THE REAL JERRY MAGUIRE
It was the spring of 1993, the week of the annual NFL owners’ meetings in Palm Desert, Calif. Leigh Steinberg, whose clientele included future Hall of Famers such as quarterbacks Steve Young and Troy Aikman, had arranged for filmmaker Cameron Crowe to spend time with one of his clients, safety Tim McDonald. Crowe was researching a movie script about a charismatic sports agent; McDonald was trying to charm his way out of free-agent limbo and into a new jersey.
One evening, with CNN’s Moneyline playing on the television in the athlete’s room at the Marriott, the director listened to McDonald vent about the off-season: the travel, the glad-handing, the stress. Then, McDonald said “Someone’s going to have to show me some money”.
Of course, the exact quote that inspired the director is beside the point. Once the words were shouted on screen by both an exasperated athlete (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and his agent (Tom Cruise), they proved iconic for all involved. Steinberg was already an A-lister in the sports world: Every year he threw the biggest Super Bowl party and signed the biggest prospects. More than anyone else, he had feasted as athlete contracts surged from five figures to seven. But Jerry Maguire meant cultural immortality. Ever since the premiere in 1996, Steinberg swears, he hasn’t gone a single day without someone yelling “Show me the money!” at him, whether he’s walking around an NFL stadium or his local 7-Eleven. Plenty of others have heard him yell it too.
What no one anticipated was that just as the movie was released in 1996, the man who portrayed himself as the real-life Maguire was quietly beginning to fall apart.
16 years later, on a recent evening in Newport Beach, Calif., the world’s most famous sports agent shuffles into a drab Urgent Care center, and there is only silence. At age 63, Steinberg — for years hailed as the real-life Maguire — now finds himself a bankrupt, recovering alcoholic, plotting a comeback from the bottom. And on any given night before 10pm, as mandated by the California Bar Association, he must show that his urine is clean.
The life of one of American sport’s most influential figures, the original uber agent, unraveled, a fall from grace that mirrors the script of the blockbuster film he inspired minus, at least for now, the Hollywood ending.
This is the story of the Real Jerry Maguire. Of his meteoric rise, his harrowing descent, and his unlikely stab at redemption.
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VOICES:
SPORTS/ Steve Bartkowski, Steve Young, Troy Aikman, Warren Moon, Bruce Smith, Thurman Thomas, Kordell Stewart, Jeff George, Ben Roethlisberger, Matt Leinart, Mark Brunell, Ricky Williams, Howie Long, Eric Karros, Dusty Baker, Lennox Lewis, Oscar de la Hoya and John Starks. Drew Bledsoe, Corey Dillon, Ahman Green, Jevon Kearse, John Lynch, Jake Plummer, Amani Toomer, Darren Woodson, Jerry Jones.
HOLLYWOOD/ Cameron Crowe. Cuba Gooding Junior, Tom Cruise
ARCHIVAL:
TV/ 60 Minutes,” “Larry King Live,” “The Today Show,” “Good Morning America,” “CNN,” “CNN World News,” “Charlie Rose,” Fox Business,” “Fox News,” “CBS Morning News,” “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” “The Pat Sajak Show,” “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, “The Leeza Gibbons Show,” “Living Large,” and “The Man Show.”
RADIO/ “The Dan Patrick Show”, “The Herd with Colin Cowherd”, “The Jim Rome Show”, “Mike and the Mad Dog,” WFAN NY, “Coppock on Sports,” “Ticket,” “The Ticket,” 710 ESPN, KFWB 980, and Fan590 Toronto. Throughout the 1990s he was often used as a guest host on “The Jim Rome Show.”
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SYNOPSIS:
Not so long ago, Leigh Steinberg was larger than life, the most famous — and most powerful — sports agent on the planet. He popped up on talk shows, modeled his gray-green eyes and tan for GQ, let Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous film his wedding, cameoed with Young on Beverly Hills 90210.
During his career Steinberg had negotiated contracts reportedly worth more than $2 billion for a client list that included Super Bowl winning quarterbacks Steve Young, Troy Aikman and Ben Roethlisberger, and world champion boxer Oscar De La Hoya. Eight of Steinberg’s clients were selected as the top overall pick in the NFL Draft, a milestone unmatched anywhere within the sports industry.
At his apex, Steinberg represented a staggering 86 NFL players.
By the late ’90s, though, Steinberg’s closest and most important clients — Aikman, Warren Moon, Young — were fading just as the complexities of the NFL’s salary cap began to take root. Steinberg had skillfully used the existence of alternative leagues to land contracts that made him famous, sending Young to the USFL, bringing Moon down from the CFL. That leverage was long gone. So were straight-up negotiations unimpeded by complex formulas.
But the changing landscape of the business wasn’t the biggest threat to Steinberg’s empire. That distinction went to Steinberg himself.
In the social business of sports management, cocktails are as commonplace as contracts. But for Steinberg, who has called the industry “ a Disneyland of Drinking”, those things became dangerously out of balance.
By autumn 2000, Steinberg was drinking a liter of vodka a day and using prescription drugs. Steinberg’s weight, which famously yo-yoed, looked to Murphy to have ballooned to 270 pounds. As his alcolholism progressed, episodes of erratic behavior became more and more frequent. Colleagues believed Steinberg’s name was still a draw, but they were also convinced their boss could no longer relate to young athletes. By their count, Steinberg had lost five of the top players in the 2000 NFL draft by making them or their families uncomfortable.
The balance of power at his firm was shifting. Like many Steinberg clients, Drew Bledsoe eventually grew closer to a junior partner, David Dunn, than to the superagent himself. And when Dunn and two other agents decided to cut their losses and leave Steinberg’s firm, Bledsoe went too. So did dozens of other pros, including some of the NFL’s top stars.
This betrayal sent Steinberg deeper into the bottle and accelerated his downward spiral. Steinberg seemed increasingly unwilling — and unable — to do the work it took to even maintain what he’d built. As billings shrank, debt grew.
Finally, in 2003 a Steinberg employee took a $300,000 loan from one of his clients. When the money wasn’t paid back, the client went ballistic and took his story public. It is a clear violation of NFL Players Association rules for an agent to solicit a loan from a client. Steinberg, facing discipline, let his NFLPA certification to represent players lapse in 2007.
He was unable to work as an agent, decertified by the NFL Players Association, millions of dollars in debt and facing a series of lawsuits. Two of his children were afflicted with retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease that causes near blindness. He had lost his home and his marriage. And after bouncing in and out of rehab for two years, he was losing his battle with alcoholism.
But by 2009 the agent, had by his own admission, “hit rock bottom”. At 61 years of age, Steinberg had lost everything and moved back in with his mother. There he had a moment of clarity:
I thought to myself: “Is this what I was put on this planet to do?!? To end up drinking on my mothers bed?”
Sober since March 21, 2010, he has begun plotting his triumphant return. As part of his treatment, he has also begun handwriting letters to former clients — including Young, Moon and Aikman — whom Steinberg felt he’d embarrassed. “Part of what happens,” he says, “is the fog lifts.”
As he waits to hear about NFLPA recertification on Oct 10th, his ex-colleagues and competitors wonder whether the industry he and Jerry Maguire helped inflate — there were more than a thousand registered NFL agents by 2005 — has passed him by.
