by Josh Luchs
We got to the Combine, checked into the hotel, and still didn’t know what he weighed. Maurice was set to be officially weighed the next morning, then run through the whole process. This was the first time the Combine was televised, and Steve set up a live interview with Rich Eisen and Terrell Davis on the NFL Network to be held after Maurice’s performance at the Combine. That night Maurice was dressed in layers and layers of clothing, and he worked on the treadmill and elliptical at the hotel for hours, pouring sweat, trying to lose water weight before the weigh-in, like a boxer.
The next morning, Maurice weighed in a couple of pounds lighter than he had the year before, and the buzz was great. “Wow, Maurice is in shape.” Nobody knew how he got there. And he managed to do well with the bench press, lifting 225 pounds twenty times. Then came the press conferences. We had prepped him very well and he’s a good speaker. This was the new Maurice Clarett, new attitude, new maturity, a new man, just what the teams want to hear. So far, it was going great. Next was the Cybex test, a part of the physical that we had told him not to take. In fact, I’ve told lots of players not to take it. For the Cybex, they strap one leg down and have you do leg extensions until your leg is completely exhausted, so the next few days you have dead legs when it comes time to run the forty-yard dash. If they really pressed a player to do it, we always told them to do it after the forty, which pisses off the people running things but there’s not much they can do and they’ll never actually reschedule it. Amazingly, Maurice did what we said and skipped the Cybex.
Instead, we worked on more prep for the Wonderlic. The next day it was time for the forty-yard dash and the other field work. Gil Brandt, an NFL legend who runs the Combine and happened to be supportive of Maurice, broke precedent and let me and Steve into the media green room, with all the writers, to watch the monitor while Maurice ran. Most of the beat writers had no idea his agents were floating among them so they were openly rooting against Maurice. He got ready to run and it was as if everything was in slow motion. Not because that’s how I imagined it, or because it was important to me—this was because Maurice was literally running in slow motion. No burst, no explosion, just flat. He finished the forty in 4.7-plus seconds, a good two tenths of a second slower than the 4.5 he needed. Disaster.
There was laughter and howling in the media room, pretty cold delight. Now Maurice was supposed to run routes and running back drills. The only thing he could do worse than his forty time would be to just quit. And that’s exactly what he did. He walked off the field. He knew he was fucked so he walked. But instead of going to his hotel room, he went into his interview with Terrell Davis and Rich Eisen to discuss the most anticipated but worst Combine performance in NFL history. Somehow he stumbled through it. When they asked him why he’d walked off, he said he just wasn’t feeling it and besides, he was going to work out at Ohio State’s Pro Day the next week and scouts could see him there. That sounded like a reasonable answer but it opened up a can of worms. First, we couldn’t get him fixed up in a week. Second, we had no idea if Ohio State, having thrown him out of school and then read about him ripping Jim Tressel apart in ESPN the Magazine, would let him work out there.
We just tried to hustle him out of the hotel—Steve, David Kenner, and me—and out of town, past the fans yelling at him, stuff like, “I can drink a forty faster than you can run one,” and him just staring at the ground. Once on the plane, he started downing miniatures of Grey Goose, one after another, never showing any sign of being drunk. Steve and I were hit with another rude awakening. Maybe he was an alcoholic too. Maybe that, plus being out of shape, was the thing slowing him down.
We followed up the trip with a “Come to Jesus” meeting—it was time to train, according to our rules, or we were dropping him as a client. And if Steve Feldman, who’d made a name for himself dealing with misfits, walks away from you, that’s a curse the scouts won’t miss. We recommended, and Hai and David agreed, to have Maurice train with Todd Durkin, a phenomenal trainer who’d worked with LaDanian Tomlinson, which ought to be as impressive as Poliquin working with David Boston.
