I know I do this on occasion but the subject of today’s blog is not going to be The NBA Finals (yawn); The Stanley Cup Finals (I plan to watch it all) or even Jim Tressel (I wrote a column you can read on WashingtonPost.com or on this blog).
I will add one thing to the Tressel column that there wasn’t space for (it will also run in tomorrow’s newspaper) because even though it isn’t directly connected to Tressel, it has some relevance in any discussion of big time college athletics.
I have no sympathy at all for Tressel or for Gordon Gee or Gene Smith—who, as I wrote in the column—should both be fired too at the very least for complete incompetence. But I also think we should keep things in perspective a little bit.
Ohio State is getting fried—justifiably—for allowing its program to run amok and then for trying to cover up clear violations. But why is it that almost NO ONE around the country is nailing Notre Dame for the cavalier manner in which it handled the death of Declan Sullivan?
Please don’t tell me you buy into Father John Jenkins blanket, “we’re all guilty,” press release. Really? If everyone is guilty where is the list of those fired or at least disciplined—starting with Jenkins and then going on down to the athletic director (who claimed there was ‘nothing unusual,’ in the weather conditions minutes before Sullivan’s tower came crashing down) to the head football coach who insisted on practicing outdoors on a day when there were wind warnings all over the Midwest; to whoever was responsible for not ordering Sullivan to stay off the tower—even if he was willing, though apparently terrified, to go up there?
No one was fired. Jenkins should have added a sentence at the end of his statement if he was being intellectually honest about how he felt that said: “Now let’s get back to the important work of figuring out how to beat Navy!”
Jenkins strikes me as a complete fraud. Can you imagine him refusing to meet with the family of the girl who committed suicide shortly after filing a report alleging sexual assault against a Notre Dame football player? He was acting on the advice of his lawyers. Where in the vows Jenkins took, I wonder, does it say: “your lawyer’s advice comes before comforting those involved in a tragedy?” Meeting with the family would not have been an admission of guilt; only an admission that he cared about people who were suffering.
Can’t have that. The lawyers told him so.
I can’t wait for the fall when all the TV apologists will tell us what a wonderful, caring place and nurturing place Notre Dame is. I will keep an air sickness bag handy should I happen to encounter a Notre Dame game while flipping channels. You can bet I won’t actually WATCH one. (Go ahead you Irish fans, pile on and tell me how awful I am for criticizing such a wonderful place. Can’t wait.)
Let me move on to a different sort of Irishman. His name was Peter Francis O’Malley. He died suddenly on Saturday at the age of 72 of a heart attack. Peter O’Malley wasn’t a friend of mine but I considered him a worthy adversary.
He was a political power broker in Maryland, a lot of his base being in Prince George’s County, the place that was once home to The Washington Bullets and Washington Capitals and is now home to The Washington Redskins. O’Malley was close friends with Abe Pollin and was an ‘advisor,’ to most of the important Democratic politicians in Prince George’s and to many others throughout the state. One of his many protégés was Steny Hoyer, now the minority whip in The House of Representatives. It was also O’Malley who played a key role in helping push through the legislation that got The Capital Centre built in about 15 minutes back in the mid-1970s.
I first encountered him when I began covering Prince George’s County. One of the first things everyone involved in politics out there told me was, “you have to get to know Pete O’Malley.”
I took their advice. I got to know him. It wasn’t as if he became one of my most valued sources—Laney Hester, the head of the police union was BY FAR my most important source—but he educated me on the county’s political history; told me who was important to know and who wasn’t and always took my calls or returned them quickly.
When I moved up to cover the state legislature he remained someone important for me to know. During the 1983 legislative session, a couple of Prince George’s County legislators decided to introduce a bill that would force Abe Pollin to pay the county’s amusement tax (nine-and-a-half percent if I remember right) from which he had been exempt. The county had waved the tax after Pollin had threatened to fold the Capitals because of red ink a couple of years earlier.
Since the bill directly affected only Prince George’s, it had to be voted on by the county’s delegation before being sent to the floor of The House of Delegates. Early on a Tuesday morning, prior to the weekly meeting of the local delegation, one of O’Malley’s ‘people,’ could be seen going from office to office. He had a message from Pete: kill the bill. They did—that morning. When I began asking questions, several legislators readily said that O’Malley had made it clear he wanted the bill dead so the bill was dead. It would not be introduced again.
