Jan 2012 // Ron Matejko
It was sometime in 2008 and Leigh Steinberg found himself sitting alone in an apartment, deep in the throes of a painful divorce. The breakup not only signaled a separation from his wife, but his three children as well. Not having that daily interaction with his children was too much to bear — especially for someone who cherished relationships and family so much.
During the months he was alone, with only his thoughts to keep him company, Steinberg found he could no longer cope. Not only from the devastation of losing his family, but also the long line of other personal and professional losses he experienced during the last eight years.
Beginning with financial losses he incurred due to the Internet crash of 2000, then becoming the focus of a personally hurtful lawsuit (brought by a pair of agents who left him to start their own firm), having two of his three children born with an incurable eye disease, losing two homes to mold, and then suffering the death of his father, the divorce pushed Steinberg over the edge. In search of a source of strength to deal with all the adversity, he turned to alcohol.
As is often the case with those who take this path, Steinberg didn’t find any solutions in the bottle. In fact, his problems only escalated.
The man, who for more than 37 years had carefully crafted a holistic image for his innovation of combining sports representation with social responsibility, was destroying his reputation as the pioneer and leader of an ultra-competitive industry.
The alcohol caused Steinberg to behave in ways he normally wouldn’t. Accusations of inappropriate behavior surfaced. Headlines about public displays of drunkenness brought his issues to light. He was reaching bottom.
In late 2009, realizing it was time for a change, Steinberg decided to step away from his practice, which had also been affected by his troubles, and took a much needed break.
“My dad raised me with two core values: one was to treasure relationships, especially family, and the other to be an agent of change,” Steinberg explains.
“But on the first one, my children didn’t ask to be born, I parented them. And to lose the everyday intimacy and interchange with them was a major catastrophe. For the first time in my life, I was in an apartment by myself and among other things, began to drink too much.
“I also felt as if I needed to explore a more spiritual side of life and try to understand my relationship with a higher power because the pace and frenetic nature of being scheduled virtually 18 hours a day, never lent any time for reflection, and I felt a void on that score.
“I realized if I kept working and kept up the pace of activity, I might come to the end of my life without understanding the meaning of it. So I knew it was time for a period of reflection and a period to focus on some inner growth.
While I had spent a lifetime changing the world, I had neglected focusing on my inner self.”
Up until that point, Steinberg had changed the world.
He certainly turned the sports industry upside down in 1975, when as a law student at Cal-Berkley, pioneered the sports management industry by negotiating a record-breaking contract for classmate Steve Bartkowski, whom Steinberg represented in the 1975 NFL Draft.
During the years that followed, Steinberg built an unrivaled sports representation firm that included nearly 200 of the top names in sports, such as Troy Aikman, Steve Young, Oscar de la Hoya and Lennox Lewis, to name just a few.
The laid-back Steinberg became the face of the industry and a sports-business icon. Much like the famous athletes he represented, he became a larger-than-life figure.
Steinberg also changed the world with his passion for philanthropy and involvement in social causes.
From developing his clients into role models and steering more than $600 million to hundreds of charities and foundations, to raising awareness about concussions and youth sports issues, and the countless time he has dedicated to environmental, economic and political issues, Steinberg proved he is about more than showing his clients the money.
In fact, it was this drive to leave a positive mark on the world, as well as a concern about the legacy he left behind for his family, that largely steered him out from the depths of his substance abuse.
“It was a realization in late 2009, early 2010, that I had a public identity and a good set of core values and tried to be a good father, but facing another year of recruiting professional athletes, another year of running a business, [I] recognized that I simply needed recharging.
“I needed to take a pause and I became apprehensive that I had never suffered a mid-life crisis because I had children and I parented my way right through that. As opposed to someone who got married young, we had our last child when I was 46. I was actively parenting through that period, where other people my age started to have grandchildren.
I also began to question whether I shouldn’t be putting more effort into the issues that we as a species were facing since I was initially raised to be an activist but had gotten on this 37-year aside,” he continues.
“While I was able to combine those goals with the practice, I started to think about what I would tell my children.
