A Sports Agent in the NFL

There is a moment in the Tom Cruise movie, Jerry Maguire, where Cruise's rival, a predatory sports agent with the ethical code of a stepped-on scorpion, glibly assures a promising young athlete that there is nothing he is not prepared to do to make the boy happy. "I will kill, maim, rape and pillage for you," the agent solemnly swears.

Which is close to the public's perception of agents, slick-talking wheeler-dealers who make their living off the sweat of their celebrated but fiscally hapless protTgTs. "Sharks in suits" is how the eponymous Cruise character describes the profession in the movie and, hey, he is one of them (Snider, 1997, p. M6).

As professional athletics has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry, where star players can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per game, agents have become, to many fans, the scourge of the sports world--responsible for skyrocketing salaries, high ticket prices, even the won-loss records of their favorite teams.

The image of the brash, overbearing agent, sniping at team officials, insisting his client is terribly underappreciated and horribly underpaid, has been part of the American sports culture since the 1960s when athletes, in increasing numbers, began hiring representatives to do their bi

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asted and prayed in their respective homes for three days. Gilbert, who lives in Moon Township, a Pittsburgh suburb, is a born-again Christian and deacon at Sound the Alarm Ministries, a church in nearby Aliquippa, Pa. Gilbert's squabble with the Redskins began in the summer of 1996, several months after the club acquired him in a trade with the St. Louis Rams. Redskins General Manager Charley Casserly said he offered Gilbert a five-year deal that averaged $3.4 million per season with a $4.5 million signing bonus--an offer that was rejected. Sunseri demanded $5 million a year with a $10 million bonus. Casserly rejected the demand. In Sunseri's view, the 6-foot-5, 315-pound Gilbert is a victim of the NFL's collective bargaining agreement between team owners and players, which allows each club to have one "franchise" player on its roster. Under the agreement, a "franchise" player cannot test the free agent market, but his club must pay him, at minimum, a salary equal to the average of the top five players' at his position. In February, the Redskins made Gilbert their "franchise" player. Dismayed, Gilbert and his wife, Nicole, left their rented house in Northern Virginia, took their 7-year-old son, Deshaun, out of a Virginia school
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1631
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)