Represent dozens of the highest-paid players in the NFL. Have hundreds of famous friends, including franchise owners and Hollywood stars. Don’t dwell on the commissioner not sending you an invitation to the league’s official Super Bowl party. Use your party as the ultimate slap-back for the snub. Start by inviting 350 fabulous friends to your plush crib. Once your party becomes an annual fixture, book the ritziest venues in the host cities. Pose with the big names and land on Page Six. Repeat 25 times. Repeat once more.
Snow threatened to make February’s Super Bowl at MetLife Stadium an embarrassment for the NFL. Nonetheless, the prospect of a whiteout wasn’t slowing down business. The Super Bowl belonged in New York, the crucible of commerce, where the power brokers on Madison Avenue were cutting $4-million cheques for a 30-second ad, where online bidding was driving the price of a choice ticket as high as $449,645, and where, for the 26th time, Leigh Steinberg was staging a party to celebrate the occasion of the greatest of America’s games.
The New York Post made it out to the glitzy rooftop club at 230 Fifth. So did Forbes. Reporters took attendance. Steve Young, check. Kevin Costner, check. Serena Williams, check. Coverage would duly note the host’s thumbnail bio: that he has negotiated $3 billion in contracts over the past four decades; that he has represented eight No. 1 overall picks in the NFL draft; that his client list has included Super Bowl stars like Troy Aikman, Ben Roethlisberger and the aforementioned Young. A celebrity auction raised money for the Lone Survivor Fund, the veterans’ charity, and West Point cadets in full dress mingled with marquee names.
When guests paid their respects to Steinberg, they asked how business was going and he rhapsodized about this crewcut kid, Garrett Gilbert, standing wide-eyed and disbelieving beside him. Remember that name. With a diet pop in his hand, Steinberg surveyed the scene. OK, it’s not like the old days when 3,000, even 4,000 made it out. Let’s just say it’s more intimate. Still, he smiled. This was how his comeback should look, like he never was gone.
Get a box-office star. Cast him as a decent man. Put him in a tough situation. Have him triumph against the odds. Remember that the facts always have to give way to a good story.
The most famous stories in business begin as case studies of inventions but ultimately evolve into the sagas of the inventors themselves. Creative genius begets an idea and then the visionary tells a tale that turns him into an icon. Thus the light bulb became Thomas Edison’s story, just as the production line became Henry Ford’s and personal computing Steve Jobs’s. Dust their legends and you’ll find their fingerprints all over them.
Not Leigh Steinberg. Someone else did the dirty work and made him into an icon. In fact, the story was so movingly written that it wound up nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1996. It comes up whenever Steinberg’s story is told: Jerry Maguire. As Steinberg has said many times, more presciently than he imagined: “Once Tom Cruise has played you on the screen, life can only go downhill.”
Where Jerry Maguire ranks in the canon of sports films is open for debate. It did win Cuba Gooding Jr. an Oscar for chewing up the scenery as NFL receiver Rod Tidwell, imploring the title character, his agent, to “Show me the money.” It also earned $150 million at the box office after its release in 1996. Steinberg’s contribution: The film’s writer-director, Cameron Crowe, shadowed him for a couple of years to get the backroom detail that lends the film its ring of truth. And Maguire owned a relentless common decency that mirrored Steinberg’s public image and ran counter to the stereotypes of the trade.
“Every day somebody will come up to me and say ‘Show me the money,’” says Steinberg, who awaits Guinness’s recognition for the lifetime record for forced smiles. However fatiguing that might be, he never shied away from his association with the film—there it is on the end of his Twitter profile: #RealJerryMaguire.
The lead character might have had a bit of Steinberg in him but the plot of Jerry Maguire played out nothing like the agent’s life story. Maguire was a young hotshot turfed out of a major agency and he wound up with a single journeyman pro on his client list. When Crowe followed Steinberg, he was the NFL’s alpha agent. He told reporters that he no longer needed to recruit players, that his phone was ringing off the hook, that he only had to pick which stars he wanted to represent. Not imperious about it, mind you, but those were the facts back in the ’90s.
