Show Notes

• Evolution of the sports industry
• Impact of the NCAA’s name, image and likeness (NIL) policy
• The proliferation of sports gambling
• Leigh’s struggle with alcohol
• Advice for people facing personal and/or career adversity
• The agent-client relationship beyond contract negotiation
• The drive to thrive at 75
• Show me the money!

Connect With Leigh Steinberg

✩ Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/leighsteinberg
✩ X – https://x.com/leighsteinberg
✩ LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesteinberg/
✩ Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/SteinbergSports/

Additional Resources
✩ Book: The Agent: My 40-Year Career of Making Deals and Changing the Game
✩ Book: Winning With Integrity:Getting What You Want Without Selling Your Soul

Summary

Known as the real-life inspiration for the Oscar-winning film, “Jerry Maguire,” legendary sports agent Leigh Steinberg has secured over $4 billion for his 300+ elite athletes, including eight number one overall picks in the NFL draft and 12 Hall of Fame inductees. Leigh discusses the evolution of the sports industry, and overcoming personal and career adversity.

Full Transcript

Brian
Welcome to another episode of LifeExcellence with Brian Bartes. Join me as I talk with amazing athletes, entrepreneurs, authors, entertainers and others who have achieved excellence in their chosen field, so you can learn their tools, techniques and strategies for improving performance and achieving greater success. Leigh Steinberg, renowned sports agent and entrepreneur, is the chairman and founder of Steinberg Sports and Entertainment. He is often credited as the real life inspiration for the Oscar winning film “Jerry Maguire.” During his 50 year career, Leigh has represented many of the most successful athletes in multiple sports, including the number one overall pick in the NFL Draft an unprecedented eight times in 64 first round draft selections. With an unrivaled history of record setting contracts, Leigh has secured over $4 billion – that’s billion with a “B” – for his 300 plus pro-athlete clients, and directed more than one billion dollars to various charities around the world. Over the course of his career, Leigh has been featured on numerous national television programs, including “60 Minutes,” “Larry King Live,” and “The Today Show,”and he has been profiled in a host of magazines, including Business Week, Sports Illustrated, People and Forbes. Leigh is a best selling author of two books, “Winning With Integrity: Getting What You Want Without Selling Your Soul” and “The Agent: My 40 Year Career Of Making Deals and Changing the Game.” Leigh has received numerous accolades for both his philanthropy and his impact on sports, including being inducted into the California Sports Hall of Fame. He continues to shape the sports industry and inspire others through his work, and it’s truly an honor to have him on the show. Welcome Leigh, and thanks for joining us on LifeExcellence.

Leigh
Thank you, Brian. I’m happy to be with you.

Brian
I’m happy to have you. Leigh, 50 years is a long time to be in any business, and the sports industry has changed dramatically in just the last five years, let alone over five decades. I think the first contract you negotiated was $600,000 for four years for rookie quarterback Steve Bartkowski, which, of course, was a huge amount back in the 70s. In 2020 for comparison, your firm negotiated the largest deal in NFL history, a ten year, $450 million contract extension for Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes. That deal was not only the largest in NFL history, by the way, but it was also the largest contract at the time in any American sport. In what ways is your role as a sports agent the same as it was when you began your career and how has it changed, Leigh? Because there’s certainly greater complexity today in many ways, not the least of which is how contracts are structured.

