VICE Sports Q&A: Leigh Steinberg

Welcome to VICE Sports Q&A, where we'll talk to authors, directors, and other interesting people about interesting sports things. Think of it as a podcast, only with words on a screen instead of noises in your earbuds. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Once upon a time, Leigh Steinberg was the biggest sports agent in the world. He represented hundreds of athletes, and was the loose inspiration for Jerry Maguire. Then a combination of alcoholism and financial problems unraveled his career. Steinberg recently wrote his story in his book The Agent. He sat down with VICE Sports to discuss his friend Frank Gifford, who was recently diagnosed with CTE; the state of the NFL; and his own journey.

VICE Sports: Frank Gifford was a close friend of yours, right?

Leigh Steinberg: Frank Gifford and I were friends for years. As a matter of fact, in the 1984 Summer Olympics, in Los Angeles, I was called on to do an interview on the ABC broadcast, but I was downtown and I was wearing shorts. So, Gifford took me back to his room and gave me a suit to wear. It was a little big. [laughs] I didn't have the big shoulders that Frank did.

When you look at football players and the wear and tear on their bodies, they don't complain. They accept it, but it is like they are in a traffic accident on almost every play. So, the fact that Frank could live to 84 years old is, I think, a testimony to good work habits, but football players take a pounding and that is why the average professional lifespan of an NFL player is so short.

Long before the concussion problem became headline material in the NFL, you were at the forefront of looking into the issue. What was the situation like back then and where do you see it now?

There was complete denial when I started back in the 80s. We held two concussion conferences, and I called it a "ticking time bomb" and an "undiagnosed health epidemic." The league wasn't telling the players the truth. They had studies then, showing that there was long-term damage that could ultimately show itself as Parkinson's, premature senility, Alzheimer's, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and depression that could come from this. They just weren't being honest with the players. There have been some changes, but I believe that every time an offensive lineman hits a defensive lineman at the inception of a football play, it produces a low-level, sub-concussive event.

So, you can have an offensive lineman walk out of high school, college and pro football with ten thousand of them, none of which have been diagnosed, none of which he is aware of, but the aggregate of which is almost certainly worse than getting knocked out three times.

I think the NFL settlement on the concussion issue was an impediment to the NFL moving forward because they were afraid to do a whole series of preventative things because it would admit that they had been wrong before.

We need new helmetry; we need nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals, better diagnostic techniques, so there is a long, long way to go. I think we're going to see a variety of new products that can ameliorate the situation.

How did you feel that the NFL handled the Tom Brady Deflategate situation?

I think the NFL pretty much made up procedures as they went along. It didn't really fit into a discipline category, and I think they violated procedure with the basic principle, which was what separates the NFL and other professional sports from wrestling: the belief that the games are played on an even playing field. The equipment is even and the rules are the same. The problem is that this case pits maybe the most popular player in NFL in Tom Brady, one of the most respected owners in Bob Kraft, and a franchise that had just won the Super Bowl against the rest of the NFL and Roger Goodell.

The timing has been atrocious from the start. They released the first charge against the Patriots on the Friday prior to Super Bowl week. It dominated the headlines.

The court proceedings in New York happened right before training camps were supposed to open. People should have been filled with anticipation and excitement for the new season. It was done with agonizing delay and the timing could not be worse. The whole thing was fraught with inconsistency. It's the kind of thing that a deft commissioner would have handled internally and it would not have played out this way.

Are you saying that Mr. Goodell is not a deft commissioner?

He is absolutely superb when it comes to negotiating the collective bargaining agreement that took the players' share down from 53 to 47 percent. He is absolutely amazing in new TV contracts, stadia, and the rest. The reason he is so bulletproof is that he has played a large part in enriching these owners to an amazing degree. His job is not going to be in peril, but this was all very clumsy stuff from the group that is supposed to be the master of PR.

If Tom Brady had been my client, I probably would've had him make a statement way back in January and say, "I am very competitive. I like to throw a deflated football. If I pushed our equipment people too hard and somehow stepped over the line. I am really sorry. It was not my intent." The situation would have died. Brady might have been fined, and the whole thing would have been over.

Los Angeles has not had an NFL team since the Rams and the Raiders left in 1995. Now there is talk of three NFL teams—the Rams, the Raiders, and the Chargers—fighting for the right to move into the market. Where do you think Los Angeles stands right now in its attempt to get the NFL back?

