Becoming a Sports Agent

Gary Rivlin

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501167980
• Topic: Desarrollo personal
• Subtopic: Carreras

A revealing guide to a career as a sports agent written by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Gary Rivlin and based on the real-life experiences of several top agents—required reading for anyone considering this profession. Becoming a Sports Agent takes you behind the scenes to find out what it's really like, and what it really takes, to become a sports agent. Bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Gary Rivlin shadows some of the best agents in sports to show how this dream job becomes reality. Behind every high-profile athlete—in football, baseball, basketball, and more—is an agent. Learn the ins and outs of scouting, contract negotiation, licensing, brand building, and more. Takeaway invaluable lessons as you follow the paths of top-tier agents, from legendary pioneers like Leigh Steinberg, who represents star quarterback Patrick Mahomes, to Don Yee, who represents Tom Brady, to Matt Sosnick, whose client list includes baseball rookie sensation Pete Alonso. Rivlin uncovers the realities of this cut-throat business, from discovering unknown talent to securing multi-million-dollar deals.

1 Once He Was King

Gone is most of the memorabilia: the autographed footballs and jerseys from Warren Moon, Troy Aikman, and Steve Young. Lost, too, are the framed photos of a grinning Leigh Steinberg next to the big-name athletes he’s represented over the years: Ricky Williams, Ben Roethlisberger, Thurman Thomas, Eric Dickerson, Earl Campbell. There were shots, too, of him with Tom Cruise and Cuba Gooding Jr. on the set of Jerry Maguire. But he put everything in storage when his life crashed and he was evicted from his high-rent offices in Newport Beach’s Fashion Island. By the time he declared bankruptcy in 2012, he was more than $3 million in debt.

“They took my storage lockers, and one of the creditors cleaned me out,” Steinberg said. He motioned to the walls in his new, less majestic office. There’s a picture of him with Barack Obama, and another with Julia Roberts. A framed Aikman jersey he managed to hold on to hangs on one wall, and a pair of boxing gloves signed by Lennox Lewis sits under glass on a coffee table. Mostly, the office is an homage to one client, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes II, who people were already speculating might become the NFL’s first $200 million player (generating $6 million in fees for Steinberg Sports & Entertainment). I had to shift my eyes as we spoke so that I wasn’t staring at Mahomes, whose picture hung over Steinberg’s shoulder. There were Kansas City keepsakes and framed magazine covers featuring Mahomes scattered around the office, but most striking was a series of photos on the wall behind Steinberg’s desk: blowups of pictures taken when Mahomes, a cell phone cradled to his ear, learned that the Chiefs had made him the number-ten pick in the 2017 draft. There’s a look of ecstatic relief on the quarterback’s face, but it’s Steinberg, sitting just to the left of his client, who is more openly celebrating his providence. In one shot, Steinberg is pumping his fist; in another, his fists are raised triumphantly above his head. He was back on top.

Steinberg had just seen Mahomes a few days earlier in Oakland, where the young quarterback threw for 443 yards and four touchdowns in an easy win over the Raiders. That Sunday he was heading to Kansas City to see the Chiefs host the Baltimore Ravens. Steinberg was dressed in beat-up cargo shorts, running shoes, and a red T-shirt under a striped dress shirt that he left untucked. His once boyish face was bloated and red, his sandy hair unkempt. The thick wad of tobacco under his lip had him spitting into a cup for much of our time together. He leaned back in his chair, propped a foot against his desk, and, not for the first time, told me about his glory days, including the ten Hall of Famers he represented.

“I’ve had sixty-two first-round picks,” he said. “The very first pick overall eight times. Some weekends I was representing half the starting quarterbacks in football.” He had built one of the most impressive sports-agent practices in history and then watched it collapse, and now was building it back. “Living in your parents’ house,” he said, “having no more clients, drinking a bottle of vodka every day—that tends to put things in perspective.”

