by Ed Stack
Michael was twelve and never missed a chance to golf. He spent long hours by himself on the course, hitting drives and practicing his chips and putts. He worked hard at the game. But instead of saying what I expected—“Great! I’d love to play”—he replied, “Mom says I need some clothes and she’s taking me to the mall tomorrow. So I think I need to go with Mom.”
It was completely out of character for him, so odd that I had a strong and immediate sense that the universe was trying to tell me something. “I think I need to go up and see my father,” I told Denise. I called USAir and booked a flight to Binghamton for the next morning.
I found him in bed, asleep. He’d been in and out of consciousness for weeks. I sat beside him and took his hand. He didn’t stir. I felt sure that I was supposed to be there, that it was important I be there on that day, at that time. “Dad,” I said, “you’ve done all you can do for us. You did all you set out to do. You’ve raised all of your kids. You’ve put everyone through college. You built your business, and you were successful. There’s nothing more you can do.” I had to pause to wipe away some tears. “The business is in great shape. The kids are all fine. I promise you that I’ll make sure the business continues on, and I promise I’ll take care of everyone.” I squeezed his hand a bit tighter and said, “Dad, if you want to go, it’s okay. You can go.”
He slept on. I sat there for a while, looking at him, my sharp-edged, two-fisted, ball-busting, deeply sentimental, and ultimately good-hearted father. I wiped away more tears, told him I loved him, and flew back to Pittsburgh.
I’m convinced he waited for me and that visit. Kim called at two the following morning to say he’d died.
* * *
We held the funeral at St. John the Evangelist, where my dad had been an altar boy, and where, sixty years before, he’d played baseball and acquired a love for sports that he passed on to me. On the drive to the cemetery, the cortege detoured to Court Street and made a slow loop through the parking lot at 345. I sent an email to the 4,300 people who worked for Dick’s. “Those of us who knew him and loved him,” I wrote, “will miss him very much.”
I think my dad’s legacy might, to some, be that business he created, a company that, at the time he died, had fifty-one stores in six states, each emblazoned with his name in letters ten feet tall. And of course, the stores are a big piece of his history. But the Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin ran a story the day after he died that was insightful in how it summed up his life. The first paragraph read: “You can’t read the newspaper for more than a week or two without noticing Dick’s Clothing and Sporting Goods sponsoring some event to benefit youth sports and community beautification or combat cancer, drugs and drunk driving.” The story went on to talk about how he’d grown the business, but I think it’s telling that it began not with his company’s success, but its involvement in the community. That’s how he, and Dick’s, were thought of in Binghamton.
By the time he died, I’d abandoned a good many of the examples he set in actually running the company, but the way he made Dick’s a springboard for helping the city and people around him stuck with me. I’d grown up with that part of our company culture ingrained in me.
He was making a difference to his community before I knew it was happening, with his contributions to Binghamton’s youth baseball programs—work that I directly benefited from and that made my hometown a measurably better place to live. As a teenager I saw him demonstrate that same spirit when he dealt gently and knowingly with that young shoplifter who so desperately wanted to play baseball. I have no idea what became of that kid, but my dad understood the transcendence of sports—that they can channel kids’ energies, give them focus and goals, keep them out of trouble, reshape their lives. And he understood that it wasn’t enough to wish these benefits on others. He was willing to reach into his own pocket to give that kid a chance at them.
Under my dad’s leadership, Dick’s contributed to Binghamton charities and causes throughout my years in high school and college, continuing right up to the moment he sold the company to us. I don’t think this was altruism, necessarily. He saw that for Dick’s to prosper as he hoped, the city around it had to be healthy, that he stood to benefit indirectly by seeking to improve the standards of life in town. More fundamentally, I think he believed that companies have to be more than machines for making money, that in America more than anywhere else, our companies are key building blocks of society—and in return for our patronage, and our service as employees, we should expect our companies to behave as good citizens, to be contributors to the common good.
I disagreed with my dad on many subjects, but I’m 100 percent aligned with him on that. I’ve tried to follow his example. A few years after I took over the business, I was on the board of the Boys and Girls Club in Binghamton, and I was tapped to help pick the winner of its annual top youth award. We interviewed four finalists, both boys and girls, and I asked the same question of all: “What can be done about the drug and alcohol problem in high schools today?”
Every one answered the same way: Nothing. Can’t do anything about it. Kids drink. Kids do drugs. That’s the way it is.
I found that really disturbing. As I walked to my car after the Q & A session, I found myself thinking that the kids had been courageous in their answers, though fatalistic. Surely, something could be done about the problem. I didn’t agree it was a lost cause—I’d had my own embarrassing experience with beer, but now I mostly avoided drinking. When I thought about why that was, one answer was that my dad’s drinking had scared me. But another, and perhaps even more powerful, reason was that I’d been busy. I played baseball and football.