Crowe never made a sequel to Jerry Maguire, leaving us to presume that Cruise and Renée (“You had me at ‘Hello’”) Zellweger plunked down and lived happily ever after. If there ever will be a Maguire Redux, and if it hews more closely to Steinberg’s life and times, look for a far darker story.
Connect with a rising star without coming on too strong. Recognize opportunity. Position valuable incoming talent at the point of greatest leverage. Stand in the background when your client is signing a record-breaking deal.
Leigh Steinberg wasn’t born into show biz, but nonetheless his birth 65 years ago was duly noted in the Hollywood Reporter. The journal announced his arrival because his grandfather was the manager of Hillcrest Country Club and friend to many Jewish stars and moguls denied membership at lily-white Gentile 18-hole enclaves. Thus the grandson grew up around famous actors and comics like Jack Benny and Groucho Marx, at least when visiting the golf course, and had opportunities as a child actor. “To grow up in southern California is to be fascinated by the entertainment industry,” Steinberg says. “Acting, directing, producing, all of these seemed like career goals to me.”
The Steinberg home, however, was devoid of glitz. His father was a high-school principal and chaired the city’s human-rights commission. His mother was a classics-loving librarian. Dinner-table conversations could pass for small talk in a philosophers’ circle. “No one had a bigger influence on my values than my father,” Steinberg says. “He told me, ‘Treasure relationships. Make a difference in the world. Make it a better place.’”
By the time the younger Steinberg applied to the University of California’s law school, he was torn between career ambitions poles apart: either the entertainment business or politics. The arc of his life took an unexpected turn at Cal when he served as a freshman dorm counsellor and struck up a friendship with a kid named Steve Bartkowski, a football recruit.
Four years later, Bartkowski was a first-team All-American as a quarterback and was considered the top player eligible for the 1975 NFL draft. With the prospect of talking contract with the Atlanta Falcons, the owners of the No. 1 pick, Bartkowski approached Steinberg, who was wrapping up law school at Berkeley. “Until then I hadn’t thought about a sports law practice, and sports law [in the NFL] was in its early stages,” Steinberg says. “Most players just represented themselves. And at the time, if a GM took a position that he didn’t want to deal with an agent, he could just hang up the phone.”
The Falcons could have hung up the phone on Steinberg when he called on Bartkowski’s behalf, but they were motivated to lock up the quarterback. They weren’t even half-filling Atlanta Stadium. The Falcons needed an attraction and believed Bartkowski would create a buzz. Negotiations would have proceeded as usual if not for a wild card: the World Football League, a rival loop with modest ambitions of trumping the NFL and taking the game into European and Asian markets.
The WFL had fielded 12 ragtag teams for its inaugural season in 1974 and was an ongoing debacle: Players went AWOL; teams relocated in mid-season; and, in a sublime climax, the IRS threatened to shut down the WFL’s first championship game unless the league immediately paid back taxes out of the gate. Most NFL executives believed the WFL wouldn’t last beyond a second season—and it didn’t. Nonetheless, the Falcons couldn’t risk a PR disaster that would spill over if Bartkowski chose the semi-glorified barnstormers over Atlanta. He wound up signing with the Falcons for four years at $650,000 and thus did Steinberg, a 25-year-old who had never considered working in sports law, break into the business with the largest rookie contract in NFL history.
It was neither Bartkowski’s contract nor his subsequent Rookie of the Year award that most impressed Steinberg, but rather something that others wouldn’t have given a second thought to: the Atlanta NBC affiliate breaking away from Johnny Carson and The Tonight Show to cover Bartkowski’s arrival in the city. “I could see what a hold a sports star had, the star worship,” Steinberg says. “I saw the opportunity that an athlete had to do good things and make a difference. After that I talked to Steve and he got involved and gave to the United Way. And that’s something I impressed on my clients, the idea of making a difference.”
