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| 2009-05-11 -- Agents of Steel (Muscle & Fitness) |
 One decent punt away from the sands of South Beach, the men responsible for more than a billion dollars in NFL contracts are grinding through their workouts on a battered high school football field. Sweat beads the size of shot glasses cascade off of their bodies. Every labored breath is a small victory against the suffocating humidity.
It’s 8 a.m. at Miami’s Neham Football Field House and Drew Rosenhaus, the world-famous NFL agent, is running wind sprints between the hash marks, phone in hand. “I always bring my phone with me, and I always answer if it’s an important call,” he says, sucking in air between sprints.“I know people use their workouts as an escape, but not me. I don’t escape because I love what I do. When I run,
I concentrate on the work that needs to get done for my clients.”
Those clients include more than 100 active NFL players, many of whom have worked out with Rosenhaus on this very field.
“What’s more productive, running gassers with my clients and bonding out here, or taking them to a crowded bar somewhere?” Rosenhaus asks as he stops at the goal line. “When we’re pushing through a workout together, they see that when I say I work hard, I mean it.”
He bolts back down the field, his last statement lingering like a cloud of smoke left by the Road Runner: “When I say I work hard, I mean it.”
Fitness Comes First
The words hang in the air, feeling less like a quote and more like a company motto. It explains why behind the east end zone of the field Drew’s brother Jason, the vice president of Rosenhaus Sports, is sparring with pro MMA fighter Brent Carraway. It explains why Director of Client Services
Danny Martoe is fighting through football conditioning drills near the goalpost. And it explains why
a few miles away, former NFL standout and Director of Marketing Robert Bailey is putting himself through the paces of a mile swim followed by weight training and basketball.
“We’re successful for two reasons,” Jason says. “We outwork and we outsmart. It takes a great deal of energy to work hard from dusk to dawn. Exercising like we do gives us the strength to do it.”
That strength is on display a second later as Jason flips and then groundand- pounds an MMA grappling dummy in a 30-second burst. As he unleashes a barrage of strikes on the dummy, Carraway explains that Jason and Drew are both fourth-degree black belts. Verbal combat is clearly a walk
in the park once you’ve worked your way up the ladder as a martial artist. When Jason’s done, he gets up, breathes deep and gathers his thoughts.
“Being physically fit gives us a sense of confidence,” he says, wiping his brow with a Rosenhaus Sports T-shirt. “It gives us a little machismo when we walk into the lion’s den, whether we’re
competing with a rival agent or negotiating with a team.”
Walking the Walk
Bailey, who played in the NFL for 11 seasons before joining Rosenhaus Sports, looks at it this way: “If you’re out of shape and unhealthy, how can you preach to guys that they need to stay in shape and eat right?” he says. “With our agency, I know athletes listen to our advice about training hard
because we train hard. Especially this time of year when we’re getting guys ready for the [NFL] Combine. They’ve got three months of hard work to put in, and they need to stay motivated.”
Of course, the dream of an eightfigure NFL contract provides plenty of motivation on its own, but before there’s a contract, there’s the NFL Draft. And before the draft there’s the NFL Combine.
The Combine is the Olympics for an NFL prospect, and it’s an agent’s job to make sure his client has everything he needs to be ready— including the best available training environment.
For many of Rosenhaus Sports’ players entering the draft, that means setting them up with trainer Pete Bommarito at Perfect Competition in Davie, Florida.
“When we decide where we’re going to have a player train for the Combine, we look at a lot of variables,” Bailey says. “We try to get all the guys together so they can push each other. These are guys who had probably never met until they started training in the same gym, but in three months they become friends and they support each other because they have the same goal: getting to the NFL.”
When players sign with Rosenhaus Sports, they expect the agency to make that happen. And since all of the athletes have spent their lives playing organized sports, the teamlike atmosphere the Rosenhaus agency projects is comforting. It’s a camaraderie they recognize from all their years on the gridiron.
“The energy and passion the Rosenhaus team brings…it’s just something you want to be a part
of,” says Cornelius Ingram, a 6'4", 250-pound tight end from the University of Florida. Ingram missed last season due to an ACL injury, so he’ll have to work harder at the Combine to prove to NFL teams that he can play. When looking for an agent, he said he wanted one who would go to war for him.
“I wanted an agency that would be in my corner and go to battle with me. You see these guys working out and you know they’ll do it,” he says.