Leigh
So what’s the same is my father had two core values, one was treasure relationships – especially family – and the second was make a meaningful difference in the world and cure pain and help people who can’t help themselves. I was looking for a profession that would give me the opportunity to do that. I asked the athletes to be role models and retrace their roots to the high school community where they set up a scholarship fund or work with the Boys and Girls Club or church. At the collegiate level, where they would endow some form of financial endowment to the university and stay part of that alum community. Then set up a charitable foundation to challenge a problem they felt in the world and get the leading business figures, political figures, and community leaders on an advisory board to help execute that. That’s like work done; putting the 200 single parent and the family into “the first home I ever owned” by making the down payment and moving them in, or that’s Patrick Mahomes with his 15 and The Mahomies [Foundation] that helps at risk kids, kids in hospitals and kids facing financial challenge. So that core has remained the same. What’s changed is everything else. To understand the change in the sports field, you have to understand the growth of television. Television used lost leader bidding, meaning more money spent on rights fees than they could ever get back on advertising to try and show promos on Monday through night and build the ultimate value of the network. From $2 million per team in 1975 – per season per team – we now have TV revenue of more like 300 million per team per season, and the franchises then were worth 16.5 million dollars. Seattle and Tampa Bay and the Dallas Cowboys are now valued at ten billion. Another fundamental change has been the advent of social media. Today, the currency in how to do a book deal, a speaking deal, an endorsement, is how many followers does someone have on LinkedIn and Instagram and TikTok and all of those social media, so you have athletes creating their own content and branding themselves. That’s a change. And then recently, in the last three, four years, three major factors have completely revolutionized sports, and the first is gambling, the introduction of gambling into pro football. Second is NIL (name, image and likeness) which has again changed the whole concept of amateurism. So now the unintended consequence they have, it’s being used by collectivism alums in recruiting, so a player going from high school to college can get ten million in guaranteed NILs from SC but you know what? Michigan law firm 10.5 and Alabama law firm 11, and then the same thing true later. Then conference realignment. So these have been massive changes that impact the whole field of sports.

Brian
You brought up two issues that I definitely wanted to ask you about. Let’s start with NIL. Who benefits from NIL other than the college athletes? And just by way of background, the NCAA policy change in 2021 around name, image and likeness, allowing college athletes to benefit economically from the sale of their brand, basically – you can correct me if I’m wrong on that, Leigh – I know allowing college athletes to be compensated will help the best players, but is NIL a positive change, in your opinion, overall for college sports?

Leigh
It was the law, Brian, of unintended consequences. So instead of thinking this through, it came in a rush. California passed SB 206 back in 2020, with a three year start date. All the other states feared that California would sign the best athletes. But what they didn’t intend was for four conferences – the top four football and basketball conferences – to pull away from everyone else because of the power of their alum base. I think ultimately you’ll see those four conferences get rid of the NCAA and negotiate their own television contracts and negotiate their own rules. So the problem is, is there a drip down, ripple down effect to all the rest of the universities in the country? Maybe what’s threatened is the non-revenue sports, because the funding from football and basketball won’t be there for them. So it affects women’s sports, it affects men’s volleyball or water polo, and if the charge of a university is to provide maximum educational experiences for maximum numbers, those numbers will start to atrophy. The second thing about it is that athletes never needed $15 million at the college level. What they were looking for was just a supplement. You probably could have taken at-risk athletes and told them here’s $5,000 more, and it would have made their stay on campus a lot better. They were not able to compete with their non-athletic peers who could work during the school year, where athletes couldn’t, so some of them from disadvantaged homes were having a tough time. The best of them are being compensated but it does drop down a bit because Phil Knight gave every athlete at Oregon an NIL and there are alums from all schools, so that part’s okay. But what’s different is this, you now have a 15 year old high school student who wants to market himself and hire a marketing director. Yesterday, I got a call from the father of a high school quarterback who is 17 and he wants to market himself, so any semblance of whatever was good about amateurism is not there anymore, and whatever was good about a normal childhood is not there anymore and it starts younger and younger. That impacts the agent business because if you want someone to do the type of role modeling I’m talking about and focus on second career, those are reasonably far-looking concepts. Probably somebody at 15 is not going to be real worried about those. So it changes the nature of the agent business and how early, I mean, who…hospitals over here, there are probably agents looking for healthy, robust mothers in the maternity ward. [Laughter.]

Brian
So who benefits from NIL other than the college athletes and the law firms? Are there new opportunities for you as a sports agent?

