"Kerry Wood said it took 15 minutes to get a deal done with Cubs President Theo Epstein after more than two months of negotiating and recent reports he was resigned to leaving.

"I thought it was three different teams in about a week," Wood said. "I made it the right one."

Wood, 34, agreed to a one-year, $3 million deal Friday with a $3 million club option in 2013 and no buyout. He said he was waiting for a call to take a physical with another team he declined to reveal, having already agreed to terms.

"I'm not sure if (the Cubs) knew," Wood said of the other deal. "I wasn't relaying what I was doing to anybody, but there were definitely options out there and I was close. ? I wasn't ready to go, but I was to that point where it was definitely a possibility."

In a bit of staged dramatics, Wood was the last player introduced at the opening ceremony of the Cubs Convention, about a half-hour after Epstein told reporters, "If you start making baseball decisions based on PR, you're losing."

But Epstein already knew the deal was done. The Cubs wanted to keep it secret and announce it to the crowd -- the best PR move they could've made.

"There were some scary moments along the way," Epstein said. "But the communications opened up a lot, both ways, toward the end, and that helped get a deal done. It wasn't so much a fundamental change at all.""