In reply to: So is Bevacqua officially the AD now? * posted by 105Marquette
I'd prefer an AD that's way in the background.
longer need to prioritize constant thanking and glorification of their AD.
Wearing a football logo sweatshirt while celebrating the WBB trip to the Sweet 16 seems like a subtle way to communicate what his priorities are.
Not that he's not the AD for all sports, but football is far and away his top priority.
Oh wait. That happened at a team meeting in the Monogram Room in the Fall of 1987. It was pretty damn authentic looking too. I wonder if they borrowed it from USC, who were already in town.
The Colonel was late in showing up, but at that time only Lou knew what was going on. Everyone else was completely in the dark and thought it was just the usual Friday, pre-game lunch there. On this occasion, Lou had finished telling the team that they were about to hear from "A Great man from The West!" who was about to walk in, but then no one showed up. I was eventually dispatched to go outside the Monogram Room to see where this Great, but now very late, Man was. I walked out through the double doors, walked around a bit in the concourse and looked around the corners but saw no one. I had no idea who or what I was even looking for. I finally gave up and walked back in through the closed doors to report back to the Man. As soon as I opened the inner door, I immediately realized that the whole team was already staring at the doors and expecting this Great Man! to be the one entering. Instead, this idiot walked in. Without missing a beat, Frank Stams sprang out of his chair with a giant grin and yelled (in Monty Python fashion): "It's Moff! Moff is the Great Man From the West!!" and led a standing ovation as everyone cracked up, including Lou. Good times. The Colonel walked in a little later dressed as the Trojan and proceeded to try to rally the team by pissing them off. Also good times.
Bravo!
Your Delta name is 'Great Man of the West"
before. But I try to spread the retellings out enough over time. ;)
It's right up there with the time Frank stopped by the manager's office on his way back from the old weight room to the ACC lockerroom, as he would often do to shoot the breeze. I was crashed on the old couch we had in there, so he sat at my desk. After a while, my phone rang and he answered it. "Moff's office... Sorry, he's not here right now.... Where is he? ... Um, he's out back smoking pot... Yeah, uh huh, uh uh, okay... Bye."
Me: "Who was that Frank?"
Frank, with that same big grin: "I have no idea."
Never caught any grief for it so I assume it was not the Football Office calling. Probably Gene O'Neill or Brother John Campbell calling from the Varsity Issue Room.
Good times.
I will always remember, along with a couple others also involving Frank.
I would favor a rule prohibiting the ND athletic director from wearing swag of ND vendors.
I am amware that back in the day, a previous AD ordered all employees to wear adidas apparel on the day the adidas corporate rep was visiting the atrheltic offices. Some of the staff panicked and had to run to the bookstore to buy swag.
I wish he would have just worn business attire and not signaled to UnderArmour that he was going to wear their shitty clothes with their shitty built in billboards to work.
He's actually been an executive at major organizations, unlike Jack, who was a commercial contracts attorney who probably never managed anyone other than a couple recent law school grads in his whole life. And he probably treated them like crap.
Attorneys, like doctors, are usually terrible at strategy setting and organizational leadership. Jack was no exception. I'm hopeful, based on his prior, relevant leadership experience that Bevacqua will be an exception. We desperately need him to be the kind of leader that Jack wasn't, and never really could have expected to have been.
And you have high hopes??? Wow.
there's a chance. But I do worry that Jack may have contaminated Bevaqua as Bevaqua shadowed Jack. And if I ever hear talk of a brand emanating from Bevaqua's lips, it might be time to head for the hills and never look back.
We should know in the first year whether Bevaqua is a jackass or not and we'll know it if we see it, kind of like pornography. I hope he's his own man and grateful that he was chosen to lead Notre Dame as he witnessed it during his formative years here. You have to wonder what Jack was doing while he was a student here.
Litigators and even transactional types. Like telling adversaries, counterpartes and wrongdoers to go shit in a hat, and to hold such people to account..