Leigh
To do the NILs for people, but again, it talks about an entry level in meeting those families that would be much younger than what I’m used to. The athletes benefit, some commercial projects benefit because they get added exposure of younger athletes who still have profile. The colleges in that top tier benefit because now they have available income to compete in recruiting.

Brian
You also brought up sports gambling, and I certainly wanted to ask you about that, I know you have strong opinions. As you know Leigh, prior to 2018 sports gambling was prohibited almost everywhere, and now it’s legal in 38 states and the District of Columbia. The American Gaming Association expects $35 billion again – that’s billion with a “B” – in bets to be placed on NFL games alone this year in 2024. What are the risks of opening the flood gates and allowing sports betting to become so pervasive? And as someone who’s devoted your entire life to the sports industry, does this concern you at all?

Leigh
It does. I don’t think that the revenue that comes in will be worth the risk. Professional and collegiate sports rest on this premise that the games are real athletic contests played by people who want to win, played with the same rules, and anything that creates the perception that inside information is being transmitted to gamblers, or that people are shaving performance based on maybe being in debt to a gambler, any of that is an existential threat to the continued fan bases for professional and collegiate sports. All it takes is one Jontay Porter and basketball to be at the margin. He needs money, getting in gambling debt. And then there’s a thing called prop betting, which means you can bet on the over-under, on virtually any athletic achievement from the before game to after game. And so if the gambler knew that the player was going to shape performance, not score as many points come out of a game early, it would corrupt the whole system. That’s first; that’s a threat that’s of a magnitude that is beyond anything else. We know that bad behavior by athletes doesn’t kill professional or collegiate sports because there’s been plenty of it. This is the thing – this and concussion – are the things that could really tip the balance. The second thing is, when you’re watching those games over the weekend and you see non-stop ubiquitous advertising for gambling sites, some percentage of that population will not be able to handle it and they’ll become gambling addicts. You’re going to create a societal problem because they make it look so attractive, and they’ll give you money up front to be part of their site, and you can have $500 in credit to get started. There’s going to be a sizable group of people who get in gambling debt and trouble, and just because of the addictive factor of it, keep trying to get back to even and even; they don’t and now they’re in tremendous debt. So that’s, I think, the second part of it. There was an impregnable wall for the entire history of my practice between gambling and pro-sports. There was never going to be a team in Las Vegas. They didn’t want to be close to those casinos. Now you have a football team, a hockey team, and soon to have a baseball team. The Super Bowl was held in Las Vegas and you’ve got two NFL owners who own part of FanDuel, a gambling app. You’ve got advertising in the stadia themselves. You actually have the ability, Brian, to go into Washington Commander stadium and when you’re buying a hot dog you can also place a bet, and you can do it where the Bulls play basketball in Chicago.

Brian
And so how do you see that playing out long term? Because it doesn’t sound good, and it seems to be snowballing.

Leigh
More and more penetration, more and more gambling opportunities, more and more revenue raised, and as you said, 38 states. But that will spread. That will be all 50 states very soon, and that just magnifies the problem.

Brian
Leigh, you mentioned the media and the impact of media revenue for NFL teams being a difference between when you started, obviously, and now. I think I know the answer to this, but what’s driving the astronomical escalation in salaries? Is it strictly the media contracts that teams are getting.? You have, as we mentioned, Patrick Mahomes making 45 million a season, Steph Curry in basketball, making 40 plus million a year, and the Dodgers – I know you’re a Dodgers fan – Shohei Otani making 70 million a year after his 700 million dollar/ten year contract. It seems like at some point the math just isn’t going to work anymore. What’s driving the high salaries and how do you see that playing out long term?

