll never sign anyone. No one without me.” He offered to hook me up with a friend of his at Mattel, the toy company. I thanked him and swallowed my real thoughts, and we parted. Not exactly like my emotional departure from Doc Daniels. Ironically, after I left the agency, and in some ways because of his actions, I eventually became just what he didn’t want me to be: a threat.

  CHAPTER 7

  Going Hollywood

  Steve Feldman was a former sports law professor at Cal State who now looked to me like a cross between Harvey Keitel’s character, the Wolf, in Pulp Fiction and Sean Penn’s Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High—a middle-aged guy wearing surfer’s board shorts. At one time, Steve had represented a powerhouse list of young prospects, but now he focused on recruiting mostly established NFL veterans. His roster had included All-Pro defensive end Lee Roy Selmon, for whom he had negotiated a contract that made Selmon the highest paid defensive player in NFL history; Rickey Dixon of the Bengals, the highest paid defensive back; future Hall of Fame offensive lineman Jackie Slater of the Rams; Redskins Super Bowl quarterback Doug Williams; and all-world linebacker Junior Seau of the Chargers. Steve was smart, aggressive, and highly effective, with a reputation for successfully navigating controversial player negotiations, like the deals that brought Carl Pickens to the Bengals, Andre Rison to the Colts, Corey Dillon to the Patriots, and Lawrence Phillips from the Rams to the Dolphins. What Steve didn’t do was go after rookies anymore. He had soured on the whole sordid process, the minefield of families, friends, hangers-on, and oversized immature egos—the stuff I was good at.

  When I met with him, I put on a mock presentation, as if I was talking to a player and his family. I had morphed the Game Plan from a bound book into a PowerPoint, the digital format of the moment, and renamed it “the Playbook.” It showed off the key stats, player histories, Wonderlic tests, copies of the classified interview process, even video—clips of the drills players would be run through, Senior Bowl clips, confidential NFL video from the Combine, and so on. I was proud of my changes; the whole presentation could be altered with the click of a button, plus there was no book left behind to be fact-checked, or shared with another agent. The bottom line was: Here’s how we’re going to help you, the player, do better on these tests and impress pro teams. Here’s how we’re going to handle the media to get buzz, and how it’s all going to get you drafted higher. Here’s our competitive edge. Steve sat in the darkened home office at my house and watched, totally mesmerized. When I finished, he stood up, gave me a bear hug, and said, “We’re going to make a shitload of money.” He’d been old-school, nondigital, paper and ink, printed fliers, concentrating on negotiating contracts, which he was very good at. I’d taken what I’d learned with Gary to a higher level. Together we were going to be a force to reckon with.

  On day one, I reached out to some of the people I knew could open doors for us in recruiting. My first call was to the best recruiter I ever knew, John Blake. He was, at the time, a coach at Nebraska.

  Back when I was still with Gary Wichard, John had briefly coached at Mississippi State, just long enough to help Gary sign his first Mississippi State player, Tommy Kelly, who went on to become one of the highest-paid defensive tackles in the NFL with the Raiders. Kelly had been a top-rated defensive lineman in college but due to his failing a drug test, he tumbled hard on draft day, ultimately not getting picked at all. After the draft, Gary hadn’t secured a free-agent contract for Kelly and had been ready to give up and go home. I told him that if we didn’t find a home for Kelly within a few hours of the draft, all the rosters would be full and he’d be lucky to get into anybody’s training camp. Gary said he had dinner plans but if I wanted to, I could get on the phone and try to find a spot for Kelly. I called my old buddy George Karas and cut a deal to bring Kelly to Oakland. Gary came in the next day, made a few tweaks to the contract so he could say it was his, signed it, and Tommy Kelly had his chance to play in the NFL. Since Tommy was from outside of my territory, I wasn’t entitled to payment and, as expected, Gary didn’t offer.

  Wherever John Blake coached, Gary signed players. In fact, it started back before Blake was officially a coach, when he was working for the Oklahoma Sooners as a graduate assistant to the coaching staff. He cultivated relationships with some of the players and then helped steer them to Gary, guys like linebacker Brian “the Boz” Bosworth and tight end Keith Jackson. Later in his coaching career (including his ill-fated stint as Oklahoma head coach, in which he was a great recruiter off the field but on the field could never measure up to the Sooners’ legendary Barry Switzer), he connected Gary to defensive end Cedric Jones, tight end Stephen Alexander, and cornerbacks William Bartee and Jacoby Sheppard. Aft
er he was fired from Oklahoma, he became a full-time employee at Pro Tect. Blake used to tell me that without his delivering players to “G,” his nickname for Gary, Wichard would never have made it in the business. Blake is a colorful guy, full of colorful phrases and his own country-boy humor. I’d talk to him about how we had to recruit a certain player and he’d make his favorite bad pun, “You got to cruit him before you can re-cruit him.” Once when he heard Gary and me tell a joke that happened to involve cunnilingus, Blake said with his slight lisp, “Cunnilingus? I don’t know nothing about no cunnilingus. Why you guys always got to use all them big Jewish words around me?” Blake is a true original, charming, disarming, and as good as they come in the game. I hoped to follow the same path Gary had and have Blake endorse me so that I could get a kick-start in recruiting in my first year with Feldman.

