The Agent: My 40-Year Career Making Deals and Changing the Game - Hardcover

Steinberg, Leigh; Arkush, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1250030420 ISBN 13: 9781250030429

Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books, 2014

Synopsis

A New York Times bestseller!

The real-life "Jerry Maguire," superagent Leigh Steinberg shares his personal stories on the rise, fall, and redemption of his game-changing career in the high-stakes world of professional sports

Leigh Steinberg is renowned as one of the greatest sports agents in history, representing such All-Pro clients as Troy Aikman, Bruce Smith, and Ben Roethlisberger. Over one particular seven-year stretch, Steinberg represented the top NFL Draft pick an unheard of six times. Director Cameron Crowe credits Steinberg as a primary inspiration for the titular character in Jerry Maguire, even hiring Steinberg as a consultant on the film. Lightyears ahead of his contemporaries, he expanded his players' reach into entertainment. Already the bestselling author of a business book on negotiation, the original superagent is now taking readers behind the closed doors of professional sports, recounting priceless stories, like how he negotiated a $26.5 million package for Steve Young―the biggest ever at the time―and how he passed on the chance to represent Peyton Manning.

Beginning with his early days as a student leader at Berkeley, Steinberg details his illustrious rise into pro sports fame, his decades of industry dominance, and how he overcame a series of high-profile struggles to regain his sobriety and launch his comeback. This riveting story takes readers inside the inner circle of top-notch agents and players through the visionary career of Leigh Steinberg, the pre-eminent superagent of our time.

About this title

About the Author:

LEIGH STEINBERG founded his sports law practice in 1975 and has since represented over 150 professional athletes. Currently President and CEO of Steinberg Sports and Entertainment and an advocate for player safety, he contributes a weekly column to Forbes and The Huffington. The author of the bestselling book Winning With Integrity, Steinberg lives in Newport Beach, CA.

MICHAEL ARKUSH has written 10 books, including Rush! and The Last Season.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1
LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON

