McNall Tries to Buy a Rocket : Football: He will offer Ismail $6 million for two years to eschew the NFL to play in Toronto.

The surest and quickest way for a college student to make a fortune today is to arrive at the head of the class in the NFL draft.

In the last two Aprils, the league’s two No. 1 choices, Troy Aikman of UCLA and Jeff George of Illinois, have each won six-year contracts, Aikman for $11.2 million and George for $15 million.

As marketed by agent Leigh Steinberg of Newport Beach, Aikman received a signing bonus of $2.7 million from Dallas and George one of $3.5 million from Indianapolis.

“Their first two salary years were also guaranteed,” Steinberg said Thursday.

But you haven’t seen anything yet.

In Los Angeles today, Bruce McNall, one of North America’s most celebrated collectors, will attempt to add the most coveted 1990 college football player, Raghib (Rocket) Ismail, to his Toronto collection with a record bid.

“We’re planning to make a formal offer of $6 million for two years,” McNall said, noting that he and three associates will be meeting at an undisclosed Southland location with representatives of Ismail, the swift Notre Dame wide receiver-running back-kick returner.

The gem of this year’s draft, Ismail is expected to go to the New England Patriots as the NFL’s top pick on April 21, unless :

--They trade him, or

--McNall gets him.

McNall, owner of the Kings, is also the principal owner of the Canadian Football League’s Toronto Argonauts, who averaged 31,000 a game with their run-and-shoot team last year in the Skydome.

There’s room there for another 20,000 Toronto football fans at an average $24 a ticket.

“The excitement Ismail will add to our team, and the league, means that he will more than pay for himself,” McNall said. “He stands to be a giant star in Canada. Their three-down system and the bigger Canadian field fit his style as if he had been born for it.”

Ismail’s style is uncommon if not unique. Three months ago in the last minute of the last game of the season, his dramatic, 91-yard punt return for a touchdown was called back because of a penalty, Colorado winning by one point.

“He still made the play,” Notre Dame spokesman John Heisler said. “It didn’t count for Notre Dame, but it counted for Ismail.”

That got the Patriots interested.

“We’re zeroing in on picking the Rocket,” said their new coach, Dick MacPherson. “The trade talk you hear is pure speculation.

“No team has called us yet with an offer. It reminds me of all those years I wanted to date Elizabeth Taylor, and she never called.”

New England would pay Ismail handsomely, MacPherson said, but not $3 million a year.

“No NFL rookie ever got $3 million,” Steinberg said.

MacPherson has one edge over McNall: He can put Ismail in the NFL.

“My goal is to play in the Super Bowl,” the Heisman Trophy runner-up said last season.

And the road to the Super Bowl doesn’t run through Canada.

It doesn’t run through New England, either, at the moment. If he opts for the NFL, wouldn’t Ismail rather play for a title contender?

“I’ll be more than happy to play with any team that finally selects me,” he told his attorney, John Edwards of San Francisco, who heads the negotiators meeting with McNall today.

Ismail’s representatives are known in the NFL as Team Rocket. He has more agents than any player who ever presented himself for the draft--several lawyers plus a conventional agency, the Morcom group headed by Oakland agent Ed Abrams, plus a marketing organization, ProServ, headed by David Falk.

Team Rocket was organized by a friend of Ismail, writer Ralph Wiley, who said he is leaving Sports Illustrated this month to pursue other interests.

Wiley, of Hyattsville, Md., enlisted as Ismail’s principal negotiator a lawyer without much sports experience.

“(Ismail) is my first athlete-client,” said Edwards, who specializes in corporate litigation for Brobeck Phleger and Harrison, a longtime San Francisco law firm with offices in Los Angeles, London and elsewhere.

Edwards’ aim is to place Ismail in what he calls a quality organization. “It isn’t just money that interests Raghib,” the lawyer said. “He’s accustomed to winning. It’s no fun to be the highest-paid player in a losing organization.”

