August 2004

Sporting Lessons

On a stifling August Sunday the summer before I began high school, my grandmother took me aside in the church vestibule to give her view of baseball. "No lady or gentleman," she said in a whisper, would wear a radio earplug to listen to the play-by-play of a game while waiting in a reception line at a wedding. Where were my manners?

This August as another baseball pennant race heats up, you will find a lot of conversation in this magazine about sports and what they can teach us about how to live. Business School alums who are marketing managers in both professional and college sports discuss how they go about building lifelong fans, as surely as my grandmother tried to build lifelong ladies, out of gawky kids. You can read another story about the Business School's popular sports management courses under the leadership of professor George Foster and Bill Walsh, former 49er and Stanford football coach. Their offerings include an executive education course for managers in the National Football League and its players association. Their cases cover a wide range of sports, from car racing to Australian football.

In Barbara Buell's profile of School Dean Bob Joss, we learn that his patience and determination are honed partly by playing competitive sports. Unlike me, who has been known to stomp off a tennis court when I couldn't match an opponent, Joss, in middle age, has happily played zone and man-to-man defense against basketball pros!

This magazine issue also includes alumnus Jim Thompson's account of his work retooling sports coaches who aren't always encouraged by our society to teach the best life lessons to young people. And while video games aren't exactly a sport, we learn in another story about their power to compete with sports and movies for consumers' discretionary income.

If that is more than enough sports for your taste, we offer a tantalizing tale of news media bribery on page xx in our research section, plus findings on how election years shape presidential decision making, how large banks can help build an underdeveloped economy, and why theater managers practice price discrimination. Rick Booth, MBA '96, offers an inside view of the "touch-feely" course that the School offers now for alums, and, California Controller Steve Westly, MBA '83 and a Democrat, writes about his unusual teamwork with Governor Schwarzenegger, a Republican.

Thinking back to my early education as a team player, sports fan, and lady, I have to thank Grandma for dragging me to operas and ballets, and I have to thank my father, Jackie Robinson, and the New York Yankees for dramatizing some of life's tougher lessons though sports. After observing coaches replace neighborhood ballplayers who weren't team stars, Dad built a team around rejects and taught all of us on the field and in the stands about the power of persistence and practice. I personally am doubtful the civil rights movement of the sixties would have accomplished as much as it did without Jackie Robinson's courageous example with the Dodgers. And then there's the Yankees, always around to teach us humility. How 'bout them Yankees? No waves, please.

Kathleen O'Toole
Editor

From the Editor

Dean's Column

Kathleen O'Toole
Editor