The Agent Dance: Ari Emanuel's Turkey Bowl
Hollywood types are so hypercompetitive that professional athletes can seem like Zoloft-abusing eunuchs by comparison, so the only thing surprising about this Reliable Source injury report for a Turkey Day pick-up football game is that only one player wound up in the hospital:
L.A. is a very dangerous place. If you go there, you run the risk of getting lured into a touch-football game with Tim McGraw , Faith Hill and Garry Shandling , and maybe tearing a ligament. Okay, maybe that wouldn't happen to most of us — but it did happen to Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) when he took his family to visit his brother, agent Ari Emanuel , for Thanksgiving. The game, organized by Ari's pal, actor-director Peter Berg, also included former superagent Mike Ovitz . The congressman says he slid on one knee to catch a long pass from country crooner McGraw; on the next play, his knee just collapsed. So: football with Faith? "She's a darn good player," he said. "And McGraw's got a good arm — I felt lucky catching the pass."
Luckily, even with two high-powered agents (well, one high powered agent and one Ovitz) involved, not a single player was stabbed in the back while running a flag pattern. But an operative did whisper to us that Emanuel "power-slammed" Shandling to the ground following a disputed play, making it sound like the game wasn't a whole lot more civilized than a typical day at the Endeavor office.