This is a story Steinberg has told hundreds of times and it could pass for a bit in a routine, yet those who have known him since the ’70s insist it shaped his career. “Leigh’s a sincere, idealist guy and always was,” San Francisco Examiner columnist Glenn Dickey says. “He was and still is interested in social causes, liberal, progressive, whatever you want to call it. He convinced clients to get involved with charities, good causes that they cared about. With Bartkowski it was the United Way and others it was school or something else. It wasn’t PR. That was just Leigh.”
Do not hard-sell. Listen before you talk. Remember, if the heart is empty, the mind doesn’t matter.
You’d imagine the sports representation biz is rife with hucksters and hustlers, fast-talking and when necessary bribing young athletes into the fold—but that has never been how Leigh Steinberg presented himself to the media, to the public and, most importantly, to a prospective client. He has never seen the point of winning a client that he didn’t respect or one who didn’t respect him. He has always believed that mutual respect would get them through tough times.
Steinberg has a special place for clients whose careers were fraught with trouble early on. He needs to be needed. A pair of his Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterbacks provide instructive examples.
While Steve Young is best remembered for leading the 49ers to Super Bowl titles, the start of his career was one misadventure after another. Everything seemed to be rosy for Young when, coming out of Brigham Young, he signed a $42-million contract in 1984, the largest in North American sports history.
But a couple of problems arose.
First, Steinberg’s star client possessed the oddest of quirks: He didn’t want the money. Not that he wanted out of the contract, wanted to play somewhere else, wanted some other consideration. No, the day after Young signed, he told Steinberg to give all the money back and make sure that he was paid a salary equal to his teammates’ average and a side amount that would let him get an apartment in L.A. and four new tires for his 1965 Oldsmobile. A nervous wreck, Young bolted back to Utah and went into hiding. Steinberg stepped in and coaxed the client out of his socialist impulses. “Steve was an intelligent young man who didn’t care about money,” Steinberg says. “The money didn’t make sense to him and he felt like he couldn’t take it in good conscience. I talked him through it.”
The second problem was one more easily foreseen. Young had signed with the Los Angeles Express of the USFL, an update if not an improvement on the late, unlamented WFL. Predictably, the exactor of failure came in: The Express owner was succumbing to the unbearable lightness of pocket and the league was collapsing. When Young’s payments were missed and the owner was mining the lint in his pockets, the USFL commissioner’s office believed the league was not on the hook for the balance of the quarterback’s contract. Au contraire, Steinberg said, waving a contract with layer upon layer of ingenious legal protections against the Express’s and USFL’s demise. Steinberg says: “Unless life as we knew it came to an end on planet Earth, Steve was going to get paid what was owed to him.”
Though Young walked away from the wreckage with lifetime security, his problems on the field didn’t end there. He was ready to quit the game on more than one occasion when he was stuck in a backup role with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, but Steinberg engineered a trade that landed his client in San Francisco and, ultimately, in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
By contrast, Warren Moon’s problem was an existential crisis: Despite his impressive performance in the 1978 Rose Bowl, the University of Washington quarterback passed right through the NFL draft. All he had were offers to try out if he were willing to play another position. African-Americans were seen as lacking the “intangibles” necessary to play quarterback in the NFL. It was a form of institutional racism straight out of the 19th century.
Some agents would have advised Moon to chase short-term returns that come from walking on with an NFL team at receiver or tight end. Steinberg realized that wouldn’t end well. “As an agent you have to understand your client’s hopes and dreams, his fears and anxieties,” Steinberg says. “Everyone thinks it’s always money—it’s not. Warren was never going to be happy if he wasn’t a quarterback.”
Most agents would have looked at the short-term returns in the NFL and assumed Moon would never be more than a bit player. As a point of pride and with a hope for a fair shake, Moon went to the Edmonton Eskimos. Over six seasons, he proved himself as the CFL’s best quarterback and belatedly established a market for his talents in the NFL. He wound up landing a contract in Houston that made him the league’s highest-paid player, a $5.5-million deal with a $4.5-million signing bonus.
Moon got a late start in the NFL but stuck around until age 44, throwing 291 touchdown strikes and passing for almost 50,000 yards.
