VibeBlog

Bob LaMonte remembers clearly what Al Davis told him when LaMonte mentioned 30 years ago that he was going to become an agent for NFL coaches. And how Davis told him. The Raiders owner looked at LaMonte like he was out of his mind.

“Coaches will never make any money,” Davis told LaMonte. “Don’t you know the 25-25 rule?”

Advertisement

LaMonte said he didn’t.

“I can get any effin 25-year-old to coach and pay him 25 fuckin’ thousand dollars,” Davis growled at LaMonte. “They will do whatever I want for a chance to coach in the National Football League. You want to get in that business?”

LaMonte wasn’t deterred, but admits that most people around the league then shared Davis’ skepticism.

Now, 30 years later, LaMonte just did a deal with Davis’ son, Mark, to bring Jon Gruden back as Raiders coach. The price tag? $100 million for 10 years.

Including Gruden, LaMonte represents eight current NFL head coaches and eight general managers among his 51 clients. Not bad for a guy who has never taken a law or business class. LaMonte started Professional Sports Representation, Inc., with his wife as a part-time venture 38 years ago. The former teacher and real estate broker is now a power broker.

“Bob is the only agent that I know that can call an NFL owner on the phone and get a call back right away,” one league executive said.

Part of the reason for that is LaMonte’s approach. The Sicilian often uses the phrase “La Famiglia” (the family) when talking about his agency and clients. He and his wife, Lynn, not only don’t seek out clients, but once assistant coaches come to them and are approved, the LaMontes help train them for head-coaching interviews years ahead of time.

“We run our business like a family,” Lynn LaMonte said. “We only select people we’d like to work with. We still have our small, brick-stone office in Reno — it looks like a home — and we spend our time servicing the folks we have and not recruiting.”

Rams coach Sean McVay first called Bob LaMonte when he was 27 years old, and LaMonte broke his minimum-age rule (more on that later) because “Sean was a freak, it’s like I was talking to Gruden again.” LaMonte took McVay on and four years later, McVay was the next coach of the Rams, five years later the NFL Coach of the Year.

Advertisement

“Guys like McVay and Gruden come along every 10, 12 years,” LaMonte said. “Everyone wants to find them, but that’s why they fire seven people every year.”

As we sat down at his Half Moon Bay home to talk, LaMonte was happy to unwind after a crazy few weeks that saw him enjoy a Super Bowl win for Eagles coach Doug Pederson and general manager Howie Roseman (both clients), go to press conferences for new coaches Gruden, Pat Shurmur and Frank Reich and fire a client, Josh McDaniels.

McDaniels backed out of the Colts job at the last possible second, after a deal had been struck — “this is Runaway Altar, not Runaway Bride,” LaMonte said; “the ring was on the finger” — setting up an opening for Reich, the Eagles offensive coordinator, to jump into.

If it seems sometimes like all the dominoes in play are LaMonte’s, that’s because they are.

Take Oakland.

It was just a year ago that LaMonte worked out a new four-year, $20 million contract extension for Raiders coach Jack Del Rio.

LaMonte and PSR senior executive associate Mark Schiefelbein have a war room board — just like an NFL draft board — in their Reno office of each team and its head coach and who is on the hot seat, so they can identify which jobs are coming open. Suffice it to say that Del Rio did not have a red flag on that chart until the last minute, when the deal for Gruden to replace him was essentially done.

“Praise God that I was able to have Mark Davis do that monster four-year deal for Jack a year ago,” LaMonte said. “That was such a weird thing because Mark Davis has probably met with Jon Gruden 25 times in the last seven or eight years.

“You know people make a big deal about the money that Jon got, but we were getting calls in November every year from Power 5 schools — college — and Jon Gruden had major opportunities to go wherever he wanted. For massive money.”

Advertisement

Del Rio was coming off a 12-4 season in 2016, but LaMonte said Del Rio always knew the landscape in Oakland.

Said LaMonte: “If you would have asked Jack if there was a chance — when he first got the job, when we did the first deal — that Jon Gruden would be sought after, he would have said, ‘Yeah, obviously. Mark talks to me about him all the time.’”

LaMonte said he and Gruden were talking about the Tampa Bay job possibility in December, when Gruden was meeting with Davis.

“Jon would never say anything to me then in deference to Jack,” LaMonte said. “And Mark wouldn’t say anything to me. And I was thinking Tampa, but nothing ever really percolated there.”

LaMonte said people give him way too much credit when they talk conspiracy.