The NFL has tried repeatedly to put a franchise back in Los Angeles. It has not been their reticence; it has been the inability of Los Angeles to agree on a single venue and to actually come up with a viable plan. In the year 2000, Los Angeles was granted a franchise and we could not produce, so the franchise went to Houston. Then NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue came back again and wanted to build around the LA Coliseum site, and again Los Angeles couldn't put it all together.

We've got 15 million people here within two hours of a site. We've got huge corporations. The valuation of the St. Louis Rams is $930 million. The valuation of the Raiders is $970 million, and the San Diego Chargers are worth a little over $1 billion. The LA Clippers team was purchased here for $2 billion, so it makes all of the economic sense in the world for franchises to come back here.

I have felt for a long time that the Rams would be most likely to come back to Hollywood Park because they have an owner [Stan Kroenke] with incredible means. They have an out in their lease. They have a construction project that would revitalize the Inglewood area, so it would be more than just a stadium, you'd also get daytime traffic and business.

Then the buzz became maybe two teams coming back, in the form of the San Diego Chargers and the Oakland Raiders. That would allow the NFL to completely solve two unsolvable stadium situations. There is no way that Oakland is going to be able to produce a state-of-the-art football stadium, and San Diego has a real problem on its hands because there is such a distance and they are talking about a mixed-revenue proposition. It is a little counterintuitive because the Chargers and the Raiders would both be AFC teams, but I am pretty sure that NFL football is coming back to Los Angeles in 2016. The teams would have to play in a temporary sites.

How badly does the NFL really want football back in Los Angeles?

You have NFL owners like Robert Kraft, Jerry Jones, and Art Rooney, two of whom are on the actual committee, saying they believe that football will be back in Los Angeles in 2016. That means that you've got the most powerful forces among owners pushing this. The fact that they are speaking publicly on this leads you to believe that a decision on this will not be too far away, and teams will come.

I was chairman of "Save the Rams." We had a group of 130 businessmen who fought very hard to keep the team here in Southern California. I grew up going to Rams games in seats that were so far from the field that you needed a telescope to watch the game. Now a whole generation has grown up here without a local NFL team. We can amply support a team and I think we'll get one.

Should one nickel of LA taxpayer money go into this stadium project?

I don't think there's any justification to put public money into a project like this in an economy where schools are suffering, roads and highways are in disrepair, and there are all sorts of other civic needs unless that money will come back in spades. The NFL could come in and finance a stadium by themselves. Other than a few minor alterations in terms of roads and things, no municipality should be financially jeopardized for private business.

I was shocked a few years ago when I found out that you were suffering from alcoholism. I congratulate you on your continued sobriety. You seem like a guy who had everything in the world going for you. What the heck happened?

What happened was a series of things in my personal life, which, improperly, made me feel as though I was powerless. My father died a long, ugly death from cancer. My two kids were diagnosed with an eye disease that leads to blindness. We lost our house. Then I got divorced and I turned to the wrong thing. I looked to check out for a while and I got to the point in 2010 where I gave my practice away and said, "Look, all I care about is being a good father and being sober." That was six years ago and now we are back. We are recruiting athletes and rocking and rolling.

How do you beat something like alcoholism—or do you?

You are never cured. What you have is a daily reprieve based on doing the work involved in the program. The truth is that after a few months the craving to drink leaves you and then it's just a matter of making sure that whatever the underlying causes were, are something that you address all the time. It's keeping up a regimen that is designed to give you the best shot to put it behind you.

One of the things that you have instilled in your clients is that it is not enough just to get the big contract. What else do you ask of the athletes that you represent?

We ask each one of them to go back and retrace their roots to the high school community where they could set up a scholarship fund, work at the church or at a Boys and Girls Club. Then go to the collegiate level, where people like Troy Aikman, Eric Karros, and Steve Young endowed full scholarships at their universities. At the pro level, we had them put foundations together that gave them the chance to tackle some fundamental problem that they were passionate about.

For example, Warrick Dunn, the running back for Tampa Bay and Atlanta, putting his 143rd single mother and her family into the first home that they will ever own, by making the down payment and having it furnished. In aggregate, our players have raised close to $1 billion in trying to attack some root causes.

Athletes have an incredible opportunity to serve as role models and trigger imitative behavior, so when I had Lennox Lewis, the heavyweight champion, put out a public service announcement that said, "Real men don't hit women," it could do more to impact rebellious adolescents in their attitude toward domestic violence than a thousand authority figures ever could.