As I drove home my thoughts morphed from Somebody’s got to do something to Why isn’t anyone doing anything? By the time I got home, they’d sharpened into: I should do something. With that, Dick’s helped organize a program called Get Involved. During the back-to-school season, we ran a big campaign encouraging kids to go out for sports teams, join school clubs, try out for the marching band. We didn’t push athletics more than the chess club—we knew that not every kid is a wide receiver, or wants to be one.
At the heart of the push was our belief, and my personal experience, that kids need a place to go after school. They need a group, to feel they belong. And in particular, they need a community that provides them with a mentor—whether a teacher, a coach, the director of a play, an editor who volunteers his or her time. They need a reason to not go to the Wigwam.
While we were ramping up that campaign, we kicked off a fund-raising program in partnership with Students Against Driving Drunk and the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program. For every pair of shoes we sold, we’d donate two dollars to a fund to finance antidrinking and antidrug programs. Schools and school districts would apply for help in financing after-hours prom parties and similar events, and SADD and DARE would distribute the cash we’d set aside.
We got a lot of positive feedback from students, teachers, and parents. Too many kids are hurt or killed on prom night, as a result of drinking. A good many pregnancies happen that night, too—it’s an event in which kids tend to act with abandon. With our help, schools in the Southern Tier rounded up seniors after the prom and herded them into the gym, for soda and pizza and dancing until daybreak. The kids were probably wired on all the sugar they consumed, but they weren’t getting into trouble, and they all made it home alive.
When we opened our stores in Syracuse, we took these programs there. I believe they made a difference. It’s hard to know what might have happened had we not helped fund the prom after-parties. But it was a start, a step in our evolution to help the communities and kids we serve. Once you start giving, it grows inside you, becomes more important to you to give. No doubt, my dad figured that out.
So when we heard that some townships in upstate New York were having trouble getting community sports programs together due to a lack of equipment—that they didn’t have the balls, goals, and other gear they needed to r
un practices and games—we decided we’d give them a hand. We put together kits for soccer, baseball, volleyball, and basketball teams. Each consisted of a big gym bag filled with up to a half dozen balls, some cones to mark off a field, a whiteboard and markers, and a couple of whistles. We also threw in sets of pinnies, those bright nylon-mesh vests that distinguish sides in a scrimmage. It was everything you needed to run a practice in one bag.
We started this at about the time we moved to Pittsburgh. We put out word that teams or programs could request a bag, and we’d provide it at no charge. We also created a community marketing effort within Dick’s, and our associates would seek out programs that needed these kits. Before long it had spread into Pennsylvania; we were giving out as much as $5 million in gear per year.
I was excited about that program. It worked. I think it’s safe to say that we helped a lot of kids. A few years down the road, as the business grew, we’d be thinking much bigger.
CHAPTER 13 “THEY’RE NOT GOING TO SAY YES UNTIL YOU SAY NO”
With our growing pains behind us, and new controls and metrics in place, we got back into the rhythm of opening stores. We spread throughout Ohio. We moved into Philadelphia and the Detroit suburbs, into Delaware and Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky. Altogether we opened ten stores in 1997, nine the following year, and thirteen the year after that, for a total of eighty-three by year’s end 1999.
By now the design of our stores had been refined to better give the departments distinct identities. Each had signature signage and color schemes. The golf department, which we labeled “The Pro Shop,” was wood paneled and clubby. “The Lodge,” where we sold fishing tackle and hunting gear, was constructed to look like the inside of a log cabin. The athletic footwear area was big, with almost five hundred styles on display. We used a lot of wood and indirect lighting throughout to make the whole store inviting. Once you walked in, we hoped you’d stay awhile.
You could spend some of that time testing merchandise before you bought it. The new stores incorporated not only driving ranges but running tracks and archery ranges. We would sweat every detail to surprise and delight our customers. We’d constantly visit our competitors’ stores, and if we found something we liked, we’d incorporate that, too.
When we opened a new store outside Baltimore in Columbia, Maryland, we included a “Nike Women’s Concept Shop” loaded with gear especially for female athletes—long overdue in an industry patronized by as many women as men but never catering to women at an equal level. Today, our sales of women’s products often eclipse those of men’s, and even so, we constantly battle with our vendors to provide us with more products specifically designed for female athletes.
All of this effort translated into a healthy income that enabled us to accelerate our growth. The year my dad died, we posted $728.3 million in sales—an average of $9 million per store—and netted $11.2 million in earnings. In fifteen years, we’d grown from two stores to a super-regional chain. We had plans to push our footprint out from there, across the Mississippi. Our ambition had grown with the company. We wanted to be not only the best but the biggest sporting goods retailer in the country.
We were nowhere near that yet. The Sports Authority was growing, too, and they’d had quite a head start. They produced more than twice our sales and covered a lot more territory. But this game had just begun.
The key to everything I’ve talked about—the way the stores looked, the products we sold, the booming sales—was that our leadership team kept visiting our stores. I’d spend two days a week, three weeks a month, out in the field. I’d fly into a city such as Charlotte, where we had several stores, and all the store managers would meet me and our team from Pittsburgh at one store. We’d walk the aisles and talk to them. More important, we’d listen.