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STEINBERG THOUGHT HE MIGHT work in politics, or try his hand at acting, in which he dabbled as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. Or work as a news reporter or assistant district attorney. It was 1975, and the truth was that Steinberg, who’d stayed at Berkeley to earn a law degree, had no idea what he wanted to do. Then his friend Steve Bartkowski invited him to dinner. Steinberg’s father was a high school teacher turned principal, his mother a librarian. He had grown up comfortably in Los Angeles, but his family was hardly rich. To help pay for law school, Steinberg worked as a dorm counselor. By chance, he was assigned to a dorm housing some of the school’s football players, including Bartkowski, then the team’s backup quarterback. The two had become friends long before Bartkowski, whom Steinberg calls Bart, was the number-one pick in the 1975 NFL draft. The Cal coach had sent Bartkowski to the same lawyer who had negotiated contracts on behalf of previous Cal stars, but talks with the Atlanta Falcons, the team that had drafted him first overall, were stalled. Over dinner, Bart asked his friend if he could take over.

There was no template for being an agent in the mid-1970s. It was barely a profession. Babe Ruth famously used a Boston druggist to represent him in salary negotiations. When one of Vince Lombardi’s star players, future Hall of Famer Jim Ringo, showed up with an agent to a meeting with the legendary coach and general manager, Lombardi supposedly excused himself, made a phone call, and returned to let the pair know they were negotiating with the wrong team: Ringo had just been traded. Buzzie Bavasi, general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, had a similar reaction in 1966 when his star pitchers, Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, hired a Hollywood agent to represent them. The Dodgers had offered Koufax $100,00 and Drysdale $85,000 but the pair demanded that the team pay them each an annual salary of $167,000. After a brief double holdout, the team acquiesced. The Dodgers would pay Koufax $125,000 a year and Drysdale $110,000 but Bavasi refused to negotiate with their agent.

“If I gave in and began negotiating baseball contracts through an agent, then I set a precedent that’s going to bring awful pain to general managers for years to come,” Bavasi wrote in an essay he penned for Sports Illustrated, “because every salary negotiation with every humpty-dumpty fourth-string catcher is going to run into months of dickering.” Players negotiating contracts with general managers were expected to do so alone.

A Cleveland lawyer named Mark McCormack is generally viewed as the first sports agent. His first client was Arnold Palmer, who until that point had had only his wife to help him handle the financial end of his golfing career. In 1960, when McCormack took over, Wilson Sporting Goods was earning millions each year on the Arnold Palmer golf clubs they sold, but paid Palmer only a few thousand dollars annually for the right to use his name. Heinz, the ketchup company, had paid Palmer $500 for permission to use his name and image in ads it ran in national magazines. For a cut of 10 percent, McCormack negotiated new deals that made Palmer private-jet rich. Soon McCormack was representing golfing greats Gary Player and Jack Nicklaus, and eventually skier Jean-Claude Killy. His clients were the stars, McCormack argued. They deserved a much larger share of the money.

Representation came more slowly to team sports. One pioneer was Bob Woolf, a Boston-based former criminal defense lawyer and college basketball player who declared himself a sports agent in 1964. He claimed to have negotiated more than two thousand contracts over the next dozen years on behalf of a long list of clients that included Boston-area stars Carl Yastrzemski and Jim Plunkett and also basketball great Julius Erving, who had starred at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Ron Shapiro was another pioneer, a Baltimore lawyer who rescued Orioles star Brooks Robinson from a bad financial deal and then negotiated his next contract. Soon Shapiro was representing more than half the team, including greats Jim Palmer and Eddie Murray, and later Cal Ripken Jr.

Initially, Shapiro charged the sort of hourly rate he would with any other client. But his law partners didn’t want to integrate baseball representation into the rest of their practice, so Shapiro created an agency. At that point he started taking 5 percent of every contract, but then cut that to 3 percent. “We charged an additional one percent if we handled what was to me the most important thing: oversight of finances,” Shapiro said. “To teach players how to hold on to what they earned rather than end up in bankruptcy like so many do.” Nowadays, the giant agencies such as CAA offer financial services through a dedicated financial division, and of course there are plenty of independent financial managers (think Dwayne Johnson in the HBO series Ballers) eager to handle an athlete’s money for a small annual cut.

When Steinberg was starting out, there were still signs outside some clubhouses barring agents from entry. Teams had no obligation to negotiate with agents until the early 1990s, when the collective bargaining agreement the NFL reached with the Players Association included a provision requiring them to negotiate with a player’s representative if an athlete chose to hire one. A later agreement also established a certification program that required an agent to have both undergraduate and graduate degrees (typically an MBA or a law degree), submit to a background check, and pass a sixty-question multiple-choice test. Back when Steinberg got into the business, people could be agents simply by declaring themselves one.

