NEWPORT BEACH – Three weeks after the sixth anniversary of the day his new life began, the world’s most famous sports agent peers from behind a desk cluttered with papers, memorabilia and Diet Dr. Pepper cans to admire the scene outside of his bay window, where the water on Balboa Bay is a cool, mesmerizing blue.
“That view,” Leigh Steinberg says in wonder, his eyes widening.
Views have always mattered to Steinberg. On a clear day from his former office in Fashion Island, you could see Catalina. And 37 years ago, when he bought his first home, a four-level redwood treehouse in the hills of Berkeley, Steinberg gaped at its panoramic views of San Francisco Bay, even as his interior had only a TV, a bed and a couple director’s chairs.
“I guess it gives me a sense that things are larger out there,” he says.
Inside these walls, though, nothing is bigger than Leigh Steinberg himself – and six years into his second lease on life that might be why he’s so eager to look past them.
This third-floor office is a museum. A collection of relics earned over a four-decade career takes up most of the open counter space. A pyramid of autographed baseballs is pushed to the back of a top shelf, near a deflated football signed by Jerry Rice. And scattered near the balls are some cardboard cutouts of former clients, tiny boxes of Wheaties and a DVD of “Jerry Maguire.”
Picture frames cover most of one wall, each offering a glimpse into a charmed past. Here is Steinberg with Troy Aikman. With Steve Young. With Warren Moon. There he is smiling next to Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, Cuba Gooding Jr. In one framed photo his arm is draped around a grinning Barack Obama.
In all of them, Steinberg looks happy, comfortable. Like he belongs.
But that Steinberg – with his boyish good looks, record eight No. 1 NFL draft picks in his stable of clients, and net worth upwards of $75 million – is only vaguely reminiscent of the 67-year-old man sitting behind his desk in baggy khakis and an untucked button down. He has no delusions of competing with his younger self. The pictures and the memorabilia – it’s all for clients, he says. Truth is, he barely notices them anymore.
They all trace back to a once-glamorous life and towering career that came apart at the seams, leaving the man who romanticized the title of “superagent” in a haze of cheap vodka, bankruptcy proceedings and debilitating personal demons. In the six years since his last drink, that fall has been chronicled numerous times, rehashed in linear detail by Steinberg himself – his father’s death, his houses lost to mold, his divorce, his failed attempts at rehab, his millions in debt, the powerlessness that came from it all. It’s a nightmarish and inescapable part of his life – this much, Steinberg readily admits.
And yet, at this particular juncture, days before his return to the rarefied air he once so regularly occupied atop the NFL draft, friends and family suggest that version of Steinberg has never felt so distant.
Two years into his attempt to re-enter the game he once conquered, talk of his “comeback” has come and gone. The client who breathed life into that narrative, Garrett Gilbert, has bounced around NFL teams, and Steinberg’s firm still boasts only seven other clients.
But it’s the eighth client, a quarterback not unlike the ones he built his career on, that has him sketching a grand future for Steinberg Sports & Entertainment. That future includes ambitious – and possibly farfetched – save-the-world projects ranging from reality TV to anti-bullying campaigns to climate change.
That’s a lot of weight on his aging shoulders – and on the much younger shoulders of University of Memphis’ Paxton Lynch, Steinberg’s game-changer client and first-round pick in Thursday’s NFL draft.
But as some wonder why Steinberg bothers returning to the scene of his public self-destruction, with a future no less blurry than the small army of younger agents flooding the market, this feels like the clarity he sought. It’s certainly not lost on the man himself.
“This is the end of a long odyssey in the desert,” Steinberg says. “I know it.”
ONE THOUGHT
To truly understand the climb back, we must begin at the bottom.
It’s March 2010, and Steinberg sits at the edge of his late father’s bed in West L.A., clutching a plastic jug of vodka. By now, he has been in and out of rehab facilities and arrested three times – twice for DUI, once for public intoxication. His marriage is over. His agent certification is gone. Debt is piling up; court documents will show he owes more than $3 million to various creditors. Steinberg says later that he has just one thought: “‘Where can I find more vodka?’”
Days later, in Orange, he enters a sober living facility. Right away, Tom Van Voorst, a fellow alcoholic and lawyer, recognizes him – and the daze on his face.
“Like any of us,” Van Voorst says, “he was completely broken.”
The men become fast friends, leaning on each other in the months that follow. Steinberg tells old stories of hobnobbing with celebrities and athletes. He shares dreams of starting again. They talk about their fears. Steinberg worries most about his kids, how he can’t protect them from his “wreckage.”
Of his three children, Matt takes his struggles the hardest. Alcohol, Matt thought, dimmed the ineffable spark he admired in his father. Each rehab stint brings renewed hope of seeing it again, but with each disappointment, expectations diminish. Soon, they stop talking at all.
“I felt like he could get sober, but he just didn’t want to,” Matt says. “I felt helpless.”
That spring, after a hiatus, father and son reunite at the graduation ceremony of Steinberg’s oldest son. He tells Matt he’s been counting his days of sobriety. After a weekend together, Matt, for the first time, sees a change in him. It gives him hope.
“Nothing I could say was going to be as important as stacking days of sobriety on each other,” Steinberg says.
In March 2011, one year after rock bottom, Steinberg decides to celebrate his sobriety at the Irvine house he shared with Van Voorst. In typical Steinberg fashion, hundreds of guests show up to the party.