 
It did not take me long to make the papers for the first time.
“Warren and Betty Steinberg presented John Steinberg with his first grandchild yesterday, a boy, at Cedars,” it was reported in the March 29, 1949, edition of The Hollywood Reporter, the popular daily trade publication for the movers and shakers in show business.
“He’s happier about that than the opening of the swank new Hillcrest.”
If that were, indeed, the case, then Grandpa must have been overjoyed, for he was totally committed to his job managing the mostly Jewish Hillcrest Country Club, the answer to decades of discrimination by those who belonged to the older, Waspy Los Angeles Country Club. Hillcrest was also a haven for people in the entertainment community denied membership in other clubs.
Grandpa was never afraid to take a risk. In the early ’30s, he owned an upscale restaurant on Long Island called the Pavillon Royal, which attracted some of the biggest acts in entertainment. Ethel Merman, the legendary Broadway singer, who often performed there, credits him with her first big break. Another to benefit was FDR, who held major campaign events on the grounds. In 1936, like so many others in his generation, Grandpa made the move out West, taking over the Café Trocadero, a posh club on the Hollywood Strip that was a hangout for Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, and Cary Grant.
Years later at Hillcrest, the regulars were just as impressive, featuring the likes of Jack Benny, George Burns, Bob Hope, Groucho Marx, George Jessel, Danny Kaye—they called it the comedians’ table—and a buxom blonde named Marilyn Monroe whose lap I sat on one day. I went to the club once a week, sitting on Grandpa’s lap—I’m guessing I enjoyed Marilyn’s more—as he played gin rummy. Another time, I was introduced to a singer who had established quite a following, Elvis Presley. He gave me an autographed guitar.
I began to believe the entire world was filled with Jewish comedians. It was Burns, in fact, along with Grandpa, who took me to my first professional baseball game, about three years before the Dodgers arrived from Brooklyn. We saw the Hollywood Stars, the minor league outfit that competed in the Pacific Coast League at old Gilmore Field on Beverly. To me, while there couldn’t have been more than maybe 10,000 spectators in the stands on any given night, it seemed like the big leagues. Thus began my childhood love affair with baseball.
Grandpa enjoyed the finer things in life, wearing the most expensive suits and Bay Rum Cologne. His fingernails were manicured every day, and he went on gambling trips to Havana. Grandpa had what they used to call “style.” On Monday nights, he took the family out to one of the old, classic L.A. restaurants. Our favorite was Lawry’s, a prime rib palace on La Cienega. Spending time at his home in Beverly Hills felt like entering a universe that did not exist anywhere else. He owned every state-of-the-art gadget, even a machine that squeezed real oranges.
On my mother’s side, I never knew either grandparent. My grandmother, Florence, died in 1937 from a brain tumor. She was thirty-nine. My grandfather, Leo Blass, somehow found time to take care of three young daughters, including Betty, my mom, who was only nine, while maintaining a medical practice and assuming an active role in the local Jewish community and in the City of Hope. In 1948, he helped found City of Hope National Medical Center, and when the new State of Israel was fighting for its survival against several Arab countries, he went there to help assess the nation’s medical needs and treat the wounded soldiers. He didn’t think about the risk he was taking, only about the good he might accomplish. Grandpa remains an inspiration to this day.
He was shot by a sniper, and he died a few days later. He was buried in Safed, a city in the northern part of the country. Once the war was over, his three daughters decided to keep him there. My mother was devastated to lose another parent at such a young age—she was twenty—but there was little chance to grieve. She was about to become a parent herself for the first time.
My parents proudly named me after Grandpa Leo. As for the unique spelling of my first name, it depends on who I choose to believe. According to my dad, Leigh came from James Henry Leigh Hunt, a nineteenth-century English poet, essayist, and critic. Mom, meanwhile, attributed it to the actress, Vivien Leigh, immortalized in film history as Scarlett O’Hara from Gone With the Wind. I suppose I’ll never know the true story—or both versions might be accurate. Either way, my lifelong love for the written word and the cinema were clearly ordained from the start.
I was only ten when I worked on my first publication, The Corinthian, named after our residence on Corinth Avenue in a section of Los Angeles adjacent to Culver City. Culver City was home to MGM Studios, and we snuck over fences on back lots to play on Western, Mexican, and South Sea sets.
Assembled with the use of a regular typewriter, the paper chronicled such earth-shattering events in the neighborhood as a mouse we found in our house; the visit to the Marchewka family from Aunt Blanche, coming all the way from Canada; and the breaking news that the Eschners were selling their house. Our one block certainly felt like a separate world to my friends and me. Everything seemed bigger in those days.
My parents were progressive on every issue that mattered. Both were terribly sad on election night in 1956 when Adlai Stevenson lost for the second time to Dwight D. Eisenhower. There was one political figure, however, they disliked more than any other, Richard Milhous Nixon. They called him “Tricky Dick.” They weren’t alone.
To my father, being passionate about one’s opinions was not sufficient. Each person had a moral obligation to do something about them. It was a lesson I never forgot.
“When you’re looking for someone to solve problems in the world, there is no they,” he said. “The they is you, son.”
Dad was eternally optimistic, preferring to see the good in human nature. I adopted the same attitude, though it would sometimes later be to my detriment. He was even-mannered, fair, and consistent.
While he was in the Marine Corps, before he was shipped off to the Pacific theater in 1942 or 1943, Dad wrote an editorial for the Daily Trojan, the USC student newspaper, criticizing the relocation of Japanese residents in internment camps. By the mid-1950s, after a series of temporary jobs, Dad discovered his true calling as an English and social studies teacher and athletic director, starting out at Jordan High School in Watts. Dad eventually became the vice principal at University High and Crenshaw High, and principal at Le Conte Junior High and Fairfax High.
His father was not very pleased, to say the least, with his career choice. Just a few decades after the Great Depression, Grandpa was more interested in his son making money, as he had done very successfully, than in making a difference. One night, though, he went to a school function at Jordan and was amazed at the effect Dad had on his students, the love they showed him. Grandpa never brought up his son’s choice of career again. My father cared deeply about other people and served on the Human Relations Commission in Los Angeles for thirty years, multiple times as its president.
Grandpa was right about one thing: We struggled to get by. In those early days, the five of us, which included my brothers, Don and Jim, shared one bathroom. The three boys slept in one room on bunk beds. When our jeans wore out, we didn’t purchase new ones. We put patches on them. Our shoes had taps to preserve the soles. We watched cartoons on a tiny black-and-white television.