“In other words, when I asked my father in the early ’50s what he had done to make the world safe from the threat of Hitler and the threat of fascism, he was able to tell me that he fought in the military.
“I started to contemplate what I would tell my children when they said, ‘Didn’t you know, Dad, that fossil fuel was going away, that the quality of air and water was in peril? Didn’t you know oceans were rising, and what did you do to protect us?,’ That question haunted me.
“And there were issues like concussions that made me feel like an enabler, where I was facilitating athletes entering a sport that would eventually grind up every joint in their body and more significantly would lead many of them, because of concussion, to impaired cognitive function.
“So I simply felt, as Mario Savio said in the ’60s, sometimes just you have to halt the machine and have the strength to step away from it.”
And so Steinberg did just that. He walked away from his empire, handed what remained of his practice to two agents who were practicing with him, and for the first time, stopped living to make everyone around him better and instead focused on improving himself.
With the support of his family and programs geared toward treating alcoholism, Steinberg began traveling down a path of sobriety, one day at a time. He learned about meditation, adopted a deeper search for inner meaning, and investigated the role of his faith.
Steinberg, who reportedly weighed more than 250 pounds at one point, also took a renewed interest in his health, often frequenting the gym and losing a significant amount of the weight he gained when he was drinking.
“I woke up one day and realized I was 61 years old. How did that happen?” he jokes.
Those steps addressed his mind and body. He tapped into his soul by increasing his involvement in social causes. Steinberg wrote books on youth athletics, in addition to his autobiography (out later this year), while also frequently speaking out about concussions and many humanitarian issues.
His return to sports representation, however, will be his bread and butter, and Steinberg has big plans to again reinvent the industry, now that he’s comfortable with his progress since stepping back nearly two years ago.
“I started to miss the time I spent around sports and missed that teaching-counseling function,” Steinberg explains.
“I still like to negotiate and feel like Robin Hood. I still had a desire to impact popular culture and sports in this country. I had books I wanted to write, movies I wanted to make, television shows to develop, and a whole new set of community-oriented goals to accomplish.”
But Steinberg realizes that part of his return to prominence will entail rebuilding trust among the members of the sports industry, many of whom were last exposed to Steinberg during his most public of transgressions.
“The reality is, that if I’ve had some personal issues, it wasn’t a matter of being dishonest or hurting people other than those closest to me, it was a matter of dealing with internal issues and hopefully, I’ve done that,” Steinberg says.
“I am far from getting married again,” he continues. “I won’t have any more children get an eye disease. I don’t have another father to lose, and hopefully I won’t lose another home to mold.
“My life was so charmed and golden for so long, I think if anything I have a deeper appreciation for the struggles and circumstances people can find themselves in.
“I hope it will make me better in terms of relating to the totality of the people I run into. For athletes that have a social conscious and want to leave a legacy and make a difference in the world, I think we’ll find each other.”
Now that Steinberg has his own house in order, it is time for the real-life Jerry Maguire to return to the industry he innovated, with plans to be bigger and better than before.
In addition to player representation, his plans for Steinberg Sports include consulting or producing a variety of content across all forms of media including new technologies and applications, development of inspiring sports-themed movies that are based on true stories, building out a market in education on the art of negotiation, as well as marketing, memorabilia and naming rights opportunities.
He’ll also continue development of the Sporting Green Alliance, which uses sports as a platform to address environmental issues and speaking out about concussions, youth sports issues and humanitarian issues.
He’s being honest about his past and looking forward to the future. And if that means using his battle with alcohol as a vehicle to satisfy his desire to help make the world a better place, then he is all for it.
“My basic feeling on this is if I can help one person who is either searching spiritually or feeling a sense of emptiness, and it helps them, then that is what I was put on this earth to do,” Steinberg says.
“I don’t have any illusions that the billions of dollars in contracts I’ve done will stand the test of time. Putting your name on a building won’t necessarily stand the test of time, the newspaper clippings will fade. What are you left with?
“You’re left with the quality of relationships you had and whether or not you made a difference in this world. I’ve found that Americans love the fall of the high and mighty, and almost revel in it. But the only thing I like more is a comeback story.”