In this episode, Dr. Flowers and Robin welcome to the show American sports agent and the inspiration for the titular character, Jerry Maguire, Leigh Steinberg. Leigh has represented over 150 professional athletes in football, baseball, basketball, boxing, and Olympic sports. He has represented the No. 1 pick overall in the NFL draft a record eight times, a milestone unmatched within the sports industry. His client list has included Steve Young, Troy Aikman, Warren Moon, Bruce Smith, Thurman Thomas, Ben Roethlisberger, Matt Leinart, Ricky Williams, Howie Long, Dusty Baker, Oscar de la Hoya, and John Starks, to name just a few.
Today, Leigh takes Dr. Flowers and Robin through his illustrious career, touching on some of the peaks and valleys as well as what has kept him motivated throughout the years. They discuss the art of active listening, the concept of winning with integrity, and the importance of having a plan and sticking to it consistently. Leigh opens up about his struggles with addiction as well as the work he’s done to help other athletes suffering from addictions of their own. Finally, Leigh speaks to a crisis of conscience he experienced mid-way through his career and what he did to ensure his work aligned with his values.
Key Takeaways:
02:09 – Leigh Steinberg shares his connection to the film, Jerry Maguire
04:53 – Robin shares a quick rundown of Leigh’s accomplishments
06:14 – Leigh expounds on the topics of his two books, Winning with Integrity and The Agent
09:08 – The art of active listening
11:57 – Core values and lessons Leigh learned from his father
14:34 – The highest and lowest points of Leigh’s professional career
16:32 – The secret to Leigh’s successful sobriety
17:34 – Leigh’s work in Traumatic Brain Injury and brain health
20:39 – Leigh speaks to his struggles with addiction and how he helps athletes suffering from addiction
24:34 – Leigh shares his daily habits and routines
26:54 – Leigh discusses his experience with Stem Cell implants
28:58 – Advice Leigh would give to young men and women looking to pursue a career in sports agentry or other sports-related professionals
32:20 – Leigh weighs in on the incredible success of Nick Saban
32:53 – Dr. Flowers and Robin thank Leigh for joining the show and let listeners know where to follow him
Resources Mentioned:
JFlowers Health Institute – https://jflowershealth.com
JFlowers Health Institute Contact – (713) 783-6655
Subscribe on your favorite player: https://understanding-the-human-condition.captivate.fm/listen
Leigh’s Website: https://steinbergsports.com/en
Leigh’s Books:
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Listen to the podcast here
Leigh Steinberg – Winning In Sports And In Life With Integrity
Introduction
How are you?
It’s good to be back after our pause.
We took a little pause while we moved over to the Houstonian.
For those who don’t know, we just moved from 5,800 square feet to 18,000 square feet.
We’re out of space.
You’re probably going to move me back to the Houstonian again.
Probably.
I think it’s just days from now.
It’s crazy how we’re growing and running out of space, but it just goes to show the importance of the incredible gentleman we’re interviewing on our show, Leigh Steinberg. We’re going to talk a little bit about brain health, which is a significant topic around the world right now. Leigh, welcome, and thank you so much for your time.
My pleasure to be with you.
Jerry Maguire
You’ve got a lot going on, and you’re hosting your 35th annual Leigh Steinberg Super Bowl party. Thank you for doing that every year. You’re quite the philanthropist, and we’re going to talk a little bit about that, but thank you for spending time. Most of us know you as the character that Tom Cruise played in Jerry Maguire. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
In 1993, Cameron Crowe, the writer-director, called me up and asked if he could follow me and be a fly on the wall to pick up the atmosphere for a film that would feature a sports agent. He went with me to the draft in 1993, where I had a player, Drew Bledsoe, as the first pick. He came up to Boston for a press conference. He went to Palm Desert for the league meetings. He came to Pro Scouting Day and to a series of games. I told him lots and lots of stories. He went off and wrote a script that became the movie Jerry Maguire.
