The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (10 page)

At Carson, the QB and his private coach won over their new teammates as Klein amassed more eye-popping stats, leading the Colts to a city championship and the state title. Then, after football season, Klein transferred in the winter to Santa Monica High, where he played on the volleyball team. “It was made out to be such a big deal,” Danny Klein recalled. “It was, like, here is this rich father who would do anything to make his kid a better quarterback. But it was a good experience for Perry, and now they’re all doing it, transferring to different high schools because they think it will make them better.

“If he was a violinist and wanted to go to a special high school to get better at violin, would anybody be upset? No one would care. It really upset me. One day my wife was in the Malibu market, and some lady who had a son who knew of Perry came up to her. She started chastising my wife for taking him away from Palisades High School.”

As keen as Clarkson’s marketing sense was, it took some advice from Klein’s father, a self-made man who never went to college and had made a fortune in the scrap-metal business, to open the former quarterback’s eyes to something bigger.

“We were talking, and he pulls down his bifocals to the tip of his nose and goes, ‘By the way, you’re missing a great opportunity here.’ ” Clarkson thought the elder Klein was talking about some potential real estate boom, since they’d spoken about that before.

“ ‘Look,’ Klein continued, ‘there are [private] tennis coaches and golf coaches and pitching coaches. You could be the first quarterback coach.’ ”

Given all the potential Danny Kleins out there—the rich dads of Southern California—Clarkson’s mind kicked into high gear. He took a leave of absence from Black Angus, because he knew he was on to something bigger in the football world. Clarkson didn’t need to put any ads in the newspaper or spring for a TV commercial. The visibility of Perry Klein in high school worked better than any advertisement Clarkson could’ve had. Klein accepted a scholarship to Cal, while word of the coach’s impact on his protégé had other parents scrambling for Steve Clarkson’s number.

“The college coaches helped me the most,” said Clarkson. “They’d run into a high school kid at their camp, and they’d recommend me.”

In 1994, Klein, who also transferred in college (to Division II C.W. Post) was the third quarterback selected in the NFL Draft, behind Heath Shuler and Trent Dilfer. By then, Clarkson’s QB business, the Air 7 quarterback academy, was booming. Eager parents saw Steve Clarkson as their sons’ ticket to stardom, and Clarkson saw many of them as his ticket to a lavish lifestyle. Several of his pupils had dads worth eight and nine figures. Clarkson was raking in $700 an hour and had some parents paying him $10,000 a month for private
lessons for their sons. Many of those kids he trained did blossom into college quarterbacks. Later, one of his clients, Kevin Feterik’s dad, not only funded hundreds of hours of tutoring but was also the subject of rampant speculation that he bought a CFL team, the Calgary Stampeders, so his son could play quarterback in the pros.

The zest to cultivate a budding NFL quarterback taps into the vanity of many, especially the type A big-business leader conditioned for success. For some dads, syncing up with the top quarterback guru for the teenage QB—or preteen QB—is akin to a business student’s getting accepted to Wharton or a journalism student going to Medill. Only there is no accreditation for this education. Instead, they have to sort through hype, hope, and hearsay.

“The QB dads are like nomads in the desert,” said Rick Neuheisel, the former head coach at UCLA, Washington, and Colorado, who started out his coaching career at UCLA in the late ’80s and early ’90s. “If you tell ’em there’s water, they’re gonna drink it. They want their sons so badly to have the instruction, so if you have any sales ability at all, you can make them believe they have to know what you know.

“All you have to do is tell ’em, ‘Hey, he’s got
It.
’ And they’ll keep spending. And spending. And spending. That’s all it takes.”

Greg Biggins, a former personal trainer based in Southern California who spent more than a dozen years handling playing personnel for the Nike Football Training Camps and also was on the Elite 11 selection committee for thirteen years, says the Little League father is tame compared to the quarterback dad. Biggins says he’s been offered $5,000 by some fathers just to rate their kids higher. (Biggins didn’t take the money, he said.)

“The nuttiest species on the planet is the dad of a quarterback,” said Biggins. “He is the most myopic. They have such blinders on toward their son. If the kid’s 5′10″, it doesn’t matter, because, well, Drew Brees is 5′10″. But these guys are paying an expert to ‘like’ their kid, so that gives them even more reinforcement.”