While Maurice was doing that, I had to deal with the Ohio State Pro Day problem. No way would Maurice be ready in a week, and we couldn’t have him pull out of Pro Day on his own; it would just confirm him as a quitter. So the only way out was to hope Ohio State would kill it. That was our bet. I sent a formal request for Maurice to participate, crossed my fingers, and luckily they sent us a formal rejection. Then I leaked that story to John Clayton of ESPN—Maurice wanted to do Pro Day at Ohio State but the school wouldn’t let him—and, as I expected, it went viral. Now all we had to figure out was where scouts would see him and when he could actually be ready. The NFL rule was that teams can only attend a player’s workout where he played college or high school ball or at a “conjoining metropolitan area,” meaning pretty close to either of those. It turned out Charlie Frye, the quarterback prospect out of University of Akron, was going to do his Pro Day in Akron in early April, one of the last scheduled “pro days” of the cycle. If we could piggyback with him, that would buy us an extra eight weeks. Akron isn’t that close to OSU, which is in Columbus, but after some back and forth with the league, they agreed to let Maurice work out there.
But there will still problems. The athletic department at Akron wouldn’t agree, and most importantly, Charlie Frye wouldn’t agree. Everyone thought it would create a circus atmosphere and steal attention from Frye. All the while, Maurice was supposedly working out in San Diego but Durkin reported that it had been a struggle to get him to workouts each day. Finally Hai and Kenner got Maurice’s cousin, Vince Morrow, to live with him, like a babysitter, to make sure he showed up every day for his drills. And I kept searching the state of Ohio for a place to do a Pro Day. Maurice wanted to do it at Warren G. Harding High School, in Warren, Ohio, because it’s where he played and they have a hard Tartan track. And he knew it was the same surface that fellow college exile and NFL hopeful Mike Williams of USC had run on. On this kind of track, you can’t wear track spikes and instead have to wear flat-bottom sneakers, but it lends itself to fast forties. Of course, scouts know this and adjust for it, but each scout adjusts differently so maybe it was worth it … unless it rained, and the track got slick and the grass field turned to mud and craters. Then I’d have to find a place for Maurice to run indoors. I gave myself an instant Ohio geography lesson and came across a place called Farmer Jim’s Indoor Soccer Complex in the town of Cortland, just close enough to Warren to meet the NFL rules. And Farmer Jim’s indoor surface is the original Astroturf over concrete—hard as rock, literally, and fast. Maurice didn’t want to do it there so the plan was to go to the high school and if it rained, we’d call an audible and send the scouts to Farmer Jim’s. At this point, I was figuring whatever could go bad, would.
And even on the trip out from L.A. to Ohio, it turned out that way. Steve and I were in the Phoenix airport for a connection, and I was on the phone with John Clayton of ESPN, and suddenly there was a scene with a police officer escorting a prisoner who somehow must’ve convinced the cop to take off his cuffs so he could take a leak or something, and the prisoner started beating the hell out of the cop, right in front of us. I ran over to the fray and asked the cop if he needed help. He said yes, so I grabbed the convict, threw him down, and pounced on top of him while Steve kicked him a few times for good measure. The cop picked himself up and took control again. John Clayton ended up writing a feature entitled, “Clarett’s Agents to the Rescue.” Steve and I concluded that everything to do with Maurice Clarett is trouble, even a walk through an airport. It’s funny but too true.
Of course, when we got to Warren, Ohio, it poured rain. We gave ourselves a head start and told everybody to re-route with directions to the location twenty minutes away, so we could get to Farmer Jim’s ahead of the pack.
Typically the order of the workout is they take height and weight, then bench press, vertical jump, broad jump, then the forty, shuttle drills, and positio
n work. We had about an hour and a half until the workout started and we figured Maurice was still a little heavy so the first thing we did was crank up the heat until it was like a sauna. Then we hid the scale in a locked closet so we could say, “Who’d have thought they wouldn’t have a scale?” Even if they came up with a scale later on, we’d have ninety minutes for him to sweat off another couple of pounds. Then Steve and I took a measuring tape to recheck the distance for the forty because Maurice couldn’t afford the time of a fraction of an extra step. The workout started and there was more media than scouts—about four or five teams, including the locals, the Browns and Bengals. After warmups, Maurice was ready and the scouts started bitching about wanting a scale. We said we’d scheduled the run for one o’clock and we were ready. We videoed the whole thing for the teams that weren’t there and we were planning to do the entire workout first (the parts that would make him sweat), and the measurements afterward. If Maurice got weighed later, we could edit the tape to put the weigh-in at the beginning of the workout. Every little bit that might help. Embellishment. Finally … he ran: 4.68. Not the 4.5 we wanted but more than a tenth of a second faster than his 4.7+ last time. We called John Clayton at ESPN and on Sports Center they reported, “Maurice Clarett had his workout today and though he was two pounds heavier than at the Combine, he ran faster.” All they focused on was the improvement. In reality, it was the surface he ran on, but sometimes perception is better than reality.