  Once I’d started working with Steve Feldman, the first guy John connected me with was another player from back when he was at Mississippi State, nose tackle Ronald Fields. When Blake had moved to Nebraska, safety Josh Bullocks, one of his players, called him for a reference on me, and Blake said, “Yeah, Luchs is a good guy. He’ll take good care of you.”

  In our first year together, Steve and I signed both Bullocks, who went to the Saints in the second round, and Fields, who was picked in the fifth round by the 49ers. We also had Claude Terrell, an offensive guard from New Mexico, picked by the Rams in the fourth round; James Sanders, a safety picked by the Patriots in the fourth round; Ryan Riddle, a linebacker out of Cal Berkeley, who went in the sixth round to the Raiders; and David Bergeron, a Stanford linebacker and seventh-round pick by the Eagles. (Willie Howard, by this time no longer in the NFL, was technically Gary’s former client, but we had stayed close. I helped hook him up with the East-West Shrine Game as a D-line coach and he helped hook me up with David Bergeron.) All that, plus Maurice Clarett, the notorious and superathletic Ohio State running back, a story unto himself, who went—miraculously—in the third round to the Broncos. We didn’t have a first-rounder but we represented players in six out of seven rounds, contrary to Gary’s prediction of my future.

  I got so much help from Blake that now it was my turn to get the call from him like Gary got, asking for a “high five” in return. Around Christmas, John Blake reminded me of the favors he’d done and said he needed a “high five” in the form of a $1,500 flat-screen television for his family. He called me from the electronics store and I gave them a credit card number. No problem.

  I never forgot that Gary told me I’d be nothing without him, and it was sweet to prove him wrong. And it was especially sweet that I got key leads from people I’d met and worked with at Pro Tect, Gary’s people, like John Blake and Willie Howard, and even Wade, the street runner.

  Recruiting Big Samoans: Is That Redundant?

  During the 2006 college football season, I reconnected with Gary’s runner, Wade, and he offered up connection to Tennessee Volunteers players, by way of a man called Navy, a gigantic Samoan who had connections to a couple of other gigantic Samoans, two Tennessee players. When Navy walked into our hotel room in Knoxville for our first meeting, I realized that he was a former offensive lineman Doc had represented, whom I hadn’t seen in years. He explained how he was “involved with the agent selection process” (any deal would have to go through him) for star defensive tackle Jesse Mahelona and offensive tackle Albert Toeaina. Albert was a lesser-rated prospect but a superb athlete with enormous upside … and an enormous backside. He also had a temperament issue, having been suspended by Coach Phil Fulmer for the final game of the regular season for spitting on a cameraman on his way off the field.

  After Steve and I had good initial meetings with both players, they made it clear they both wanted to work with the same agents—us—provided we got the blessings of their parents. Steve and I flew up to northern California to meet Albert’s father, Pastor Alex Toeaina. After a warm Samoan greeting—“Talofa!” and a full-body hug—and the presentation of our “Albert Toeaina Playbook,” Pastor Alex proclaimed he and his family had prayed on it and determined we were the agents sent from God … with one catch. Obviously, God would not want his son to get anything less than what other agents were offering. (I hadn’t realized God even got involved in these negotiations.) Pastor Alex then showed us an e-mail from a financial advisor who worked with another agent, which promised a credit line of $250,000 for Albert if he signed with them. The pastor asked if we would match that offer. I diplomatically explained that, as good as Albert is, he wasn’t rated high enough to justify that much, and more importantly, that that amount of money would put his son too deeply in the hole to start his career. But I told him we could arrange for a $25,000 credit line, more than enough for the next few months since we’d be covering his living and training expenses in Long Beach, preparing for the Senior Bowl and Combine.