I called O’Malley that morning and left a message telling him what I was writing for the next day. It was the first time he ever failed to call me back. The story ran on A1 of the paper, more as an object lesson in how to exert political power than anything else.
That morning, O’Malley did call me. “We’re supposed to have lunch next Monday,” he said. “I’m canceling.”
“Oh did something come up?”
“No. I just don’t have time to have lunch with the likes of you.”
I had heard in the past about O’Malley’s volcanic temper. This was the first time I had been exposed to it first hand. “Pete, was there anything in the story that wasn’t true? Did I call you to comment?”
“That’s not the point. The point is you didn’t HAVE to write the story that way but you CHOSE to write it that way.”
“Yes I did. And I think I wrote the right story.”
“Good. Tell that to the person you have lunch with next Monday.”
O’Malley forgave me, but not until I was out of politics and back covering sports. And he forgave me in his uniquely O’Malley way. After I’d written a story on Jim Phalen, the legendary basketball coach at Mt. St. Mary’s—his alma mater—he wrote me a note about how much he had enjoyed the piece. And then he added: “I think you belong in sports. The better side of you comes out when you are working there as opposed to politics.”
I passed that along to some of his political friends who agreed it was pure O’Malley: I’m going to give you a compliment, but remind you that I’m still smarter than you.
I’ve had the chance to know a lot of people in a lot of different walks of life. As anyone who reads this blog, I tend to be very black-and-white in my feelings about people even though I try very hard to stand back from my biases—or at least recognize them—when I write. At the very least I KNOW the biases exist.
Peter O’Malley was different. He wasn’t a friend and he wasn’t an enemy. I certainly respected him but probably not as much as he thought I should have respected him. He could be difficult and he could be helpful. But he was never, ever un-interesting. I’m truly sorry for his family that he is gone so quickly and so prematurely. He deserved a long retirement. He worked very hard for a long time to get there.
Showing posts with label Abe Pollin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Abe Pollin. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Discussing Abe Pollin After His Passing; Wishing Everyone a Happy Thanksgiving
Abe Pollin died yesterday. I realize to most of the country his death is not that big a deal. He was 85 and he had been sick for a long time. He was the owner of an NBA team that hasn’t been a serious factor in the league for most of the last 30 years. His Wizards, in fact, have won ONE playoff series since 1988.
Here in Washington though, Pollin’s death was a huge story—which is as it should be. It was Pollin who brought the NBA and the NHL to Washington in the 1970s and Pollin who spent $220 million of his own money to build Verizon Center in downtown. To look at the thriving area around the building now you would be hard-pressed to understand that it was completely burnt-out, practically a ghost down before Pollin opened the arena 12 years ago.
So, it is fair to say that Pollin was responsible for changing the quality of life in his hometown. When he brought the (then) Bullets and Capitals to suburban DC in the 1970s the nation’s capitol had ONE professional sports team—the Redskins. Baseball didn’t come back until 2005 and by then the Redskins were in control of arguable the worst owner in the history of sports.
Pollin made plenty of mistakes and he has to take at least some of the responsibility for the Wizards mediocrity (he changed the name in 1997 when the team moved downtown because he didn’t like the connotation of the word, ‘Bullets,’ in the city which, at the time, had the highest murder rate in the country). But he really did try to do the right things—he worked tirelessly for numerous charities and, unlike the owner of the Redskins, never tried to take bows for doing good.
(Let me pause here to explain that a bit further. Not long after Dan Snyder bought the Redskins he called me, upset because I had been critical of him for firing long-time employees left-and-right after taking over the team, including a public relations assistant who had been there for about 30 years.
“Do you have something against Children’s Hospital?” he asked me.
“WHAT?” I said. Children’s is one of the best pediatric hospitals in the country and, in fact, my son had gone through hernia surgery there and the people in the hospital had been fabulous from start to finish.
“I just thought maybe you were attacking me because I give a lot of money to Children’s Hospital.”
“First of all Dan, I would never attack someone for giving money to any charity. Second, I’m attacking you—if that’s what you want to call it—because I think you’ve treated people badly. Third, did you really just ask me that?”
He changed tactics—slightly. “You don’t know me well enough to criticize me. You don’t know how much money I give to charity.”