It had been a roller-coaster ride since the Combine. Before it started, there were people saying Maurice might not get drafted at all. Then after his interviews, some said he could go as high as the second round. Then he worked out and went into free-fall. Now, three and a half weeks before the draft, we’d had his Pro Day and the positive chatter was picking up. We thought we were doing great, a minor miracle in fact.
But it wasn’t okay with Maurice and his handlers. Kenner, Hai, Maurice, and his mom, Michelle, seemed to think I was getting quoted too much in the press. Plus Hai and Kenner had the idea of building their own athlete management business, with Maurice as the centerpiece. To them, my media attention was stealing thunder from their new business plan. To me, I was managing the media blitz the way I’d observed Wichard doing it for years, and it was working. They weren’t happy and they summoned Steve to a private meeting—very ominous. I was in Palm Springs for a couple of days off with my family. Steve was very uncomfortable given all we knew, had heard, and read on the Internet about these guys. Who knew what they might do? Steve even called Tom Friend to let him know the meeting was happening so somebody in the media would know where he was that day in case he disappeared. He got to the meeting and they really unloaded on him, saying how dissatisfied they were, how much they disagreed with what I was doing and how I was doing it. They didn’t threaten Steve but even so, these are not people you want to have mad at you.
We just kept doing our job. Our goal wasn’t just to keep Maurice or ourselves in the headlines; it was to get some meaningful buzz—draft news—out there about him, something with some shred of truth that we could leak to the press. And we got it. One morning, Steve was on his treadmill and he got a call from Bill Parcells, then the head coach of the Cowboys, giving him the third degree about Maurice. Was he really ready to play? Was he getting in better shape? What was his attitude like? And he indicated, if the answers were good, the Cowboys were interested in taking Maurice at some point in the draft. We embellished that conversation in the retelling to suggest Parcells had targeted Maurice for the fourth round. It was not exactly what he’d said but, to coin a phrase, it was “leakable” and the morning of the draft, it “somehow” got out. The Internet is amazing. Click: the bloggers get it, couple it with a quote or two from Parcells about interest in a “big back,” then the sports sites pick it up, then the national media run it, and the more it runs, the more real it gets. Once it was out, we figured the fourth round was the floor, the latest we projected he’d go in the draft, and if another team was interested, they’d think they would have to draft him ahead of the Cowboys.
We knew that Mike Shanahan and the Broncos had an interest in Maurice because, even though they weren’t at his Pro Day, they’d asked for a tape of it. We knew the Broncos had a nontradable compensatory pick (a selection the league gives based on free agents lost the previous season), the last pick in the third round, but didn’t have a pick in the fourth. We figured they didn’t want to take the chance the Cowboys would take him in the fourth, as we had spread the word they planned to. It was a long shot—the Broncos had only rumors to gauge Dallas’s interest—but, to our amazement, it worked. Maurice Clarett, the magnet for trouble, was picked on the first day of the draft. He didn’t fall out of the draft like some people predicted. He didn’t even go late. He went to Denver, a team that had a history of a great running game, and he went to Mike Shanahan, who everybody thought was a genius with running backs—the guy who’d drafted Terrell Davis. Finally, Hai Waknine and David Kenner were happy. So were Maurice and even his mother.