And in 2006, Moon asked Steinberg, the only guy to stand beside him through thick and thin, to introduce him at his Hall of Fame induction ceremony. “No one in the game had a bigger impact on my career than Leigh,” Moon says. “No one gave me more support. The time of the induction was a tough time for Leigh. I knew about his troubles. It had been building for years, just so many issues that he just couldn’t manage it all. The stress he was under would break anyone. In Canton, I was worried about him getting through the weekend. But he did.”
Think big—really big. Take on partners. Take on proteges. Believe all people are inherently principled. Gain confidence in your ability to make things work out.
Over the course of a couple of decades in the business, Steinberg established himself as a heavyweight behind the scenes in the NFL and a photogenic celebrity in the bright lights, with his blond hair and wholesome good looks befitting his white knight’s image. Cosmopolitan named him the magazine’s Bachelor of the Year in 1983. He modelled menswear in a fashion spread in GQ. His wedding to his college sweetheart was featured on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. As his profile rose, his ambitions grew. He talked about becoming governor of California, even President of the United States. Laugh if you will now, but if you can get millions out of a moribund football league you might be able to pull off universal health care or gun control.
Back in those heady times, Steinberg grew his practice. When the workload became too much in 1985 and he was looking to add major league ballplayers to the client list, Steinberg brought in Jeff Moorad as a partner in the agency. For the balance of the ’80s and through the ’90s, theirs was a seemingly perfect professional relationship, Steinberg focusing on the NFL, Moorad on MLB. While they negotiated tirelessly on behalf of clients, Steinberg says that they spent “not one second figuring out how to divide the big pie” that was the agency’s profits. Theirs was the ultimate good-faith arrangement. “Earlier . . . than he merited, I gave Jeff a stair-step to a 50-50 deal,” Steinberg says.
Further expansion proved problematic and, ultimately, destructive. Other associates were brought aboard in the late ’90s, most notably David Dunn, who rode shotgun to Steinberg on the NFL client list. In retrospect, Steinberg can see how the agency started to go off the rails in the ’90s. “Factors are going to create dissension,” he says. “People’s desire for public recognition, for financial recognition, younger associates’ ambitions to chart their own path . . . all of that’s in play. When it comes to recognition, everybody tends to feel under-recognized. [In fact], they tend to overvalue their own contribution.”
By the end of the ’90s, 30 people worked on the agency’s staff. Steinberg had prided himself on his ability to empathize with GMs and owners at the bargaining table, but he had no read of his own office and was oblivious to the level of dissension in the ranks.
At the time, major entertainment talent agencies and corporate interests were acquiring sports agencies like kids collecting baseball cards. Assante, a Winnipeg-based financial outfit, made an overture to Steinberg that he was initially skeptical about: an offer to buy the agency attached with a promise that he would stay on and conduct business just as he had for the past 25 years. When the offer reached $74 million, Steinberg signed off on the sale.
Today, playing Monday-morning quarterback, Steinberg doesn’t need to view the game film to see the read he missed. “I undervalued the autonomy I had,” he says.
Issues escalated from day one. Dunn believed Assante had shorted him to the tune of $2.5 million in stock. On a black day in February 2001, not even two years after the sale to Assante, Dunn bolted the agency and took several disenchanted staff with him. Worse, he took more than 50 of the 84 clients. And, rubbing salt into the wound four weeks later, Dunn negotiated a record-breaking 10-year, $103-million contract for New England quarterback Drew Bledsoe, a former Steinberg client. Dunn and his associates did not respond to several interview requests over the course of weeks from Sportsnet magazine.
When Steinberg and Assante filed suit for breach of contract, a courtroom street fight ensued. Round one went to Assante and, nominally, Steinberg. A jury awarded the plaintiffs $44 million in damages. The ultimate pyrrhic victory: The award was going to Assante and the trial left Steinberg’s reputation in tatters. Staffers he had hired years before had taken the witness stand and recounted his over-the-top office outbursts, drunken embarrassments at public events. Bledsoe even testified that his wedding had been disrupted by an inebriated Steinberg. For years, friends and associates had tried to talk him into going to rehab, but Steinberg claimed his drinking never affected his work. Those protests now rang hollow.