Each March, for the next four years, even as Steinberg slogs through bankruptcy and eventually gets his new company off the ground, he continues the annual sobriety party tradition.
But this year, as his new clients crisscrossed the country to visit with NFL teams and the draft process churned on, March approached with no plans.
When the day came, Steinberg picked up another sobriety chip and wrote a Facebook status:
“SIX YEARS TODAY ON THE SUNNY SIDE OF THE STREET.”
This time, he didn’t feel the need to celebrate.
CLEAN, LUCKY BREAK
Call it divine intervention. Call it fate. Perhaps, this was simply the universe handing Leigh Steinberg a much-needed break.
But in October 2014, when David Lynch called his office in October 2014 to get a read on his son’s Paxton’s future, Steinberg wasn’t entirely sure who Paxton Lynch was. And the agent who once represented Kordell Stewart, a decent player who never became a star, certainly didn’t know that Stewart was young Paxton’s childhood idol.
What Steinberg did know was that he needed to represent a franchise quarterback.
In 1975, his rise from novice to superagent began with that draft’s top signal caller, Cal’s Steve Bartkowski. And at his peak, big name, big money QBs were Steinberg’s calling card. He negotiated deals for Moon, Aikman and Drew Bledsoe. “He was the best,” says Moon, who grew so close to Steinberg that the agent gave the introductory speech when Moon was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2006.
When the Lynch family called, nearly two decades after the release of “Jerry Maguire,” Steinberg’s brand still had value – enough that his name recognition, years later, was still higher than any other agent. But the gap in clients was notable. Also, the game had changed since his 1990s peak.
“For this generation, that’s ancient history,” says one of Steinberg’s sons, Matt, who now works at the agency.
Still, Steinberg was confident in his formula. After one year with late-round clients and another consumed by a book tour, now was the time.
“I knew,” Steinberg says, “that would be a signal to the world that, in some sense, we were back.”
As with all potential clients, Steinberg laid his cards on the table. He told Lynch’s family upfront about his alcoholism and his dark days, and how he could never truly guarantee his sobriety, even after six years.
“He was very confident in that, and very proud of himself in how far he’d come,” Paxton Lynch told Sports Illustrated.
Their values meshed, so they kept in touch. In the summer, Steinberg met with Lynch for the first time, at his house in Memphis. In the fall, they met three more times.
He chased other top quarterbacks, too, flying to Bismarck, N.D., to meet with North Dakota State’s Carson Wentz and his father. The romantic in him dreamed that Jared Goff, another Cal quarterback, would sign and bring things full circle. Instead, both signed with Bruce and Ryan Tollner, former Steinberg’s partners from a decade ago. For the draft’s presumptive top two quarterbacks, Steinberg’s fear was realized. His gap from relevance, he said, “had ruled the day.”
As the holidays neared, the group of potential star QB clients thinned to just Lynch. The weight of the decision was enormous for the company – and for Steinberg himself. To lose Lynch would mean another year of waiting. The urgency to land Lynch was palpable.
The call came shortly before Christmas. Matt remembers watching father smiling through the glass that separates their offices. “Yes!” Steinberg yelled, loudly enough for the entire office to hear.
“YES!“
They all knew.
COMEBACK MAN
Is Leigh Steinberg back? The answer depends on perspective.
But here, the view from his third-floor office suggests that the journey out of bankruptcy and the vice grips of alcoholism is no longer a grueling climb. Steinberg will never be what he was, but after years of struggle he’s at peace with that. On his desk now, closer to him than any of the mementos, are pictures of his kids.
“That pressure to maintain some unbelievable empire; it’s gone,” Steinberg says.
Once everything has collapsed, even time can’t put all the pieces back together again. Grasping that is crucial to recovery. For Steinberg to rebuild even as much as he has, Van Voorst says, is nothing less than “remarkable.”
Matt Steinberg puts it this way: “He has as much back as he’s ever going to get.“
Van Voorst suspects Steinberg returned to the agent game to prove to himself that he could, even after his disease had stripped him of everything. Another friend, Richard Gillam, believes he was simply looking for a platform to do good, and being a sports agent provides that.
Now, as his plans for the future leak out over the course of two meetings in his office, it’s clear that the ambitions he once put on hold now pull Steinberg in every direction.
He’s writing a proposal for his third and fourth books, planning another iteration of his mentorship program “Agent Academy,” and acting as co-producer on an upcoming Kevin Costner movie about his longtime client, June Jones. There are more movie scripts, speaking opportunities, reality TV offers, an endless string of radio show invites and weekly columns for Forbes and Yahoo. There’s saving the world from climate change and bullying and the like.
And while some of those endeavors may not currently exist outside of his own head, this burst of ambition, however implausible, has Steinberg feeling alive again.
“I think this is the reason I was brought back,” he says.
For the next week, though, his focus is on the NFL draft. And as he stares at a sheet with the first round’s draft order, speculating about where Lynch might be selected, he smiles. Leigh Steinberg was in Florida with the Lynch family for Thursday’s first round, and for the first time since his new life began, he will again play the game he once conquered.
This time, he’s convinced the view will be even better than before.
“After all,” he says, grinning, “I haven’t been here in awhile.”
Contact the writer: rkartje@ocregister.com