So I don't really thing we need a corporate type in these times. Jack's problem was not that he was a lawyer. It was that he was small time, self absorbed, and prioritized currying favor and rubbing elbows with adversaries who ate his lunch. He also prioritized revenue whoring over all else at Notre Dame.
I have heard very good things about our new AD from people very close to him, so I am hopeful. I do think he is going to have to tell the SEC and ESPN and the ACC to fuck off in the near future.
I didn't mean to gloss over that. Even if Jack were a good human being, which I don't think he is, and is his core problem, I do not believe attorneys are well-suited to running major organizations. They are good at lots of things - organizational leadership is rarely one of them.
I think Bevacqua is a rare exception to the general rule.
attorney. It is that he is an aloof, craven, haughty, conniving, self aggrandizing, opportunistic, self serving, self centered, nepotistic jerk whose priorities and loyalties are woefully misguided. He views our adversaries as his colleagues, our vendors as his partners, his fellow alumni as unsavvy gnats.
His niche legal practice was small time: he served as outside general counsel to amateur athletic organizations such as USA Gymnastics and USA Diving. While there, he dispensed legal advice relating to the obligation of such organizations to report allegations of sexual abuse of minors to law enforcement. He later distanced himself from the horrific advice he provided, hiding behind the cloaks of attorney client privilege and bankruptcy. He also lied about receiving an honorary flying wedgie. I am not sure why O'Leary could not get away with fuidging a resume but Swarbrick could.
Swarbrick's crackerjack legal instincts were on full display in perhaps Notre Dame's most tragic on campus event - the Declan Sullivan scissor lift in a gale force windstorm. He tried to spin the news coverage and liability posture.
His instincts served Notre Dame the same way with the vacatur of wins due to academic fraud. He countenanced the direct violation of the NCAA's edict that Notre Dame not publish any of the vacated wins in any fashion. But to honor the NCAA punishment would diminish the credit that Swarbrick yearned to take for Kelly. So he ordered the celebration of Kelly as the winningest ND coach at the time of the ND/Wisconsin game.
He showed disdain for notions of candor and transparency time and again on issues like artificial turf and shoes/equipment vendor. He arranged for jobs for two of his children with two of the athletic department's biggest vendors.
No, Swarbrick did not fail because he was a lawyer. He failed because he is a douche.
Bevacqua, by all accounts, is a good man.
So, now, we have a good man as a football head coach, a good man as a AD. We should be genuinely grateful for those gifts.
Let us raise a collective finger in the direction of the Cheesecake Factory at Keystone at the Crossing and finally bestow the honor of a Flying Wedgie he claimed long ago.
It's a fine trough.
I would add that not only did he distance himself from the horrific advice he provided, but he actively scrubbed his resume to remove his association to the athletic organizations he served for many years despite those athletic organizations being prominently displayed on his CV when he campaigned for the job of athletic director ("I spent decades around world class coaches").
school. (A couple of them at ND - Bank of America and PG&E).
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/top-law-schools/articles/2012/06/26/table-where-the-fortune-500-ceos-went-to-law-school.
Although not on the list, there is also our own Rod West, a Group President at Entergy.
Not sure how many of them practiced for any substantial period of time before becoming CEOs, or how many were litigators versus corporate law or the like. I knew some in my law school class who just went to law school for the training and with the plan to use it in business right away. One such friend was actaully more interested in being the lead singer of his band than taking over the family's business, but he eventually relented. Given how nice his family's home was back in the day in Upper Saddle River, I bet he doesn't regret it too much. I still have his band's cassette of original tunes. Robert Wright worked for a while at the firm at which I spent most of my career, before going to GE, but that was an exception as most stayed in the law biz.
(As another one of my all too often digressions/anectdotes:) Some people very near and dear to me used to work for H. Donald Campbell and his wife Alice, and ended up becoming like family to them. He was the type that went to law school only to go (almost) immediately into the banking industry. He did a nice job leading what would become WaMu and was then hired by Chase Manhattan Bank after the Depression broke out, eventually taking over as President of the bank and later adding the title of Vice Chairman of the Board, guiding Chase through the Depression, WW2 and beyond.