Leigh
In the fight between hundreds of different networks and channels, sports is one thing that delivers, and it delivers in real time. Because if you’re going to wait for someone to tell you what happened in a Dodger -Mets game last night so you can tape it and watch it, good luck [laughter] no one’s going to tell you. It’s watched in real time, the ads are placed in real time. It has that extra value, but additionally, it’s the one thing that can alter the bottom line value of a network, which is billions and billions of dollars. For example, Fox was the fourth network and then they bought – way back in the day – NFC football, and they immediately, because of the promos they showed, went up to number one rated, which increased the value of the valuation of their network by many, many times what they paid for in TV. CBS, which was a number one network, went to number four. So it has that dramatic effect. Les Moonves of CBS, once showed that; I just bought the rights fees for Thursday night football, and I bought the ability to lose $100 million. Well, he lost 100 million there, but he gained so much in the network valuation. As long as that competing starts, and now you have streaming: Amazon Prime and Netflix and other people coming in. Which I don’t think it’s a great idea because it undercuts the fact that every human being who can afford a couple hundred dollars for an old fashioned black and white TV can watch games, now if you start to parse it out into pay TV avenues and platforms then all of a sudden you lose the 130 million people who watched the Super Bowl last year that create these networks. The other thing that you have is brand new stadia that have all sorts of revenue enhancing opportunities, which is luxury boxes, premium seating, jumbo scoreboard, sponsorship naming rights and all sorts of things, the growth of fantasy sports with 40 million people playing fantasy football every week, you have merchandising and memorabilia. So this country is in the midst of an unprecedented love affair with professional football. 61 of the top one hundred shows last year were football games, and that means it’s not only the most popular sport by some magnitude, it’s the most popular form of televised entertainment. When I was growing up, it was baseball but even baseball wasn’t that dominant.

Brian
I think sports in the US is a $69 billion a year business. I don’t know if that’s an accurate number or not, but it’s certainly a big number. The sport…and this extends beyond NFL football obviously. Golfers are making more than ever, tennis players are making more than ever, you have corporate money, not just gambling companies, but other corporations, providing more revenue than ever for sports. So the revenue is there to support the salaries, but some people – maybe even some of the folks on the receiving end of that revenue, some of the folks you’re negotiating with, your athletes – would say that athletes are overpaid. I know one of the effects of highly paid athletes, and this is something that affects me, it affects you when you go to a Dodgers game, is the impact on ticket prices and the difficulty of maintaining accessibility for the average sports fan. What’s your take on that?

Leigh
So let’s be clear with your initial premise, the money is there to pay these salaries. You don’t have NFL owners complaining about economic problems, or baseball, which used to complain, there ain’t complaining anymore because there’s a revenue split – 53% for NFL owners, 47% for players – that takes the money. So they can only spend what they’re taking in but it does bring up a troubling problem. Years ago, I used to offer, in my early years naively, that our athlete could live with less money; we could take a cut in compensation to the extent that owners would lower ticket prices. But ticket prices are a function of supply and demand, so they will raise the prices unrelated to what they’re paying the players until they can no longer fill the stadium, and that’s just an economic concept. Now, where I think they make a mistake is that you need to see the sport for the future, each of these sports. I think it would be much more forward looking to take five to ten thousand seats out of a football stadium every week, and distribute them on an entirely different basis, where you’re giving them to the working families, young kids, and you’re building the future. You’re taking a bet on the fact that for people to follow a sport, they either have to play it themselves or they have to see it played live to get the full impact of it. So could the athletes live on less? Yes, if we could directly tie it to more access to people that are not multi-millionaires to go to games, I think it would make real sense. In baseball there are extra seats, in basketball and football. If you want to popularize your sport, then keep growing it for the future.

Brian
I can see as you’re talking where there are even potentially challenges with that. Let’s say we give 5,000 World Series tickets, or 5,000 tickets to every Dodgers game, and now they’re in the playoffs and in the World Series. The middle class folks who have access to these tickets, what are they going to do with those tickets? Are they going to go to the game, or are they going to sell the tickets to the people who tend to be attending the games now, the corporations, the wealthy?