I was the technical advisor to vet the script to ensure the willing suspension of disbelief that holds you in a motion picture wasn’t broken, if the dialogue was stilted, or the look was phony. He assigned me to some of the actors, so I took Cuba Gooding Jr. down to the Super Bowl in Arizona. I made him pretend he was a wide receiver all week. He had to hang out with Desmond Howard and Amani Toomer. I showed the quarterback in the film, played by Jerry O’Connell, how to throw a spiral because he had gone to NYU, and they didn’t have a football program there. Anyway, it’s been years of people running up to me at an airport or when I’m out to dinner and saying those four words that start with “show me the.”
Of all the things you’ve done in your life, you’re one of the most famous and sought-after sports agents in the world. You’ve raised over $800 million and given $800 million in philanthropy. What so many people remember is Jerry Maguire. That movie, no matter what your age is now, everyone knows that movie, so congratulations on that.
Thank you. I think it humanized the sports agency a bit so that people get to see the real caring in some of the relationships, not just the greed.
Career Highlights
Something I want to back up on and ask Robin French to do a little bit since we’ve talked about Jerry Maguire is he has such an amazing bio, and we could talk for an hour about who he is and his bio, but why don’t you tell our readers a little bit about Leigh Steinberg?
Leigh Steinberg, premier sports agent, entrepreneur, bestselling author, and Chairman of Leigh Steinberg Sports and Entertainment Holdings, is best known for his work building athletes into standalone brands. He’s often credited as the real-life inspiration for the Oscar-winning film Jerry Maguire. Leigh has represented many of the most successful athletes and coaches in football, basketball, baseball, hockey, boxing, and golf, including the number one overall pick in the NFL draft an unprecedented eight times in conjunction with 64 total first-round picks.
With an unrivaled history of record-setting contracts, Leigh has secured over $4 billion for his 300-plus pro-athlete clients and directed more than $800 million to various charities around the world. Over the course of his career, Leigh has been featured in numerous national television programs, including 60 Minutes, Larry King Live, The Today Show, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, and many more. He’s been profiled in a host of magazines, including Businessweek, Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine, People, Forbes, Playboy, GQ, and FHM. Leigh currently resides in Newport Beach, California.
That is where he happens to be sitting on this beautiful sunny morning. He was showing us a view of the ocean from his home.
Leigh’s Books
Leigh, you’ve been named one of the most powerful people in sports in the NFL, and you’ve written two books, The Agent: My 40-Year Career Making Deals and Changing the Game and Winning with Integrity: Getting What You Want Without Selling Your Soul. Would you mind sharing the details of both books, the how and the why there?
Winning with Integrity: Getting What You Want Without Selling Your Soul is a book designed to help people negotiate in their own lives. It’s the twelve principles of negotiating. It speaks to the fact that if you can listen, if you have the ability to draw out another human being and understand their deepest anxieties and fears and their greatest hopes and dreams, and put yourself in the other person’s heart and mind, then you can create a deal. You can start a relationship, you can navigate your way through life gracefully. It teaches you how to do win-win negotiation, which is both sides come away happy. It means listening and it means preparation. It walks you through exactly the psychology of putting together a deal that doesn’t deadlock, that doesn’t cause antagonism.
If you can understand another person’s deepest anxieties, fears, and greatest hopes and dreams — and put yourself in their heart and mind — then you can create a deal and build a strong relationship.
The Agent: My 40-Year Career Making Deals and Changing the Game is an autobiography. It’s like a life story. It takes me from my grandpa running Hillcrest Country Club in Hollywood, where Groucho Marx, George Burns, Jack Benny, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley came and me sitting on his lap. You go up to Berkeley in the late ’60s. I’m on campus when all the social change is happening in the country, including rock music, lifestyle, and long hair.
I was the student body president when Ronald Reagan became the governor of California. Every time we demonstrate, he cracks down. I learned everything I needed to learn about the art of negotiation from dealing with Ronald Reagan. It takes you through 47 years of the representation of athletes, from Steve Bartkowski being the first pick in the first round in the 1975 draft. There wasn’t really a field of sports agentry with teams able to simply slam the phone down and say, “We don’t deal with agents,” to the modern sports tableau with massive television contracts and stated that has ancillary revenue streams and fantasy sports and VR sports and social media.