Many parents, eyeing Division I dreams for their sons—and their families—schlep their boys to one college summer camp after another, sometimes hitting six campuses in seven days. In some cases,
the dads seem to want it a lot more than the kid does. The dads hope their kid will pick up a few key tips from famous college coaches and get noticed in these mini auditions in hopes of landing a big-time scholarship or at least generate some recruiting buzz, but they usually just end up with a half dozen T-shirts. Steve Clarkson, though, had history on his side … at least enough history to make things very tempting for a lot of dads.

ANDY BARK
’
S BUSINESS
,
WHICH
became Student Sports, Inc., spread into sports camps. After the 1990 high school season, Bob Johnson, a veteran Orange County, California, high school coach and onetime Fresno State quarterback, told Bark he was retiring so he could watch his sons, both QBs, play college football. The older, Bret, had been a starter at UCLA before transferring to Michigan State, while Rob was set to play football at USC.

When Johnson asked Bark if he had any work he could give him, Bark offered him a part-time gig as the lead instructor at the weekend camps he had scheduled throughout the football off-season. He also gave the salty coach some advice: “You had [Stanford quarterback Steve] Stenstrom and your sons; you ought to coach QBs, because this Clarkson guy is killing it.”

Johnson had amassed a lot of clout among college coaches for building a powerhouse in Orange County at El Toro High. He was up front about planning on going back to coaching in a few years, but he wasn’t sure if it would be back at the high school level or in college.

“We were a really small, lean option—we couldn’t pay Bob very much,” said Bark. “Two things naturally came to my mind: Steve Clarkson. Kids need it [coaching]. My deal was, when they’re eighteen and off to college, it’s too late.”

By the early ’90s, Bark had emerged as perhaps the most influential person in the Southern California youth sports scene, both through his publications and the camps, combines, and 7-on-7 tournaments he was running. Back in the ’70s, when he served as ball boy for the USC football team, Bark first noticed the advantage a budding quarterback could gain from growing up around high-level coaching.
He saw it firsthand with Trojan QB Pat Haden, who was best friends with J. K. McKay, his go-to receiver who happened to be the son of USC head coach John McKay. During Haden’s senior year of high school at Bishop Amat, he even lived with the McKays. “I saw [that the] coach’s kids had a huge advantage,” Bark said. “My dad was a surfer. I’m not complaining. But I realized, the earlier you’re exposed to it, the quicker you make decisions, and the more reps you get, your feet are better. Your release is better.”

That message was reinforced for Bark when then-University of Miami offensive coordinator Gary Stevens in the late ’80s told him that the way the college game was structured, with the NCAA limiting coaches to only twenty hours of practice a week, it was too much of a time crunch to develop a quarterback. “Unless you’ve got Bernie Kosar, who is basically smarter than the coaches, you can’t make up for your lack of fundamentals,” Stevens said.

“He told me, ‘You gotta get your drops early. You really can’t get ’em up to speed in twenty hours,’ ” Bark recalled. “ ‘You need to come in as an eighteen-year-old ready to learn your plays and be a dude in the locker room.’ We’d write about it, but I’d keep thinking, ‘Where do I go to get this coaching? My high school coach is still running the Veer.’ ”

Bark also researched that more than 40 percent of NFL quarterbacks were the sons of either former quarterbacks or coaches, a number that was staggeringly high to the former college receiver. But the more Bark examined it, the more it made sense—and the more it bothered him.

“You shouldn’t have to be a coach’s son or a player’s son to be a quarterback,” he said.

Bark recruited Johnson to handle the fundamental work at his roving camps. He also provided Johnson with the player who would eventually become his most successful protégé—a tall fourteen-year-old named Carson Palmer. At the time, the big seventh-grader’s dad, Bill Palmer, a successful Orange County financial planner, called Bark, asking for advice on developing his son, who he thought had a good arm and lots of potential. Bark mentioned a couple of viable options: Steve Clarkson, but that would probably mean a ninety-minute
drive each way; and Bob Johnson, who four years later helped turn Carson Palmer into one of the country’s biggest recruits in 1997 and a future Heisman Trophy winner for USC. By 1999, when Bark created the Elite 11, a week-long quarterback “campetition,” Johnson was installed as the head instructor, which over time certainly elevated his “guru” status as Clarkson’s brand was flowering in the grassroots football world.