Leigh
The problem is that history shows they sell the tickets. So when you go to SoFi Stadium, to a Charger game, and they’re playing the Chiefs, and a third of the rooters are Chief fans, they’ve obviously bought those tickets for a premium. It’s going to cost a couple thousand to go to the World Series. So my point would be, if at the end of that Dodger season, they had 80 home games, you would have some number of hundreds of thousands of people who had been able to attend it, and you’re growing this sport for the future. So you just need to get the coalescence of owners and all the rest of them…but look, their ultimate bet is franchise value. That franchise value is a lot higher if you have a larger base of people who have seen the sport, they watch more of it on television, they buy more memorabilia, they do all those things. So it’s not like a net loss of revenue. They’re going to spend money at the ballpark.

Leigh
I’m not sure I ever heard the answer to the question as to whether athletes are overpaid or not. Are athletes overpaid in your opinion? It’s a loaded question, isn’t it?

Leigh
Well, it talks about the definition of overpay. If you ask in terms of benefit to the society, should we pay teachers more? Absolutely, we turn our kids over to them to shape their lives. Should we pay nurses more? Yes. Should we pay policemen more? Yes. Should we pay vital services people more? Yes. But I don’t have a magic wand that recreates an economic system for enterprise. It’s based on supply and demand, and the truth is, the entertainment business in every aspect has always compensated those few people that can do it at a higher level. So do I think they’re overpaid? Not according to the principles of the current economic system. You can easily convince me that we ought to pay certain types of people that do critical things in our society more money, and that would be fairer.

Brian
That’s well said, and I completely agree with that. Switching gears a little bit, you’ve been incredibly blessed in your career and life, but you’ve also faced tremendous adversity. I’d like to delve, if we could, into a couple personal issues you faced. Because, one, I think they’re instructive as a reminder that possessing wealth and success doesn’t mean we aren’t susceptible to adversity. And second, I think your experience is a model of redemption and the power to recover from and overcome challenges that we face in our lives. You’ve been very open in in the media about your struggle with alcohol and thankful you’ve been in recovery now for a long time, since 2010. But could you share a little bit about what caused that downhill spiral that really jeopardized everything that you had been building for years, both professionally and personally?

Leigh
I led a very charmed life with virtually no drama and a lot of positives in terms of trying to give back to the world. But I got to the point, in the early 2000s, where my father died a long death of cancer, esophageal cancer, my two sons were diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, which is an eye disease that leads to total blindness. And we lost a house to mold, which was the house of our dreams, but if you live in a beach side city you get this growth, and it totally…we had to knock the house completely down. I’d started to feel powerless; that I had a responsibility to help save my father, save our house, protect my boys from blindness, and it was grandiose to think that I ever had that power. But that was in my mind, and I started to feel like Gulliver, stranded on a beach, tethered down with little people sticking forks in me, and I turned to alcohol to numb the pain from all of those things. And if you’re out there and you’re struggling, despondent, depressed because of problems with addictive substances, just know if you can break denial about the fact that you have a problem, which I had to do, there are 12 step programs with unique fellowships that will support you and you can have a happier life. The reason I’ve been public about it is in hope that someone who’s in the same situation I was in, could believe that there’s light at the end of the tunnel and they too, can come back. Next March, it’ll be 15 years of continuous sobriety, if everything goes well. I think that it’s the same thing whether your addiction is gambling or shopping or sex or drugs or alcohol; they all hit the same part of the brain. I have a new book coming out at the Super Bowl that’s called “The Comeback: Resilience, Compassion and What Matters in Life.” I’m going to talk about it again there, and I only have this one lifetime to try to make some difference in a positive way in the world, I may as well be open about it.

Brian
First of all, I commend you for getting to almost 15 years, and I appreciate you sharing what you shared on the show. The reason I wanted to bring it up is because you have a story of…not a story of despair, but a story of hope and the way you’ve come back is remarkable and it’s inspirational. Again, there are a lot of people out there who are in denial, to use your word, who are numbing pain, whatever that is, and eventually will, unfortunately have consequences relating to that. What was the turning point that caused you to decide enough is enough and sparked your journey to recover?

