Marvin Demoff has built a reputation for cutting deals that can work for those on both sides of the table.Tony Florez

Marvin Demoff has been a trusted adviser and confidant to some of the biggest names in sports over a career that spans nearly 50 years.

And chances are, if you’re not an NFL or sports broadcasting insider, you’ve never heard of him.

The one-time public defender became an NFL agent in the early 1970s and built one of the greatest client lists of all time. With Pittsburgh Steelers safety Troy Polamalu’s election this year, Demoff has now represented 13 players in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Six clients were named to the NFL 100 All-Time Team. Two of them — quarterbacks John Elway and Dan Marino — were famously both taken in the first round of the 1983 draft.

Yet despite having so many high-profile clients, the publicity-shy Demoff has always shunned the spotlight. There are no grip-and-grin photos from past drafts. He has no Wikipedia page. And there have never been profiles of him claiming to be “the anti-agent,” although those who know him describe him that way.

“If you would Google, ‘Marvin Demoff would not return a phone call,’ you would have more hits than anything else,” said Kevin Demoff, Marvin’s son and the chief operating officer of the Los Angeles Rams.

Demoff has instead focused on building relationships and has established a reputation for getting deals done that can satisfy both sides of the table. Even if he forgoes the flash that often dominates the headline-grabbing sports agent business.

“They did not make ‘Jerry Maguire’ about Marvin Demoff,” said client Al Michaels. “A lot of agents think they were the model for it. Marvin is not.”

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The funny thing is, Demoff’s office is the office of a super agent. It’s on the Avenue of the Stars in the building that houses Hollywood powerhouse Creative Artists Agency. On the third floor, it looks out onto the Century Plaza Hotel, an L.A. landmark that is undergoing a $2.5 billion renovation.

The office contains all of the things you’d expect to see at a major sports agency, including signed footballs in glass cases and a big photo of the ESPN “30 for 30” documentary on the Elway and Marino draft. Still, such elements run counter to the personality of Demoff, who in a two-hour interview was polite, patient, soft-spoken, and self-deprecating.

Nowadays, many NFL agents count their success based on the number of first-round draft picks they’ve represented, but when you ask Demoff how many he’s had, he says he honestly doesn’t know. If you point out his qualities, Demoff will tell you about his defects.

“I don’t have much of an ego,” he said, before immediately coming back with, “I get angry … Oh, yeah, I get angry if I don’t get my way. I hold grudges.”

That side, Demoff said, is triggered when someone does something to hurt his clients or his family.

“See, I don’t have a problem with someone who doesn’t do the right thing because they don’t know any better,” Demoff said. “But if they know what’s right and they do something wrong … then I am not very forgiving,” he said.  

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Demoff is a Los Angeles native, which is unusual for Angelenos of his generation. He’s 77 and has lived all his life in the city.

His father was in the wholesale shoe business and his mother was a homemaker. Demoff attended Los Angeles High School, where he played basketball and tennis, and was awarded a scholarship to USC for his work on the debate team. However, since he was a child, he had wanted to go to UCLA, so that’s where he went and originally wanted to study accounting. “I like numbers, because they are agnostic.” A teacher later convinced him to change his major to political science.

He then went to Loyola Marymount Law School where, in the summer between his second and third year, he met the love of his life. Patti Demoff, who was attending Mills College in Oakland, was 18 years old and had stopped in a store in Los Angeles to buy shoes. “I was home for the summer and he supported himself from the time he was 15, all through law school — selling shoes,” Patti Demoff said.

Marvin and Patti Demoff have now been married for 51 years.

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Demoff was a key figure in the ESPN “30 for 30” film “Elway to Marino” that highlighted the 1983 NFL draft.Tony Florez

After law school, Demoff landed a job with the Los Angeles County Public Defender office. It was the late 1960s at a time of great awareness about civil rights.

“It was the best job I ever had,” Demoff said. “Our office at that time had a group of 800, 900 lawyers but you usually were in a group of 20 or 30. There was no money involved, so everybody worked well together for hopefully what we thought was right. Most of those cases were victimless crimes. Drug cases.”

That early work would one day guide his approach to deal-making as an agent since he learned the importance of remaining calm, even in tense negotiations. Getting emotional is a mistake. “When I was a trial lawyer, way back when, when I got angry at a police officer, I’d do my worst work,” he said. “I do believe it’s like dating or marriage or anything like that — the person least involved controls the situation.”

As Demoff gained more experience, he was assigned more serious cases, including murder trials, and found it was not something he wanted to do.

Demoff joined a swanky boutique law firm, but quit after only a short stint, saying he “detested” it. “I wasn’t smart enough to realize that if the offer was too good, the job was bad,” he said of the high-paying job he quit at the firm. 