Sweating the Details
Back on the football field, Drew is putting himself through his own battle, dropping down for sets of push-ups and sit-ups between sprints. He calls it his Superman workout. “When you’re in shape, you can work harder, you stay healthy and you don’t get sick,” he says. “Clients don’t want to hear
on draft day that their agent isn’t feeling well.”
With the No. 1 overall pick in last year’s NFL draft signing for $57.5 million and the last pick in the first round for $11.15 million, there’s too much at stake to let a cold sabotage a contract. As coaches demand performance from their athletes, athletes demand performance from their agents. After all, the pre-Combine training can be some of the most grueling, repetitious and
stress-filled time for a young athlete. If he’s killing himself in the weight room, he wants an agent who will kill for him in the boardroom.
“I asked a bunch of guys I know in the NFL who they’d roll to the Combine with, and they said Drew,” says Alphonso Smith, a 5'9", 193-pound cornerback from Wake Forest University.
“If a gym guy like [NFL wide receiver] Anquan Boldin is on board with these guys, I know I’m with the
right team. They have great energy.”
That energy is something on which Drew Rosenhaus prides himself.
“I work out wherever I go,” he says. “I’ll run in nice neighborhoods, I’ll run in poor neighborhoods. I’ll run wherever I am. I was just at the Pro Bowl and I swam in the ocean, I swam laps in the pool, I hit the gym, I ran on the beach, I did some cliff diving. When athletes see me getting after an activity,
they know I’ll have that kind of energy when I’m working for them.”
Drew then drops for a set of pushups — though not before strategically placing his phone within earshot. He does 30 and gets up to start running back down the field.
“I do the push-ups and sit-ups within my run so I’m always moving,” he says. “The push-ups are good for my upper body, the sit-ups are good for my core, and the running and stairs are good for my legs. I cover everything.”
Martoe approaches, fresh from a set of cone drills, to watch Drew take off. “With our schedules, we don’t get to work out together like this too often, but it’s great when we do,” he says. “We all have different ways of staying in shape, but the focus is the same thing: be in the best shape so we can
be the best at our jobs.”
Pushing to the Limit
The sun is now just creeping over the hotels that line South Beach, and team Rosenhaus needs to
wrap up their workouts and get to Perfect Competition to check on their athletes. Drew hasn’t
worked out with his newest crop of clients yet, but he knows when he does, he could be in for
some pain.
“I’ve been through some brutal workouts with my clients,” he says upon returning from his dash across the field. “Terrell Owens. Jeremy Shockey. They were hard on me. But the toughest workout
I ever did with a client was with Sean Taylor. He was a tremendous athlete and person. We did a set of 24 110-yard sprints on this field and I was throwing up afterward. It was the toughest workout I’ve ever been through.”
Drew rests with his hands on his hips as if the mere memory of that workout saps his strength. It’s a quiet moment, and you can see he’s thinking about his late friend Taylor, the Washington Redskins safety who was murdered when his home was invaded in 2007. It’s at this point when what
Rosenhaus has been talking about all morning seems most poignant. You can wine and dine a client all you like, but if you’re willing to run side by side with him in 100-degree heat until you both puke, you form a connection that can’t be had over a bottle of Cristal and a filet mignon. For an agent, that connection is priceless. Because while he can’t bond with a client in uniform, he
can certainly bond with him by training in unison.
People who are 6'4" and weigh 230 pounds are rarely considered too small for anything, but when it comes to playing on the defensive line in the NFL , 230 pounds won’t cut it. That’s why Aaron Maybin, a defensive end prospect from Penn State University, gained 20 pounds before he went to the NFL Combine.
“Penn State has a tremendous lifting program,” Maybin says. “I just needed to put on some size. That’s why I trained at Power Train Sports.”
Power Train Sports is based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and is considered one of the top facilities at which football players can train.
“We base every program on an individual player’s needs,” says Steve Saunders, director of sports performance. “We take only 12 guys each year, and we have more than 50 players in the NFL right now. One of the keys to our strategy is the overspeed training we do.”
Overspeed training is Power Train’s strategy of making clients faster by ramping up the nervous system. For instance, they use bands to slightly increase the stride length and speed of an athlete. This forces the body and the nervous system to keep pace. Sound confusing? It’s supposed to.
“We’re secretive about exactly what we do, but it’s effective,” Saunders says.
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