Atlanta’s management proved willing to talk to the twenty-six-year-old Steinberg about Bartkowski. But that just meant repeating what they had told his predecessor: $425,000 was a generous offer for an unproven quarterback who, the GM pointed out, had limited mobility. Steinberg took his time preparing his response. He had moved back to his parents’ home in Los Angeles and set up a card table in a spare room. There, he searched for the data points that would give him the ammunition to argue that his client deserved more.

Steinberg discovered that the Falcons’ offense had been pitiful the previous year, averaging less than ten points a game. That hurt ticket sales—the team drew barely ten thousand fans to its final home game—and no doubt concession revenues also plummeted for the 3-11 team. Steinberg focused on Bartkowski’s potential impact on attendance and revenue. Bartkowski would juice up the listless offense, Steinberg argued, or at least lift people’s hopes long enough to fill more seats for a year or two. At a time when black players were virtually barred from the quarterback position, Bartkowski was a lean, broad-shouldered white athlete who stood 6'4" tall. Steinberg, as he admitted in his 2014 autobiography, The Agent, shamelessly played up his friend’s “blond, blue-eyed matinee-idol looks.”

Steinberg asked for $750,000 a year for four years. The Falcons immediately rejected that offer, motivating Steinberg to drill down even deeper. He calculated how much more the franchise would earn even if they sold only a few thousand more tickets per game, and contemplated what it would cost the Falcons if they failed to sign Bartkowski. That, Steinberg realized, was what gave him and his client the upper hand: a fan base that would be furious if the team wasted the number-one pick. At around the time Atlanta’s rookies were expected to report to training camp, the Falcons agreed to a four-year contract that paid Bartkowski $600,000 a year—a new record for an NFL rookie.

“The question is always whose reality prevails,” Steinberg said. The Falcons pushed a narrative that cast Bartkowski as an unproven rookie not worth the big bucks. Steinberg countered with a narrative that cast the Falcons as a desperate franchise in need of a savior to fill the seats.

“Just saying, ‘I want this dollar amount,’ is no way to motivate the other side,” Steinberg continued. “For starters, I’m dealing with a general manager who may have to justify a salary to an owner. So I’m helping give him the arguments to make.”

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STEINBERG INITIALLY FIGURED THE Bartkowski contract would be his first and last. That was before experiencing the glory of representing the NFL’s top draft choice. He flew with Bartkowski to Atlanta for the contract signing. Though they landed past midnight, Steinberg said, “There were klieg lights flashing in the sky, like for a movie premier, and a huge crowd pressed up against the police line.” The pair was treated like royalty when they arrived at the Falcons’ facility to sign the contract the next day. Soon Bartkowski was hosting his own pregame radio show and doing ads for a local car dealership. For weeks, Steinberg fielded calls from reporters wanting to talk to him about the most lucrative rookie contract in NFL history. “I knew then what I wanted to do,” he said.

Steinberg earned a $30,000 commission on year one of Bartkowski’s contract but racked up $25,000 in expenses in his first twelve months in the business. He survived his second year by maxing out his father’s credit cards. He attended an annual college all-star game, the East-West Shrine Bowl, in search of new clients—and slept in his car to save money. His old friend Bart swooped in to pay for a plane ticket and pick up the cost of a rental car so Steinberg could travel to Atlanta to recruit a promising offensive lineman at the University of Georgia who was getting some buzz ahead of the 1977 draft. Steinberg signed his man, allowing him to survive another season.

He grew more systematic over the years. For starters, he would pursue only potential stars. “As I would discover… with Moon, Aikman, and Young, one superstar generates greater interest from the press, corporations, and the public than the next fifty players combined,” Steinberg wrote in The Agent. He started building what he calls an agent’s “infrastructure”—the trainers and coaches and assistant coaches who might recommend him to a player. He was personable, quick on his feet, bold, and (maybe most important) Steve Bartkowski’s agent—the agent who had negotiated a record-setting rookie deal. That’s how he introduced himself to Bill Walsh when the future 49ers coach was making a name for himself at Stanford University—and one year later, he represented three players who were part of the high-octane offense Walsh had built. He still hadn’t found his superstar, but he was building his client list.