“Dan, I don’t CARE how much money you give to charity. Rich people SHOULD give money to charity. I know people a lot less wealthy than you who I bet give a much higher percentage of their income to charity than you. But that doesn’t matter. The fact that you would even bring it up makes me think less of you, not more.”
We have not been good friends since.)
The point is, Pollin would never in a million years have done that. He might pick up the phone to tell you he hated something you wrote. In fact, he bought full page ads in The Washington Post criticizing Post columnists for criticizing him. He once call me FURIOUS because I had called The Capital Centre, “the worst building in the world.” He got me to admit that perhaps I hadn’t been in every building in the world. There was no mention during the conversation of his charity work.
I actually got to know Abe while I was covering Maryland politics. The Cap Centre was in Prince George’s County in Maryland and Abe and his political cohort Peter O’Malley had twisted a lot of arms to get the building up and running and to get the tax breaks they felt they needed to make it work. A lot of the local pols didn’t like O’Malley and thus didn’t like Pollin.
I liked Pollin. Actually my dad knew him better than I did because he and his wife Irene spent a lot of time at The Kennedy Center when my dad was running it and were major patrons of all the arts in town. In the mid-80s, I was asked to do a piece on Pollin for The Washington Post Magazine. He agreed to talk to me at length and we had a long session over dinner in his private dining room at Cap Centre one night.
I wrote what I thought—and what most people thought—was a very favorable, though fair piece. It talked about all the good he had done and all that he had accomplished but also talked about some of the controversies he’d been involved in.
On the Sunday that the story ran I was at a Caps playoff game and ran into Steny Hoyer, who is now the House majority leader. Hoyer is a Prince George’s County guy and O’Malley was his political mentor so he was close to Pollin.
“Jeez, why didn’t you warn me that Abe was so angry at you,” Hoyer said.
“Angry?” I said. “What in the world is he angry about?”
Hoyer shrugged. “I’m not sure. But I just saw him and I said, ‘hey, great piece in The Post magazine today.’ He practically bit my head off and said, ‘it baffles me that a great guy like Martin Feinstein could have such an SOB for a son.’”
To be fair, a lot of people said that. My father loved that story. But that was Abe—never afraid of criticism but very sensitive about it. He was also forgiving. The next time I needed to talk to him he took my call, we talked at length and we moved on. He played a major role in the start-up of what is now The BB+T Classic by giving us The Cap Centre and later Verizon Centre at a very reduced rental rate. (The people we now negotiate with there haven’t been as generous).
When Abe, urged on by Ted Leonsis who had bought the Capitals from him, hired Michael Jordan as President of the Wizards, it was hailed in Washington as a master stroke. After all Jordan brought nothing but credibility to a franchise that desperately needed it.
The problem was the only good personnel move Jordan made in three-and-a-half years was hiring himself to play. Even at almost 40 he was still a good player but he certainly wasn’t Michael Jordan. And he was a lousy CEO: he was rarely at games, he hired all his cronies and gave them unlimited expense accounts; he drafted Kwame Brown with the No. 1 draft pick and he never really seemed to care if the team got better as long as he had his cigars and his luxury suite when he did bother to come to town.
At the end of the 2003 season, Pollin fired him, a difficult and gutsy move because he knew he would get hammered for it. Which he did. A lot of people pointed out how much money Jordan had made for him by selling the arena out during the two years he played. That was true. But here’s the question: Did Abe ask Michael to play or did Michael tell Abe he wanted to play? It was, of course, the latter. Was Abe supposed to turn Michael down? Would any owner in sports have turned Michael down?
Of course not. Abe fired a lousy executive. If his name had been Joe Smith no one would have even taken note of it. But because it was Jordan, because Jordan stormed out of Pollin’s office it was a huge deal. Two of Pollin’s major attackers were John Thompson and my friend Michael Wilbon. Both implied there were racial undertones to the firing.
They were wrong on every level. Pollin did the right thing for the right reasons. Hiring Ernie Grunfeld turned the franchise around—the Wizards ended a 17 year playoff drought in 2005 and made the playoffs four straight seasons before injuries devastated them a year ago.
It would be nice to report that in the smart, sweet column Wilbon wrote in this morning’s Post that he did a mea culpa and said Pollin had been right six years ago. Instead, he said he wished Pollin and Jordan could have forged the kind of friendship that Pollin had with Magic Johnson, who Pollin helped guide into the business world. That, of course, misses the point: if Johnson had been as incompetent an executive as Jordan was in Washington, Pollin would have fired him too. Michael should have said, “I made a mistake.” Hell, we all make them.
