Associated Press
Celebrating Super Bowl championships has become an annual tradition for NFL coaches and executives agent Bob LaMonte.
He’s going for seven in a row when Kansas City plays San Francisco on Sunday.
LaMonte, who represents Chiefs general manager Brett Veach, coach Andy Reid and defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, has represented the winning team’s head coach, general manager or top executive each year since Philadelphia beat New England on Feb. 4, 2018.
His streak began with two clients: then-Eagles coach Doug Pederson and GM Howie Roseman. It continued with Nick Caserio, the vice president of player personnel for the Patriots, who beat the Rams the next year.
Reid won his first Super Bowl with the Chiefs after the 2019 season. LaMonte represents Buccaneers GM Jason Licht, whose team prevented Kansas City from repeating following the COVID-19-impacted 2020 season.
It was Reid, Veach and the Chiefs again last year over Roseman and the Eagles.
One of the cool perks is LaMonte’s clients give him a Super Bowl ring.
“It’s a nice thing. I don’t deserve them,” he said. “But, my name’s on them so I gotta keep them.”
LaMonte also has four World Series rings, two from Toronto and two from St. Louis. He represented Blue Jays pitchers Dave Stieb and Pat Hentgen and Cardinals pitcher Chris Carpenter.
That’s quite a career for a man who considers himself an academic more than an agent. The 79-year-old LaMonte never took a law or business class and was a high school history teacher before one of his former students, Rich Campbell, asked for representation in 1981.
LaMonte and his wife, Lynn, started Professional Sports Representation, Inc., as a part-time venture and he’s negotiated over $3 billion in contracts over the past four decades. He currently represents seven head coaches and seven general managers. That’s a whopping 22% of all the people in those positions.
“We’re a 100% referral company,” LaMonte said. “So when you’re a referral company, you know you’re an outlier. No one else is a referral company so if you don’t call us, then we don’t have clients.”
But LaMonte doesn’t take on just anyone. He interviews potential clients.
“The beauty of that is they come to us for help. We train how they interview,” LaMonte said. “So when we get people an interview, we’re expecting them to get the job. … It’s ironic we have three of the four youngest coaches in the NFL, Sean McVay, Brian Callahan and Zac Taylor. We’re very blessed we have very young, positive and strong clients. But what’s nice about is they’re interested.”
McVay was 26 when he called LaMonte.
“We’re very rigid that we don’t take anybody under 30 — and he called and said just give me a chance,” LaMonte recalled. “We interviewed him at the combine and I said: ‘We’d love to work with you.’ Well, we usually can pick him, and he was a good one.”
Former Packers and Seahawks coach/GM Mike Holmgren was LaMonte’s first NFL head coach. At the time, LaMonte says the average head coach made $295,000 per year. That average annual salary is up to $7.5 million.
“Once you break the glass ceiling, you can turn that into things you want to,” LaMonte said.
LaMonte’s success in this business is unprecedented. He’s been approached by bigger companies with offers to buy his agency over the years and has turned them down.
For a man with Sicilian roots, it’s always been about family.
“You always have to be in a position where you listen because you never know but the reality of it is what we do is such an outlier that it doesn’t exist anywhere in sports,” LaMonte said. “So if you don’t recruit, how are you possibly going to survive if you don’t get clients? And for them, and I would be the same way if I were them, it’s recruit or die. They spend 99% of their time recruiting. And that was the key that we had. We were small and we grew and we grew bigger. And then, we won six straight Super Bowls and hoping to get another one this next week.
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Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