“Steve always tried to figure out a way to scale himself,” said Bark. “Bob didn’t care about scaling his stuff at all. He charged $20 for a couple of hours. He liked being in the limelight as the Quarterback Guru.”

The competition among Clarkson and Johnson and their protégés created an awkward dynamic with some residual effects. A few Clarkson protégés supposedly steered clear of the Elite 11 because they didn’t want to be coached by Johnson for a week—out of loyalty to their coach. Another Clarkson QB approached one of the Elite 11 coaches, Yogi Roth, and asked whether changing his personal QB coach would “help me with the Elite 11, since I know you guys don’t really like him.” (Roth, a former USC assistant, told him no and not to worry about it but was stunned a kid would be so direct about the tension.)

Clarkson also had a pipeline into arguably the most fertile QB factory in the country, Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana, located right in Johnson’s backyard in Orange County. Clarkson began working with Matt Leinart when he was a fourteen-year-old freshman after the Monarchs coaches connected the two. Clarkson also groomed future Mater Dei stars Colt Brennan, a Heisman Trophy finalist at the University of Hawaii, and Matt Barkley before he went off to be the four-year starter at USC.

“Steve’s whole deal is, he made average guys good, and good guys very good,” said Bark. “And he generated hype and sizzle. [Mater Dei head coach] Bruce Rollinson doesn’t let anyone touch his athletes except Steve Clarkson.”

In Northern California, another onetime college QB, Roger Theder, also got involved in the private quarterback coaching game.
Theder was older than Clarkson and Johnson and had a richer coaching pedigree. As an assistant at Stanford, he had coached Jim Plunkett to consecutive Rose Bowls and a Heisman Trophy; at Cal, he had developed Steve Bartkowski into the NFL’s first overall pick in the 1975 draft, and later he helped make unheralded Jeff Garcia from San José State into a future NFL star.

“I drive a Honda Prelude station wagon, the same car that I drove for some twenty years,” said Theder, when asked if he thought his approach to the business was similar to Clarkson’s. “I don’t think we’re opposite. My goals are different. My goal is just to make the kid a better quarterback. I think he [Clarkson] wants to make a lot of money.”

By all accounts, including his own, Clarkson had.

Google Steve Clarkson’s name and you’ll find a litany of jaw-dropping monetary amounts parents have paid him at different times over the past two decades, depending on the frequency and time he’s invested with a kid. A 2004
New York Times
story said that tutoring for a year at Clarkson’s camps cost up to $60,000. In a 2008
Men’s Journal
story on Clarkson, which detailed how he trained, among others, the sons of Will Smith, Wayne Gretzky, and Snoop Dogg, Clarkson got $700 an hour for private sessions, with a minimum commitment of a year. (Clarkson pointed out to me that he’s also coached the sons of FedEx founder Fred Smith and talk-show legend Larry King … yes, that Larry King. Both men have sons named Cannon.) In a 2009
Philadelphia Daily News
story, Clarkson’s “cheapest” deal was $625 a month, which included forty-eight sessions a year but no actual one-on-one instruction. Clarkson told me his best bargain deal was now actually $650 a month, which included thirty-six sessions a year, not forty-eight.

That deal was separate from what Clarkson made on the private-instruction side, where he had about two dozen quarterbacks, he said, adding that he had clients nationwide and in Germany, England, and Japan. According to the 2009
Philadelphia Daily News
story, the starting price for his private instruction was $8,000 a month. And that didn’t include the two-day evaluation that each young QB must
pass, which costs an additional $3,000 plus traveling expenses. Clarkson steered clear of getting into too many specifics about his rates.

A friend of Clarkson told a story about how the private QB coach spent much of his fall of 2005. Clarkson would get on a plane on Friday (usually from Los Angeles) and fly to Philadelphia, where he coached a ten-year-old quarterback. He’d call plays in the kid’s game Saturday morning and then fly to Boston later in the day to review film and work with Harvard QB Richie Irvin, the son of a Southern California attorney. Then on Sunday morning, he’d board the first flight up to San Francisco so he could go over the high school film of a Bay area quarterback, Nate Montana, the son of NFL legend Joe Montana. Clarkson’s friend said the coach was making around $75,000 a week for the road swing.