Update 10-3-06

Hi,

As promised last week, the nice article about Andy Dolich, from the American University alumni magazine.

    As told by Pat Gallagher, the story goes like this:

    In 1990, Andy Dolich, then vice president of business operations for the Oakland A’s, emerged from an elevator onto the top floor of San Francisco’s posh St. Francis Hotel dressed in his finest suit. Dolich, SPA ’69, one of Gallagher’s closest friends, was prepared for a face-to-face meeting with the late Laurence Tisch, then president of CBS, whom Dolich believed anxiously was awaiting his arrival behind the doors of the swanky suite.

    Dolich, wearing a power tie and sporting a spiffy new haircut, carried with him a briefcase filled with business proposals and ideas about how he could help the network, which he thought was courting him to lead a new division. Tisch, however, was nowhere in sight. Instead Dolich found his buddy Gallagher and a handful of his other close friends from the world of baseball and the media, all with ear-to-ear grins plastered on their faces. The whole episode, which involved a reputable headhunter and several other coconspirators, had been an intricate ruse, part of an intense half-decade practical joke war between Dolich and Gallagher that ended only when their wives intervened.

    “The first thing he said was ‘I knew it was a hoax,’” Gallagher recalls, a dash of devilish glee still evident in his voice. He tells the story not only to revel in the sidesplitting success of the prank and once again needle his old pal, but also to illustrate two of Dolich’s best characteristics, traits that over the course of a 35-year career have helped catapult him into the upper echelon of America’s sports executives.

    “When you first meet Andy he can appear to be very serious, very thoughtful, almost reserved,” says Gallagher, an executive with the San Francisco Giants. “But when you get behind the facade, he’s not only a creative maniac, maybe the most creative person I’ve ever met, but he also has a great sense of humor. The best thing I can say about him is that he’s a regular guy.”

    Gallagher should know. He wasn’t always pulling a fast one on Dolich; often, he was the victim.

    “In 1989, for my birthday, Andy had searchlights and a sign that said ‘Giant Garage Sale’ put on my house, in a town that prohibits garage sales,” he says. “He called the police to be there when I got home. The police arrested me briefly.”

    Growing up on Long Island in a town actually named Green Acres, Dolich didn’t harbor dreams of a glamorous career as a sports executive. In the 1950s, such an industry didn’t really exist. But after working in AU’s athletic department as an undergraduate in the late 1960s, Dolich became convinced that he was meant for the world of sports. A little-used reserve on the basketball team, the 5-foot, 10-inch Dolich was passionate about sports, but had the brains to realize his future wasn’t on the field of play, but rather in the front office.

    “If you would have told me that I would be sitting on the banks of the Mississippi near Graceland I would have told you you were crazy,” Dolich said in June from his office in Memphis, where he’s president of business operations for the NBA’s Grizzlies. “I’ve been totally blessed in that I’ve always been in the right place at the right time. My life has been nothing more than a whole series of interconnected dreams come true.”

    A sports career is born

    One of Andy Dolich’s earliest—and fondest—memories is of a trip to Brooklyn’s legendary Ebbets Field. His father, Mac, took five-year-old Andy and his brothers, Barry and Ira, to root on Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, and the rest of the Dodgers.

    “Coming out of the subway with that Brooklyn kind of gray and brown everywhere, going into that small ballpark and seeing the green of the field and the signs on the outfield wall has stayed with me to this day,” Dolich says. “I loved the overall feeling and the ability to be with your family.”

    In high school Dolich played basketball and soccer while participating in student government. It was that fascination with politics that drew him to American University.

    “Probably the last thing in my mind was a career in sports when I drove down Massachusetts Avenue and went to campus,” he recalls.

    A scrappy guard who could usually be found playing pickup games at the old Leonard Gym, Dolich managed to make the junior varsity team as a walk-on.

    “I’ll go back to what it said in the ’66–’67 press guide,” says Dolich’s friend, Steve Hines, CAS ’69, now assistant director of corporate sponsorships for Georgetown University athletics. “He was an intelligent basketball guy who played very hard to make up for his size.”

    Dolich eventually clawed his way onto the varsity squad, but rarely appeared in games.

    “I was the least talented, the last player on the bench,” he says. “For some young punk kid from Long Island to be on the varsity team, wow. That’s when I started to get in my mind that I loved this more than anything. More than reading the political section of the Washington Post, I loved reading the sports section.”

    Begrudgingly acknowledging he was all out of growth spurts, Dolich went to work after his sophomore year for the late Mike Trilling in AU’s athletic department.

    “I was one of many Trillingettes,” Dolich says. “I joined him and had a great introduction to the world of sports from a business, marketing, and media standpoint. Junior year I got the job as student intramural director, and that’s when I was hooked.”

    After graduating with a degree in government and public administration and recording a few less-than-impressive scores on the LSATs, Dolich enrolled in the new sports management program at Ohio University. It was the first of its kind in the country—today there are more than 200.

    Armed with a master’s degree in sports administration, Dolich joined the Philadelphia 76’ers just in time for their 9-73 record-setting season of futility in 1972–73.

    “I look back at that as the most fortuitous place that I could have been because of the challenge,” Dolich says. “I wouldn’t have had an insight into my livelihood in sports marketing. How do you take a product that is totally flawed and start looking at specific sales programs, promotion, marketing, merchandising, stadium operations?”