Leigh
It was a epiphany I had that led me back to proportionality. So the realization is, if my dad had those two core values and what I was supposed to be doing in life was being a good parent and making a positive difference in the world, that I was failing on both counts and and why? I wasn’t a starving peasant in Darfur in the Sudan. I didn’t have the last name Steinberg in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. I wasn’t sitting in Ukraine under a Russian bombing pattern. I didn’t have cancer, I wasn’t sick in any way. I had great health, even with…what excuse did I have to not try again? I’d been raised with a sense of optimism, to be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, to be able to to be surrounded by debt, risk and destruction and try to see beyond it. I mean, I’m so naive that if there was a defecation in a barn, I’d be sure that there was a pony there somewhere. [Chuckle.]

Brian
Well, and if all that wasn’t enough to endure, you also faced tremendous financial difficulties around that same time.

Leigh
It all had the same cause, but I was never concerned that I’d be able to build a career back again, although you had to face the basic questions; how can you guarantee us you’ll be sober? How can you tell us that our son’s in good hands if you couldn’t handle your own money? You’re a little older, will you be around? Do you still have contacts? So if you’re trying to get some redemption, you have to be realistic with yourself about challenges that that you face. But I was pretty sure I could still find athletes. My comeback is the ability to maintain sobriety and being a good father and trying to make a difference in the world. I mean, the professional success is just a little cherry on the top.

Brian
Leigh, what message do you have for people who are facing adversity, whether it’s financial or with addiction or just running into everyday obstacles that we have in relationships or in our careers or jobs or business, whether in personal life or in our careers? What message do you have for people, especially when they’re in that stuck state and they’re just unsure what to do about it, how to move forward?

Leigh
What I advise people is to do an internal inventory and get in touch with what your values and priorities are right now. One might be short term economic gain, one might be long term economic security. One might be family, one might be spiritual values, one might be geographical location, one might be autonomy. One might be working in a way that makes a positive difference in the world or profile. But whatever it is, figure out that list and then chart a course which gives you structure so that you get a routine of starting to do those recovery activities that get you to the ultimate point. And don’t keep thinking about the ultimate result, just keep staying in process, doing those things that will get you there with the trust that eventually you’ll get there. And when you feel overwhelmed by 50 different things to do, sit down, make a list, prioritize them, work on the first thing first and then the second, and eventually it will diminish. But don’t be intimidated by the totality of every last task that’s necessary or challenge that you face, and then you’ll be able to, little by little, chop away at all the destruction and detritus and make a difference. If psychological help is for you, get therapy. You know there’s a thing called EMDR that helps with PTSD, if you’re still traumatized by what you’re going through, and help is available.

Brian
I appreciate you offering that advice and and I know, Leigh that there’s somebody listening to the show or watching it on YouTube who’s going to benefit from that, and that that was the reason that they were meant to be listening to or watching the show, so I appreciate that. Leigh, I called Warren Moon last week as I was preparing for your show. And I don’t know Warren well, but he and I have a couple close friends, and I met him several years ago at an event, and the reason I called him was I wanted to get a sense of the agent-client relationship beyond the business side, beyond contract negotiation. I knew I was going to ask you about it, and so I wanted to hear about that from the client perspective. Warren and I had a great conversation. And of course, you know, he thinks the world of you. One thing he emphasized was the role you played from the very beginning of his career in helping him to think about what he called his second career beyond football. You actually alluded to this earlier in the show, and he also said that you instilled in him the idea of using football as a stepping stone for a bigger purpose, to become a leader and role model in the community. And again, you mentioned that too during our conversation. Warren described you as – and I’m quoting – “an innovative guy who revolutionized agentry.” I think he put it very well. Leigh, I know coaches have an influence in athletes lives beyond the support they offer on the field, and I suspect that’s the case with agents too, at least in certain instances, and it certainly was in the case of you and Warren. Tell us if you would, about the opportunity and maybe even the responsibility that agents have with their clients, beyond merely negotiating the best contract they can or steering them toward the best team or the best opportunity career wise.

