Bruce Allen’s Partner Provided Access to UNLV Players : Football: Two former Rebel coaches allegedly recruited undergraduates as GBA Sportsworld clients.

When Bruce Allen became a sports agent in 1985 at 29, his most obvious asset was the football background he had gained as the son of George Allen, the former Ram and Washington Redskin coach who is now at Cal State Long Beach.

Less obvious an asset, but certainly no less important, was Bruce Allen’s access to the University of Nevada Las Vegas football program through his former partner.

With the aid of two former UNLV coaches, Allen’s agency, GBA Sportsworld, Inc., was able to build its client base with nearly a dozen players from the school--sometimes, apparently, at the expense of NCAA rules.

During one swing through the UNLV football office in August of 1985, former UNLV assistant coach Bob Owens, then Allen’s partner in GBA Sportsworld, signed two UNLV defensive stars before their senior seasons, according to one of the players involved, former UNLV safety Harvey Allen.

NCAA rules prohibit college athletes with eligibility remaining from dealing with agents.

As Harvey Allen remembers it, he and a teammate, linebacker Gentry Walsh, were walking through the UNLV football office during preseason practice in 1985 when they ran into Owens, who had just left the UNLV coaching staff to start GBA Sportsworld.

Owens asked the two players to step into a vacant office with him, Harvey Allen said.

“(Owens) had come back to visit the coaches--the kind of situation where everybody’s coming in and saying, ‘How are you doing, Coach?’--and wanted to talk to us for a minute to explain things, the chances we had of going in the draft,” he said.

During the meeting, he said, Owens produced documents and asked the players to sign them.

“(Owens’ explanation) was like, ‘Well, I’m going to put this under the table. I’m not going to bring it out until it’s time. Just as long as your name is here.’ Just a deal personally for us and him,” Harvey Allen said.

He said both he and Walsh signed the documents.

Currently a Los Angeles County juvenile probation officer, Harvey Allen said he knew that, by signing a representation agreement with GBA Sportsworld before his senior season at UNLV, he had jeopardized his eligibility.

But, he said, it would have been hard to say no to Owens, a man who, as UNLV’s defensive coordinator, had been his coach the previous three seasons and had recruited him for UNLV from Fremont High School.

“Dealing with agents at that point . . . well, you know how fast they rush at you,” he said. “I was kind of comfortable with (Owens). I knew this guy right off. Dealing with agents, you don’t know who’s for real. A coach I played three years for, that was a plus. To be able to know the guy, especially at the beginning of the year like that, was a plus.”

He said Owens led him to believe that he could break the agreement at any time. But when he dealt with other agents at the end of the season, he said, Owens told him, “Stick to your deal.”

And when he actually did sign with another agent shortly after the ’85 season, Harvey Allen said, GBA Sportsworld sent him a bill for $1,300 to cover the cost of disability insurance that the agency claimed to have bought for him.

He said he did not pay GBA Sportsworld because he believed no such policy was ever purchased in his name.

However, Ben Armstrong, a Phoenix consultant who was then working with GBA Sportsworld, said he arranged for policies from Lloyd’s of London for Harvey Allen, Walsh and another UNLV player at the time, fullback Tony Lewis, at GBA Sportsworld’s request during the 1985 season. GBA Sportsworld paid the premiums on the policies, according to Armstrong.

NCAA rules also prohibit college athletes with eligibility remaining from receiving cash or other benefits, such as insurance policies, from agents.

Efforts by The Times to reach Walsh and Lewis were unsuccessful.

Owens, who left GBA Sportsworld in 1989, acknowledged dealing with Harvey Allen and Walsh while working for the agency, but said he did so within NCAA rules.

“I’m not saying I didn’t recruit them, because you have to recruit kids at that level,” he said. “But I didn’t sign them early, and we didn’t buy them insurance early.”

Asked about Harvey Allen’s account of the meeting with Owens in the UNLV football office, Bruce Allen said: “I would have to see that to believe it. I’ve had a rule from Day 1 that there is no player--and I mean no player--worth signing early.”

As it turned out, neither Harvey Allen nor Walsh made it in the NFL.