Both of them are absolutely amazing books. I would encourage everyone to read both of these books. Something I just want to talk about for a second. In Winning with Integrity, one of the things that you mentioned that you talk about is the art of listening. As a mental health professional in graduate school and postgraduate school, it’s drilled into my head and it’s trained to be an active listener. Robin and I see every day, when you’re in a conversation, that people interrupt you all the time and they’re not really listening to you.
I can’t agree more with what your statement is, Leigh, about if you look someone in the eyes and listen and hear them, how much further you get in the conversation and how much further you get either in a business deal or a negotiation or whatever it is that you’re working on. How did you learn your skillset? How did you pick up on your skill set of active listening?
I realized, even as a young person, that people could be so different inside than the manner that they display, and especially men don’t share emotional concepts or vulnerability so easily. You have to create an atmosphere of trust around someone and allow them to reveal themselves. If you’re simply thinking about the next thing you’re going to say in every conversation, you’ll miss it. It’s text and subtext. It’s what comes out of someone’s mouth. It’s body chemistry. It’s feeling the emotional connection.
I just think it’s critical in every aspect of everything I’ve ever done. It will help you in a relationship, romantic or marital. It will help you parent better. It will help you, in our field, recruit new clients, negotiate successfully, and anticipate their needs. If you go in with a preconceived concept of who someone is, they may surprise you.
I learned about listening at a very young age. My grandfather was a surgeon, and I remember being 5 or 7 years old. I was one of those inquisitive kids and I constantly asked him questions. I’ll never forget one day he turned around and said, “Jim, if you would wait five minutes instead of asking so many questions and anticipating what you’re going to ask while someone else is talking, you will get your answer within the next five minutes.”
Influence Of Leigh’s Father
That’s often so true. You don’t lose the thought of what that person is talking about, worrying about what you’re saying. In your own life, you have such amazing respect for your father and you really learned a lot of valuable lessons and core values from your father. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about your dad.
My brothers and I were hardwired to believe that there were two critical values other than spiritual ones. The first was to treasure relationships, especially family. The second was to make a meaningful difference in the world, target problems, and help people who couldn’t help themselves. We were hardwired to try to go make a difference in the world in some way.
There are two critical non-spiritual values: treasuring relationships, especially family, and making a meaningful difference in the world by helping people who couldn’t help themselves.
The corollary that he had to do was waiting for someone to solve a problem, right a wrong, or cure a situation in the world, as minor as picking something up off the floor and as major as climate change or racism. The tendency is to wait for they or them to solve the problem. The amorphous they, older people, political figures, he would say, you could wait forever, son. The they in life is you.
You are the they. It set up a sense of responsibility that I can use professional sports to target bullying, sex trafficking and domestic violence. I can have the heavyweight boxing champion like Lennox Lewis who cut a public service announcement that says, “Real men don’t hit women.” We can, together, trigger imitative behavior and rebellious adolescents in a way that a thousand authority figures ever could using the power of sports. We ask that each client go back to the high school community and set up a scholarship fund, then go to the collegiate community and do the same thing, or at the high school level, work with the church or Boys and Girls Club.
Finally, at the pro level, create a charitable foundation that takes the leading business, political, and community leaders and puts them on a board to execute a program. That’s Warrick Dunn putting the 175th single mother in the first home she’ll ever own by making the down payment and moving the family in. It’s athletes changing lives.
Career Highs And Lows
Roses and thorns. What’s the highest part of your professional career, and what was the lowest part of your professional career?