He then started his own firm with some attorney friends and briefly represented women tennis players before in 1974 turning his attention to football players.

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“It wasn’t a complicated business,” Demoff said of his early days as an agent. “It wasn’t anything like it is now. There were not many people doing it.”

Demoff was in the agent business before Leigh Steinberg. At that time, the other agents representing football players included Jack Mills, who, with his son Tom Mills, now represents Cleveland Browns quarterback Baker Mayfield, and Howard Slusher, a flamboyant agent nicknamed “Agent Orange” for his personality and red hair. 

In the early 1970s, few players had agents, but Demoff was a pioneer in changing that. 

“Players were transitioning to agents,” said James Harris, the first African American to regularly start as a quarterback in the NFL and one of Demoff’s first clients. 

Harris, who played quarterback for the Buffalo Bills, Los Angeles Rams and San Diego Chargers from 1969 to 1981, like his teammates, had negotiated his own deals before signing with Demoff. “You and your teammates would be negotiating with the team, but you really didn’t know what to ask for and you didn’t know your value,” Harris said. 

Demoff started representing other Rams players and his work established a verified value of what teams were actually paying players, Harris said. “I don’t remember the numbers, but I know it was a lot better than me sitting across from the team and the team saying what they couldn’t pay me,” he said of his first contract handled by Demoff.

When Demoff got into the business, players were making $20,000 to $30,000 a year. “Lee Roy Jordan was making $50,000,” he said of the great Dallas Cowboys linebacker who was the 1973 NFC Defensive Player of the Year.  

Demoff started representing players for the NFL draft in 1975. His first client selected in the first round was cornerback Louis Wright, who was taken No. 17 overall by the Denver Broncos. Wright would go on to be a four-time, first-team All-Pro.

By 1983, Demoff had begun earning a reputation as a top agent in the business. That’s when he decided to go after a client he really wanted: John Elway.

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duced several creative concepts in NFL contracts, including voidable years. He also has set many financial records for clients, dating back to landing an unheard of $100,000 deal for Jack Youngblood in the 1970s.NFL

After representing Elway and Marino in the 1983 draft, Demoff continued to represent a stable of not only elite NFL players, but coaches and broadcasters. 

In addition to Shannon Sharpe and Al Michaels, Demoff counts Joe Buck and Gary Danielson among his clients. Many agents claim to be selective; Demoff really is. 

“I think for the most part he tries to represent good people,” Sharpe said. “He reads people very well. If you are not a good person, Marvin is not going to work with you. It’s as simple as that.”

During his heyday, Demoff represented between 30 and 40 players a year. The reason? “I’m a very bad delegator,” he said. “Very bad. It turned out in the mid-30s, I could do all the work, be on top of my work and have the relationships the way I wanted them to be.” 

In the 1980s and 1990s, Demoff would take on no more than five new clients a year. “Hopefully they were good players, but I could do three No. 1s, a third- and a 10th-round guy — because I liked them.”

Today, Demoff represents about 15 clients, mostly broadcasters. And his reputation is such that some of the biggest names in sports will open up to Demoff about issues they’re facing.

“There isn’t anything that he doesn’t know,” said Sharpe, who has been represented by Demoff for 23 years, first as a hall of fame tight end and later a broadcaster. Sharpe said he’s counted on Demoff for advice, both personal and professional, and has told him things that only his brother and sister know.

“My most painful things that I had to go through — he knows,” Sharpe said. “Marvin knows.” 

Carmen Policy, the former longtime general manager of the San Francisco 49ers, has a nickname for Demoff.

“Sometimes when I put a call in to him … I would say, ‘Is the Monsignor in?’” Policy related. “Monsignor is a position of the Catholic Church right below a bishop, so this would be a position where people would almost go to confession,” Policy said.

Michaels, who has been a Demoff client since 2008, said his brother, producer David Michaels, who is also a Demoff client, goes to Marvin’s office in Century City and literally lies down on his couch and talks. It’s kind of a joke, but it’s kind of serious, too, Michaels said.

“Look, the greatest thing is when you know somebody in your life and there are things that you can share — things that you don’t want out for anybody else’s ears,” Michaels said. “And it never, ever comes back to you, ever. And believe me, that is fairly rare in the representation business.”

Elway has been represented by Demoff since that 1983 draft to the present day. “He’s been like a second father to me,” he said. “My dad passed in ’01, so Marvin has been sort of like — as far as business — a great sounding board that my dad used to be. Especially with my job now, as [Broncos] GM. I will bounce different things off him.”

Elway says Demoff has the respect and trust of players and team personnel. Demoff’s humility may have a lot to do with that.