“It isn’t like I am in a room with Jon and Mark, and we’re plotting this,” LaMonte said. “The agent gets called only when it’s ‘I want to take this job; can you do the deal?’ That’s when I get called. They don’t call me and say, ‘How does this situation look? …

“Jack Del Rio could have gone 10-6 last season and he would have still got terminated.”

That switch marked the 11th time that LaMonte has replaced one of his fired clients with another face from PSR.

“You’re hired to get fired,” LaMonte said. “We’ve brought out 50 head coaches. One wasn’t fired — Mike Holmgren. Bad odds.”

The only thing going up faster than the number of fired coaches is their salaries.

The average NFL head coach salary in 1988 was $295,000. Today, it’s over $5 million. Gruden got $100 million, though where that big number came from is anybody’s guess. Davis didn’t put it out there, but LaMonte has no reason to dispute a market-changing number like $100 million.

“All I’ll say is that it’s a contract for the ages,” LaMonte said.

Not bad for a guy who never planned on being a sports agent.

Advertisement

“I never wanted to be a sports agent,” LaMonte, 72, said. “I was a historian, studied in Moscow. What’s ironic about it is that I was a U.S. diplomatic historian and a teacher, and there is no better field to study than diplomacy if you want to become an agent.”

LaMonte grew up in San Francisco, had played football and was coaching it at Santa Teresa High in San Jose. The diplomatic degree and classes that LaMonte had taken in American Labor History all of the sudden came in handy when Cal quarterback Rich Campbell asked him in 1980 if he could help him with his first contract in the NFL. LaMonte, also a real estate broker, had helped his former Santa Teresa quarterback’s parents sell their house, and they trusted LaMonte.

LaMonte said no at first, and offered to help the Campbells line up an experienced agent. They said they would prefer he do it, Campbell was drafted sixth overall in the 1981 NFL Draft by the Packers and the rest is history. Well, LaMonte’s course was clearly set a couple of years later, when a punter LaMonte coached at his previous gig at Oak Grove High approached him about being his agent as well.

That was Blue Jays All-Star pitcher Dave Stieb. LaMonte got him a deal in 1983, then an even bigger one — $17 million for 11 years — in 1985.

“That’s when things mushroomed,” LaMonte said.

Swervin’ Mervyn Fernandez, a receiver who LaMonte had coached against, knocked on the door next, as did other local athletes. (Al Davis was furious during the Raiders’ negotiations with Fernandez, because he couldn’t always get LaMonte on the phone right away. LaMonte was busy lecturing at San Jose City College.)

Bob and Lynn decided to keep doing it part-time until their four kids were out of the house, which was 1993.

“And then I started running all over the country,” Bob LaMonte said, with Lynn handling a lot of the business side, including some clients’ financial planning, and dealing with coaches’ wives.

Advertisement

“Bob and I both come from educational backgrounds,” Lynn LaMonte said. “And we just kind of segued into this. We never thought coaches would be making what they’re making now. We just saw a need and had a nice respect for coaches. And we were a bottom-up company, so it was able to grow organically.”

Bob LaMonte recalls how he and another teacher and Oak Grove coach, longtime friend Mike Holmgren, used to have monthly beers at a San Jose pub and wonder if they would ever be able to afford to leave a nice tip for the bartender.

“(It’ll) never happen,” Holmgren said.

Holmgren went on to San Francisco State as offensive coordinator, then BYU and then the 49ers as a quarterbacks coach in 1986. He had asked LaMonte to help with his contracts, and then in 1988 he asked LaMonte if we would consider representing coaches.

LaMonte said he already started to see a bleaker future for representing players, as the agents’ cut from contracts was reduced from 10 percent to 7 percent. It’s since gone to 5 percent, to 3 to 1.5.

“I have to get into an environment where I control it — the coaches had no union and you get whatever you can,” LaMonte said. “I saw that as true capitalism and I am a capitalist.”

LaMonte got Holmgren an unprecedented contract as offensive coordinator for the 49ers in 1989, and the light that had gone on for LaMonte years prior was now like fireworks in the night.

“It was like the Wild West,” LaMonte said. “If you had the right guy, you could get whatever you wanted.”

Soon, Holmgren and other LaMonte clients were getting the power of general manager when they became head coaches, with the salaries hitting the million-dollar threshold. That’s when general managers felt they were underpaid and, yes, LaMonte was there for them too.

All the while the referrals are multiplying.

Advertisement

“We had a lot of people from the Mike Holmgren tree, and then the Andy Reid tree was almost double that,” LaMonte said.