I think the highest point was being able to give the presenting speech for quarterback Warren Moon at the Hall of Fame. Good old Houston. I’m very familiar with the Houstonian. It was the ability to give the speech, talk about our 23-year relationship, and recount his amazing role model life off the field, where he sent hundreds of kids to school on his starships. It was amazing. When Steve Young came off the field, having won the Super Bowl and being in Joe Montana’s shadow, he hugged me on the field and said, “The monkey’s off my back,” because he’d been in the shadow of Joe Montana. Troy Aikman winning his first Super Bowl and seeing how his life changed after that.
I think the low point is my struggle some years back with alcohol and the fact that I had a series of problems in my personal life. I started to use alcohol to numb the pain from my kids’ blindness, my inability to help my dad when he died from cancer, losing a house in a beachside city to mold and problems in my marriage. I finally hit the point where I broke denial, went to Sober Living, worked a 12-step program, and put sobriety first.
Congratulations. That’s absolutely amazing. What is your secret for maintaining your sobriety, other than one day at a time?
It’s a sense of proportionality. At my worst, I wasn’t a starving peasant in Sudan. I didn’t have the last name Steinberg in Nazi Germany in the late ’30s. I wasn’t sick with cancer or anything else. How could I not be the best parent I could be? How could I not approach life with my full faculties? It’s just being conscious all the time that if there’s only one thing in life that you can’t do, which is consume alcohol, there are thousands of things you can do and much better.
Traumatic Brain Injury And Concussions
I’m sure that crosses over into your professional life and working with the many young athletes that you mentor in that area as well. Thank you for the service that you do in that area. Another passion of yours is traumatic brain injury and concussions. How could it not be with what you’ve done for so many years? Tell us a little bit about your work in that area.
I had a crisis of conscience back in the 1980s. I’m representing half the starting quarterbacks in the NFL. They’re getting hit in the head and knocked out. We go to doctors back then and ask them, “How many is too many? When should you consider retiring?” They have no answers. Back in the early ’90s, I held the first concussion conference and brought together Troy Aikman, Steve Young, Warren Moon, Drew Bledsoe, and a series of football players. We brought some baseball, too, and talked with them about the dangers of concussion and tried to raise awareness and think about prevention and ways we could cut down on the number and also talk about can we cure a concussed brain. Is there a way to bring it back?
In the early 90s, I held the first Concussion Conference, bringing together football stars to address the dangers of concussions, raise awareness, and explore prevention strategies.
When we got to around 2006, Bennet Omalu and a series of neurologists said that they thought three was the magic number. After that, you have an exponentially higher rate of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, premature senility, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and depression. I called it a ticking time bomb and an undiagnosed health epidemic.
We’ll have our 17th concussion conference. We look at everything from taking blocking and tackling with the head out of the game to not having young people start tackle football too early to playing a style of football where there’s no hitting during training camp or practice. It’s all saved for the games. It’s nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals that can prophylactically protect the brain or heal the brain once it’s been concussed. It’s processes like hyperbaric oxygen and the electronic stimulus to the brain called RTMS and a whole series of modalities. At our Super Bowl party, we’ll display them in what we call a brain lounge, and the guests can be exposed to new healing aspects.
I’m so proud to be a part of that brain lounge at the Super Bowl party, your 35th party, I believe it is. Jay Flowers Health Institute, along with Neurologics and Dr. Hack, will be there. We’re super excited to meet with athletes and folks and tell them about the brain mapping that neurologics and Jay Flowers Health Institute are doing.
Struggle With Addiction
Thank you for putting this party on again for the 35th time. That’s absolutely amazing in itself. Along with brain injury, we often see addiction across the spectrum, but I know in athletes you’ve seen that. Tell me a little bit about your life with addiction and what you do when you see an athlete who’s struggling with addiction.
We try to screen at the very beginning who our clients will be and find people with good values or from strong families who have squared away, who have a charitable impulse, and who want to be involved in a second career. Having said that, challenges with addictive substances can come to anyone. The first emphasis is to get people to talk about their feelings, and it’s mental health is simply health. It affects an organ, which is the brain. It fits all the definitions of a disease, but it’s stigmatized. Athletes are in denial anyway. They accept levels of physical pain and injury that most of us would be in bed forever. They accept the fact that they have to go out.