Recruiting collegians had its drama. He was hungry for clients but also had limits. The recruiting process normally began with a sit-down with the family. Steinberg drew the line at the parents he met living vicariously through their athlete son to the point that they ignored their other kids. (“I felt terrible for the sisters and brothers left behind, each trying desperately to be noticed.”) There were also the parents who thought their child was the best athlete on the planet, and there was no telling them otherwise. He also steered clear of those who hit him up for cash. One might say, “You know, man, I got bills,” and Steinberg knew exactly what a parent was telling him: I’d be happy to consider you for my son’s agent in exchange for some cash. One collegian whom Steinberg described as an “outstanding running back prospect” stopped him in front of a jewelry store and nodded to a pricey watch in the window. “If you buy me that watch,” the prospect told him, “it will give you a better chance.”

Over time, Steinberg carved out a kind of specialty: the community-minded player. “He stressed the value of giving back to one’s community,” Warren Moon later said of Steinberg, “and how he found it imperative that I, along with the rest of his clients, start charitable foundations.” Early in a meeting with an athlete, Steinberg would broach the idea of devoting a small portion of the money they earned to charitable causes. It was an expression of his beliefs, and a test. He’d talk about how his father had taught him to “make a difference and change the world,” and listen carefully to how a player responded. “I found I had a relatively high level of success when talking to a player who found that important,” he said. He saw himself as a counselor to the whole person and not just a player’s representative when negotiating with management.

“I would tell players, ‘You have a platform,’ ” Steinberg said. “I told them, ‘You could speak out against bullying, against domestic violence,’ whatever it was for them.” There were ethical reasons for a star athlete to give back, but Steinberg also stressed the more practical ones: the dividends it would pay in both popularity and wealth.

Steinberg found his superstar in 1978 when he landed Warren Moon as a client. Moon, the starting quarterback at the University of Washington, had gone to the same high school as Steinberg, who stressed the connection in a handwritten note introducing himself to Moon. Steinberg rarely attended college games; his standard line to prospects was always, “Would you rather that next fall I be at your football game in the NFL and have dinner with you the night before, or that I attend a college game to recruit players for the following draft?” But he bought a ticket to see Moon play during his senior year, when Washington came to the Bay Area to play Cal. He knew right then that he had to have him as a client.

Recruiting Moon was no easy task. He played his final game in the Rose Bowl, where he earned game MVP. Steinberg estimated that he spoke to Moon fifty times over a three-month period before the quarterback finally committed to him. He took solace in the fact that Moon was still returning his calls. “I was overwhelmed by his dignity, maturity, wisdom, and attention to detail,” Steinberg wrote in The Agent. Moon’s skill at networking also impressed him. That would serve him well both as a player and in life after football.

Success in landing Moon meant sharing the frustrations that were the first half dozen years of his career. Moon was a quarterback, but he was also black. Would he consider changing positions, teams asked Steinberg, and play running back or receiver or defensive back? “If he were open to that idea, they assured me, he would go much higher in the draft,” Steinberg said. Instead, Moon signed with the Edmonton Eskimos in the Canadian Football League. The $35,000 signing bonus and $35,000 salary he negotiated on Moon’s behalf, Steinberg said, was “a better deal financially than what we projected he would have received in the NFL.” There would be no denying his quarterbacking skills after he led the Eskimos to Grey Cup championships (the CFL’s Super Bowl) in five of his six years in the league. Belatedly, the NFL noticed that Moon, then twenty-seven, was as marketable (handsome, poised, a winning smile to match a winning personality) as he was talented at the quarterback position. “I knew I had a bidding war situation,” Steinberg said.

The upstart AFL had taken on the established NFL in the 1960s and helped Joe Namath earn an unprecedented $427,000 a year—more than double what he would have been paid if he’d signed with the NFL’s Cardinals, which had selected him twelfth in the 1965 draft. The players lost that leverage one year later when the two leagues merged and all eight original AFL teams were absorbed by the NFL. As luck would have it, the United States Fo...