But two years later, GBA Sportsworld picked up several clients from UNLV who went on to successful professional careers, chief among them Cincinnati running back Ickey Woods.

“Bob Owens came to me at the beginning of my senior year and told me he would give me a shot at the pros,” said Woods, a second-round draft pick in 1988. “My first three years (at UNLV), I only rushed for something like 300 yards, so I really had no shot at the pros. . . . If I had had a bad year, I would have had to try to be a free agent. I wouldn’t have been a draft choice. I kind of trusted Bob, and he kind of screwed me.”

Woods, who says he has lost about $100,000 in investments orchestrated by Owens, also indicated that he felt compelled to sign with GBA Sportsworld because of Harvey Hyde, UNLV’s head football coach from 1982 through 1985.

Now George Allen’s chief assistant at Cal State Long Beach, Hyde was fired at UNLV in April of 1986, but remained in Las Vegas as the host of a sports talk show on radio.

“He was a factor,” Woods said of Hyde. “But I really don’t want to discuss those bastards. They’re the last thing on my mind right now.”

Others familiar with the situation, however, have more to say about it.

Recalling the 1987 season, in which he and Woods were seniors, former UNLV defensive back Anthony Drawhorn said: “Coach Hyde was on us (about GBA Sportsworld) the whole year.”

Like Woods, Drawhorn has seen the sense of familiarity that caused him to sign with GBA Sportsworld turn into hard feelings over the way the agency does business.

“I felt like they were a crock,” said Drawhorn, who has played for British Columbia of the Canadian Football League the last three years. “They were sending my mail to Ottawa, and I was in Vancouver. When that happened, I was through with them.”

Hyde has had business dealings with Owens dating back to 1973, when Owens was an assistant coach at Arizona State and Hyde was an assistant at Pasadena City College.

Hyde, Owens and Myron Tarkanian, the brother of UNLV basketball Coach Jerry Tarkanian, were officers in an Arcadia company known as American Education Enterprises, Inc., from 1973 to 1981, according to records in the California Secretary of State’s office. Owens said the company was set up to stage teacher-improvement workshops.

Hyde and members of his family also have been extensively involved in real estate investment deals put together by Owens dating back to 1981, records in Maricopa (Ariz.) County and Orange County show.

In some of the deals, Hyde has held interest in notes secured by property owned by Phoenix real estate investor Tim Mills, a former football coach who was on the staff at Pasadena City College when Hyde was coaching there.

Woods and other NFL players who have been represented by GBA Sportsworld have raised questions about similar deals orchestrated by Owens, complaining that Owens did not disclose that he and Mills were business partners.

Hyde, however, said he did not know that players’ money was being invested in such deals.

“Hey, all I know is the Bob Owens part of an investment,” he said. “I don’t know anything else (dealing) with players nor do I give a damn what (Owens and Allen) do with the players.”

As for recruiting Woods and Drawhorn for the agency, Hyde said: “What I did was, when players asked me if Bruce Allen was a good agent, I said I thought he did a very good job with the people I had heard he had (represented). I thought he was well thought of, and I still think he is one of the best (agents). If a player asks me about (an agent) I know of, I recommend that the player take a look (at the agent). Nothing more than that.”

But Drawhorn said that Hyde called him repeatedly and took him out for meals during the ’87 season to tout GBA Sportsworld. And when he finally signed with the agency the following spring, Drawhorn said, the representation agreement was delivered to him in Las Vegas by Hyde.

“He said these guys were good agents, had represented some people, and he mentioned some names,” Drawhorn said. “I figured, seeing as I knew Coach Hyde, it was an opportunity to deal with somebody I knew. I thought it would be easier.”

Drawhorn said he later learned of Hyde’s business dealings with Owens.

Had he been aware of those dealings when Hyde was recruiting him for GBA Sportsworld, Drawhorn said, he probably would have picked another agent.

“If I had known that he had money tied up with them, I probably wouldn’t have even dealt with (Hyde’s overtures on behalf of GBA Sportsworld) because I would have felt like he was in it for something, trying to gain,” he said.