We’re getting them to talk about struggles with addiction and the ever-present concept of pain and relief from the pain. You have athletes who use opiates and get addicted even in the hospital. You have athletes who mask all the tension and fatigue with alcohol. You have athletes who use different types of drugs to get more energy to speed up. If there is a problem, the key is trying to get the person to break denial and recognize the problem so you can get some help. There’s help available. There are programs through every league and players association, and the help is there.
These people who are so impregnable and powerful still have the same emotional set, so it’s getting to be observant and see where there is a problem. If you have aberrational behavior, an arrest for drunk driving or anger bursts, all of those things are symbols that something might be wrong. It’s trying to spot it as early as you can and then do the often uncomfortable thing of trying to have someone confront their demons.
Something that Robin and I talk about all the time is the concept of what we do with a 360-degree comprehensive diagnostic evaluation and working with so many athletes who have come from backgrounds that all of a sudden become famous individuals. They become wealthy, and they become stressed. They have marital difficulties. They have many difficulties in life and money does not always bring happiness, as you well know, Leigh.
Doing a comprehensive diagnostic evaluation and really looking at the brain, looking at brain mapping, looking at small, even minor TBIs, looking at their psychological health, wellness, psychiatric health, nutritional health and physical health. Putting together that diagnostic picture of someone and then getting them back out with a plan on how to thrive, be healthy, and be the philanthropist you are. Be that individual who gives back to society. I think that’s so important. Thank you for pushing that, talking to your players about health, and being a role model and a mentor.
Daily Routine For Success
That’s a great segue to my question, which is, do you have a daily routine that you do that creates a successful day for you that you’d share with the audience?
A little bit, yes. Among other things, I have a Fitbit that says it is time for a stroll. I try to do 10,000 to 15,000 steps every day. I work out with a personal trainer about three times a week. I do hyperbaric oxygen and something called LightSim, which is an LED bed that stimulates things. I actually went down to Medellin, Colombia, and had 240 million stem cells injected. I’m trying to use every healing modality to keep cognitively as sharp as possible and be as active as possible. I go into the office and fortunately, it looks over the Newport Base and every day is different.
Sunday night, I was back in Kansas City, seeing the unfortunate loss of the Chiefs and our client, Patrick Mahomes. I flew back to Los Angeles, drove up to the campus at Pepperdine University, and gave two speeches, one to the kids at lunch and then later in a big lecture room, and came back to start to plan our Super Bowl party. I’m in the process of writing a third book and they’re filming for a documentary.
Every day is different and now you want to support your players with the Rams, who are in the Super Bowl. It’s a variety of different things. We’re raising money at the party for a community program called The Lantern, which helps young inner-city kids get mentorship into how to succeed in business. It’s a potpourri of different types of things.
It sounds like one of your keys to a long, healthy life. You have more years ahead of you, but it’s just staying busy, staying active, being proactive, and taking care of your own health now. One of those ways that you did it, you said, was with stem cells. How did the stem cell implant work for you?
They’re still working. I had 60 million shot into my eyes in a separate concept and it’s enabled me to drop my glasses. They don’t work instantaneously. They take time. I’m six months into this cycle and I think the expectation is sometime in the next six months, they’ll start to kick in. I have sciatica, which is compressed discs in the back. It just comes over time. There’s no traumatic injury, but I had them inserted into my brain, knee, and back. We’ll see.
I believe that we’re on the brink of astounding health breakthroughs and biomed breakthroughs and that we’ll look at medicine as it is commonly practiced now in the same way that you and I look at people bleeding. The president of the United States to help with gunshot wounds or anything else that people born now will probably live to 120 and this will get better and better as we start to replace human body parts and do preventative medicine in a way where you never end up with the doctor.
Advice For Aspiring Professionals
I hope you and I are the beneficiaries of living at least towards that 120-year mark in a healthy way, but I agree with you. I think stem cells are just one of the many things that we’re looking at in modern medicine now and I’m so excited to see what comes around the curve. We’d love to keep up with you. Unfortunately, we’re running out a little bit of time, but I did want to ask you, what advice do you give young men and young women who want to be the next Leigh Steinberg?