  They went off to consider the offer, and, after what we assumed was more praying, we ended up signing Albert. Evidently Jesus gave us the nod. Then, a few days later, I got an emotional phone call from Pastor Alex, confessing that he had altered the e-mail from the other agent, adding a zero to the $25,000 credit line offer. Steve and I had already suspected this; I’d personally heard from that same financial advisor earlier, offering to create a credit line of $25k for players we signed, provided we worked with him. No doubt this was a financial advisor of great integrity. I knew that game. And anyway, it didn’t matter; we were fine with the $25,000 credit line since we weren’t on the hook for it; the financial planner was. The pastor just had one more request. He said his son would work even harder to get ready for the draft if he had a custom Escalade with chrome rims and every option available including having his son’s name, “Albee,” embroidered on the headrests … and to please have it delivered during his sermon to inspire his congregation. Amazingly, the financial advisor agreed to make the arrangements, put the car in Albert’s name, and had it delivered. We can only assume the congregation was uplifted. One gigantic Samoan down, one to go.

  For us to meet Jesse’s father, Mr. Mahelona, was a little longer excursion, twenty-five hundred miles from L.A. to Kona on the island of Hawaii and back again in twenty-four hours. It was a trip, in every sense of the word: an expedition, a journey, and a bizarre experience. First, Mr. Mahelona said that no business would be conducted until we had dinner together, which he would arrange. He selected an Italian restaurant that we assumed was very good because it was packed. We made small talk about Hawaii, family, and football, and had what at best would be a less than mediocre meal. At the end of dinner, the waiter brought the check toward Mr. Mahelona, who executed a perfect last-second body-feint, steering the waiter and the bill to us. To eliminate any doubt about who was paying, Mr. Mahelona thanked us for taking him and his family to dinner. I looked at the check and it seemed to have one too many zeroes, like the credit line offer for Albert. When I looked a little closer, I realized that most, if not all, of the people in the restaurant were supposedly part of the extended Mahelona family, which explained why, despite the bad food, it was packed.

  A thousand dollars or so later, it was finally time for business. We followed Jesse’s father to his home perched at the top of a hill with breathtaking views of the Pacific Ocean. This barefoot Jabba the Hut plopped himself down in his huge chair and grunted, his signal for me to begin the pitch. I told him about our company, Steve’s history and mine, and began to explain that we had a track record of managing the draft process so that our clients got drafted as high as possible. He interrupted me, screaming, “You don’t get my son drafted; my son gets my son drafted.” He hoisted his enormous body out of his chair and demanded we leave his house and never come back. Steve and I looked at each other with the same disbelief as when we had seen the dinner bill, only this time I didn’t just swallow it. I got up in his face and yelled back, “We flew all the way here, six hours from the Mainland, to meet you, to get your blessing, to do our best to represent your son, and we are not leaving until we at least g
et through our presentation.”

  Mr. Mahelona was stunned but unrelenting. Steve, always the cooler head, pulled me outside while he calmed Mr. Mahelona, making small talk about anything but football, picking through their garage full of old surfboards, buying time, letting Mr. Mahelona cool down. He let us back in, and over the next few hours, we laid out our plan and he seemed to warm to it, and even to me. At the end, he proclaimed that we had his blessing. We took out a representation agreement for him to sign (meaningless and nonbinding without his son’s signature, but getting a player to sign is almost always easier if his father has already signed). He then called Jesse in Knoxville and told him he was giving us his blessing. From a total disaster to a save—miraculous. Two for two, a Samoan Sweep.

  Mr. Mahelona listened a little on the phone, and hung up. We were ready to celebrate when he explained that Jesse had decided to sign with an agent in Tennessee, Chad Speck, who said he was representing players with a philosophy of “Christian ethics,” according to Mahelona. All I knew about Speck was that he represented the feared and brutal Titans defensive tackle Albert Haynsworth, who later that year would become infamous for his suspension for stomping another player’s head at the end of a play. Where ethics fit into this picture was a mystery to me. The father gave us both smothering bear hugs, thanked us for making the trip, and for dinner, and said good-bye. Our miracle was short-lived. We flew all night and arrived back in California wiped out, in every sense of the word. I called Jesse’s dad—why, I don’t know. He said hello, and without even identifying myself, and for no particular reason, I sang, “No New Year’s Day …” There was a long pause and then Mr. Mahelona completed the lyric in his deep, island-accented voice, “… to celebrate …” and together we went into the chorus of Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” Steve Feldman was looking at me as if I were nuts which, after no sleep, a thousand-dollar dinner for a village-sized family, being thrown out of the player’s father’s house, begging our way in again, bringing a deal back from the dead, and then losing it to an agent who they said claimed to have “Christian ethics” and they all bought it … well, maybe I was nuts at that moment. I hung up the phone and Steve and I just laughed. What else could we do? That’s the business we were in.