Leigh
I think the critical skill in life is listening. Can you draw out another person and cut below the surface of their responses to get deeper and deeper, so that you discover their deepest anxieties and fears and their greatest hopes and dreams? Can you put yourself in another person’s heart and mind and see the world the way they see it? That’s what I would do with Warren or any new client, which is to understand uniquely what their passions are, what their fears are. I would ask them a question in the first meeting, do you have any other skills or interests besides playing football, baseball, basketball, that we might explore using the off-seasons. And I would work with them on the concept of networking, that every time they would go to a banquet or to any event, they could spend five minutes talking to someone. They could establish a little contact. They could take their card and they could start what you and I would call a Rolodex with those cards and start to build relationships. I would ask players in Santa Clara, can you think of any industries proximate to where you’re training in Santa Clara? Well, high tech and venture capital. So it’s not by chance that Steve Young is head of a hedge fund and Brent Jones put together a $4 billion hedge fund. What are the skills and talents you have? Are they political? Are they coaching? Are they broadcast? Are they business? What can we do? How can we think of you as the owner? And so I’ve got a couple players to be owners of part time teams. So you’re trying to stimulate the best in them, but you’ve got to listen first and let them explain who they are, because men don’t tend to share as easily about their deep feelings as women do, and so you’ve got to create an atmosphere of trust around them so they feel comfortable to unveil who they really are.

Brian
I asked Warren why he chose you as an agent rather than other people who were trying to get his business and his answer was related to everything that you just said. He said the other agents were talking about what they could do for him in terms of the contract, the number, and you were talking about all those other things, talking about that second career, really painting a picture and even holding a vision for them that they probably didn’t even have themselves. They were narrowly focused. You were talking earlier about high school kids or even younger kids now with NIL opportunities, and they’re not thinking about what they’re going to do after they’re done playing the sport. They’re thinking about, how can I benefit economically, even before I get on the field to play the sport. I was going to ask you what separated you from other agents, but the conversation with Warren answered that, and you just did, and the things that you were asking prospective clients about and talking to them about. It’s very clear that you were looking out for their long term best interests, whether that involved you or not. I think that’s admirable. I know one of the highlights of your career, and maybe your life, was the day Warren Moon and Troy Aikman – two players you represented their entire careers – were inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and you had the additional honor of introducing Warren at that ceremony, which is not something agents usually get to do.

Leigh
Warren and I were together for 23 years, yes. So essentially, I mean, he played six in Canada and 17 in the NFL. So it’s like we grew up together, and he ended up being as much of a help in my practice in securing other clients and being a sounding board. I used to use him for advice, because he was so erudite and so filled with wisdom. These are not like normal lawyer-client negotiator situations because they’re long term, and you’re with someone through the highs and lows, and you build up trust and they know where you’ll be when they hit a crisis point. You’ll be right there with them.

Brian
I think in the position that those two, and many others that you’ve represented are in, it’s not easy to have people in your inner circle, so to speak, who you can trust wholeheartedly. Probably that isn’t something that you earn from day one. You earn it – in the case of you and Warren – over 23 years, and I know with Troy, it was a long term, and continues to be a long term relationship. What did that day mean for you in Canton? First, in terms of the pride that you must have felt for Warren and Troy, and secondly, because of how affirmed you must have felt knowing the role you played in their careers and lives.

Leigh
It felt like redemption, because I had spent so much time working with Warren as he was facing a racial barrier stopping him from playing in the NFL, and was so anxious to get back and play in the NFL. And we were together for 23 years and became really close friends. With Troy the fact that he had been drafted number one overall by the Cowboys, but then very quickly, they used something called the supplemental draft to take another top college quarterback, named Steve Walsh, and drafting him. So not only were they going to go 1-15 the first year, so Troy had that to deal with, but he had another competitive quarterback to deal with. So to watch those struggles and see it come to fruition in such a happy way thrilled me.

