Pinnacle

Assante Sports CEO Leigh Steinberg Handles Heavyweights of Sporting World With Heart

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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LEIGH STEINBERG, CEO, ASSANTE SPORTS MANAGEMENT GROUP: Moving up eight ticks to take Eness (ph). The trading's just frenetic. It's going to go on all the way. These first picks are going to go the whole 15 minutes.

BEVERLY SCHUCH, HOST (voice-over): This man may not look familiar to you, unless you hang around in locker rooms...

STEINBERG: So I just talked with Jim Hirsch (ph)...

UNIDENTIFIED PLAYER: Yeah, I know.

STEINBERG: ... and there's going to be a charge.

UNIDENTIFIED PLAYER: I know.

STEINBERG:

SCHUCH: But in the world of sports, Leigh Steinberg inspires his athletes...

STEINBERG: Cool. So we're there.

UNIDENTIFIED PLAYER: Right.

SCHUCH: ... and instills fear in team owners.

STEINBERG: Then we would need to go to 49ers and have a real frank discussion with them about their plans to protect him.

SCHUCH: He's Leigh Steinberg, the real life inspiration for "Jerry Maguire," the sports agent who handles some of the biggest names in the business and does it with heart.

CAMERON CROWE, DIRECTOR: And action!

SCHUCH: For three years, film director Cameron Crowe scouted Lee Steinberg like Steinberg scouts the season's hot new rookie. The result? "Jerry Maguire," an atypical sports agent who plays with compassion and integrity.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: The answer is fewer clients, less money, more attention, caring for them, caring for ourselves, the games.

SCHUCH: Leigh Steinberg represents more than 150 of the world's best football, baseball, basketball and Olympic stars. The most recent addition, heavyweight boxing champion Lennox Lewis.

STEINBERG: A new team representing undisputed heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis.

UNIDENTIFIED PLAYER: Yeah, I like that.

STEINBERG: OK.

SCHUCH: Steinberg likes to think he's cornered the market on quarterbacks, managing everyone from Steve Young to Warren Moon, from Troy Aikman to Drew Bledsoe. Leigh Steinberg's athletes don't just play in the sports arena. He makes sure they participate in the human arena, as well. In Steinberg's 25 years as a sports agent, his client roster has donated more than $80 million to charity.

(on camera): When you interview people, how do you choose who you want to represent?

STEINBERG: I talk to them about their values in the very first discussion that we have and talk to them about what's important as a...

SCHUCH: What do you say? What are your values?

STEINBERG: How important is short-term financial gain to you or long-term financial security or family? How important is making an impact in the world to you? What do you see yourself doing after professional sports? Let's say that you broke your leg tomorrow and could never be a football player, you pulled something and could never pitch in baseball.

SCHUCH: But these are young kids and they think they're immortal. They're god like, I suppose, with their athletic abilities.

STEINBERG: But you can tell a good heart pretty, pretty early. You can tell someone who's got some sense of caring.

SCHUCH: How many have you rejected? How often do you reject an athlete?

STEINBERG: Oh, a large number, and remember, there's research that goes into this. I can talk to a college coach, to a high school coach, to other players who've played with this player, to the parents. I mean, so it's not simply a matter of interacting with the athlete. They'll have a track record and history.

SCHUCH (voice-over): Steinberg's own professional track record began quite by accident in 1975 with quarterback Steve Barkowski (ph), a college buddy from the University of California at Berkeley. Before the number one draft pick asked for his help, Steinberg had no thoughts of becoming a sports attorney. He hadn't even practiced law yet. But the $600,000 package he negotiated with the Atlanta Falcons was at that time the largest rookie contract in NFL history.

STEINBERG: You get off in klieg lights flashing across the sky like for a movie premier, a huge crowd is pressed up against a police line and the first thing we hear is we interrupt "The Johnny Carson Show" to bring you a special news bulletin. Steve Barkowski and his attorney Leigh Steinberg have just arrived at the Atlanta Airport. We switch you live for an in-depth interview. Well, I looked at him the way that Dorothy must have looked at Toto and I said I guess we're not in Berkeley anymore.

And it was really then that I saw the tremendous idol worship and veneration that athletes are held in communities across this country. They are the role models. They're the celebrities. And it was then that I started to see the opportunity and capacity for an athlete to serve as a role model and to make a real impact.

SCHUCH (voice-over): How the socially minded super agent transformed the world of sports. The story of Leigh Steinberg, CEO of Assante Sports Management Group, is next on PINNACLE.

