I can’t bear to write about the Chargers again this week so let’s talk about recruiting and college football instead. Since the Chargers are playing the Pittsburgh Steelers, let’s visit Pittsburgh circa 1985.

With the end of senior season, the bowl games, and all-star games, now comes the process of choosing an agent for college players and of course choosing a college for high school athletes. Let’s take a little trip down memory lane when girls were dressing like Madonna and smelled of Jene Nate body spray. Boys were wearing gold rope chains and rocking Journey cassettes through Trans-am T-Tops. It was 1985. Rocky had just restored American pride by beating Ivan Drago for the Heavy Weight Championship in Rocky IV, and it was also my senior year in high school.

Recruiting was much different then with no cell phones, social media or internet. Money was abundant to buy players and that practice carried on through college. I never really took money of any significance. Sure, I took twenty bucks here and there but never was bought, or I would’ve ended up at Georgia or Florida State, not Pitt. That’s not to say there weren’t plenty of offers. I was a high school All-American, and in the mid 1980’s southern schools were tripping over themselves to recruit All-American “white” defensive players. In the end, I chose Pitt because it was a city school. I had grown up in the city and felt comfortable there.

I think the second I arrived at Pitt I regretted that decision. They didn’t play the defense I was accustomed to and thrived in, but hey no one looked at that kind of thing back then – or at least I didn’t. As fate would have it, the entire staff was fired that year and a new staff was hired. John Fox, the current Denver Broncos head coach and Castle Park high school alum, was hired to run the defense and my bad decision to choose Pitt was vindicated by his arrival.

With John Fox’s new system, I began to flourish again after a brief hiatus as a scrub. I was a three time All- Conference pick as well as All-American. With all that new found attention came some of the same issues from high school recruiting, although this time it was a little more adult and serious in nature.

Pitt was sort of the Roswell New Mexico of agent player recruitment at the time, with four or five of our players signing with Norbie Walters, a Gambino crime family associate that was bank rolled by none other than John Gotti. Their scam was the Mob would provide up-front cash, and these guys would descend onto campus with cash, cars cocaine, and promises. A player would sign and in essence lose all of his money in short fashion. It wasn’t just the mob in those days.

Boxing was also trying to get a piece of this unregulated gold mine. Junior Seau and I were flown first class, put up in a suite in Atlantic City, and sat ring side at an Evander Holyfield fight by Lou and Dan Duva, the boxing promoters. They wanted to get into football representation.

1987 was met at Pitt by another first – Craig “Iron Head” Heyward was the first underclassman to leave school early to enter the draft. This turned our coach at the time, Mike Gottfried, into a one man crusade against agents, even though our linebacker coach, Sal Sunseri, had a brother Gusty that was an agent and a fixture on campus at the time.
These were the late 1980’s when there was no Players Union or agent registration under any governing body. Names like Reverend, Tank, and Big Daddy were standard agent names of the time. If I saw Boss Hogg from the Dukes of Hazzard walk through the door at the time, it wouldn’t have surprised me. These were the early days of Wild West style, where anything went. Sadly what ultimately “went” was the players’ money.

For the most part these practices are a thing of the past, but I still found myself smiling as I wrote about them. Was it embarrassment or nostalgia? Who knows and really who cares? The important thing is I didn’t have to write about the Chargers losing last week, and getting ready to travel to Pittsburgh to lose again.