At one point, the bank's Chairman Winthrop Aldrich -- brother of Abby Adrich Rockefeller -- asked Mr. Campbell to teach his nephew, David Rockefeller, the banking business, or at least further his education as to same. Winthrop's sister Abby Adrich married John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and they had, among other children, Nelson and John D. Mr. Campbell apparently did a good job as mentor, as David later took over as CEO and Chairman circa 1969.
The Campbells had a house on Cape Cod that they let my parents use for their honeymoon. It was not far from that of the Kennedy's. Although many of the elite shunned Joe Kennedy, Mr. Campbell used to say he was not a bad guy and they used to play cards together. But he would then add with a smile that "those boys were brats." (Meaning young JFK, Bobby, Teddy, etc.) During the mid to late 60's, Mr. and Mrs. Campbell visited my parents' very middle, middle class house in Oyster Bay, NY for lunch. At one point during the visit, Mr. Campbell commented to his wife, Alice, that it was a nice house and she should get someting like it when he was gone. Mrs. Campbell was a very nice and humble lady (a relative served as her personal secretary and they traveled the world together and became best friends), but I bet she was not thinking "You're right, honey." At the time they also had an estate in Connecticut (later bought by Gene Rayburn of all people), a winter home in Scottsdale, AZ that was later purchased by Elizabeth Arden, and a home at The River House, arguably still the Upper East Side's premier address (a Rothschild is one of the current residents as was Henry Kissinger until he recently passed away). Reportedly Nixon, Joan Crawford, and Gloria Vanderbilt did not make the cut there, and it was more for the Roosevelts, Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Greta Garbos, etc. who did live.
My only grandfather figure, Joe Loving (the brother of personal secretary, May Loving) served as the Campbell's driver and bodyguard, most likely using skills he had used during Prohibition, working alongside his Port Washington buddies Eddie Pelo, "Duke" Salerno and Pete Biscaro. (Only Eddie stayed in that line of work. Later on, it took just one phone call to Brooklyn for Eddie to make sure that Joe's car, stolen in Manhattan, was delivered back to his driveway on Long Island the next day, washed, waxed and with an apology note. I remember at Joe's 1978 funeral, Eddie had a horseshoe shaped set of flowers delivered to the funeral home, as he if he had won the Derby, with a ribbon across it that said "So long, old pal." I remember being impressed by same, and by Eddie himself when my mother pointed him out and introduced me to him at the funeral home. But I digress in digressing)
Joe and May would often run into the rich and famous with them at, among other places, The River House. For instance, Joe said Prince Rainier was a nice guy and they once struck up a conversation out front while the Prince was waiting for Grace to come downstairs. In later years, if my father was unexpectedly delayed doing a delivery at nearby New York Hospital, he would ask my mother (they knew the Campbells through my mother's side of the family, i.e. the Lovings) to go over to The Campbell's apartment at TRH to wait for him. On one such occasion, my mother had my brother along with her and he thus became the first baby that Mr. Campbell had ever held, as the Campbell's never had any children of their own. Mr. Campbell remarked to my mother that my brother looked so intelligent and that she should have more childen. And, of course, he was right! ;) Good times, all before my time.
Linked is a photo available online of Mr. Campbell and Withrop Aldrich in the latter's office at the bank, complete with a picture of the bank's founder, Alexander Hamilton, and Wintrhop's daughters in the background. I actually picked up a copy of that print which I probably did not need to do as I ended up with some of Joe and May's copies of their portraits, and even some photos of their believed dog and cat (along with a couple sets of his cufflinks). He looks pretty scary in the photo, but I was assured he was most humble and kind.
As leaders. I guess we can add Biden to this 2008 list of Presidents with law degrees/education.
working for and becoming friends with some. ;) As I know you know, and I think we have discussed it, the best at what they do are often the most humble, kind and least pretentious. But you'll notice I still call him "Mr." having gotten that from my family who always referred to them that way.
comment. Those of us in large private practices (fewer and fewer by the day) have to be able to both strategize and manage large numbers of employees. Now if you compared us to managing financials, that would likely go better.