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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: What you gonna do, Jerry?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Show me the money!

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Congratulations, you're still my agent.

SCHUCH (voice-over): Show me the money became everybody's favorite catch phrase in 1996 because of the Hollywood movie "Jerry Maguire." Director Cameron Crowe modeled the Tom cruise character on Leigh Steinberg.

(on camera): What was the Jerry Maguire effect?

STEINBERG: It was pretty, John will tell you, they came down to the office and took my clothes and yellow legal pads, pictures and all the rest. They took photographs off the wall and so magically if I'm sitting there with Drew Bledsoe then it's, instead of me next to Drew Bledsoe, it's the Tom Cruise or Jerry Maguire that's in the picture.

SCHUCH: Do you how many people would die to have Tom Cruise play them in a story?

STEINBERG: Well, it's not...

SCHUCH: Flattering.

STEINBERG: It's not me.

SCHUCH: No.

STEINBERG: It's Cameron Crow's character.

SCHUCH: Were you happy with it?

STEINBERG: Yes, I was, because I think it humanized the whole concept of who a sports attorney or a sports agent is and what they do in their lives. And Warren Moon and I have been together for 23 years and I think some of that gets picked up in the Tom Cruise/Cuba Gooding relationship in the film.

SCHUCH (voice-over): Steinberg even got a chance to act in a brief cameo.

STEINBERG: Hey, Jerry, how are you doing? Remember Troy from the Super Bowl party?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Hi, Jerry.

SCHUCH: He advised on the movies "Any Given Sunday" and "For the Love of the Game."

(on camera): Did anyone ever say show me the money?

STEINBERG: Not in those precise words. Tim McDonald, a free agent from the San Francisco 49ers, was out at the league meetings with Cameron and evidently Cameron was in his room asking him what his motivation was in free agency and I know "MONEYLINE" was on in the background and somehow out of that trans...

SCHUCH: CNN'S "MONEYLINE"?

STEINBERG: CNN "MONEYLINE" was on in the background and somewhere between the two of them, show me the money ended up coming out.

SCHUCH (voice-over): Leigh Steinberg is an expert at getting sports executives and owners to show him the money and he's written a book about how to do it with integrity.

(on camera): Let's talk about how you negotiate, why you're so brilliant at this. I mean you've got to walk in the room and make your counterpart, do you have to make him like you? Is that important?

STEINBERG: Well, I think it's really important, first of all, to have done an extensive amount of research about the other human being, what that person's pressures are, what that person's goals are because ultimately the only way to satisfy my own client is to satisfy the person I'm negotiating with and to help them fulfill their goals and aspirations and to make sure that they end up coming out feeling that they're a winner and they've been successful.

Each party is always going to believe that they're completely justified in their position and the other side is taking advantage. So you don't just walk into that room and say here's what I want. You walk into the room and say look, you know, here's, here's what my client or our position can do for you and here's why it's worth this amount of money.

SCHUCH: And you apply this to, not to buying a car or to whatever, you say...

STEINBERG: You can apply it to anything you ever want to do in life.

SCHUCH (voice-over): Serious issues and funny men, what happened when George Burns took Leigh Steinberg to his first baseball game. More of our interview with laid back Leigh Steinberg when PINNACLE returns.

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SCHUCH (voice-over): Leigh Steinberg's southern Californian childhood was a golden mixture of sports and show business. His grandfather ran the legendary Hillcrest Country Club in Los Angeles, where some of Hollywood's most famous funnymen practiced their routines.

STEINBERG: I would sit there every day with my grandfather and his buddies were George Burns and George Jessel (ph) and Jack Benny and Groucho Marks and they would play gin rummy every single day. So I thought the whole world was old funny Jewish comedians...

SCHUCH (on camera): How hilarious that must have been.

STEINBERG: So my first baseball game I went with George Burns and my grandfather and so it was sort of exciting.

SCHUCH: Tell me what was left in your memory from that.

STEINBERG: Well, this was minor league baseball. It was the Hollywood Stars in the old Pacific Coast League and the players I can hardly remember, but I was just thrilled. And one day we sat next to Dizzy Dean, who was another friend of my grandpa's. He knew basically everybody. And I just loved it all, the smells, the smell of the cigar, the smell of the leather, the smell of the grass, the feel and the look and I feel in love with baseball that day. And being there, sitting there next to my grandpa and George Burns, I mean there was no place else in the world you'd rather be.