“He’s a guy who is under the radar but a guy you want to be around because of his intelligence and the brilliance that he has,” Elway said. “He has a great feel for people. He has a great feel for situations. And he’s really a deep thinker where you really trust everything you talk to him about.”

Marino represented himself for his broadcasting career, but called Demoff for advice. Nowadays, he stays in touch with Demoff and calls him regularly.

“Marvin is a true gentleman, but very low key,” Marino said. “He’s not looking for attention, but knowing that he’s probably the best at what he’s done who’s ever done it. You know what I mean? He doesn’t need that attention because he knows he’s really good at what he did.”

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Demoff takes a cautious approach to the agency business: what he says, what he does, the clients he represents, and the deals he negotiates. In the NFL, he’s known for his honesty. “You can only lose your integrity once,” he said. “You only have one reputation.”

“I don’t think I ever had a contract with Marvin; we just had a handshake,” Marino said. “I don’t think Marvin changed. You know, most great people don’t change. I think he is the same guy he was when I was 20 years old.”

Jon Miller, NBC Sports and NBCSN president of programming, has known Marvin and Patti Demoff for 30 years and says Marvin is honest, fair, respectful, tough and smart, and negotiates deals that are good for the client and good for the network. 

“Here is one of the things I think is really unique with Marvin and his current broadcasting clients: They all share great relationships with the networks that employ them,” Miller said. “And I think that is a real credit to the way Marvin negotiates the deal and the way that the networks communicate issues back and forth so there is never a problem beforehand. And Marvin would anticipate an issue beforehand, before it even becomes an issue.” 

Policy negotiated many NFL player contracts with Demoff in the 1980s and 1990s. “I probably raised my voice to him — certainly more so, by far, than he ever did to me,” he said. “And I can’t honestly recall an incident where he raised his voice to me.”

Harris said that in the 1970s, Demoff had the ability to get what the players wanted and still maintain a good relationship with the organization. “He had this legal pad and a sharp pencil and he would write down his ideas where you could see them and understand them.”

Decades later, he does the same thing. Sharpe said in his negotiations, Demoff writes down the pros and cons of any offer and then they talk it out.

Demoff has a way of getting what was good for the client not just personally, but professionally, Sharpe said. “If the client wants to stay in Denver, my job is to get him as much money as he possibly wants while staying in Denver. If my client wants to leave, then my job is to get him the most money and to get him to the best situation he possibly can — that’s how he sees it.” 

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Demoff credits his wife, Patti, for “98 percent” of his success. While he always worked hard, he was always home for dinner, realizing the importance of family time.

One of his first clients was quarterback Craig Morton. One night Tex Schramm, the longtime president and GM of the Cowboys, called Demoff because Dallas was trading him to the New York Giants. 

“And I said, “Can you call back in an hour, because we are watching ‘Rhoda’s Wedding?’” Demoff related. “He said, ‘I can’t because the trade deadline is in 20 minutes.’ So he got traded to the Giants.”

Agents are on the phone all the time and the Demoff house was no exception. He once had four phone lines and a fax machine in the house.

Demoff has two children: Allison (Demoff) Jacoby, who is his oldest, and Kevin. When they were in college, Demoff would still go to parents weekend, which was often on the same weekend as the NFL draft, and he would get extra phone lines in the hotel, Patti Demoff said. 

At home, the phone would ring all the time. “People would call in the middle of the night for bizarre reasons that were football-related or whatever and think nothing of it,” Patti said. “And I’d be like, ‘OK. No. There really needs to be a midnight cutoff.’” 

Kevin Demoff said his father went to all of his baseball and other games growing up. Jacoby said Demoff was a carpool dad, who drove her and other kids in the neighborhood to school every day. Jacoby, an attorney, has worked with Demoff since 1997.

Understanding the mystery of Demoff is not that complicated, his daughter said. “He cares about his work,” she said. “He cares about his family and he cares about his clients. But he really doesn’t care about the fame.”

These days, Kevin Demoff is increasingly becoming well-known and influential in the sports business, given his role with the Rams and the new SoFi Stadium under construction. 

Said the elder Demoff, “I am much happier people knowing me now as Kevin’s father, rather than him being my son.”

Demoff has devised a number of creative concepts in NFL contracts, including voidable years, which he did for quarterback client Rick Mirer. (The last years of the contract are void if a player hits certain targets.) 

He’s set many financial records for clients, including getting Jack Youngblood $100,000 when that was unheard of in the 1970s, and getting Marino a reported $9 million in the mid-1980s, which at the time was a record and was fully guaranteed.

At the end of the day, Demoff said, it’s not the contracts he’s most proud of. It’s the relationships that have lasted, some for 30 or 40 years.

“Every day I feel very fortunate.”