That’s really the beauty of PSR — it’s just a referral business that has made LaMonte one of the most influential people in the NFL.

“We were never a big-time agency,” LaMonte said, “we just represented a lot of big-time people. La Famiglia is about quality and not quantity, and we want to see if we’re a fit for you as well as you for us. We have never spent a dime on recruitment. We were getting better and better clients each year and never spending any money.

“Everyone else has to recruit or die, and we service and live.”

Coaches will contact the LaMontes about coming on board, and PSR whittles down the list to a couple of candidates who they interview at the NFL scouting combine in Indianapolis every year.

Bob LaMonte has very strict parameters for the coaching candidates whom they will take on as clients.

“If you are over 55 when you first contact us, we think that is too late, even if you are a coordinator,” LaMonte said. “If you’re under 35, we think you’re too young and we would like to wait on it. That may sound weird, but history bears that out.”

What’s even more restrictive than that is how he rules out candidates based on their resume.

“If on offense you haven’t coached the quarterback position, or you haven’t done offensive line, because fronts are important, we will say no,” LaMonte said. “Because we believe those are the two most important things to become a head coach on offense. On defense, if you’re not a defensive-backs guy, then we don’t think the guys working with the linemen or linebackers see the field the way a DB guy does.”

LaMonte has a plethora of former DB coaches who have proven that point, from John Fox to Jim Mora Jr. to Mike Nolan to Leslie Frazier to Steve Spagnuolo, all former head coaches. Del Rio doesn’t fit that mold, but he approached LaMonte after he had been a head coach with Jaguars.

Advertisement

“We don’t need revenue, we need the right people,” LaMonte said. “When we turn people down, they know we have a system and can say at least we were honest with them. We’re not out to get their buck.”

Once PSR started taking on prospective general managers, LaMonte had similar age guidelines.

“We only take you if you have done the college side,” LaMonte said. “If you’ve just done the pro side of evaluation, we ask that you go back and do the college side. Because we believe it all starts with the ability to set the (draft) board.”

After a coach like McVay signs on with LaMonte, he goes through a six-month training session.

“It’s the opposite of cramming for a big test,” Schiefelbein said.

LaMonte falls back on his teaching background and prepares his clients how to interview and get a head-coaching job. Particularly, owners don’t want to hear about X’s and O’s, they want to be taken in by the coach’s leadership skills and knowledge of his team, and they want the candidate to ask them good questions.

And then LaMonte adds the finishing touch.

“The real secret sauce is the ability to meld that with media and set a narrative,” LaMonte said. “We’ve always been able to set a really good narrative in the media, one, because we never talk about ourself and two, because I have always tried to be very honest with them.”

The whole process is done before training camp starts, and then LaMonte meets with his clients during their bye week “to brush up on some things.”

Meanwhile, the war room coaching board is updated several times a year with red flags for this season — and the next two after that.

Once the season ends and the job cycle starts, LaMonte and his clients hit PSR’s database to research the particular teams with job openings.

LaMonte has always been able to hit the ground running thanks to the Gruden factor.

Advertisement

“The teams would start calling about December 5th or 6th every year, ‘Would Jon come back? Would Jon come back?’” LaMonte said, smiling. “We’re going to miss that because we would know where all the firings were going to be.”

That will change next season, of course, but La Famiglia will carry on its traditions just fine.

“One of Bob’s special abilities is that he has vision, and he saw that we could create a market for coaches,” Lynn LaMonte said. “And as things have changed, he was a good eye for what’s developing, and is so good at dealing with people.”

That’s because Bob LaMonte enjoys what he does, and that’s the biggest reason he and Lynn haven’t sold PSR when the big corporations have come calling.

“What Lynn and I did could never happen again now,” LaMonte said. “It’s impossible. … We will continue to serve people the way we like, keep it around 50 clients and keep La Famiglia strong.”

(Top photo of Bob LaMonte with Mike Holmgren at his 1999 introductory press conference with the Seattle Seahawks: Otto Greule Jr./Getty Images) 

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57kW1ucHBoZH9xfZdoZ2tnYmZ8ra2Mn5imoZehtqJ5x6iuZpqfl3qtrcyopa2dXZeypK3MnmSoppVivKd506GcZqaWocBuuc6sq2ahnpu5trHNraCapF2bvLOvxKxkmqaUYrWmuM%2Bem2aflal6q7vNZp6rrZSau259j2lkpqGcobawuo4%3D