The Hall of Fame career of quarterback Steve Young was almost derailed before it began when he was physically assaulted during negotiations — by the owner of the team signing him.
by Leigh Steinberg with Michael Arkush
(Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press)
As detailed by super-agent Leigh Steinberg — a primary inspiration for the film “Jerry Maguire,” and possibly the most successful sports agent in history with 16 first-round NFL picks including seven number ones — the business of signing top sports talent is fraught with eccentricity.
In Young’s case, the BYU quarterback was being heavily pursued by the L.A. Express of the now-defunct USFL, and after an intense 24-hour negotiation with team GM Don Klosterman, Steinberg secured Young a $42 million contract — then the richest in sports history.
All that was left was to review the contract language and sign it — and that’s where the problems began.
The team’s owner, William Oldenburg, invited Steinberg and Young to his office to sign the contract and celebrate. He was also celebrating his birthday that day, which Steinberg did not know.
Oldenburg, it turned out, was not used to agents being as thorough as Steinberg in reviewing contract language. As minutes stretched into hours, interfering with Oldenburg’s birthday plans, the owner killed the time with booze, and continued growing angrier until finally exploding at Young.
“Do you want to be my quarterback or don’t you?” he yelled. Young confirmed that he did, but this wasn’t enough for Oldenburg.
“He flung out his arm and knocked a row of glasses off a table a few feet away,” Steinberg writes. “The glasses scattered, sending shards of broken glass everywhere. ‘I don’t know if you are man enough to be my quarterback,’ he said [to Young].”
Then, Oldenburg “jabbed a finger into Steve’s stomach and punched him in the chest.”
“You do that one more time,” Young said to his future boss, “and I’m going to deck you.”
Oldenburg lifted a chair to throw it out the window in anger before Young stopped him, and Steinberg and Young were tossed onto the street by security at 3:30 a.m.
The next day, after a collective night’s sleep and an apology by Oldenburg, Young signed with the Express.
Looking at Steinberg’s life, it seems like he was destined to live amongst the stars.
His grandfather, John Steinberg, ran prestigious Hollywood haunts, including Cafe Trocadero and the Jewish Hillcrest Country Club, entertaining A-listers such as Jack Benny, Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire and Judy Garland.
As a child, he hung out regularly at Hillcrest’s comedians table, where the regulars included Groucho Marx, Bob Hope and Danny Kaye. He sat on Marilyn Monroe’s lap, was given an autographed guitar by a young Elvis Presley, and went to his first baseball game with his grandfather and his pal, George Burns.
As a politically-active student leader at Berkeley during the Vietnam War, he was president of the school’s Nonviolent Action Party, and one of his duties was to meet with visiting celebrities.
Doors’ singer Jim Morrison wanted to know “what students were reading,” and “where they stood in terms of their spiritual consciousness.” Steinberg took Jimi Hendrix on a campus tour, and his grilling of Timothy Leary on the effects of LSD validated his avoidance of the drug. And while he isn’t explicit about this, he infers that something amorous happened between him and Gloria Steinem, who, he says, he brought back to his dorm room after a campus visit, having been “struck by her beauty.”
He was also chosen to debate then-Governor Ronald Reagan, who was trying to oust the school’s chancellor, at a Board of Regents meeting.
After rigorously defending the chancellor, Steinberg was cut off by the governor, who suddenly asked, “Aren’t you the same Mr. Steinberg who was arrested in Oakland in 1960 for sitting in front of troop trains?”
“Governor,” Steinberg replied, “I was 10 or 11 years old in 1960. I was much closer to playing with toy trains than sitting in front of troop trains.”
The debate ended in hostility, but Reagan, as president, would later honor Steinberg with the Presidential Commendation for Community Service. After he left office, the two became friends.
One of Steinberg’s buddies at Berkeley was the school’s star quarterback, Steve Bartkowski. In January 1975, Bartkowski was selected by the Atlanta Falcons as the No. 1 draft pick in the nation. But negotiations between the team and his lawyer had been dragging, and he asked Steinberg, then contemplating career moves, to take over.
Steinberg knew nothing about being an agent, but his student government experience and his law degree made him comfortable with high-level negotiations. He quickly determined that the problem was Bartkowski’s lack of leverage, which he fixed by reaching out to the short-lived World Football League (WFL) to create interest. Based on this and other tactics, Steinberg secured for Bartkowski a 4-year contract paying $625,000, then “the most lucrative rookie contract in NFL history.”
After that, other athletes came calling, and Steinberg, then 26 and working off a card table in his parents’ house, had a new and unexpected career that would find him securing record-breaking contracts in often the most bizarre of circumstances.
Violence, or at least the threat of such, was not unusual in football’s back rooms, whether by players or team executives.
While negotiating a contract for quarterback Jack Trudeau with Colts owner Robert Irsay, Irsay called Trudeau a “mediocre quarterback.” Trudeau, enraged, “cocked his arm to throw a punch,” but Steinberg “stopped him just in time. Irsay was petrified. The talks were done for the day.”
The bad behavior surrounding him was hardly limited to violence, as the duplicity and double-dealing of other agents, he writes, initially came as a shock. One time, he was approached by a man claiming to be the uncle of a prominent tight end who was preparing for the draft. The man asked about how he worked, and Steinberg, hoping for an inside line on signing the player, told him everything before later discovering that the “uncle” was actually a rival agent.
Years later, after a prominent sports magazine that he doesn’t name ran a hit piece on him, Steinberg sensed that something was amiss. He hired a private investigator, who discovered that a rival firm had paid the writer $75,000 to write the piece.
Both Steinberg and director Cameron Crowe stop short of saying that Tom Cruise’s Jerry Maguire character was based directly on Steinberg, but many elements of his story were, as Cameron had trailed Steinberg for years to learn about the profession.
After seeing Renee Zellweger’s love interest complain to Maguire that he spent too much time away from home, Steinberg’s wife got angry with him, saying, “Did you have to tell [Crowe] everything?”
He consulted on other sports films as well, including Oliver Stone’s “Any Given Sunday,” where Stone asked him to “assess the throwing ability of a well-known rapper” who was set to play a third-string quarterback. Steinberg told him that the rapper “throws like a girl,” and when several NFL coaches couldn’t correct the problem, the director went with Jamie Foxx instead. Steinberg doesn’t identify the rapper in the book, but it was reported at the time that the rapper Foxx replaced was P. Diddy, who reportedly dropped out due to “scheduling conflicts.”
Steinberg, now 64, faced hard times over the past decade, including a devastating bout with alcoholism, and the loss, thanks in part to the ill-advised sale of his company and the duplicity of several colleagues, of his business empire.
Now, almost four years sober and two years past a bankruptcy filing, he’s attempting a comeback, hoping his remarkable legacy will matter to players who weren’t yet born when he achieved some of his greatest triumphs.
“Why, at sixty-four, should I expend all this energy to build a practice all over again?” he writes. “For me, work is a passion. . . . [I still believe] I can prepare athletes to have more fulfilling careers — and lives.”