SCHUCH (voice-over): Steinberg's maternal grandfather also had a profound influence on the young man, but in a much more sobering way.

STEINBERG: In 1947 he went to Israel to try to aid in the fight for that state to be born and he was part of a doctor's convoy and they were going from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and they were hijacked by a group of Arabs and he was shot and killed. So he gave his life for the establishment of the State of Israel. So I had that message in my life also. UNIDENTIFIED EMCEE: Our community and the nation are better off because of your leadership and dedication to making a difference in the lives of our young people. Leigh, could you come forward?

SCHUCH: Of all those who've influenced Steinberg, he credits his father Warren for teaching him the importance of giving back.

STEINBERG: I was lucky. I was brought up to feel I was lucky. It's an accident of birth and I was taught that a lot of people fought in wars in this country and died to give us this standard of freedom so that the very least I could do was to make sure that I repaid my good fortune.

SCHUCH: Despite early leanings toward show biz, Steinberg ended up studying law during the turbulent '60s. The civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam helped shape his social conscience.

(on camera): And you were draft eligible. How did you avoid the draft?

STEINBERG: Well, they had this one dramatic day where in our dormitory there were hundreds of us gathered together and they had a lottery. And they went through every date of the year one by one and they pulled a little ball out of a shoot. And they assigned each date a number from one to 365 and I believe mine was 268. So that at that number it was clear that I wasn't going to be drafted.

Now if I had been drafted, I would have gone because...

SCHUCH: Would you have?

STEINBERG: Yes. It's, I mean ultimately I'm an American and I'm part of this country and I would not have, I wasn't going to allow someone just because they were poorer or they didn't have a student deferment to go take my place. I mean that wasn't going to be right.

SCHUCH (voice-over): It's an entirely different kind of draft which occupies Steinberg these days, the process by which the most promising college football players are selected for teams in the NFL. As well as baseball and basketball players, Leigh Steinberg's books bulge with the names of talented quarterbacks. Since the $600,000 deal Steinberg closed for Barkowski, he has now negotiated more than $2 billion in contracts for the athletes he represents.

(on camera): And your fee for all these things, is it regulated?

STEINBERG: Yes. The players unions regulate the fees in the sport of football, the -- for contract negotiation, the fee is three percent of the player's monies as they come to him. In the sport of basketball it is four percent. In baseball it's five percent.

SCHUCH (voice-over): In the mid-1980s, he signed Warren Moon to the Houston Oilers for $5.5 million and barely a month later he struck a deal worth $42 million for quarterback Steve Young, which clinched his reputation. STEINBERG: A bidding war starts and it is amazing. So Steve's at my house one night, USFL fighting against the NFL, Cincinnati Bengals. We get calls from Joe Namath and from Pete Rozelle (ph) and from Howard Cosell and Roger Staubach and everybody's throwing their two cent's worth.

Well, the dollars start escalating and escalating and remember, this is 1984, it's not the year 2000. These economics still mean something. And so they're going up and up and up and we're $20 million, $30 million, $40 million. And all of a sudden we put together the biggest package in the history of American sports for Steve.

SCHUCH (on camera): What are you thinking as these numbers are going up, you know, incrementally?

STEINBERG: I'm thinking that we're fare beyond any economics that have ever made any sense so we're just in crazy land.

SCHUCH (voice-over): For Steinberg, negotiation involves more than just nailing down the fattest salaries. His athletes have to agree to contribute to good causes in return. He tries his hardest to protect them from the risks of the game. And no one is more aware than Leigh Steinberg that a professional football career can be nasty, brutish and short.

STEINBERG: This is the chief guilt I have in the work I do. It's the injury rate that the athletes suffer. And I work so hard to protect them contractually and to try to help prepare them for a second career and yet at the end, I can't stop, especially in the sport of football, some of the egregiously painful and long lasting injuries they suffer.

SCHUCH (on camera): And you really roiled the community when you came out and suggested that Steve Young perhaps think about retiring.

STEINBERG: Well, look, I'm going to know these players when they turn 50 and the world will have forgotten them in their glory days and yet I've got a responsibility to these athletes not simply in their 20s, but their 30s, 40s and 50s and it's one thing to lean over and suffer aches and pains that when you lean over when you're 50 years old, it's hard to pick up your child. It's another thing not to be able to identify that child.