    Realizing that he’d have to move positions frequently to work his way up in the sports world, Dolich left the Sixers after three seasons to embark on what he calls his “magical mystery tour,” a journey that’s taken him across the country to a dozen jobs in hockey, lacrosse, baseball, consulting, ticket sales, and ultimately, to the Grizzlies.

    “Obviously he can’t keep a job,” quipped Rick Welts, president and COO of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns.

    Working magic in Oakland

    Roger Moskowitz, CAS ’76, is senior director of corporate marketing for Washington Sports and Entertainment. He began his career working for Dolich with the Washington Capitals and followed him to the Washington Diplomats soccer club and eventually to the A’s.“He’s always there to help people along the way,” Moskowitz says. “He’s very innovative. He came up with a promotional platform called ‘The Year of the Uniform.’ Teams give away a lot of items during the course of the year, and the concept was if a kid came to each one of those promotional nights, by the end of the season he’d have an entire uniform, from hat to T-shirt to wrist bands. It’s a great example of Andy’s ingenuity.”

    In 1980 Dolich accepted the unenviable task of elevating the financial fortunes of the Oakland A’s, a struggling franchise that drew a paltry 320,000 fans to its Coliseum that season. Working with a Bay Area agency, Dolich helped craft the team’s now legendary “Billyball” ad campaign, which promoted mercurial manager Billy Martin’s unorthodox style of play.

    “Out of pure luck, we win our first 11 games [of the 1981 season], 17 out of 18, and Billyball blows up nationally,” Dolich says. “We became big time media darlings. We were actually on pace to have the greatest one-year attendance increase in Major League Baseball history.”

    A player strike derailed that, but when it ended the A’s capped the success story by making the playoffs.

    After a string of mediocre seasons, Oakland again rose to power in the late 1980s. In 1989 the team was playing in its second straight World Series, this time against the cross-bay rival San Francisco Giants. On October 18, Dolich was in a luxury box at Candlestick Park awaiting the beginning of Game 3.

    “It was one of the most beautiful days, not a ripple of wind, 72 degrees and sunny,” he says. “I was sitting down at four minutes after five and I started to feel a rumble. I started to see the light standards sway.

    “There was a rocking and rolling that lasted for a long time. I had experienced several earthquakes, and when you go through your first one you don’t ever want to go through another. In the back of your mind, you’re thinking, ‘Is this the big one?’ My immediate reaction was, ‘Holy mackerel, this is big.’ The two basic kind of earthquakes are a jolt and then there’s the rolling quake, which feels like you’re five miles out to sea but you’re in a building. This was a little bit of both.”

    When reports of death and destruction throughout the region started to filter in, the game was postponed.

    “It was beyond surreal,” says Dolich, who still has a plaque hanging in his office with the San Francisco Chronicle front page headline “Hundreds dead in huge quake” and an original seismograph from the U.S. Geological Survey. “We were in a circumstance that didn’t have a script. Players were walking out of the building in their uniforms. Everyone was worried about their families. My family was home in Alameda on the other side of the bay. We had no communication. All the phone lines were dead. I won’t say people were panicking but they were panicky.”

    The A’s went on to win the championship, but ultimately, their title would be little more than a historical footnote on the Earthquake Series.

    Dolich left the A’s in 1994 and served as president of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, president of his own sports consulting firm, and as an executive with the Internet start-up Tickets.com. But at all these stops, something didn’t feel entirely right.

    “What I missed the most, going back to my high school years, was the ability to be in a team-type setting, working with people that have different capabilities than you, who are better than you, to create the sum that’s stronger than the individual parts,” he says.

    So in 2000 Dolich accepted his current position with the then-Vancouver Grizzlies, playing an integral role in overseeing the franchise’s move to Tennessee. The team has thrived in the league’s smallest market, packing crowds into the gleaming new FedEx Forum, and making the playoffs for the past three seasons.

    Dolich’s work in Memphis has garnered him praise from executives throughout the league.

    “Their arena today is the model for all other cities to shoot for, and that was really more Andy’s inspiration than anything else, having seen everything there is to see and everything there is to know about arenas and stadiums,” Welts says. “There are very few people in the history of our industry that have touched as many sports from a business and marketing perspective as he has. That’s truly unique. I don’t think there’s anybody quite like him in our industry that can claim that.”

    In June the NBA approved the first pension program for the league’s nonbasketball employees. Dolich played a key role in lobbying for the proposal.

    “It was only through his due diligence and enthusiasm for it that it passed,” Welts says. “That’s something he’ll never benefit from, but it’s something that a lot of the younger people coming up through the industry will.”

    The policy could one day help Dolich’s own children. His son Cory, 27, is director of ticket operations for the minor league baseball Sacramento River Cats, and his 21-year-old twin daughters, Caryn and Lindsey, have just started jobs at the NBA headquarters and ESPN magazine, respectively. Someday, they could find themselves working alongside their dad, who doesn’t sound ready to hang ’em up anytime soon.

    “I’m 59, and I surely don’t think about that age when I’m hoisting up errant three pointers in our empty practice facility, nor do I think about spending 35 years essentially in one career,” Dolich says. “It is renewing because of the energy. I’m sure it sounds trite, but when the game or season is over you wipe the slate clean and start again. That energy is pretty hard to find in anything else.”