Drew Rosenhaus, known as "The Shark," has made plenty of enemies - and money.
By DAVE SCHEIBER, Times Staff Writer
Published September 4, 2005
DAVIE - The Shark is near.
You don't see him here in the land of the Dolphins on a recent August morning. He has been too busy lately in the chilly football waters of Philadelphia to surface at one of his favorite haunts, the posh training facility of Miami's NFL franchise. But you can definitely hear him.
"Rosenhaus," says the voice on the phone.
After months of pursuit, you have caught sports super agent Drew Rosenhaus - the self-proclaimed shark that never sleeps - on the line. He is some 25 miles away down Interstate 95 and another few toward the pristine surf off Miami Beach and the pricey home where he lives and works.
He just returned the night before from a cross-country trip to negotiate a deal for a client, and he is leaving the next day to visit another. But right now, shortly after 9 a.m., the 38-year-old bachelor who estimates he has negotiated half a billion dollars in contracts in the past year alone - who says he works seven 18-hour days a week and never takes vacations - is doing what comes as naturally to him as breathing: answering and making calls on his ever-present cell.
Of course, seeing Rosenhaus in person is no easy feat unless you are one of the 90 NFL players he represents or a GM ready to hash out a new deal. Or maybe ESPN, which can give one of America's best-known, most controversial agents and his latest agenda more exposure.
He is a man who deals in volume.
Not just the sound of the phone ringing in the background as you talk to him. Not just the enormous load of clients to coddle and potential clients to recruit for his streamlined, three-man operation, which includes younger brother Jason and former NFL player Robert Bailey.
It's the occasional high volume of his negotiations, most notably the one that unfolded last month with his outspoken crown jewel, wide receiver Terrell Owens of the Philadelphia Eagles.
For several weeks, their attempt to renegotiate Owens' seven-year, $49-million deal that included a $10-million signing bonus in 2004 dominated NFL news. Though Owens was only one season into the contract - brokered by his previous agent David Joseph - Rosenhaus contended his client "outperformed" the agreement and was underpaid compared to other top receivers.
"I just think it's very aggravating that if you have a player who is underpaid that it's considered so controversial to go to the team and try to work a new deal," he says. "It creates such hysteria if a player asks to do this. It shouldn't be so outrageous. The teams do it. So it's a little bit of hypocrisy there."
To Rosenhaus, the larger issue is that NFL contracts, unlike those in Major League Baseball and the NBA, guarantee only the signing bonus, not salary. So teams can cut players at any point or ask them to accept a lower salary. Rosenhaus calls the system patently unfair to players, leaving them with little job security and no alternative but to try to renegotiate if they think contracts don't match a player's value. And he has said that if Owens' contract were guaranteed, there would be no need to renegotiate in the first place.
"But I'm not on a mission to overhaul the system in the NFL," Rosenhaus says. "I'm just trying to do the best job I can possibly do for my clients."
Had Rosenhaus succeeded in forcing the hand of the notoriously hard-line Eagles, it might have prompted other agents to follow, or encouraged even more players to sign with Rosenhaus, fueling increased contract standoffs.
But the effort hit a brick wall and Owens returned to camp with no new deal.
Another of Rosenhaus' new high-end clients, Green Bay wide receiver Javon Walker, also stayed away from minicamp and hinted at a training camp holdout if he didn't get a new contract though two years remain on his current one. Quarterback Brett Favre ripped his wideout publicly, and some 15,000 spectators in Green Bay booed and jeered Rosenhaus at a charity softball game. In the end, Walker showed up at camp with no upgrade in pay.
"Without referring to anybody directly, one of the problems with confrontational public negotiating is that it runs the risk of alienating a public with a median family income of $35,000," says renowned veteran agent Leigh Steinberg. "So that when a player is complaining publicly that he's only being paid $7-million a year instead of $9-million, a fan can look at that with real anger. And an owner who's challenged publicly may simply become more locked in and less apt to ever compromise."
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While his players swear by him and many fans swear at him, one thing is clear: Rosenhaus thrives on publicity and knows how to get it. In fact, one offshoot of the Owens saga was to thrust Rosenhaus' name back into the headlines. That can't hurt when it comes to marketing himself to potential clients watching on TV, impressed by his scrappiness.
