After T.O.-Rosenhaus fiasco, sports agents fight image problem

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. - It's a typical midweek morning in the Axelrod home, and amid the activity, somebody has turned the television to ESPN.

"Next question!"

Barry Axelrod, a baseball agent for nearly three decades, can't help but hear what's being broadcast. Heck, he has it memorized. The report has been aired on every sports cable channel in existence for the past 24 hours.

"Next question!"

Axelrod's 12-year-old son is watching. He's not a huge sports fan, his dad said, but he does keep tabs on the biggest stories of the day. What he is watching is one of the biggest stories of the year.

"Next question!"

It's almost comical at this point. So as the young boy walks away, one key question simmers in his brain. "Who is that?" he asks.

"So his mother says, `He's a sports agent, kind of like your dad,'" Axelrod said, relaying the story. "I thought to myself, `Hey, I'm nothing like that.' ... But that's the image we're all fighting now."

The image that is causing Axelrod and many in his industry to cringe was brought to you straight from the lips of Drew Rosenhaus. In the now infamous Nov. 8 news conference - "Next question!" - Rosenhaus tried to defend the actions of his client, Terrell Owens, after Owens was sent home from the Philadelphia Eagles for the remainder of the season for conduct detrimental to his team. Instead, Rosenhaus cast an unseemly light on his profession.

What other agents, not to mention club executives and players, would like to set straight is that, no, they're not all like that.

"A lot of agents do very positive things," A's assistant general manager David Forst said. "They can educate players on the intricacies of ... being a professional athlete and all it entails. ... There are a lot of good ones out there. Like in all things, it's not fair to take one case and draw a blanket over the entire industry."

Fair or not, the Rosenhaus-Owens fiasco has left an indelible mark, one that won't easily be erased for either party.

"You're molding the image of somebody," said John Boggs, who has represented Tony Gwynn and Robin Ventura, among others, during his 22 years as an adviser for baseball players. "It's not a false image, but you are trying to embellish it."

Instead, Rosenhaus seems to have branded his players as ones to be wary of. As for himself, he seems to have become the poster boy for a brand of agents best embodied by Bob Sugar, the scruples-lacking, camera-loving slime ball portrayed by Jay Mohr in the movie, "Jerry Maguire."

Yet to hear real-life agents tell it, such a genre was probably inevitable. Thanks in no small part to the work of Rosenhaus' peers, athletes have become corporations unto themselves. Those who surround them don't want to lose their cut of the pie.

"One of the problems that I've seen is that (because) they're so afraid of being fired, they're petrified to give their clients real reality-based and hard-nosed advice," said Leigh Steinberg, one of the industry's pre-eminent figures. "If a player was outside a 90-story building, he'd be surrounded by family, friends and his agent, all of whom would be telling him that he can fly, that gravity doesn't apply to him."

Steinberg, who has advised some of the NFL's biggest stars since former quarterback Steve Bartkowski, a fellow Cal student, asked for his representation before being selected first in the 1975 draft, said such an attitude could not be more of a disservice.

"Sports is discretionary income," he said. "It's not gas to take somebody to work, it's not food to feed the family. So part of the role of an agent is to keep ... the sport that an athlete is playing healthy and fan friendly. If an athlete is in a newspaper complaining that he's making only $9 million and that he should be making more, that holds a player up as a symbol of greed and alienates the fan from the sport. ... It hurts the sport and the athlete."

In Rosenhaus' case, it also has hurt the agent. One Web site, www.firedrewrosenhaus.com, advised Rosenhaus' current clients to fire him (the site has since been disabled). Another one, Wagerweb.com, set odds on which of Rosenhaus' clients would next follow the steps of Green Bay Packers wide receiver Jevon Walker, who recently canned Rosenhaus. In July, the agent had advised Walker to stay away from training camp in an unsuccessful attempt to renegotiate his contract.

"Rosenhaus basically helped make Terrell Owens look like a bigger fool than he made himself look, which is a hard thing to do," Wagerweb.com CEO Dave Johnson said in an e-mail. "It takes agents like Rosenhaus to give athletes a bad name, making them look like all they care about is money and self-promotion."

In reality, Steinberg and several of his peers say, many agents are more concerned with the exact opposite. The more a player remains in the background off the field, and the more his contract remains a subject for the back pages, the better for everybody involved.

"The way I analyze this thing ... is that as the agent, you have to be the tough lover and be in the minority of the people who interact with (the athlete)," said Bill Duffy, the Walnut Creek-based agent who represents mostly NBA players, including Carmelo Anthony, Yao Ming and Steve Nash.

"Most people, including family, are kissing his you-know-what because they're on the gravy train. I'm getting paid a lot of money, as well, so I could take the position of telling them what they want to hear. But to be successful over the long term ... you have to tell them what they need to hear."

Rosenhaus seems to have taken the opposite approach. And if that was a mistake, it was compounded by guarantees Rosenhaus made that he couldn't deliver.

Running back Edgerrin James remained a Colt despite promises from Rosenhaus, confirmed by several agents interviewed for this story, that he'd find a suitor in a trade. Walker's holdout netted him nothing. And the restructured contract that Rosenhaus angled for after Owens' superlative effort while playing hurt in the Super Bowl was instead replaced by a pink slip.

That, and images of T.O. doing sit-ups in his driveway.

"It was handled wrong," Boggs said. "At a certain point in time, you have to have intuitive skills to let players speak from the heart without injecting the agent's point of view. ... I got the feeling that (Rosenhaus) told T.O. to step aside so he could be his mouthpiece."

Boggs is not viewing things through rose-colored glasses, either. In 1996, he had to steer one his clients, then-Baltimore Orioles second baseman Roberto Alomar, through the media firestorm created when Alomar spit on umpire John Hirschbeck.

Alomar, at Boggs' behest, was contrite and apologetic in the aftermath of the incident, and time eventually dulled the stain. Boggs and other agents say the same thing can happen with Owens, but only if mea culpas are forthcoming.

"I look at the Ricky Williams situation, which was one of the worst experiences of my career," Steinberg said of the Miami Dolphins running back. "I did not like the way it happened. I let him know I didn't agree with the timing of his decision to retire (days before the Dolphins opened their 2004 training camp) or with his public statements on marijuana. But I let him know that he was my client, and that I'd see this through to the end. Here we are a year later, and Ricky is not such a pariah anymore."

It's hard to imagine Rosenhaus refurbishing his own image so quickly. But the case of baseball super-agent Scott Boras proves it is possible. Boras negotiated the largest contract in professional sports history - Alex Rodriguez's 10-year, $252 million with the Texas Rangers in 2000 - and several clubs who were angered by his tactics swore not to deal with any of his clients.

Five years later, some teams continue to avoid Boras' players. But he hasn't had trouble finding jobs for those he represents; he just netted center fielder Johnny Damon a four-year, $52 million contract with the New York Yankees.

So what should Rosenhaus' next move be?

"If I was Drew, I'd lose myself for a while," Boggs said. "Get back to Public Relations 101."

He may be doing just that. Rosenhaus, who could not be reached for this story, has made no public comments since the Owens fiasco. Many of his peers would like things to stay that way.