Yet we never thought of ourselves as deprived. There were many other riches to savor—simple ones, such as our dog, Harry, named after the book Harry the Dirty Dog, or playing hide-and-go-seek or staging rubber-band wars or my favorite, going around the block to Henry’s Market for a candy bar and a large bottle of pop and then hanging out by the railroad tracks to throw rocks and talk about comic books or who owned the best baseball card collection. We used our imaginations to make games out of ordinary objects.
For me, as much as I adored Superman, the greatest heroes in my early youth called themselves Dodgers. I’d rooted for them when they were in Brooklyn and can still recall watching on our Emerson as they beat the dreaded Yankees in Game 7 to win the 1955 World Series, their only title in New York. I was in heaven when they moved to Los Angeles in ’58 and was lucky enough, thanks again to Grandpa, to be at the Coliseum for the very first home game against the Giants, the good guys prevailing, 6–5. He got me out of school with a note claiming “urgent family business.” Urgent it most definitely was.
I saw the Rams play in person at the Coliseum, as well. I cheered wildly as their outstanding running back, Jon Arnett, a local kid, sprinted the length of the field for a touchdown. Ironically, given how I’d eventually make my living, it was baseball, not football, that meant more to me growing up. I continued to root for the Hollywood Stars and was drawn to Gene Autry’s Los Angeles Angels when they joined the American League in 1961 as an expansion team, but nothing matched my love for the boys in blue.
One of my favorite players was shortstop Maury Wills, who would become, in 1962, the first to steal more than 100 bases in a season. There was something so wonderfully daring, almost subversive, about the “stolen” base, and no one was a better thief than Wills. I also yearned for him to swing for the fences, as Dad promised to pay me twenty-five cents for every Wills home run. My father was no fool. Over Wills’s fourteen-year career, he hit a grand total of 20. I was mesmerized, as well, by the soothing voice of Dodgers play-by-play man Vin Scully. He painted a picture of each ball game more vivid than the one we observed on TV in our living room. To hear Vin as an adult—in his mideighties, he is still going strong—is no less mystical.
The main reason, though, for my attraction to the Dodgers was Sandy Koufax, the superb left-handed pitcher born and raised in Brooklyn. Sandy struck hitters out like no one else in the game, and I loved strikeouts even more than stolen bases and home runs. He was also Jewish, and for Jews growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I cannot possibly overstate how crucial that was. Anti-Semitism was everywhere, in comments that were far from benign—“You killed Christ” or “Don’t Jew me down”—and it had been less than two decades since the Holocaust.
Sandy proved that Jews could excel in the most innately American of pursuits, our national pastime, and instead of attempting to conceal his rich heritage, he celebrated it. His decision to sit out Game 1 of the 1965 World Series against the Minnesota Twins because it fell on Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish holidays, generated even more admiration than anything he did on the diamond. If not for Sandy, I might not ever have become so enamored with sports and drawn to their potential to impact society at large.
I grew up in an area with few Jewish families. From the first day I can remember, I played with the blacks and Mexicans and Asians in our neighborhood, sleeping at their homes so often I felt like part of their families.
Mar Vista Gardens, a housing project for low-income residents, was across the street from my school, Stoner Avenue Elementary. If there were any differences among us, I either didn’t notice or didn’t care. At home, we put a decal on our front door to welcome neighbors from any race, religion, or nationality. Decades later, I blended in easily with the athletes I represented from various ethnic and religious backgrounds. Blacks can usually tell when a white person is uncomfortable around them, and vice versa.
At the same time, I never let the peer pressure on the street compromise the core principles I inherited from my parents. One afternoon, when I was about eight or nine, as I was walking home from school, I saw a handful of gang members torturing a small mutt. I can close my eyes and still visualize each of them burning the dog with their cigarettes. I could not understand why people kept walking by and no one stopped them. Finally, with no one else daring to intervene, I scooped up the poor thing and ran as fast as I could till I was in the clear. They got in their share of punches, but I rescued the dog. Safe to say, I kept my distance from those young punks from that point on.
I was no hero. I was merely doing what my dad would expect me to do. We were on vacation in Chicago in 1960—the little extra money we did have went for annual trips around the United States and Canada—when we observed a man being a little rough with one of his girls who worked the street. Dad did not hesitate. He stopped the car, jumped out, and practically ordered the stranger to leave her alone. More startled than angry, the man did exactly that. Dad was not the only person to show me the difference one man can make. So did actor Henry Fonda, who played a juror in the 1957 film 12 Angry Men. Watching Fonda’s character stubbornly search for the truth against eleven other jurors anxious to convict the defendant and be sent home made me think about going into law someday. I was inspired, as well, by my aunt Eleanor who worked for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and my uncle Larry, an attorney who spent his life fighting for justice, in and out of the courtroom. He was like a second father to me.
A career in journalism was another possibility, although as much as I loved to write, I realized early on I would not be satisfied with reporting on the key events of the day, whether on Corinth Avenue or in the wider world. I needed to take part in them. My parents understood this, too, which is why they organized a political club for my brothers and me called the Muttonheads. We selected a president, vice president, and treasurer, and conducted our meetings according to Robert’s Rules of Order. In retrospect, I’m not certain whether we were truly dedicated to the ideals of democracy or just interested in the dessert we received at the end of each meeting.
Another highlight of my youth came before a slightly larger gathering, and the odds of it occurring were one in a thousand.
My classroom at Braddock Drive Elementary, which I attended before Stoner, was picked among the dozens in Los Angeles to be a source for the popular CBS daytime show Art Linkletter’s House Party, and then I was one of the fortunate four chosen randomly for the segment “Kids Say the Darndest Things ,” in which the host interviewed youngsters between ages five and ten. When Mr. Linkletter asked who I thought was the smartest person in the world, I didn’t hesitate.
“Myself,” I told him.
It sounds, despite our financial difficulties, like the typically idyllic Leave It to Beaver childhood from the ’50s, and in so many ways, it was.
My brother Jim and I fought all the time as kids—what brothers don’t?—but as adults we grew quite close, and I rely on him to this day. The same goes for my other brother, Don, an outstanding athlete in his youth. I also benefited enormously from a large, loving extended family. Aunt Eleanor, Uncle Chuck, Uncle Larry, Aunt Anita, Uncle Arthur, and Aunt Milly each played significant roles in my upbringing. I have such fond memories of the summer we spent with Uncle Arthur, a colonel in the air force, and his family at Wright-Patterson Air Force...

About this edition

• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1250030420
• ISBN 13: 9781250030429
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320