It got so bad that even Tom Cruise tried to distance himself from Steinberg. “He’s not Jerry Maguire,” Cruise said.
Steinberg’s trip downhill was only gathering speed. No matter what the verdict, clients weren’t coming back and Steinberg’s phone was no longer ringing off the hook with calls from first-rounders. A year later, Steinberg bought out Assante for $6 million, and he and Moorad left with what remained of what used to be the biggest agency in sports. Assante officials dismissed the deal as trivial, saying the operating costs of the sports practice exceeded what it was bringing in.
In March 2005, citing errors in instructions to the jury, a judge threw out the verdict in the breach-of-contract suit against Dunn. Assante would settle out of court with Dunn’s agency, Athletes First. Days later, Moorad announced that he was quitting the biz to become a partner and executive with the Arizona Diamondbacks.
And then, in 2007, what amounted to the death penalty for the agency: One of Steinberg’s remaining associates had borrowed $300,000 from a client, Chad Morton, and not repaid the journeyman fullback. Morton slapped the agency with a lawsuit and no amount of Steinberg’s personal charm could put out the fire. The NFLPA decertified the agent who had made its members billions of dollars.
It would soon get bleaker still. If Steinberg had undervalued his autonomy, he had overestimated his business acumen. He had invested millions in dot-coms that went bust—money thrown into dubious retail and service businesses that might as well have been burned.
Not surprisingly, Steinberg’s family life also disintegrated. The marriage that began on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous ended in divorce court. At the same time, doctors diagnosed Steinberg’s two sons with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease that can lead to blindness.
What he hadn’t lost he seemingly tried to destroy. He was drinking half a gallon of vodka a day, one plastic jug of Popov after another. He was busted for drunk driving after bouncing his Mercedes off three cars and a fire hydrant on the Pacific Coast Highway. After a conviction for public intoxication, he holed up in the basement of the home he had grown up in so he could drink without being seen. The home was his mother’s by then; his father, the one person who might have been able to ground him, had died of cancer a few years before.
Five trips to rehab and countless interventions didn’t work, but finally on March 20, 2010, Steinberg brought his drinking to a dead halt. It ended with humiliation. His brother Jim tried to check him into a detox facility for the drunk and indigent and the staff turned him away because he wasn’t drunk enough. In a brief time he drained another bottle and returned to the facility only to find that the last bed had been taken. The party was over, and when sober, he took stock of the wreckage that lay around him. “I drank to forget,” he says. “There was a lot that I was trying to avoid. Bills that didn’t get paid. Business I should have taken care of.”
In January 2012, he filed for bankruptcy protection, claiming that he was $3.18 million in debt. Creditors included Morton ($450,000), Southern Methodist University coach June Jones ($90,000), a SoCal socialite ($150,000) and various tax authorities. He also owed $1.4 million for unpaid rent on his office lease.
In the end, Steinberg listed $483,500 in assets: $475,000 in stocks, an 11-year-old Mercury Mountaineer valued at $6,700, a $1,000 flat-screen television, $150 in clothes (roughly the price of a single shirt he modelled in GQ) and $50 in personal memorabilia. At his five-hour debtor’s hearing, the recitation of his ill-fated dot-com stocks grew so lengthy that lawyers cracked jokes at his expense just to break up the monotony.
By rights, it should have all ended there.
It didn’t.
Listen to those who love you. Understand your addiction. Understand that there are things to live for. Understand that there are loved ones to live for. Be prepared to try and fail and try again.
The Super Bowl party on Fifth Avenue was supposed to be the rollout of Steinberg’s re-entry into the game, but even his favourite former client and one-time business partner remained skeptical about the prospects for success. “Leigh was at the summit but I don’t know that he can climb up the mountain,” Moon says. “I don’t think his future is in agentry. He’s probably the most intelligent man I’ve ever met and he has so much to give in other ways.”