That sounds as if Team Rocket is leaning toward Toronto, a Grey Cup contender without Ismail, over New England, a cellar contender without a quarterback.

“Not true,” Edwards said. “We have a lot of respect for (Patriot General Manager) Sam Jankovich and Dick MacPherson. We think they’re moving in the right direction.”

The sudden entrance of Toronto into the Ismail picture strikingly bettered his financial prospects, creating the competitive-market factor that the NFL tries to avoid.

Without an aggressive Canadian bidder, Ismail might not be able to command the millions that went to Aikman and George, who got theirs as quarterbacks.

So McNall has come along at precisely the right time for Ismail.

“(McNall’s) credibility is there for all to see,” Edwards said. “Look at what he’s done for the Kings.”

But is he serious about Ismail? Almost unanimously, the NFL has viewed McNall’s $3-million-a-year offer to Ismail as a publicity stunt for the Argonauts and Canadian football.

Expressing the common view, Steinberg said: “Everybody interprets the story for its publicity value to the Toronto franchise.”

Everybody, that is, except maybe the Argonauts. The evidence indicates that a magnetic new gate attraction has been an Argonaut priority since the end of the 1990 season, when McNall bought the franchise in association with actor John Candy and King star Wayne Gretzky.

“A big-name player who can produce is the way to create (ticket) sales,” Argonaut General Manager Mike McCarthy said from Toronto. “One of the first things (McNall) did after buying the club was ask me to put together a wish list.

“I spent several weeks looking over the (field) and then put Raghib Ismail at the top of the list. The more I thought about it, the more I kept pounding Ismail into Roy Mlakar’s ear.”

Mlakar, the Kings’ executive vice president, will join McNall and his chief financial officer, Suzan Waks, at the Ismail meetings today with Edwards and perhaps Abrams, among others, of Team Rocket.

Contemplating Ismail, McCarthy converted Mlakar, who converted McNall.

“He’s the most exciting player to come along in some time,” said Mlakar, who says Ismail and Toronto were meant for each other. “We play in the No. 1 building in North America, and Toronto is a sports city that averaged 47,000 a game for baseball last year.”

His point is that if it averaged 47,000 for an everyday sport, it could easily improve from 31,000 to 47,000 or more for once-a-week football.

“We outdrew the New England Patriots last year,” McCarthy said. “And we were the inspiration for the Buffalo Bills’ no-huddle offense. They came to Toronto to study our run-and-shoot no-huddle.

“It’s the most exciting offense on the continent. We averaged 38.7 points a game last year, second all-time in pro ball to the (1950) L.A. Rams. We lost our Grey Cup shot on a last-minute field goal because our defense was only No. 4.”

So the Argonauts don’t really need Ismail, they need defense, although McNall says that adding Ismail will improve the offense so much that it can overcome any defensive deficiency.

“This one person would make Canadian football a high-profile sport,” McNall said. “Like the Kings with Gretzky.”

Or, he suggested, like the New York Jets with Joe Namath, whose breathtaking $400,000 deal with showman-owner Sonny Werblin was a landmark, 1960s equivalent of Ismail’s projected $3 million in 1991.

The negative on Ismail as a football player is his size. NFL scouts say he stands under 5 feet 10 and weighs less than 175 pounds.

“He’s a great, great athlete who can take it all the way from any place on the field as a return man, halfback or wide receiver,” Jet General Manager Dick Steinberg said. “But ideally, a No. 1 should be bigger.”

Said Leigh Steinberg: “Ismail is brilliant, but you’d rather have a bigger man for the investment you have to make in a No. 1 today. Will he even be playing five years from now?”

That possibly bothers the Patriots more than the Argonauts, whose offer is for two years.

“The reason for (two years) is that if he decides then that he wants to try the NFL, we don’t want to stand in his way,” McNall said. “(At that time), his NFL opportunities will be the same as they are today, and he’ll have some (millions) in the bank.”

The Argonauts don’t, however, intend to pressure Ismail. “If his mind is set on the NFL, we don’t want to disrupt his career,” McNall said.