SCHUCH (voice-over): When PINNACLE returns, show me the serious money, why Leigh Steinberg decided to sell his sports agency.

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SCHUCH (voice-over): Even though his wedding was featured on "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," Leigh Steinberg leads a low key family life. He lives in Newport Beach, California with his three kids and wife Lucy, who he met at college.

STEINBERG: Meet my wife Lucy.

We started going out in college. Then we split for about 10 years and didn't see each other. And then she moved back to Los Angeles. She was practicing law. And we got together again in 1983 and then we got married in 1985.

SCHUCH: Leigh Steinberg's status as a super agent means he attracts a lot of media attention, but he keeps his family away from the limelight. And never mind going head to head with NFL management. Steinberg says balancing the demands of his professional and private lives is his toughest job.

(on camera): Do you have a secret for it?

STEINBERG: Well, I think the secret is just coming to the realization that your children will only be this age once and that this is, if you have them and they're young, this is the one time that can't be replaced. And thank goodness we had our kids late enough, my wife and I, in our life so that I was already established enough in my career that I got some freedoms here to go home, not talk on the phone, flip my work over to somebody else, you know, take time, be one-on-one quality time so that I'd spend time one-on-one with each of our children.

And all of us, each of us can make a difference, you know, in the world if we try.

SCHUCH (voice-over): Steinberg isn't only concerned with his own children, he wants to make sure other children care as deeply about sports as he did that day he went to the ball game with George Burns. This commitment shows in everything from his work with organizations like Junior Achievement to the way he chooses and manages his clients. He refuses to work with athletes who give sports a bad name.

STEINBERG: We have some younger players who have really tested the strings of our patience and we're hoping that they work out. And certain situations do work out. But it's hard for me to justify waste in the world and if a player is simply being self-destructive, sports is a discretionary expenditure of entertainment dollars and if our athletes push away the public by bad behavior, by ridiculous statements, by rubbing their money in the face of people whose median income is $30,000 a year, we will hurt sports. We will kill the golden goose.

So that I can't in good conscience represent athletes who in a recidivist way continue having problems off the field. One problem, well, they're not perfect human beings and I'm not and none of us are.

SCHUCH: You had your own incident with drunk driving a few years ago.

STEINBERG: Yes.

SCHUCH: That you handled in a pretty mature way. STEINBERG: There may be people in the world that look to me for a certain level of leadership and the truth is is that we're all human. And if I screw up and I had any alcohol in me and got behind the, you know, in the seat of a car, that was wrong period. End of story. Wrong. I shouldn't have done it. I'll never do it again, period. And the truth of the matter is is I don't parade myself as a perfect human being. I mean I try to do the best I can in circumstances.

SCHUCH (voice-over): Steinberg asks that his athletes do the best they can off the field as well as on. They donate money to issues they feel strongly about, from scholarship funds to helping single mothers find housing.

STEINBERG: I believe that, again, if Troy Aikman stands up and says real men don't hit women, it triggers behavioral changes that a dozen authority figures could never do. And it could actually change attitudes. It can save victims of child abuse or battered women. That's where I can really feel like I made a difference in the world and were able to do something of lasting value.

SCHUCH: Last year, Leigh Steinberg sold his company to Assante, a Canadian money management firm, for $120 million. His take was more than half of that. Even though he's now CEO of a multinational corporation, Leigh has kept his feet on the ground, his bare feet. The deal married his two passions, sports and show business. Assante's clients include Tom Cruise and David Letterman. It also means Steinberg will be able to negotiate entertainment work for his athletes and expand his sports empire.

STEINBERG: We're now in the business of trying to create new television shows, new radio, new Internet supply by bundling athletes, by using athletic theme programming, creating superstars competitions, a lot more use of athletes as content as well as marketing. And this is exciting. They're athletic theme projects and this is the trend and wave of the future.

SCHUCH (on camera): Is your dad still around?

STEINBERG: Yes.

SCHUCH: What does he think about this empire you've built?

STEINBERG: Well, I know he loves the charitable and community programs and he's a sports fan, so he gets excited following the athletes. And I give him a list and he gets off on that and gets excited about it. And so he loves the charitable and community programs and he loves the athletic part of it.

SCHUCH: If there were no more Leigh Steinberg and there was just a headline in the sports page tomorrow, what would you want it to say?

STEINBERG: Made a positive impact on the times he lived in.

SCHUCH: Would it be on the sports page?

STEINBERG: Well, you know, it is the first part of the paper that most people read.

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