I have a box here in my office in which I keep letters I want to be absolutely certain I never lose. One is from Abe, written shortly after the book I did with Red Auerbach, ‘Let Me Tell You a Story,’ came out. Red and Abe went to the same high school, though Red was several years ahead of Abe. He joked in the book that had he known Abe was going to get so rich he’d have been nicer to him.
Abe sent a handwritten note saying how much he enjoyed the book and how much he always respected Red—even if the Celtics had tortured his team for years. At the bottom of the note he wrote. “Actually, you aren’t such a bad guy. I know your dad is very proud of you.”
I took that one out and looked at it last night. That’s one I’m glad I didn’t lose.
-------------------
I’m going to take tomorrow off to give everyone—including David Stewart and Terry Hanson who do all the heavy lifting for the blog—a day to enjoy their turkey, their families and some football—and basketball. I wish everyone—and I mean everyone—a Happy Thanksgiving. I’m not a big believer in clichés but boy do I have a lot to be thankful for this year.
Here in Washington though, Pollin’s death was a huge story—which is as it should be. It was Pollin who brought the NBA and the NHL to Washington in the 1970s and Pollin who spent $220 million of his own money to build Verizon Center in downtown. To look at the thriving area around the building now you would be hard-pressed to understand that it was completely burnt-out, practically a ghost down before Pollin opened the arena 12 years ago.
So, it is fair to say that Pollin was responsible for changing the quality of life in his hometown. When he brought the (then) Bullets and Capitals to suburban DC in the 1970s the nation’s capitol had ONE professional sports team—the Redskins. Baseball didn’t come back until 2005 and by then the Redskins were in control of arguable the worst owner in the history of sports.
Pollin made plenty of mistakes and he has to take at least some of the responsibility for the Wizards mediocrity (he changed the name in 1997 when the team moved downtown because he didn’t like the connotation of the word, ‘Bullets,’ in the city which, at the time, had the highest murder rate in the country). But he really did try to do the right things—he worked tirelessly for numerous charities and, unlike the owner of the Redskins, never tried to take bows for doing good.
(Let me pause here to explain that a bit further. Not long after Dan Snyder bought the Redskins he called me, upset because I had been critical of him for firing long-time employees left-and-right after taking over the team, including a public relations assistant who had been there for about 30 years.
“Do you have something against Children’s Hospital?” he asked me.
“WHAT?” I said. Children’s is one of the best pediatric hospitals in the country and, in fact, my son had gone through hernia surgery there and the people in the hospital had been fabulous from start to finish.
“I just thought maybe you were attacking me because I give a lot of money to Children’s Hospital.”
“First of all Dan, I would never attack someone for giving money to any charity. Second, I’m attacking you—if that’s what you want to call it—because I think you’ve treated people badly. Third, did you really just ask me that?”
He changed tactics—slightly. “You don’t know me well enough to criticize me. You don’t know how much money I give to charity.”
“Dan, I don’t CARE how much money you give to charity. Rich people SHOULD give money to charity. I know people a lot less wealthy than you who I bet give a much higher percentage of their income to charity than you. But that doesn’t matter. The fact that you would even bring it up makes me think less of you, not more.”
We have not been good friends since.)
The point is, Pollin would never in a million years have done that. He might pick up the phone to tell you he hated something you wrote. In fact, he bought full page ads in The Washington Post criticizing Post columnists for criticizing him. He once call me FURIOUS because I had called The Capital Centre, “the worst building in the world.” He got me to admit that perhaps I hadn’t been in every building in the world. There was no mention during the conversation of his charity work.
I actually got to know Abe while I was covering Maryland politics. The Cap Centre was in Prince George’s County in Maryland and Abe and his political cohort Peter O’Malley had twisted a lot of arms to get the building up and running and to get the tax breaks they felt they needed to make it work. A lot of the local pols didn’t like O’Malley and thus didn’t like Pollin.
I liked Pollin. Actually my dad knew him better than I did because he and his wife Irene spent a lot of time at The Kennedy Center when my dad was running it and were major patrons of all the arts in town. In the mid-80s, I was asked to do a piece on Pollin for The Washington Post Magazine. He agreed to talk to me at length and we had a long session over dinner in his private dining room at Cap Centre one night.
