The Book of Revelations by St. Trope

Most people think the sports agency business is all booze and fast women and drugs and double-crossing and a lot of guys out recklessly to destroy the sports structure as we know it today.

Then, along comes a book by an agent, Mike Trope, “Necessary Roughness,” to shed some new light on the subject.

And, it’s all true. It confirms your worst suspicions about agentry. Its coat-of-arms should be a set of double-crosses rampant on a field of bottles, syringes and dollar signs superimposed with smears of lipstick.

Oh, it’s not that Mike dealt in all this sordid business. It was the other guys. And his clients. All Mike wanted to do, to hear him tell it, was free the slaves.

Some slaves. Mike tells of one of his American heroes, a quarterback he brought to a luxury hotel to sign with a top National Football League team. Our hero greeted his prospective employer lying naked on a bed acting out what could only be described as a one-man docudrama that would have been in bad taste in a Juarez bordello.

Did the lout get sent back to the old neighborhood where the cretins on the street corner thought it was funny? Don’t be silly. Mike got him a contract. On his own, the player got the owner’s daughter. For all we know he could be on the back of a Wheaties box to this day. Mike doesn’t identify him.

Mike Trope got in the agency business at the ripe old age of 21. It was heady stuff for this boy agent acting as a father-figure for some of the headline hotdoggers he had worshiped as a school kid.

His first client was a Heisman Trophy winner from Nebraska who had done nothing more serious than hold up a gas station in his freshman year. But, shucks, Mike figured, nobody’s perfect. Besides, who knows? Maybe all Jesse James needed was an agent.

Mike soon found out he was dealing with the most spoiled segment of the society, the All-American sports hero. With exceptions, these guys had been coddled and cozened since birth till they thought the world had been especially constructed for them. Because they ran nice with a football or threw it in a nice spiral, they found out early that powerful men would fight to gratify their every wish. They got to go through life the way only Thomas Edison should have.

“People do things for athletes they don’t do for others,” Trope found out (he’s always making these earth-shattering discoveries). “When an athlete needs some credit, even if his finances are in a shambles, he walks into a bank and gets it. Best table at a crowded restaurant? No problem. You can’t make that appearance you promised you would? We understand. You’re busy. To you and me, people say no, make us suffer the consequences of our behavior. Not athletes. Until they retire, ‘no’ isn’t a word they hear very much.”

Certainly not from their agent. To be a successful agent, you have to have what one called “the butler mentality.” You have to be able to think the master is another order of human being not subject to the normal societal constraints. You’re put on this earth to clean up after him. He’s a demi-god.

Take the All-Pro running back from Cal who was a first-round pick of the New Orleans Saints. Nobody ran with a football any better than Chuck Muncie.

“Off the field, it was another story,” writes Mike Trope. “Chuck’s level of irresponsibility ran so high, we hired one of his friends to shadow him.”

Chuck once checked into a suite at the Bonaventure Hotel, and Trope had to cut through what seemed to be a convention of freeloaders to get to him. “The room was littered with room service carts, wine bottles, cheese platters, half-eaten steaks. It looked like a bomb had gone off in it,” reports Trope.

Chuck left the hotel 12 days later, Trope reports, without the bothersome formality of checking out and paying. Trope had to come up with $10,600, including the rental on the two Mercedes that Chuck left in the basement of the hotel for more than a month.

Trope also had to clean up the mess in Muncie’s house up in Alamo, which had been taken over by a pride of wild dogs in his absence. Sometimes it seems all agents should be named Jeeves.

Trope also made the sensational discovery that collegiate football is shot through with hypocrisy. At one point, he chides the press, noting “the press in 1979, even a responsible magazine like Sports Illustrated, wasn’t yet interested in writing the truth about college athletics.”

1979! Mike Trope, apparently, is like a lot of today’s generation who think the Beatles discovered America and nothing happened in the world till television was there to cover it. The facts are that every “sanity code” put in effect in college football--and the first one was back in the early 1900s--was put there because of journalistic exposure. It’s safe to say the NCAA never imposed a sanction for an infraction it didn’t find out about in the newspapers first.

Anyway, as Trope found, there’s good money in hypocrisy. His getting angry at boosters, coaches, recruiters--the whole longtime fabric of college athletic hypocrisy--is like U.S. Steel getting mad at iron ore.

Agents get athletes who are fully publicized by the ink-stained wretches of the press till they are highly marketable commodities, fully trained, semi-educated and all ready to become million-dollar properties. All the Mike Tropes of the world have to do is get in their sunroof Rolls-Royces and roll down to the Ram--or Raider or Steeler--office and demand a million-dollar interest-free loan, a few more millions in deferred salary and insurance policies and more take-home pay than the head of a steel mill or the Politburo. The sportswriter who nicknamed Red Grange “The Galloping Ghost” probably did more for pro football than any agent, coach or even player who ever lived.

Still, Mike Trope holds no brief for agents himself. “A lying pack of hypocrites,” he labels them on Page 130.

Still, it’s an interesting book even if it does make the belated discovery that greed and hypocrisy follow the bouncing ball and money. And even if he does identify Notre Dame’s Gipp as “Frank.” He does find out what a lot of people have always known. He just got closer to it. He got in it. We just smelled it.