Demoff and wife Patti are joined by Dan Marino (left) and John Elway. Elway remains a client while Marino stays in frequent contact as well.NFL
No doubt the 1983 NFL draft was the biggest year for Marvin Demoff, as he represented both John Elway and Dan Marino, who would go on to hall of fame careers and this year be selected among the 100 greatest players and coaches in the NFL’s 100-year history.
For an agent, the quarterbacks presented completely different challenges. Elway was the only No. 1 NFL draft pick ever to choose to play another sport — albeit briefly — over football. Marino had been compared to Elway as potentially the top quarterback in the draft, but was falling fast, based on erroneous rumors.
Elway was a football star at Granada Hills High School in the Los Angeles area before he went to Stanford. He was also a star baseball player who was drafted by the Yankees in the 1981 MLB draft, when he was a college junior.
The Baltimore Colts held the first pick in the 1983 NFL draft, and Elway and his father, Jack, the head football coach at San Jose State, didn’t want to sign with the team because they didn’t like the disciplinarian style of head coach Frank Kush.
The Elways interviewed a half-dozen agents, including Demoff, in Jack’s office at San Jose State.
“I remember the meeting pretty vividly,” Demoff said. “I said, ‘There is really no reason you can’t do something creative. You have the best situation to try and do something different.’”
No player drafted No. 1 in the NFL had ever refused to play for a team, and the drama leading up to the draft and surrounding publicity was a lot for a 22-year-old to handle.
“I was a young man but an old kid,” Elway said. “What got me through is the fact I had both of their support. I had dad’s support and Marvin’s support and we were all on the same page as to what the game plan was going to be and how we approached it.”
Demoff had made a deal with Kush and Colts general manager Ernie Accorsi that the team would trade the pick before the draft. The Cowboys, Chargers, Raiders and Patriots were among the teams that tried to make pre-draft trades.
“They said they would trade him … but no one told that to [Colts owner Robert] Irsay,” Demoff said.
Indeed on draft day, the Colts selected Elway in the first few seconds of their 15-minute time limit. That night Elway announced on television he was signing with the New York Yankees. Demoff said Yankees owner George Steinbrenner knew there was a good chance he’d lose Elway to the NFL, but agreed to do a deal anyway because it was the only chance he had to land him.
“I always remember Steinbrenner in his office had a board, and he opens it up and John Elway’s in right field. And there was a guy named Don Mattingly at first base,” Demoff related. Elway also played in the outfield in college and in the Yankees’ farm system.
Demoff asked Steinbrenner what the board represented. “He said, ‘Oh, it’s the 1985 Yankees.’ He says, ‘John will be a really good baseball player,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, but he’ll be a hall of fame football player.’”
Meanwhile, the Broncos told Demoff the day of the draft that they had tried to trade for Elway, but were unsuccessful. The Broncos related that if Elway was intent on playing baseball instead of playing for the Colts, they would try again to trade for him. A week later, the Colts traded their rights to Elway for Denver’s 1983 and 1984 first-round picks and other considerations.
Marino, meanwhile, had a very different draft day and agent experience. He met Demoff at the Hula Bowl in 1983 and felt an instant level of comfort with him, Marino said. He told his parents that’s who he wanted.
“So I then called Marvin and he said he’d have to think about it. He actually didn’t say right away he’d represent me,” Marino said.
Demoff got permission from the Elways to represent Marino. Then he went to work on a false drug rumor that people were spreading about Marino. The rumor had sent his draft stock falling.
Demoff called Marino’s coach at the University of Pittsburgh, Foge Fazio, who told him, “They are 100 percent false rumors” because players had been tested, Demoff said. Demoff still doesn’t know where the rumors started. “I don’t think it was malicious,” he said. “I think it was just people being misinformed and gossip.”
Still, despite Demoff and Fazio talking to all of the then-28 NFL teams to give them accurate information, Marino almost fell out of the first round, going to the Dolphins at 27. But that year he led the AFC in passing yards as a rookie and the next year was MVP.
Many credit the 1983 draft with changing the course of the event because of the heightened drama around Elway and Marino. Six quarterbacks were taken in the first round that year. The ESPN “30 for 30” film “Elway to Marino,” which Demoff produced, was based in large part on the meticulous notes Demoff took at the time.
“One of the funny parts — and it kind of speaks to who my dad is, when they did the ‘30 for 30’ on him and they interviewed him, they spent about an hour with him just talking and at the end he volunteered to them, ‘By the way, I kept a diary and it had the notes,’” said son Kevin Demoff.
At the peak of their careers — both Elway and Marino were nine-time Pro Bowlers — people often argued who was better.
“I never tried to compare them; it’s just not the way I am,” Demoff said. “They have never asked me to this day what the other made.”
Thirty-seven years later, both Elway and Marino still talk to Demoff on a regular basis. And the two quarterbacks are friends as well.
