Recruiting Truths or Untruths?

A book was just hand-delivered to my door. With it came a note from the publisher’s publicity director, declaring: “The most explosive football book of the season is now in your hands.” And: “It’s so hot that advance galleys were not released to anyone, and review copies are still under strict control.”

I just did an Evelyn Wood number on this thing, speed-reading it so fast, I burned my finger.

It is hot.

It is “Necessary Roughness,” by Mike Trope. It is a book about recruiting--a “scathing expose of the dirtiest part of the game,” as Contemporary Books plugs it--written by one of sport’s most successful agents, a guy who went after his first client when he was a 21-year-old senior at USC.

When it hits the book stands in about a week, quite a few characters from the wide world of sports will be asked what in this book is true, what is untrue, and what is total Trope tripe. One way or another, though, it almost certainly will make some waves.

Then again, with all the unproven horror stories we have heard about recruiting throughout the years, perhaps the only unique value of this book will be in its name-naming detail. Charges and denials might start flying, might not. In some cases, sadly, we are likely to be left with little more than a couple of skunks, swapping stinks.

Some people will not even be around to defend themselves. The late Carroll Rosenbloom, whose widow remains owner of the Rams, for example, is alleged to have approached Trope with an offer that if he could convince client Earl Campbell’s team, the Houston Oilers, that there was something wrong with the running back and that the Rams might take him off their hands, “I’ll give you a suitcase with a quarter of a million dollars. Cash.”

The book also quotes Eric Dickerson of the Rams recalling the recruiting pitch of a coach from the University of Texas when he was a high school hero in that state: “If you go to school in Oklahoma, I’ll make sure you never get a job in the state of Texas in your life, if you come back to Texas. If you come to the University of Texas, you name five of anything, and I promise you, you’ll have them by tomorrow. Anything. Just five of anything.”

Another chapter concerns Trope’s overtures to Bill Walton at UCLA and the subsequent involvement of that school’s noted booster, Sam Gilbert. In Walton’s apartment--where he had a dart board with Richard Nixon’s face on it--Walton reportedly told Trope how Gilbert gave him groceries and helped him buy an expensive stereo and 10-speed bike.

When Gilbert found out that the agent had talked shop with Walton, Trope’s book claims, Gilbert poor-mouthed him to other UCLA athletes. Trope thought it a Mickey Mouse thing to do, so he sent Gilbert a Mickey Mouse cap.

Later on, the story continues, an FBI agent asked Trope if he knew anything about Gilbert having enough influence to cause point-shaving in UCLA basketball games, whereupon Gilbert accused Trope of being the FBI’s tipster. Gilbert then screamed threats at him, according to Trope, and said: “It is only with great self-restraint that I haven’t had you wiped off the face of the earth. It is only with great self-restraint that I haven’t had you killed.”

More than once, Trope either found himself in a dirty business or found himself accused of doing dirty business.

A national magazine hinted that he was providing football players with drugs and prostitutes.

When Trope suspected fellow agent Leigh Steinberg of spreading these rumors, he hired a con artist to pose as a magazine reporter and tape-recorded an interview in which Steinberg, asking the “reporter” for anonymity, said Trope procured drugs for running back Chuck Muncie.

Trope kept the tape and confronted Steinberg with it, the book alleges.

Tom Osborne isn’t going to like what’s in this book, either.

The Nebraska coach, currently preparing for a home game against UCLA, “likes to portray himself as the guileless leader of the squeaky-clean Cornhuskers, (at) the School That Doesn’t Cheat,” Trope writes. According to the author, Osborne is no saint, and last year’s scandal in which Nebraska players were penalized for ticket-selling surprised Trope not at all.

One of Trope’s clients had been Nebraska’s Heisman Trophy-winning back, Mike Rozier, who before leaving school signed with the agent, borrowed money from him and signed a pro contract--all of which is against NCAA rules. Irritated, Osborne started telling people Trope was bad news. Steer clear of that guy, he said.

Trope proceeded to produce Booker Brown, a former USC lineman whom he had once represented. Brown recalled how when Nebraska had recruited him, the Cornhuskers’ offensive coordinator fixed him up with a date, $300 in spending money and the loan of a car, and mentioned how players could sell season tickets for $1,000 above face value.

The offensive coordinator was Osborne.

After Brown went on to say that Osborne had offered the player’s mother six round-trip plane tickets from Santa Barbara to see her son play, Osborne issued denials.

And later, when Kenneth Davis, who played for Texas Christian, claimed that Nebraska had flown him in on a Lear jet and dangled other perks, Osborne blamed Trope and convinced the FBI to check out the drug charges and tap Trope’s phone, the book insinuates.

“I couldn’t help envisioning an extremely powerful football coach manipulating the judicial system to try to take revenge on one of his enemies,” Trope writes.

There are stories galore like this, detailing, as Trope puts it, “a business that often resembled a cesspool.”

A year ago he climbed out of the sewage and retired, taking up other interests including movie production, glad to get away from the responsibilities of haggling over money or rescuing the Muncies of the world from the messes they had gotten themselves into, like $10,000 hotel tabs.

And, he wrote this book.

I am not sure how much of it I believe or trust--all of it, most of it or some of it. Nor do I know if I even like it.

But I do know this.

The people who are in it sure won’t.