Brian
Leigh, I read that one of the things you look for when considering a prospective client is that they have – and I’m quoting – “the requisite work ethic and commitment to excellence.” As you know, our show is called LifeExcellence. And I wonder, what does excellence mean to you?

Leigh
It means having the ability to do the work in preparation, to do the physical training, to do the mental training, to prepare for the challenge that’s about to come, in a really complete and dedicated way. And then it means being able to perform in critical moments. So a quarterback has thrown a couple interceptions, the crowd is booing, the game’s getting out of hand, and what does he do now? Can that player compartmentalize, adopt a quiet mind and screen out all ancillary stimuli to elevate his play, to take a team to and through victory? Can he do that? Can he, in adversity, rise above it and perform at a penultimate level?

Brian
I think that’s a great definition of excellence. Leigh, you’re 75 years old, and you’ve been in the business a long time, almost five decades in sports. What drives you to continue standing on the sidelines, watching practices and workouts, sitting with prospects in their parents in their living room, and spending countless hours on the phone, nurturing relationships and closing deals?

Leigh
There’s a teaching, counseling function to starting with a young person; understanding their internal agenda and helping them through maturation and players are really expressive. People think that because you’re big and physically macho, that you’d have a hard time telling your agent, I love you or you mean so much to me. But they do that. And so there’s that. There’s the fact that we can take any societal problem, and let’s say it’s bullying. In a high school, you have kids bullied for things they can’t control, and in some cases, it’s the athletes doing it. But suppose – which I did – we talked to a group of coaches, and we get pro athletes talking to high school athletes, telling them they ought to be the purveyors of tolerance and put their arm around someone with a hair lip, or who’s very heavy or whatever, they can change the culture real quickly. There are more issues like that to deal with. There’s domestic violence where I had Lennox Lewis cut a public service announcement that said “real men don’t hit women,” and that could do more to trigger imitative behavior under rebellious adolescents just coming to terms with what it means to treat a woman decently than a thousand authority figures ever could. It’s the Sporting Green Alliance program I’ve done sometimes, which takes sustainable technology and wind, solar, recycling, resurfacing and water and integrates them into a stadium, arena or a practice field to drop carbon emissions and energy costs and transform them into teaching, education platforms where millions of fans can see a waterless urinal or a solar panel and think, how do I use this in my own home or business. So you put sports in the forefront of changing climate, pushing back on climate change. As long as there are more issues to deal with, as long as there are kids who are at risk and diseases that need conquering and the rest of it, I’m motivated to continue on to try and make an impact. I found that if you use the cultural symbols of the society to try and trigger change and good values, it can make a difference.

Brian
I can tell that it’s about much more than money for you, Leigh, and I won’t ask you to say it, but how many times have you heard the four word phrase so famously shouted by Tom Cruise in the movie Jerry Maguire?

Leigh
Every week. Whenever I go out to dinner or go into an airport, someone always runs up and either wants me to say those four words – “show me the _ ” or says them to me. And you know, it just shows the continuing popularity of and cultural influence of that film and I was lucky to be part of it.

Brian
Leigh, you’ve certainly shown your clients the money, and you’ve also shown many not-for-profit organizations the money through your commendable philanthropic work. You’ve done so much more, and I know you continue to do so much more, and I appreciate you for that. Thank you so much for being on the show. It’s truly an honor to meet you, and I appreciate your taking time to come on the show today.

Leigh
My pleasure. I enjoyed it.

Brian
Thanks for tuning in to LifeExcellence. Please support the show by subscribing, sharing it with others, posting on social media about today’s show with sports agent Leigh Steinberg, and leaving a rating and review. You can also learn more about me at BrianBartes.com Until next time, dream big dreams and make each day your masterpiece.