Q 13

PLAYBOY: Who can be an agent?

Leigh Steinberg: In the N.F.L., there is a new accreditation procedure, but there is actually nothing required. The Hillside Strangler could be an agent. Although there are a lot of ethical people in the business, agentry has been fraught with abuses. It's against N.C.A.A. regulation, but agents will go to college campuses and talk with players who are still undergraduates and sign them to representation contracts after offering them money and cars. The regulation is that a player is not supposed to have an agent until his eligibility is up. But it wouldn't surprise me that as many as 50 percent of those going into the most recent draft had signed with agents early.

A bright but unsophisticated athlete is regularly approached by hundreds of agents. He is offered many inducements at a time when he has a standard of living that is worse than that of students who are not athletes. Athletes on full scholarship are not allowed to work during the school year, so they have no way to supplement their income. If an athlete comes from a less than well-to-do family, the scholarship check is not enough to do more than pay for room, board and subsistence living. If he comes from a disadvantaged family, he may be sending some of his scholarship money home. In other words, the inducement of a car or an apartment with your own room is very attractive. Athletes are almost set up to be bribed, in a sense. There was one case in which a player had signed with six agents and had taken money from each one of them.

Although an agent can't sign the player to a binding contract while that eligibility is there, there are undated contracts and offers to contract made. There are all sorts of ruses used to get around the rules. Somehow, magically, the day after the last game of the players' senior year, they're all represented.

Q 14

PLAYBOY: How did you know you could be a successful negotiator?

Leigh Steinberg: I viewed it as a political problem. It was simply a matter of balancing interests. What happens in the negotiating room is vastly overrated. Leverage and research are the keys: understanding the needs of a team and the strength and value of the player. If there's enough demand, teams have to get competitive. A negotiation doesn't have to be an entirely adversarial relationship. It is not the most relaxing way to spend time, however. I am cognizant of what time it is at any point in a negotiation, what the expression on the face of the person I'm dealing with is saying. I can sit in a room with 15 people and, at each point, tell who is bored and who is interested. It's as if time is elongated; each second is like a minute. It's very intense. They say there are no old negotiators.

Negotiations take all forms. They can be phone calls going back and forth over many months. They can be one session. The smoke-filled room with two people hammering at each other is rare. That's the way I did Steve Young's negotiation, though. Don Klosterman, general manager of the Los Angeles Express, and I started at nine o'clock one morning and ended at seven o'clock the next morning.

I've done a lot of negotiating in my Berkeley and Los Angeles homes. George Young, the general manager of the New York Giants, negotiated a series of contracts out on my deck in Berkeley. I put managers out there in what I call the general-manager's chair and try to roast them into submission. In one negotiation, one of my players joked that we held a general manager in the hot tub until he acceded to our ludicrous demands.

Q 15

PLAYBOY: Are there owners who are notoriously difficult to negotiate with?

Leigh Steinberg: Yes. And I won't name them. The Minnesota Vikings have always been the toughest team to deal with. In the old days, St. Louis was really tough to deal with in football, and people wanted to stay away from dealing with those cities. St. Louis seems to be changing. Once, a general manager turned a desk over in my direction. I ran one of my fastest 40s to get out of that room.

Q 16

PLAYBOY: What did your parents do?

Leigh Steinberg: My father could have made a fortune as a restaurateur. My grandpa helped form Hillcrest Country Club in Los Angeles. I grew up on the laps of Jack Benny, George Burns and Groucho Marx. But my dad turned away from all that and decided to teach. My parents drove old cars when they could have afforded fancy new ones. They kept us in a modest house, even though they could have afforded a much nicer one, because ours was in an integrated neighborhood and they wanted us to live with different types of people.

Q 17

PLAYBOY: What's your cut of your clients' contracts?

Leigh Steinberg: [Laughs] Usually, I take 90 to 95 percent of the revenue and solve his tax problems that way. No, it varies. Generally, it tends to be around five percent of moneys as they come to the client.

Q 18

PLAYBOY: Would negotiating football contracts help you negotiate in world politics?

Leigh Steinberg: By all means. It's the same principle. I don't think the Russians or the Chinese have anything on the St. Louis Cardinals. The Dodgers' Al Campanis and Bob Walker could settle the nuclear arms race in five minutes if they negotiated with the Russians the way they do with me.

Q 19

PLAYBOY: You were selected by Cosmopolitan as one of the nation's most eligible bachelors and mentioned in the San Francisco Chronicle as the sexiest bachelor in the Bay Area. How has that affected your life?

Leigh Steinberg: All those things turn up tons of letters. I got 11,000 letters from the Cosmopolitan thing. The first impression I had was that these are all desperately sad people. I mean, I got underwear in the mail and nude pictures and all. To me, that's an indication that our society isn't set up for single people. One day, I found a woman in my hot tub. Another time, a woman came up to me and flashed. I get baked goods in the mail, marriage proposals. It's pretty funny. On the other hand, some of the letters are from women who sound interesting and intelligent.

Q 20

PLAYBOY: If you could switch places with one of your clients for a day, with whom would it be?

Leigh Steinberg: I'd like to be quarterback for a winning New York or Los Angeles football team. I'd also love to play with the Dodgers. I'd switch with their relief pitcher Tom Niedenfuer in an instant.