It really was a miracle. Maurice had been consistently lazy, constantly in or flirting with trouble, and had been away from football for a long time. He wanted to be a pro running back, whose job was to be fit and fast, but he’d run slow times twice and was overweight. He’d been suspended, banned, and arrested—and he didn’t even look like he was trying hard to come back. Yet somehow, he was drafted ahead of one hundred fifty other guys. If ever I’d earned my money as an agent, it was while representing Maurice Clarett. So, how did he repay us?
The next step was mini-camps, immediately after the draft. Rookie mini-camp is three to four days for the teams to see the players they’ve drafted. Right away, Maurice had a run-in with the strength and conditioning coach and went to Denver’s GM Ted Sundquist, and demanded that the coach be fired. Here was a third-round pick demanding the ten-year strength coach get canned … and we hadn’t even negotiated his contract yet. Then his drinking problem resurfaced. We got a call from the Broncos one day informing us that Maurice was frantic that he had left a bag in the back of the limo he had taken from camp to the airport. We started calling to track down the bag and the driver said Maurice hadn’t left anything in the car except a Gatorade sports bottle, which he took to Maurice, who snatched it from him as if it were more than a plastic bottle. We came to find out Maurice had his bottle with him at practice, on the sidelines. He took a swig and allegedly told Rod Smith—Mr. Bronco—his All-Pro wide receiver teammate, that he’s “gotta get his Goose on.” Yup; his water bottle was evidently full of Grey Goose vodka. The more the team saw him in action, the more they saw that the wiser, more mature Maurice Clarett was fiction.
Still, Steve and I managed to come out with a good contract in our dealings with the same Ted Sundquist that Maurice had asked to fire the strength coach. We worked out the structure of a guaranteed $410,000 signing bonus, plus his salary. Just keeping Denver interested was no small feat in itself. Fortunately ego sometimes overcomes logic: If we picked him, we can make him a star. The Broncos seemed to believe the franchise history showed they worked magic with running backs and could do it again, and they had the magician in Mike Shanahan. Magic or not, this would be some trick. We then went to David Kenner’s office in Encino and got Sundquist on the phone to review the details. But Kenner said he’d already discussed it with Maurice and it was unacceptable. They didn’t want a piddling four hundred grand up front. Maurice Clarett was going to be a superstar and he wanted a deal built on incentives that would reward him like the first-round pick he should have been. Kenner told us to work out the details and walked out of the room.
What they wanted was basically a suicide deal, especially for a player as volatile as Maurice. A little bit of contract negotiating background here: the NFL instituted a salary cap in 1994, permitting teams only so much money they can spend per year. (The actual figure is complicated to arrive at, and varies based on a lot of factors.) If they give a player a big bonus, they pay it out up
front, but for bookkeeping and salary cap calculations, it gets amortized over the term of the deal. However, if the team lets the player go early, they have to accelerate the bookkeeping, paying out all the guaranteed money, including the bonus, immediately. That, in turn, means it eats into their total team salary cap number immediately. Sometimes a team’s inducement to give a player a second or third chance is to prevent taking the salary cap hit all at once. We wanted those extra chances for Maurice.
Instead, because of David and Maurice, we were losing a good deal. And Steve and I looked like fools to the Broncos. Worst of all, it was bad for Maurice. Fortunately Sundquist was a decent guy and was open to keep talking. At one point in the negotiations, Steve and I went for a walk in Beverly Hills to get something to eat and I said, “You know, the whole thing is a shame because I’ll bet you a dollar Maurice Clarett never plays a down in the NFL.” He took the bet, I think just because it would be too pessimistic not to. We finally worked a deal in which Maurice got heavy incentives on the back end, despite the front office saying they couldn’t do it because it would be changing team policy, and even the players’ union saying it was too far out of the ordinary. We explained that our client was insisting on it even if it wasn’t good for him.
We put the best spin on it we could. We told the media that Maurice was saying, don’t just pay me for showing up, pay me for what I earn, for the way I actually perform. The talking heads on ESPN picked it up and reported that Maurice was showing a mature attitude. Just because he’d been drafted in the third round, and was getting third-round money, he was willing to give it up and show people how hard he’d work. He would prove his value. It made a good story. The question was, would it turn out to be true?