I wrote what I thought—and what most people thought—was a very favorable, though fair piece. It talked about all the good he had done and all that he had accomplished but also talked about some of the controversies he’d been involved in.
On the Sunday that the story ran I was at a Caps playoff game and ran into Steny Hoyer, who is now the House majority leader. Hoyer is a Prince George’s County guy and O’Malley was his political mentor so he was close to Pollin.
“Jeez, why didn’t you warn me that Abe was so angry at you,” Hoyer said.
“Angry?” I said. “What in the world is he angry about?”
Hoyer shrugged. “I’m not sure. But I just saw him and I said, ‘hey, great piece in The Post magazine today.’ He practically bit my head off and said, ‘it baffles me that a great guy like Martin Feinstein could have such an SOB for a son.’”
To be fair, a lot of people said that. My father loved that story. But that was Abe—never afraid of criticism but very sensitive about it. He was also forgiving. The next time I needed to talk to him he took my call, we talked at length and we moved on. He played a major role in the start-up of what is now The BB+T Classic by giving us The Cap Centre and later Verizon Centre at a very reduced rental rate. (The people we now negotiate with there haven’t been as generous).
When Abe, urged on by Ted Leonsis who had bought the Capitals from him, hired Michael Jordan as President of the Wizards, it was hailed in Washington as a master stroke. After all Jordan brought nothing but credibility to a franchise that desperately needed it.
The problem was the only good personnel move Jordan made in three-and-a-half years was hiring himself to play. Even at almost 40 he was still a good player but he certainly wasn’t Michael Jordan. And he was a lousy CEO: he was rarely at games, he hired all his cronies and gave them unlimited expense accounts; he drafted Kwame Brown with the No. 1 draft pick and he never really seemed to care if the team got better as long as he had his cigars and his luxury suite when he did bother to come to town.
At the end of the 2003 season, Pollin fired him, a difficult and gutsy move because he knew he would get hammered for it. Which he did. A lot of people pointed out how much money Jordan had made for him by selling the arena out during the two years he played. That was true. But here’s the question: Did Abe ask Michael to play or did Michael tell Abe he wanted to play? It was, of course, the latter. Was Abe supposed to turn Michael down? Would any owner in sports have turned Michael down?
Of course not. Abe fired a lousy executive. If his name had been Joe Smith no one would have even taken note of it. But because it was Jordan, because Jordan stormed out of Pollin’s office it was a huge deal. Two of Pollin’s major attackers were John Thompson and my friend Michael Wilbon. Both implied there were racial undertones to the firing.
They were wrong on every level. Pollin did the right thing for the right reasons. Hiring Ernie Grunfeld turned the franchise around—the Wizards ended a 17 year playoff drought in 2005 and made the playoffs four straight seasons before injuries devastated them a year ago.
It would be nice to report that in the smart, sweet column Wilbon wrote in this morning’s Post that he did a mea culpa and said Pollin had been right six years ago. Instead, he said he wished Pollin and Jordan could have forged the kind of friendship that Pollin had with Magic Johnson, who Pollin helped guide into the business world. That, of course, misses the point: if Johnson had been as incompetent an executive as Jordan was in Washington, Pollin would have fired him too. Michael should have said, “I made a mistake.” Hell, we all make them.
I have a box here in my office in which I keep letters I want to be absolutely certain I never lose. One is from Abe, written shortly after the book I did with Red Auerbach, ‘Let Me Tell You a Story,’ came out. Red and Abe went to the same high school, though Red was several years ahead of Abe. He joked in the book that had he known Abe was going to get so rich he’d have been nicer to him.
Abe sent a handwritten note saying how much he enjoyed the book and how much he always respected Red—even if the Celtics had tortured his team for years. At the bottom of the note he wrote. “Actually, you aren’t such a bad guy. I know your dad is very proud of you.”
I took that one out and looked at it last night. That’s one I’m glad I didn’t lose.
-------------------
I’m going to take tomorrow off to give everyone—including David Stewart and Terry Hanson who do all the heavy lifting for the blog—a day to enjoy their turkey, their families and some football—and basketball. I wish everyone—and I mean everyone—a Happy Thanksgiving. I’m not a big believer in clichés but boy do I have a lot to be thankful for this year.
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