Unlike many agents, he's not a background player. A lifelong Dolphins fan and 1987 graduate of the University of Miami, he has always been front and center. He did his first deal in 1989 while attending Duke Law School, bringing an ESPN camera crew to film contract talks with the Saints. His 1997 autobiography played off his slick, aggressive image - A Shark Never Sleeps: Wheeling and Dealing With the NFL's Most Ruthless Agent.
The title certainly rang true with Buc fans. Rosenhaus was the agent for star tailback Errict Rhett and suggested he hold out in 1996, on the heels of two straight 1,000-yard-plus rushing seasons in his first two years as a pro.
In the ensuing dispute, Rhett missed seven games. A year later, Tampa Bay drafted Warrick Dunn and Rhett was forgotten.
"I think Drew would look back at that and tell you it was a mistake," says Atlanta Falcons general manager Rich McKay, former GM of the Bucs. "I know Errict probably would. And that doesn't say it was a win for the Buccaneers. It wasn't."
Though he stresses the vast majority of his negotiations with teams are quiet, and that none of his players are holding out, Rosenhaus will force the issue with management in public if it helps.
So perhaps surprisingly, he gets high marks from some of the very people with whom he bargains.
"Certainly we've had our ups and downs over the years, and we don't always agree, but I like Drew because he's direct and a dealmaker," New York Giants GM Ernie Accorsi says. "I frankly enjoy working with him because what you see is what you get."
"I thought he did a heck of a job for his clients," says ex-Packers GM Ron Wolf, an early Bucs executive. "He works hard and earns what he's gotten."
But he also has detractors among his colleagues, some of whom say he steals clients. At a meeting in 1997, agent Tim Irwin called him "a cancer."
Says former agent David Ware: "If ballplayers were women, Drew Rosenhaus would be a pimp."
Now practicing general law in Atlanta, Ware left the business last year after seven of his clients, including Walker and Redskins running back Clinton Portis, wound up in Rosenhaus' camp.
Rosenhaus dismisses such allegations as sour grapes, adding that players make their own decisions about who can best represent them. "I really don't care about what other people think," he says. "I care about what my clients think."
He works virtually non-stop to keep them happy, and employs no secretary so his athletes can deal with him directly. And as a small family business, Rosenhaus Sports Representation, he can take less than the standard 3-percent commission if necessary.
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Rosenhaus says he needs no more than four hours or so of sleep a day, and travels four days a week, usually attending three games. He likes rap music and playing video games with clients, drives a black Hummer and has a collection of superhero figurines.
He got to play superhero himself this summer, credited with saving the life of a drowning 3-year-old boy at the Grand Floridian pool at Walt Disney World. The ex-lifeguard performed CPR to revive the boy, who stopped breathing for two minutes.
"It changed my life," he says. "You never know when you'll be in a position to help somebody. People think of me as one kind of person, the "shark' image, and then I did this thing. But all of a sudden it's forgotten when the next controversy happens."
Like the Owens flap. The concept of "outperforming" a deal did not play particularly well.
"That's ludicrous," says ex-quarterback and current ESPN commentator Joe Theismann. "When you sign a contract, your job is to play to the best of your ability. What about if an athlete underperforms? Do they give some of the millions back?"
Longtime agent Jim Neader of St. Petersburg says Rosenhaus is off base, because the large NFL signing bonus offsets the lack of guaranteed salary.
"You can't have it both ways," says Neader, who worked big baseball deals for Dwight Gooden and Gary Sheffield. "Baseball money is guaranteed, but the signing bonuses are small. In the NFL, it's the reverse. You can't sign for six years and take that big up-front money and then come back to the table after a year or two. Otherwise just sign a short-term deal."
Besides, says Accorsi, the system will not change.
"First of all, we give 50 percent of our money to players guaranteed in the form of signing bonuses," he says. "Second, this is not baseball or basketball. This is a punishing business where you're gonna get hit in the mouth on every play."
Meanwhile, Rosenhaus has increased his client load by about 40 in the past year and has no plans to stop. "Hey, he'll get 100-and-some players before it's over because they like what he's doing," says Ken Herock, former player personnel director for the Raiders and Bucs.
Rosenhaus had a recent defection. Denver cornerback Lenny Walls fired him, saying he felt lost in the shuffle. But Rosenhaus predicted he'll work with Walls again.
Overall, he says life is great. "I don't view what I do as a job," he says. "It's like one big vacation."
With a sleepless Shark always on the prowl.
Information from Times wires and other organizations was used in this report.