And Steinberg is giving back. He’s serving as an adjunct professor of law at Chapman University, a Christian school in Orange, Calif. He’s mentoring young grads who want to get into sports law.
He’s also looking for new business ventures, including the development of a reality show, a sports-biz version of The Apprentice that will wage a contest to find the next super-agent. And he’s out telling his story. This spring, he crossed the U.S. to promote The Agent, a memoir of his professional life and white-knuckle victory over alcoholism.
All this looks like the next stage for Steinberg as Moon envisions it. Still, Steinberg wants back in, not to make history, not to rebuke one-time friends and colleagues who ruined his good name, not because this up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege is all he knows. He understands better than anyone how the business landscape has changed since he was driven out. His nemesis David Dunn is now the most powerful agent in football. The first-rounders go to Dunn and his Athletes First agency, 51 in the past five drafts. Dunn negotiated Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers’s seven-year, $130-million deal, the largest contract in league history. Steinberg knows he’s competing against a turbocharged version of his former self.
And it doesn’t matter. A place in the game would give him a chance to make a difference. Channelling Jerry Maguire: A client completes him.
Once sober, Steinberg moved into an apartment with a lawyer who went through the 12-step program with him. He attended AA meetings in a Methodist church. He had to go for regular urine tests as laid out by the California bar association. He had to apply to be recertified by the NFLPA, the same union that collected dues off the billions his clients made over the years.
These days you’ll find Leigh Steinberg’s office in a modest building he shares with a bus-tour company and a wine boutique, a short walk down the Pacific Coast Highway from the place where he pinballed his Benz off parked cars and a hydrant. Steinberg Sports and Entertainment takes up three adjoining rooms on the third floor, his office overlooking the water. Charitably, you’d describe the space as nondescript.
Steinberg is 65, a suitable age for a retirement he would have trouble affording. “I have friends who have retired, but it doesn’t interest me,” he says. “I love my work. It keeps me young.”
Well, somewhat. The ordeals that visited him or that he brought on himself have made him less boyish. Surgery for skin cancer left a fresh scar on his temple. He’s 30 lb. over his fighting weight, his gut rolling over his belt. Still, he owns a ridiculously thick and blond head of hair that would look appropriate on a high-schooler. And he wears the self-satisfied smile of a kid in the front row who just got the highest mark in the class.
A working day in April 2014: To keep relatively young, he’d make 100 phone calls over an 11-hour stretch. He’d hold incoming calls during a lunch meeting with three businessmen from Houston who are bankrolling his practice. “I’ve always had good luck with Houston and Texas,” he says, after seeing them off. He drains another can of Diet Dr Pepper and loosens his belt. “I know lots of business people there. Ray Childress, one of my former clients there, was a partner in the Texans. Getting my clients involved in their teams’ communities, developing relationships with owners, gave them a chance to meet businessmen who could help them after they retire from the game.”
Steinberg wasn’t just looking to Texas for investors but also for luck once more. He was going into the NFL draft just like he did in 1974: with one client. Quarterback Garrett Gilbert isn’t Steve Bartkowski and wasn’t going to be Steinberg’s ninth No. 1 pick. He had been USA Today’s high-school player of the year in 2008 but struggled in college, first at the University of Texas and then SMU. By the spring of 2014 he was all Steinberg had. Then again, he might have been the most important player in Steinberg’s professional career.
Draft insiders had Gilbert ranked outside the top 10 senior quarterbacks and declared underclassmen. The NFL didn’t bother inviting him to the combine, the league’s seal of approval for prospects. ESPN had Gilbert ranked 315th overall, which would leave his name outside the 256 who were going to be called over the three days of the draft in May. Still, after the Super Bowl party, Steinberg brought Gilbert out to San Diego to work with a quarterback coach to prepare for private workouts.