I wasn’t there to critique their operations. I wanted them to tell me what their customers were saying—about the store, about particular products they liked or didn’t like, about what they wanted but we didn’t have. I wanted these managers to tell me what we were doing right and, more urgently, what we were screwing up. The longer these visits went on, the more enthusiastic the managers and their staffs were about talking, because it became clear that we sincerely wanted to know what they thought. The insight they offered was the difference for Dick’s. It kept us relevant to our customers, and it kept us alert to shifting trends in popular taste. The men and women on the front lines could detect marketplace demand long before we could from our desks in Pittsburgh.
I’ll give you an example of how one of these visits changed our business. In 1997, a group of us went to Baltimore to walk through our stores there. Our manager in Columbia was a guy named John Jones. I asked him how things were going, and he told me that kids were coming into the store all the time, asking for this new product, a compression base layer that football players had started wearing under their pads. It’s called Under Armour, John said. Can we get some of it and give it a try?
I’d never heard of it. When a store manager tells us we should try something, though, we almost always try it. So we put in an order for Under Armour, which was headquartered in Baltimore. We tested some of their HeatGear and ColdGear. Both fit snugly and wicked moisture; these clothes kept you dry even if you were sweating buckets. And because you stayed dry, Under Armour kept you warmer in cold weather and cooler in hot.
It blew right out of that store. We had trouble keeping the Baltimore stores in stock. So we tried it in a few more stores outside the city. Again, it sold faster than we could order new stock. After eighteen months or so, we put it in all of the stores, and the response was just as robust. We were the first major retailer to carry it, creating what would be a lasting, and important, association between Under Armour and Dick’s.
Early on, Under Armour’s tops and tights were seen strictly as football gear, and we displayed them in the football section of our stores. But as Christmas approached in 2001, it occurred to me that we should move them to the apparel displays, where we sold Nike, Adidas, The North Face, and other popular brands. Our chief merchant disagreed with me, pointing out that Under Armour saw itself as gear, not apparel. I had a hunch about it, though, and overruled him. We moved it to the power aisle up the middle of the store, and holy smokes, it spread fast from football players to athletes of all types.
From that point on, Under Armour became strategically important to us as a company; if the winter weather was colder than expected and Under Armour sales climbed, we felt it. We were important to them, and they to us. For several years, something like one out of every three dollars they took in came from their sales at Dick’s.
The company’s founder, a former University of Maryland football player named Kevin Plank, became a great friend of mine. In the years since, the brand has expanded into all types of activewear and has become synonymous with sports. Its logo has become a ubiquitous sight at athletic events all over the world. It’s been a real treat to watch that success, and to be part of it. We were two small companies that helped each other grow. It started with that manager, John Jones, who is still with us today as our vice president of store operations.
* * *
By this time, most vendors were eager to have their brands at Dick’s. Back in the day, that hadn’t been the case, as I’ve mentioned: either they wouldn’t open us up, or they wouldn’t sell us enough product to distribute to all of our stores, as they were protecting their other accounts. Now, however, we were a pretty big company. We could move the needle for most of the companies we did business with.
Still, a few brands dismissed us, just as Adidas and Puma had done years before. Probably the most notorious example was Callaway. We wanted to be the leading golf retailer, and Callaway was the premier brand of golf clubs. The company was founded by Ely Callaway, a Georgian who’d already made fortunes in the textile and wine businesses before he bought a small golf company and transformed it into Callaway Golf in the early 1980s. His groundbreaking innovation was the Big Bertha driver, int
roduced in 1991. At a time when most driver heads were made of persimmon wood, the Big Bertha had an oversized stainless-steel head that could send a ball farther and, some thought, straighter. It seemed everyone wanted a Big Bertha.
Problem was, Callaway didn’t want to sell their products through a sporting goods retailer. They sold their clubs through “green-grass” accounts—the pro shops at golf courses and country clubs—or “cement shops” that specialized only in golf. They weren’t interested in selling their clubs in a big-box store.
We understood that, but we wanted to separate ourselves from Sports & Rec and The Sports Authority in the minds of the public. We aspired to make Dick’s the first destination for all golfers—to become, in essence, cement shops that shared a roof with other sports; to become the best off-course golf retailer in America. We needed Callaway to establish our credibility.
We had several meetings with Callaway, trying to get them to open us up. When it was clear they wouldn’t budge, we switched to guerilla tactics. An existing Callaway dealer would sell us its excess inventory at a slight markup, and we bootlegged their clubs. We sold a lot of them. This went on for a couple of years, at least, beginning shortly after we moved to Pittsburgh. We had several conversations with Callaway, in which we continued to press our desire to carry them as an authorized dealer, but they kept giving us the brush-off.
Then one day Bruce Parker, who ran sales for Callaway, called me. We’d met a couple of times, and he hadn’t been terribly friendly. On the phone, however, he was warm and enthusiastic. Hey, he said, we’d like to open you up. Why don’t you fly out here? We’ll have lunch together, and we’ll talk about it. I was all ears. Later that week, I jumped on an early-morning flight for San Diego.