We’ve created programs to educate and stimulate the next generation of sports professionals, and it’s not just agentry. Sports now has a cornucopia of different jobs and opportunities. It’s working for a team, a league, a conference, an athletic department, in sports marketing, publicity, healthcare, training, facilities management, and media. There’s virtually no end to the number of jobs there, but it takes a certain skill set to be able to do it.
One of the things I offer is something called an Agent Academy, and you can go to SteinbergSports.com and find out when the next one is coming. In that, we take young people and teach them how to be recruiters, approach young athletes, be convincing, and negotiate. Half of them play athletes and the other half play agents. We also teach how to set up a charitable foundation and how to market. It’s a one- or two-day seminar.
The other thing we have is sports career conferences covering everything to do with marketing, branding, PR, and new entrepreneurial activities. We teach in those situations. You can also find my book, but the key is this: for a young person, you need to find a way to distinguish yourself from the rest. You need to do a resume, get an internship, do something unique. To do that, you need to put yourself in the heart and mind of the general manager, the owner, the agent. Whoever it is you’re going to work for and figure out how to enhance your life.
As a young person, you need to find a way to differentiate yourself from others. To do that, you need to put yourself in the heart and mind of whoever you’re going to work for and figure out how you can make their life better.
I tell a story about a young man who sent us a copy of Sports Illustrated. It arrived at the office and looked identical to Sports Illustrated. It had their font, their type, their pictures, and only this one had a picture of this young man and myself on the cover. It talked about how I hired him and how our firm flourished.
Every article in this presentation was about how our recruiting was enhanced. We got better athletes, better marketing and branding, did more deals, and hired him. Because that resume showed us research into who we were and demonstrated the use of presentation and visual skills. I encourage young people to be creative in how they brand themselves.
I think that’s absolutely amazing. I would encourage any young folk, anybody, whatever age, to go to Steinberg Sports and look at the website. I’m going to throw you a curveball here that I just thought of in my head as you were talking. Why do you think Nick Saban is so successful at what he does?
It’s because he has a plan and a system that’s a creative one, and he sticks to it. Alabama happened to be a football-crazy place. The key to winning in sports is having a plan, executing it, and being stable with it. He has all that.
The key to winning in sports is having a plan, executing it, and being stable.
The name of our show, Robin, is Understanding the Human Condition. Anyone who wants to understand the human condition needs to look at this man here, Leigh Steinberg. Read these two books, The Agent: My 40-Year Career Making Deals and Changing the Game and Winning with Integrity: Getting What You Want Without Selling Your Soul. When is the third book coming out, Leigh? No pressure. We’re looking forward to that third book coming out. Thank you for everything that you’ve done. Thank you for everything you continue to do. Thanks so much.
You’re welcome. I can’t wait to see you at Sony Studios.
Take care.
Dr. Flowers, how do the folks reach you and the staff at J. Flowers Health Institute?
You bet. The easiest way to reach us is to go to JFlowersHealth.com and look at our website. It gives you all the information that you need about our practice. You can also call us at (713) 783-6655. Our amazing Leslie Clark will be more than happy to talk to you about our program or Lisa at our office as well.
I’d like to remind everyone watching or listening to us that there are numerous platforms to find our show, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher, and iHeart Radio. Please share this episode on social media or with someone that you think could help.
Absolutely.
We remind you also that a clear diagnosis is key to the most effective treatment possible.
Yes, it is.
See you next week.
Thanks again, Robin.
Thank you.
Important Links
- Leigh Steinberg
- The Agent: My 40-Year Career Making Deals and Changing the Game
- Winning with Integrity: Getting What You Want Without Selling Your Soul
- YouTube – Understanding the Human Condition
- Apple Podcasts – Understanding the Human Condition
- Spotify – Understanding the Human Condition