After he saw his Houston backers off, Steinberg called his client and he was transported back, not to bygone glories but to the previous weekend: the occasion of Gilbert’s pro day, his workout for NFL scouts. Steinberg had watched his clients work out for NFL scouts in hundreds of sessions before. “Maybe with the exception of [former No. 1 overall pick] Jeff George, Garrett’s was the best I’ve seen,” he says.
Before he flew out of Dallas, Steinberg had sent a text to Gilbert reiterating his appraisal of the showcase: “TERRIFIC!” Since then, on the hour, he was keeping his young client apprised of every glowing review he heard about through the grapevine. “I think Leigh might be more excited about it than I am,” Gilbert says.
Some in the trade didn’t regard Steinberg’s landing this kid as a recruiting coup. After all, his father is Gayle Gilbert, a backup quarterback for Buffalo’s Super Bowl teams and a former Steinberg client. Still, Garrett Gilbert says family history wasn’t the only reason he selected Steinberg. “My coach at SMU is June Jones and he really respects Leigh,” he says. “They go way back.”
If Steinberg can use a creditor named in his bankruptcy filing as a professional reference, then no one should rule out a comeback that would be the stuff of Hollywood.
This and other ironies seemed lost on Steinberg. He sat at his desk and stared absently out onto the harbour. High on the bookshelves behind his desk and looking down on him were foot-high cardboard cutouts of Thurman Thomas, Bruce Smith and Troy Aikman among others, like residents of a thought bubble left over from 1992. “I’ve done this for 40 years,” Steinberg says. “Garrett is going to get drafted. It just takes one person to like you.”
Understand that victory is a qualified and temporary condition. Understand that defeat is not the end if you don’t surrender.
Leigh Steinberg sits in the living room of Gayle Gilbert’s home in Austin. He has gone over it with father and son. Before the draft began, he drew up a list of teams that were going to be in the market for a quarterback and had expressed interest in young Garrett. Now, midway through day three of the draft, hitting the sixth round, the second-last of the nerve-eroding ordeal, the list of possibilities has dwindled to just a couple of teams with other more highly regarded throwers still on the board.
Steinberg has sat in hundreds of living rooms over his three decades in the trade. It was where it always started, the setting for recruiting a client. He has sat in the humble homes of dozens of kids who grew up in poverty. He sat in a few sprawling mansions where young men had grown up accustomed to all the advantages. But this is draft day, and draft day always meant New York, where his big names walked on stage for their gridiron graduation day.
In Jerry Maguire, the story reaches its payoff at the Super Bowl. So Hollywood. No, that’s not where the story of this agent—down to one lonely client—would end. This gut-wrenching siege must end unseen and unshared. A living room in Austin without a camera in sight; that seems fair.
On the television screen: “With the 214th pick, the St. Louis Rams select Garrett Gilbert, quarterback, SMU.”
The commentators call up a thumbnail profile on their computer screen and remind viewers that the Steelers are on the clock.
In Austin, an old agent and a young man who were both on the clock are smiling and crying.
“You made it happen,” Gilbert says to his agent.
“You made it happen for me,” Steinberg tells him.
They know all of it hasn’t happened quite yet. A contract remains and Steinberg will handle paperwork, but there won’t be any negotiation. A sixth-rounder won’t be looking at guarantees and bonuses, just a contract around the league minimum that the Rams can vaporize if Gilbert struggles in camp. And even if he makes it through training camp, Gilbert would be the No. 3 option, like his father had been.
Knowing what there is still to do, and the long odds against glory, they keep the celebration muted. Years ago, Steinberg and his first-overall pick celebrated in style, in awful excess. Back to a presidential suite or ballroom rented for the occasion, reporters chasing them for interviews. Not now, though. Leigh Steinberg can only stay a couple of hours. He has a flight to catch to LAX, where it will begin again. Day after day he’ll stand on the sidelines at practices and workouts, sit in dozens of living rooms listening to and reassuring prospects and parents, and spend thousands of hours on the phone. This is what must go into the production of a sequel so melancholy and yet relentlessly hopeful that the floor of the next Super Bowl party will be carpeted with wet hankies.
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